Be Like Bill Gates: Blog Book Reviews

Early this year I found out that I have at least one thing in common with Bill Gates; we both review books and blog about them. I discovered gatesnotes after reading a very amusing article in InsideHigherEd by Joshua Kim. The first sentence in Kim’s article caught my eye: “There is at least one way that you and I can live our lives like a billionaire – we can spend time reading and sharing our thoughts on books.”

Kim enumerates three things that Gates’ blog tells us about wealth. I’ll just tell you the first and you can read Kim’s article for the rest. “It takes Bill Gates as much time and effort to read and write about books as it does for us. Being a billionaire does not mean that Bill Gates can read faster or with more understanding than us, and it does not mean that his thoughts on the books that he reads will be any more cogent or interesting. When it comes to reading and writing about books, you and I are in the same boat as Bill Gates. How many other activities in life can we say that about?  We can’t travel like Bill Gates. Or live in a house like Bill Gates’s house. In many big ways life is different for the rich. But not with books. This tells me that investing lots of time and effort in reading and discussing lots of books is one way that we can live like a billionaire.”

When I started this blog, I didn’t realize that I was going to read more and blog about books. Looking back at the tags on my previous posts, I see that a substantial number of them are my musings on books I’ve read. In fact this happened within the first six months of blogging. If anything my appetite of reading has increased. Thankfully I live right next to a branch of my local city library. The system has a good collection and even if the local branch does not have what I’m looking for, it’s easy to place a hold on a book, and eventually it comes in. I have a list of books on hold.

After reading Kim’s article, I went to the Gates blog to peruse what a billionaire reads. Turns out I have read a number of books he has read, and I have even blogged about some of them. Some of his reviews are very short and sparse, but others are more in-depth. While I had read a number of the science-related books, I thought I should diversify my reading and look for a genre I don’t normally read. After looking through a number of reviews, I settled on How Asia Works by Joe Studwell – it has to with politics and economics, an area in which I am particularly ignorant. I am however interested in Asia having lived there before the boom times and subsequent Asian economic crisis. I put the book on hold, and it arrived at the local library a couple of weeks ago. I’ve slowly read through it over the past week, after finishing Matt Miodownik’s Stuff Matters. Bill Gates has reviewed that too, but I found out about it from my wife who had listened to it on CD over the course of weeks during her work commute.

Studwell concentrates on eight countries in east Asia and groups them into two categories. The more successful northeast group consists of Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan. The less successful southeast group are Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. The story arc focuses on the role of government in facilitating land policy in agriculture, then shifting to industrial manufacturing, and finally to the role of the financial sector. Some countries make the transitions better than others, and Studwell tries to draw out the salient factors behind the successes and failures. There is plenty of history in the accounts be it Meiji Japan, colonial approaches, post World War II enforced restructuring, and Studwell seems to know quite a bit about the many colorful characters involved.

The IMF and World Bank are generally portrayed as providing less than ideal advice in fiscal policy and restructuring. Countries and governments that adhered to the recommendations closely seem to have fared worse in general, with South Korea being an exception. Comparisons are made between the Asian countries, but also with reference to other industrialized and industrializing countries around the world. The biggest factor that Studwell harps on over and over is what he calls “export discipline”, i.e., that government in control through central banks strongly cajole (or in effect force) entrepeneurs to be competitive on the world stage. Acquisition and control of technology is an important factor. So is breaking the oligarchies from moneyed historical families to force industrial development that can survive and thrive on the world stage. There is a fine balance between conservative control of finances and more liberal market procedures, the timing of which is tricky.

It’s in a sense “easy” to look back and point out the mistakes made – and there are many. Although you would think that one should learn from history and not tread the same ruinous path. Humans are humans, and don’t necessarily behave as the economists’ rational actor. Countries that started out in similar “economic conditions” at least measured by Gross National Income and similar wealth differentials measured by the Gini coefficient start to diverge as they take different paths. Studwell’s narrative features a number of “strongmen” who have driven different economic policies for good and ill. It’s a sobering story, and from a recent visit to Asia, I can see the after-effects of financial policies that resulted in skyrocketing real-estate and speculative trading.

My next book (just picked up from the library) isn’t on the Gates blog. It is related to Asia though, but brings in history and science/technology. I’m looking forward to Simon Winchester’s The Man Who Loved China, covering the story of Joseph Needham and his “discovery” of how the early innovations of China.

Replaying the Tape: Boardgame Version

The late Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist and a lucid science communicator, popularized the idea that if the tape of biological evolution were rewound and replayed, we might end up with very different organisms compared to those that we have today. Simon Conway Morris, also a paleontologist, who made a detail study of the Burgess Shale that was made famous by Gould’s book Wonderful Life, thinks that the differences may not be so significant. Conway Morris expounds on convergent evolution in his book Life’s Solution. He thinks that rewinding the tape would lead to many convergent structures that we might observe today, although not necessarily identical.

But what if you could rewind the tape? Go back in time and start over? Might things have turned out differently if different “choices” were made? This is excellent fodder for the world of games and simulations. Wargames started to flourish in the 1950s thanks to Charles S. Roberts, his landmark game Tactics, and the formation of the Avalon Hill game company. As a teenager I saved up cash to buy Avalon Hill games. They were expensive from my point of view as a kid so they became prized possessions. I still have my first three games: Diplomacy, Civilization, and Kingmaker. Now they are all classics. Wargaming was a niche hobby for many years, but has a broader audience now with the release of Axis & Allies.

Wargames and simulations are of particular interest to those interested in history and the military. Some simulations featured near future scenarios where one might look ahead to see how nuclear war might be triggered. Many of the most famous and best-loved wargames however deal with the past. While the past in itself is interesting, the game allows players to explore “what if” scenarios. To take an example of the famous battle of Waterloo, what if the Prussians under Blucher showed up earlier or later? How important was it to take and hold Hougomont (central farmhouse)? What might have changed if Wellington and Napoleon had employed different tactics at different times?

The exploration of such scenarios through multiple plays of a game might expose the players to more optimal strategies, perhaps better than those employed by the famous generals in their one-shot at historical victory. This is where things get interesting. Once you know the rules and therefore constraints of the game, and you’ve had the opportunity to see where different choices may lead, you can “go back in time” and make different choices to achieve a different end. In the case of a boardgame, perhaps winning rather than losing, or gaining more “victory” points for a better final score.

Could there be a game or simulation that traces how life may have started and evolved? It turns out I am a consultant chemist and a playtester of such a game. Because the game has not yet been released, and is still being tweaked, I won’t reveal many details in this post. Suffice to say that the designer is quite experienced in coming up with interesting and complex games that have a niche audience, particularly those with a scientific bent. I’m a fan of his games, even though I don’t play them very often. The rules are complex, and the games have a steep learning curve. Some have even “accused” them of being more like simulations where the game plays you rather than the other way around. The games, however, are thematically rich and very immersive.

In brief, players start out trying to generate autocatalytic sets of molecules that could evolve into bacteria-like creatures. These in turn acquire mutations and evolve abilities to survive and adapt in a potentially harsh environment. If they are able to thrive, they evolve into simple eukaryotic multicellular creatures. The more complex evolved organisms you have at the end of the game yield more victory points. The game spans the Hadean, Archean and Proterozoic eras leading up to what happens before the Cambrian (of Burgess Shale fame). Life is tough. Starting life is tough. Maintaining it is no walk-in-the-park either. Random bad stuff happens and the changing environment means that if you don’t adapt, you don’t survive and you certainly won’t thrive.

I’ve only had three runs at the game so I’m still in the rules-learning stage. The first aborted early thanks to a runaway greenhouse but the other two lasted the full length. Once I no longer make rule errors, I should be able to explore the full capacity of what the game has to offer. Hopefully I will be more useful as a consultant chemist from the game-player’s perspective. Before that point I mainly answered questions about origin-of-life chemistry and the feasibility of certain scenarios or types of chemistry. I also made wording suggestions for conceptual scientific elements of the game. I did little in the way of helping to formulate the rules of the game. The designer is very experienced and has gone through this process multiple times. As someone who enjoys games, it is interesting for me to peek behind the curtain and see what the design process is like. I’ve enjoyed being a fly-on-the-wall, and making occasional (hopefully constructive) comments.

What was particularly interesting that motivated today’s post was the juxtaposing my experience playtesting the game last week and also watching the season finale of the time-travel TV series Continuum – the show is discussed in my most recent blog post. Certain individuals and factions who control time-travel devices go back in time so they can alter the future, sometimes to benefit themselves, but sometimes to benefit humanity more broadly. This seems like replaying the tape, but in addition being an active participant to try and ensure a “better” outcome, whatever that means. Life has a steep learning curve, and being at the edge of an error catastrophe, suggests that large-scale changes in the environment could well wipe out many forms of life. We humans have co-opted our environment in a way and with a speed that no other organism has done before. One might even think it amazing that we even reached this point without a guiding hand, be it the all-powerful Deity, the “blind” hand of evolution, time-travel/time-transcendence, or some combination of all the above.

As I’m playing the complex boardgame and learning the rules, I’m getting better at the game. I’m learning how to get more out of autocatalytic cycles, or at least better at hedging my bets, now that I know the rules and I’ve tried different strategies. (The random hand of chance via a dice-roll can still do you in.) I’m getting better at timing the evolution into a simple organism and how to protect it against the vagaries of a changing environment. Each game turn begins with an environmental event of significance. Organisms that are not properly adapted do poorly. If they don’t die, they merely subsist and eke out their living. While I cannot predict the order of events from the card deck, nor that all of them will show up consistently, I now have a bit more experience of the type and magnitude of things that show up. Thus I have improved my odds of creating, surviving and thriving at the game of life. But this is thanks to the experience of having some foreknowledge of what might happen, and my making different choices for my organisms!

Life is tough. Creating, Sustaining, Thriving. None of these are easy for early life. In this sense, the game does a pretty good job of simulating what we know from the science. This brings me to a question I posed in my previous post. Is the fact that we are here suggest that there is a telos or direction guiding the process – one that knows the future and the past? The game gets more fun when you’ve figured out what you can do to succeed given the rule constraints. This does, however, require multiple plays. The first time I played a game by this designer, I almost threw in the towel. The rules were complex and I made very little progress (i.e. scores were very low). But the game was immersive and tickled my imagination in a way that was similar to the wargames and simulations of old. I persevered, and started to enjoy the process, and got much better at it.

I’m looking forward to getting in more plays of this origin-of-life game. Because it intersects with my area of interest, it might even give me some alternative ways to think about the problem. Could a game spark a research pathway? Maybe. But even if it doesn’t, there’s a certain satisfaction in playing a game where you create life and make choices to help it thrive. There’s a reason why the computer games Civilization and SimCity (both probably now considered classics) gained a huge following. They are sometimes called “God-view” games. Perhaps there’s a deity-like yearning in humanity. When, where, why and how does it begin? Is there a Who? Meanwhile, replaying the tape is fun!

Continuum: An End

After pondering the Time-Turner and having watched a spate of movies related to time travel, I discovered the TV series “Continuum”. Last year we watched the first three seasons (12 episodes per season), and this past week I watched the fourth and final season (of only six episodes).

The main protagonist is a cop from 2077 who is transported 65 years into the past  (to present day 2012) with a group of “criminals” destined to be executed. There are layers of conspiracies with different factions and individuals trying to change their destinies. The series is action-packed with lots of hand-to-hand combat, shooting of ranged weapons, and of course future tech invading the present. In the early seasons there are frequent flash forwards to events in 2077 where the “government” is run by corporations, and rebels are trying to free themselves from its tyranny – there’s a very interesting social subtext weaving its way through the storyline.

I’m not going to give away any spoilers for those who might be interested in watching the series, but I’d like to ponder some questions about time-travel and fate that come up in the show. The first point is that once time-travel is invented, you can’t put the “genie back in the bottle”. Anyone with the power, who wants things to go a particular way in his/her life can (and possibly will) use it to achieve such ends – multiple times if necessary. This lure, and the individual choices people make when given the opportunity, is examined in the series. Others who are connected become pawns of a larger game. But it is unclear how free choices are for pawn or time-traveller.

This brings me to the second point. Are individuals or factions utilizing time-travel really able to bring about substantial change to the course of history? Are they pebbles in a river that may affect some local surroundings but not be able to change the ultimate flow? When is an event momentous enough that it truly diverts the course of the future? Students in my Statistical Thermodynamics class are right now knee-deep in the Boltzmann equation (and distribution) and calculating partition functions for different types of molecular motion. When the number of particles is large, the overwhelming “occurrence” of the most probable distribution (and ancillary closely related ones) dwarfs any other possibilities. Individual and even small groups of particles may change course at the microscopic level, but may still have no effect on the macroscopic level. We haven’t gotten to entropy and the arrow of time yet, but I’m looking forward to having that discussion with my students!

Third, how do we resolve potential time-travel paradoxes? There’s a shadowy faction in Continuum that is trying to “fix” the “error catastrophe” that is mounting in the time-universe. Is there an error catastrophe? It makes me think about chemical-biological evolution and the balance between fidelity of a self-replicator and the capacity to mutate and change. Too much deleterious mutation and the “organism” dies. Too high a fidelity and the same fate befalls the organism that cannot adapt to a changing environment. Extant living systems, from a biochemical view, seem to straddle this edge. But what if the organism could time-travel to ensure its own survival or that of its species by making different “choices”? The question is how constrained are one’s choices?

In the first Back to the Future movie, as the time-line starts to diverge from that which might have produced Marty McFly, he and his history starts to “fade”. In Continuum, a time-line can collapse as events that may have spawned its birth are reversed by events that quench its existence. In the first new Star Trek movie, Spock meets his younger self and Vulcan logic prevails that such a meeting is possible. Neither version goes “insane” in seeing the other. In the third Harry Potter book, we do not see what might happen if Harry and Hermione might have met their former selves. Would their earlier selves have gone mad? In Predestination, a cycle of time loops must be engineered to bring events into a coherent “closure” of the time continuum. Continuum straddles a middle ground: some of the paradoxes are not quite resolved, but one seems the converging and diverging of a manageable number of time-lines so as not to be completely mind-bending. 

Fourth, the question of free will is raised. There is no good answer to this question, but the series juxtaposes those who think that time-travel strengthens individual choice (for those who wield the technology) or weakens individual choice (for those who know in their earlier selves that such a technology is possible). Sometimes this dissonance is present in the same person and you see the wrestling that happens within an individual about how to make choices. What does it mean to make choices and “influence” events? Are those choices predestined? Can people truly “change” if they got a glimpse of their futures?

A final summation of Continuum in relation to the limited number of other TV series I have watched. The acting is overall good. The characters are interesting. And most importantly, the series does not drag itself out but comes to a conclusion without overstaying its welcome. I think this was also done well in Breaking Bad. The momentum builds up to an explosive climax that resolves (for the most part) appropriately given all that has come before. Battlestar Galactica, to take an opposite example, seems to attempt outlandish ideas in the final season that lose touch with authenticity, and in my opinion ended rather weakly. Once Upon A Time, which started well, in my opinion, might be getting more ridiculous with each season as stronger and more powerful antagonists need to be introduced. I’ll probably continue watching it since it makes me think about magic in certain ways. (Coincidentally Once Upon A Time and Continuum are both filmed in Vancouver, BC. In my last visit I was told that the TV/movie business is booming.) The series ends with An End, but not The End. (Who knows if there will be a sequel?)

Will time-travel be invented in a future timeline connected to the present one? If it has, shouldn’t we already know it? Or is there some entity that keeps us on the road towards it that we are unaware of? (Conspiracy theorists will be working on this for time immemorial!) Or is the fact that we are here suggest that there is a telos or direction guiding the process – one that knows the future and the past? If our universe is not closed, then certainly from the thermodynamic point of view, all these questions remain open.

Aerogels, Jelly and Shield Charms

Chapter 5 of Mark Miodownik’s Stuff Matters is indeed Marvellous! The substance of interest – aerogels. What is an aerogel? Basically, it is a porous substance containing lots of air. The most common aerogel, made of silicon dioxide, has been around for a while. Also known as “silica aerogel”, it’s amazing that the same elements found in sand and glass can also be restructured to form the lightest solid in the world, made up of 99.8% air.

Silica aerogel is a good thermal insulator. The Wikipedia page has a neat pictures including one that shows a flower being protected from the heat of a Bunsen burner. Another picture shows the aerogel supporting a brick. In the same picture you can also see the translucent quality of the aerogel – it seems to almost fade into the background. It looks like a lightweight “nothingness”, yet is structurally stable, functions as a capable barrier, and acts as a superb insulator. Applications range from the mundane (window replacements or additions to glass) to the exotic (trapping cometary stardust at high speeds in a NASA project).

Miodownik describes the history and the process of making aerogels. I was surprised to learn that the basic idea was formulated and successfully carried out back in the 1930s by Samuel Kistler, a farmer turned chemist, “who conjured them into existence solely to satisfy his curiosity about jelly.” This made me think a little more about the strangeness of jelly as a substance. Apparently what makes it delicious: When you put it in your mouth, and it reaches its “melting point of 35^oC the internal gelatin network promptly melts, freeing the water to burst in your mouth.”

Silica aerogel is a bit more difficult to make than jelly. While sol-gel processes are familiar today, back in Kistler’s time constructing the aerogel was more complicated. The trick was to “replace the liquid with a gas while it was still inside the jelly, and so use the pressure of the gas to keep the skeleton from collapsing.” This was done by using an autoclave – basically a pressure cooker. It also takes advantage of the blurring of boundaries between a liquid and gas above its critical temperature. (To my P-Chem students this semester: If you’re reading this, here’s another reason why critical points are important!)

Having recently watched the 2015 Fantastic Four movie (it’s not that good; I waited to borrow the DVD from the library), I was reminded about energy shields, or force fields (in the old parlance), as generated by Sue Storm. As a computational chemist, “force field” means something very specific in my field (no pun intended). Visually it looks like a shimmering transparent bubble that surrounds the person or object to be protected. This is in generally how energy shields are visually represented in science-fiction and fantasy TV shows or movies. The Protego shield charm of Harry Potter’s magical world works similarly. I particularly liked the blue tinge in Fantastic Four, because there is a nice correspondence to silica aerogel which looks blue in color against a dark background (due to Rayleigh scattering). As Miodownik puts it, “when you hold a piece of aerogel in your hand, it is, in a very real way, like holding a piece of the sky.”

This made me start to ponder how personal protective energy shields work and how you might generate them. I suppose it depends on what you’re protecting yourself from. Also, if you’re going to move around with them, they should not be too heavy. This puts a mass limitation on the shield. Thus, it would be difficult to deflect a massive object moving at reasonable speeds – a speeding car, perhaps, or maybe a piece of spacecraft debris thrown at you by a Sith Lord wielding the force. But a shield of ions, or plasma, or some sort of electromagnetic radiation, might protect you against the Imperial emperor’s crackling lightning bolts. Sue Storm’s shield protects her from Dr. Doom’s energy attack, which visually resembles the manipulation of ionizing or electromagnetic radiation. Perhaps this is similar to how Protego works, a magical electromagnetic shield that protects against magical electromagnetic spells. (See here for a discussion connecting electromagnetic radiation and spellcasting magic.)

But what if you could add some lightweight, almost transparent matter to your electromagnetic shield? That should increase your ability to stop macroscopic solid objects. Sand, rocks, and other silicon-oxygen-containing substances are abundant. The casting of Protego could involve the gathering together of small amounts of this material, chemically bonded to provide the skeletal framework of an aerogel. It’s transparent so you can still see past your protective field (presuming your electromagnetic shield is also non-opaque). The aerogel might even cause it to shimmer blue! This is why spellcasters should learn chemistry – the understanding of matter at a molecular level (I speculate) will lead to magic both more powerful and precise.

What if you’re not a magican, mutant or midichlorian-enhanced? Can you create your own personal shield to be deployed when needed? The image of an umbrella comes to mind. It can be carried in a folded compact form, and mechanically deployed with the press of a button. With the creation of x-aerogels, flexible in nature, perhaps foldable, one could imagine an aerogel umbrella. In combination with other polymeric materials that allow the expansion of balloon-like objects, one could imagine various deployment methods.

I’m looking forward to new gizmos inspired by and that make use of aerogels. As Miodownik concludes, “if ever there was a blue-sky material – it is aerogel.”

Stuff Matters

“As I stood on a train bleeding from what would later be classified as a thirteen-centimeter stab wound, I wondered what to do.” That’s the opening sentence of the introduction in Stuff Matters, a book by materials science professor Mark Miodownik. In the police station, he found himself staring at the razor blade that his assailant had used, because he was interested in its steel edge may, perhaps portending his future profession. So yes, this is a book about materials, and not about hoarding. And Miodownik is a very engaging writer! (I also really like the title of his book because the opening question in my introductory chemistry classes every year is "What is Matter and Why Does it Matter?")

The book is subtitled “exploring the marvelous materials that shape our man-made world”. Ten chapters will cover ten common materials or substances, but he makes them so much more interesting. I don’t think I will look at concrete in the same way again. To truly savor his book I have decided to limit myself to just reading one chapter a day. I’ve now read the first three chapters which covered steel, paper and concrete. They are titled Indomitable, Trusted, and Fundamental, respectively.

Even though I was quite familiar with the material (pun intended) discussed in his first chapter on steel, Miodownik is a marvelous story-teller. The chapter opens with “I had never been asked to sign a non-disclosure statement in the bathroom of a pub before.” I won’t give away the story, only to say that I learned why top-quality samurai swords were unmatched for centuries, and that he circles back to razor blades, an entrepreneur named King Camp Gilette, and the Bessemer process.

The third chapter on concrete comes to life with his almost daily witnessing the construction of the Shard in London. However, he interposes his experience with historical vignettes starting with the Romans. Apparently the Pantheon is the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world, still standing 2000 years later. Even more interesting was that for a thousand years after the Romans, no one else was making concrete structures. One fascinating speculation is that concrete being “industrial in nature needed an industrial empire to support it.” Miodownik doesn’t elaborate on that one, but provides another more salient possibility: “Or perhaps it was lost because Roman concrete, good as it was, did have one crucial flaw, a flaw that the Romans knew all about but could not solve.” The problem it turns out is that in a compression situation, “concrete remains strong even when cracks form.” However, in other situations, cracks severely compromise the entire edifice. Who discovered steel-reinforced concrete? A Parisian gardener. (Read Miodownik’s book to learn more!)

So far the second chapter on paper was the one I found most fascinating. Miodownik explains the different processes involved in manufacturing paper. I did not know that chalk dust (good old CaCO₃) was sometimes used to whiten the paper, nor that carefully laid chemical coatings were needed to prevent ink from “being sucked too far into the cellulose mesh, which is what causes ink to bleed.” The aging process of paper results in the release of volatile organics (giving that old book smell), but more interestingly, librarians are interested in the chemistry because it might lead to a technique that helps to “monitor and preserve large collections of books”. I found fascinating the operation of thermal paper and printing. This inkless method nevertheless results fading because of how the pigments fade. I had never thought about how electronic ink worked until Miodownik explained how electrostatic particles are used, which then explains why changing the text requires a short lag time. The switching back and form gives the particles an apt name – Janus particles.

My appetite is whetted to learn more about materials and substances. I’m looking forward to chapter 4, appropriately titled Delicious because it is about chocolate!

Authenticity

Reading old issues of TIME magazine seems to provide good fodder for blog posts. (Here's one from last month.) Yesterday I read two articles in the Dec 14 issue that made me think about the subject of authenticity. The first was a feature article on the new Star Wars movie by Lev Grossman. The title: “A New New Hope: How J. J. Abrams brought back Star Wars using puppets, greebles and yak hair.”

Grossman articulated something that had bothered me about the Star Wars prequels and the digitally remastered added scenes to the original trilogy. There was an authenticity in the originals, lacking in the massive CGI-enhancement of today’s blockbuster movies. Grossman writes that the original movies were “a new kind of illusion, one that felt real in a way that no fantasy or science-fiction movie ever had before.” But this “powerful illusion [has] proved to be an elusive one, difficult to reproduce.” The trick turns out to be a return to the original bag of tricks, including shooting on film, using physically built props while minimizing CGI, and filming in actual sets/locations instead of the now ubiquitous green screen as much as possible. Perhaps that’s why myself and many others have found BB-8 so endearing – an actual physical robot rather than a CGI-enhancement. (Jar Jar Binks gets ragged on multiple times in the article.)

An additional hypothesis for the ring of authenticity comes from how the actors interact with physical objects (and characters) instead of trying one’s best to imagine a CGI beast. Perhaps there are subtle unconscious movements in our behavior in a physical interaction compared to one that requires the virtual imagination. Special attention is also paid to the many objects littered throughout the Star Wars universe known as greebles, “the tiny functional-looking details and asymmetrical sticking-out bits that encrust most technological artifacts”. Grossman makes a very interesting observation: “When you’re watching Star Wars, you’re often looking at car and airplane parts, the guts of electronics, bits of applicnaces, fragments of the everyday world, but they’re so far removed from their familiar context that you don’t recognize them – except that on some level you do.” I’ve been reading about the rational unconscious in cognitive science, and the huge amount of information being processed subconsciously by System 1 (rather than the small amount by conscious System 2),* this may explain why it’s hard to put one’s finger on that feeling of authenticity. It’s hard to articulate what your unconscious recognizes and synthesizes.

In the Matrix movies, the CGI use of color and tone to mark the separate realms is used effectively, particularly when the characters are in the Matrix. (Avatar might be another example.) In older movies or television, a dream sequence might be marked by a certain fuzziness in the borders or outlines – mainly to signal to the viewer that a different realm was being crossed. Things are tougher in the fantasy world of magic, dragons and spells. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, in my opinion, was a good balance of CGI and physical reality (with amazing detailed work from WETA). The Hobbit prequel trilogy, on the other hand, suffers from a little too much CGI. (There’s an interesting parallel to Star Wars, perhaps not to the same degree.) The Harry Potter movies also suffer from a little too much CGI, and don’t quite have the authentic feel. Perhaps it is only a matter of time, as CGI improves, that we will no longer be able to tell the difference. As our time spent interacting with and viewing electronic devices continues to increase, perhaps our System 1 will get “used to” the virtual world, so much so that the real world may start to feel drab and boring and old. That’s another important part about the Star Wars bag of tricks – making things look old, grimy, dirty and dusty.

The second article I read in the same issue of TIME was by Amy Cuddy, promoting her new book Presence. I haven’t read the book, but the gist of the article suggests “taking control of your body language [might] help you become happier and more successful”. Psychologists are always coming up with interesting experiments. The test was to compare how a “powerless” drawn-in or curled-up pose and a “powerful” posture might lead one to do better in a job interview. The results: “As expected, subjects who prepared for the interview with high-power poses – the more presence our job interviewees displayed – the better they were evaluated and more strongly they were recommended for hire by the judges.” But here’s the kicker. “We found in a related follow-up study: presence mattered to the judges because it signaled genuineness and believability; it told the judges that they could trust the person, that what they were observing was real. In short, manifest qualities of presence are taken as signs of authenticity.”

Given that I’d just been pondering the interview and hiring process in light of cognitive science, this throws another wrinkle into the mix. Does my System 1 as an interview unconsciously pick up on this seeming authenticity? Does it unconsciously provide a non-codeable halo effect? Would I be seeing someone in a better light because he or she performed some power poses beforehand that I am unaware of? My System 2 gets easily overwhelmed by System 1. Surely there are many more tricks that can be used in the interview process. Then there are the habits of mind to counter these tricks. Sounds like I should just learn how to use the Force (if only I had a decent midichlorian count) to employ Jedi mind tricks.

Maybe I should try some power poses right before class instead of being hunched over reviewing my notes. Would that increase my confidence in teaching? Would the students “think” I am a better, more authentic, teacher? (Maybe I should do an experiment.) It’s a good thing I’m very enthusiastic about chemistry in general and thermodynamics in particular, because there’s lots of it going on right now. We know from various studies (the cognitive scientists again!) that having enthusiasm for your subject matter makes a noticeable difference in student learning. They “catch” your enthusiasm, or at least are pleasantly amused (and therefore more favorably disposed to learning the material).

Like many other things in life, authenticity (“being yourself”) may not be as simple as it looks.

*Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow is to blame for my use of this terminology.

Mindware for Hiring

Happy February! Tis the season for writing recommendation letters for students. This made me revisit thinking about the process of reading applications, interviewing candidates and making potential hires. While my department completed its interview and hiring process last November (I posted some thoughts about it here), many other academic institutions are in the midst of the process right now. Today’s blog post revisits this topic in light of my recent completion of Richard Nisbett’s Mindware. For a discussion of one of his earlier chapters, see here.

What did I learn, or what principles were reinforced, when reading Nisbett’s book? For one, there is the halo effect, where certain impressions of a person (possibly formed very quickly and in a very specific context) can strongly color one’s view of a person’s actual capabilities. The impressions can be positive or negative. In some cases the impression is in line with actual ability, but in other cases it is not. Cognitive research suggests we are often not aware of how easily we can be influenced by such impressions, and how they can lead us to “see things as we want to see them”. In academia, institutional prestige seems to hold unwarranted currency. Being from a prestigious alma mater isn’t necessarily a good indicator of a capable candidate and should not be over-weighted. Note to self: The next time I’m interviewing a candidate I should carefully introspect to see if I’m being heavily influenced by a halo effect.

In a chapter titled “Spilt Milk and Free Lunch”, Nisbett introduces some economic principles: sunk costs and opportunity costs. According to Nisbett, the expression “there ain’t no such thing as free lunch” comes from the Depression-era, where bars would advertise free lunch but you had to pay for the beer. Here’s what he has to say about considering opportunity costs when hiring. “It can be sometimes quite difficult to see that the value of the unchosen alternative is actually greater than that of the chosen alternative. Every hire you make for your company constitutes an opportunity cost. If there’s no one capable who can be hired, it’s tempting to feel that noting has been lost. But if there are good reasons to believe that in the near future someone more qualified could be hired, then the present hire involves an opportunity cost to the company that might indicate that hiring should be put off.” This is particularly challenging in academia, when you have to fight for your tenure line searches, and you feel great pressure to fill the position when you have the opportunity. Note to self: Unless the candidate is stellar, consider the opportunity cost for hiring a good, but not a great candidate.

In a section titled “The Interview Illusion”, Nisbett cautions us to pay attention to variability and the law of large numbers. He relates examples from graduate school admissions where professors (yes, in a psychology department no less!) “tend to put substantial weight on the 20-30 minute interviews with each candidate. The problem here is that judgments about a person based on small samples of behavior are being allowed to weight significantly against the balance of a much larger amount of evidence…” This includes GRE scores, GPAs, essays, recommendation letters, and prior successful research experience. Apparently 30-minute interview predictions have a much lower correlation (0.1) with actual performance, while other measures do quite a bit better. Note to self: Be careful not to overweigh the short one-on-one interview over other evidence in the application file. Note to larger group: Be sure that the candidate is observed in multiple contexts by multiple people as much as possible.

Nisbett argues that “coding is the key to thinking statistically”. In cognitive experiments that compare our predictions/extrapolations based on measurable quantities versus estimating behavior/traits, we do decently on the former and rather poorly on the latter. Examples given include grades on spelling tests and points scored in basketball games, both straightforward to code; versus rating friendliness or honesty in encounters, both difficult to code. Context often dictates how you might perceive less easily code-able characteristics. There’s no good solution. Nisbett advises that “the most effective way to avoid making unjustifiably strong inferences about someone’s personality is to remind yourself that a person’s behavior can only be expected to be consistent from one occasion to another if the context is the same. And even then, many observations are necessary for you to have much confidence in your prediction.” Note to self: Distinguish between codeable versus non-codeable traits. It isn’t the case that the former is good and the latter is bad. Just don’t overweight the latter, because humans have a tendency towards doing so.

Several chapters discuss the effect of different cultural backgrounds on attitudes, behaviour, and tacit assumptions. This can be tricky to tease out because we’re often unaware of our own reference points, and how different they might be from others. Note to self: Be aware. Know thyself. Don’t superimpose thy own mindset on others. Listen more.

This leads me back to the recommendation letter. How useful is it? I don’t recall reading any “bad” recommendation letters from applicants although I have seen some lukewarm run-of-the-mill ones. (I also learned that the style of letter-writing even in the same language group can be different. For example, American recommenders were generally more effusive than their British counterparts.) Accomplishment data points in the curriculum vita are helpful, but it is also help to put them in context. That’s what a good recommendation letter can do, provided the recommender has had ample opportunity to observe the candidate, preferably under multiple contexts and occasions. But after reading many, many examples of glowing letters for “top” candidates, it can still be a challenge to pick out the stellar candidate. Some even give me pause – is this person really that awesome, littered with superlatives? Maybe. Candidates would (or should) only solicit recommenders who can provide strong positive letters. We give our students the same advice. I guess the way to think about them is as one among many pieces of evidence used to evaluate a potential hire. Note to self: Be a conscientious writer, and try to provide good solid evidence that an employer can use to hire (or accept into graduate school) the person I am recommending.