Bios Genesis Session Report

One version of how life began, at least according to a game…

Notes and Disclaimers:

1. For an earlier description of the Bios Genesis boardgame, read this earlier blog post.

2. The pictures of these components represent the old artwork with print-and-play components. Pieces were cobbled from a different boardgame. The actual game will have different artwork and components.

3. I apologize for the poor photo quality. I am notoriously bad at taking photos and my hands shake.

Over 4 billion years ago, our moon was formed by the Theia Big Whack. This was followed by an active T Tauri phase with solar flare emissions. The only possible place for life to have started was deep in the ocean at hydrothermal vents. It was an inhospitable environment.

But then oceans started to form as comets and other impactors outside the solar system brought water, organic molecules, and simple molecules that would form the early atmosphere. Now there were more places where life might take a hold. Green rust fumarole may provide sites for primitive catalytic activity. Clay mounds may have provided sites for the templating of nucleobases, the fore-runner to DNA. Autocatalytic cycles begin to produce molecules that may be incorporated into early metabolism and primitive genetic information storage.

As the earth moved in to the Archean era, plate tectonics shut down resulting in a tropical waterworld. This is where life first appeared in the form of proto-enzyme marine bacteria, utilizing amyloidal peptides.

The first supercontinent Vaalbara breaks up opening up other possible locations where new life may take hold. The formation of Mars-like Paleo Ocean and Alkaline Seeps begin to show activity. A new microorganism appears in the shallow alkaline waters, iron sulfur coastal bacteria with transition metal sulfide catalysts forging a primitive metabolism reducing carbon dioxide to acetate. RNA polymerase makes its first appearance in these bacteria, but they will not be robust enough to survive the travails to come.

The formation of supercontinent Ur leads to two new organisms, the extraterrestrial coenzyme Martian bacteria from the paleo-ocean, and GARD marine bacteria evolved from the clay mound – a robust self-replicator utilizing the more flexible glycolic nucleic acid (GNA) enclosed in a lipid bilayer.

As oxygen starts to increase 3.3 billion years ago, methane in the atmosphere is replaced by carbon dioxide, a weaker greenhouse gas, leading to a Huronian Snowball – a long and cold ice age. The new microorganisms however stay robust and even evolve new features. Superoxide dismutase makes its appearance in the Martian bacteria, while the GARD bacteria engulf another organism leading to a symbiotic relationship. Chloroplasts appear and more oxygen is released into the atmosphere. Parasitism begins as phospholipid parasites enter the scene infecting the Martian bacteria.

Sea temperatures start to increase as earth emerges from its cold spell. A large release of methane is belched from the oceans into the atmosphere. More oxygen is released and the atmosphere begins to warm up. The organisms that are able to withstand these changes continue to thrive, but in doing so more oxygen is released. Cytoplasmic streaming and bacteriorhodopsin further pollute the atmosphere leading to the demise of the Martian and iron-sulfur coastal bacteria.

After slowly evolving for almost 800 million years, the first macroorganisms appear. Brachiopod lifeforms with superior genetic fitness make the leap to multicellularity, thus ushering in the Proterozoic age.

As continental drift disrupts the thermohaline circulation, there is an ocean overturn causing an inversion of the surface waters with the hypoxic deeper water. New organisms appear. A chemiosmotic coastal bacteria evolves from a radioactive beach and ferrous ion marine bacteria emerge from the hydrothermal vents. The latter go on to quickly develop a rhodopsin eyespot while simultaneously polluting the atmosphere further with more oxygen causing the demise of other organisms. They then evolve into flatworms as an orbital bobbing events resulting in exposure of the earth to cosmic rays and supernova debris. This is followed by a giant impactor burning a hole in the ozone layer. The hot spell is replaced by a cold spell as earth goes into an ice age megadrought. All possible protected refugia where new life might take hold disappears. The ferrous ion bacteria evolve into Flatworms. Will they and the Brachiopods survive and evolve?

Without new spaces for life to take hold, parasitism becomes rife as new microorganisms try to find habitats in which they can thrive. There is competition for hosts as parasites strive for access to hosts.

The Mackenzie Flood Basalts lead to an opening for new life amidst tholin storm clouds. Life quickly takes hold as bacteria based on a fullerene template evolve very, very rapidly into more complex life with a nerve net and chemiosmotic respiration eventually reaching the ancestor to seaweeds. As the oceans rust out, more life is able to grab hold of interplanetary dust. These phosphoric Martian bacteria quickly develop the Calvin cycle to fix carbon dioxide. It seems that life has successfully taken hold on our planet as the Lamp Shells evolve into Snails!

End game scores in this four player game:

·      Blue (Genes player): L=6+2 (Seaweed), L=13+12 (Snails), T=1 (extinct organisms), total = 34 points

·      Green (Energy player): L=10+12 (Flatworms), E=1+2 (endosymbiont), T=1 (extinct organisms), total = 26 points

·      Yellow (Specificity player): B=6 (phosphoric bacteria), P=4 (malaria parasite), T=1 (extinct organisms), total = 11 points

·      Red (Protein player): P=2 (prion parasite), E=2+2 (endosymbiont), T=2 (extinct organisms), total = 8 points

The Power of Habit

I seem to be reading a number of pop psychology books. I’m not sure what this means, but I can see why they are appealing to the masses. They have catchy titles and hint at self-improvement. Molecular-level chemistry on the other hand is less interesting to most people. A frequent response from someone new that I meet, when he or she learns that I am a chemist runs along the lines of “that was my worst subject in school”. Why does chemistry conjure these feelings? I’m not going to dwell on that question in today’s post. Rather I have three short vignettes on Charles Duhigg’s new book The Power of Habit. It has the catchy subtitle “why we do what we do in life and business”, and the appendix features a “reader’s guide to using these ideas”.

The thrust of the book is to look at how habits are ingrained and how they can potentially be changed. The main idea is to understand the “habit loop” consisting of three parts: Cue, Routine, Reward. The trick is self-understanding what the Cue and Reward are. Then one needs to figure out how to change the Routine in the loop by redirecting it. Various psychology experiments are described throughout the book, but the interviews with different people and looking back at events in history are the most interesting parts.

One vignette involves the initial failure of Febreze, a Procter & Gamble product that stumped a top-notch advertising team that had seen many successes in the past. It involves an accidental discovery by a chemist and smoker whose wife thought he had quit smoking, a crazy cat lady, a park ranger whose life constantly smelled of skunk, and many videotapes of people cleaning their homes. The trick turned out to be marketing the product as a mini-celebration of a final touch to the dreary cleaning process to give it that “fresh scent” rather than the its odor-removing capabilities (which were important but simply didn’t market well).

The interviews with recovering alcoholics in AA highlighted the importance of belief and the power of community in habit change. Both were key aspects to changed habits and lives. A related story highlights Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat leading to her arrest, which was then followed by a Montgomery bus boycott, which then turned into a revolution led by Martin Luther King Jr. and others. But it wasn’t just close friends and family that led to the powerful movement, but rather what the author terms “weak ties”. Without these, things simply stay within a small community and momentum eventually flags. A related study showed that in landing a job, such “weak-tie acquaintances were often more important that strong-tie friends because weak ties give access to social networks where we won’t otherwise belong.” This made me think about molecular interactions in chemistry where weak forces (such as hydrogen bonds or dipole interactions) are what control much of the interesting associations and dissociations in macromolecular systems. That’s where all the interesting action is! (The very strong bonds don’t lead to large scale interesting systems-level interactions. It’s the weak forces!)

The final chapter is titled “The Neurology of Free Will”. It juxtaposes a sleepwalker who committed a murder (who was otherwise non-violent) and someone who became addicted to gambling. The courts acquitted the sleepwalker but did not rule in favor of the addict who was plied with gifts by the casino to encourage the forming of a strong compulsive habit. One interesting MRI study suggested that for gamblers, “near misses” or “almost winning” lit up the same area of the brain as winning, while for non-gamblers they counted as losses. More insidiously, “slot machines [and scratch cards were] reprogrammed to deliver a more constant supply of near wins.” Scary thought.

Duhigg never answers the question as to whether we are just a “bundle of habits”. He does assume that humans have free will to believe in the possibility of change (as hard as it might be) and the capability to effect such change if surrounded by an appropriate community of support. Bad habits are hard to break. Good habits are easy to keep. It’s made me wonder about the study habits of my students and what I can do to help them establish good habits from the get-go. I will have a new class of first-year advisees in the Fall, and there is the opportunity during this time of upheaval for new habits to be established. But first, I should try to help my current students end the semester well. (Stress levels are high among students with two weeks of class to go.)

Minds on Fire

Minds on Fire is a book by Mark Carnes, a historian, and progenitor of Reacting To The Past – learning history via immersion role-playing in an elaborate game. I’m halfway through the book, limiting myself to a chapter a day. It is very tempting to read more because Carnes is literally “on fire” as he evangelizes how Reacting games have completely changed students in many a class. Just from the first chapter alone, I was sold on his approach. I felt that if I was teaching history, I would clearly incorporate a Reacting game into my class. The gains by the students in terms of critical thinking and oral communication, not to mention the analytical research skills, seem significantly higher than any class I’ve been in. Part of the reason is that the students put in so much work into the class – they are completely immersed and literally inhabit their roles in the game. If you want to be pumped up about teaching, even if you don’t teach history (and might never use a Reacting game), then I highly recommend this book. The author’s writing style is evocative, hard-hitting, and it makes me want to be a better teacher!

The students aren’t a particularly special breed. This approach has been used on many different campuses and in a variety of settings. Some students drop the class early on as they start to imagine the workload, although that imagination is somewhat superficial. They don’t realize that once they immerse themselves, they no longer count the hours and their workload has actually increased more than they imagined. But it’s self-imposed, akin to immersing oneself in video games – and I know a number of students who spend the majority of their free time on computer games, which from what I understand (since I don’t play them) are quite the immersive experience. Gamification is a recent buzzword in education circles, although these often refer to the computer screen variety. Reacting, on the other hand, has the students interacting with each other in flesh and blood, with all the accompanying psychological and physical signals – not just words typed on a screen with an occasional emoji as a supporting character.

There are moments in my chemistry class where students are immersed and suddenly snap up when I announce that class has just ended. This does not happen all that often. That being said, I’ve managed to reduce the number of students who “watch the clock” in my classes over the years by trying to be more engaging. I would like to say that when the students stop watching the clock it is because they are so immersed in an interesting activity, but that’s not often the case. Often it’s simply because I’m trying to tell a spellbinding wrap-up (I’m pretty good at “lecturing”) to what they are learning and they are actually listening with rapt attention. That is, I know how to hold an audience, but are they actively learning? (No, I don’t spend my entire class lecturing – there is a fair bit of discussion and working on problems.)

Reading Carnes’ book made me think about whether I could incorporate a mini-Reacting experience into my class. It would be less effective because it takes several weeks for students to start inhabiting their characters and being immersed in the game. At first they are suspicious that any of this would work, and think it strange that they are doing all the “talking” in class (while the instructor recedes into the background as the semester progresses). Carnes actually goes into the psychology, sociology, and speculates (quite reasonably I think) on why Reacting works so well in many cases (sometimes the experience falls flat – he dissects these too). I had previously designed a one-week (three class session) experience on the Periodic Table. Students pretended to be 19^th century scientists in an alien universe trying to construct a scheme to organize the elements. I had sneakily designed the elements to seem quite alien (I enjoyed making up names!) but retained many of the issues/problems that Mendeleev and others would run into in our world. I’ve run this exercise on a number of classes and it has proved quite the immersive experience for students. The problem is that in an introductory chemistry class, there’s much more than needs to be “covered”. Or maybe the problem is that I haven’t come up with a good creative solution to do both simultaneously. Perhaps the inklings of my previous post’s Imagining New Elements final project might be a road to some sort of immersive experience.

Our chemistry curriculum is rather traditional and there’s quite the wait before one’s turn comes around to teach a special topics class. (I’ve taught one about once every 5-6 years.) This is because our department runs very lean, and there are so many core areas to be “covered”. Besides the introductory year of General Chemistry, there’s organic, analytical, physical, inorganic, and biochemistry. So I don’t see being able to run a long Reacting type game in one of my classes. (Maybe I just need to think about this more.)

Where else could our students get an immersive experience in our department? Undergraduate Research! (It’s a strength of our department.) Are there different ways I could run my research group so the students simply want to work on their research projects as much as they can? I have some students in my group who do this. My most productive student, unfortunately, simply lost interest in classes and stopped going (and then dropped out) but not before he had contributed to several papers. Most of my students are in the 18-22 age range, and college is many things to them. Academics aren’t always the most important thing on the list. Nor is research. Most of my students enjoy research, but it’s just one among other things that they do, and they are not immersed in it as much as the students Carnes describes in Reacting history classes. Perhaps the way I run my group doesn’t lend itself well to immersion. Because I was trained to essentially work independently (and computational chemistry is a rather solitary activity), my students seem to have adopted the same approach. I hadn’t consciously thought about changing my style, but reading Carnes is prompting me to think about how to consciously and actively build camaraderie in my group. Some years it just happens organically, but other times it does not. However, I think I should make some changes to my approach. I’m not sure what exactly I’ll do.

In any case, I’m looking forward to reading the second half of Minds on Fire. Carnes has made me, a non-historian, think carefully about my classes and my students, and what I can do to help them acquire the “science bug” that I have. Not forcing them to do something they don’t want to do, but providing a conducive environment so that those who choose to immerse themselves in chemistry learn deeply and that work in fact seems like play.

Imagining New Elements

The current semester isn’t even over yet, and I’m already excited about my classes for next semester! There could be several reasons: (1) I’ve been thinking about how student learning can be improved in my classes. (2) The bookstore has been harassing me for over a month with automated e-mails to select textbooks for next semester. (3) We’re currently in Registration Madness, and so I’m having many conversations with students about classes next semester. It’s likely a combination of all three factors, and more that I can’t think of at the moment. That’s because my mind space is being occupied by a great idea I’ve had this week!

So I was trying to come up with a theme that would tie the majority of first-semester General Chemistry together, that might culminate in a creative final project for students, and I might have hit on something interesting! (Or at least, I’m stoked about it right this minute!) While you’re waiting with bated breath to hear this miraculous idea, let me wax poetic with some context and history. I started this blog almost 1.5 years ago in preparation for my Spring 2015 second-semester General Chemistry class. Part of the reason was that I wanted students to blog about connections between what they were learning in class, and anything else they found interesting. The theme that semester was Energy (which fit in nicely with the main topics covered – thermodynamics, kinetics, and equilibria). I was hoping this would culminate in a creative final project related to Energy – but I was over-ambitious with all the new things I was introducing in class that I decided to axe it after a mid-semester survey. (The students thought the current workload was too demanding – they might have been right this time.)

But now I’m excited about taking another run at a creative final project for first-year students. What a great start it could be to their college experience! (Yes, I know I sound idealistic – but you need a dose of idealism to be excited about your job every day. My colleagues, in general, will describe me as exceedingly pragmatic.) What might tie the topics that we cover in General Chemistry 1? A peek at my syllabus (not necessarily in order) suggests:

·      Atomic Structure

·      Nuclear Chemistry

·      Electronic Structure of Atoms

·      The Periodic Table

·      Chemical Bonding and Molecular Structure

·      States of Matter and Properties

·      Intermolecular Forces

·      Chemical Reactions and Stoichiometry

Here’s my idea for the final creative project: Imagine you could create a new element (as Tony Stark does in Iron Man 2). What properties would be desirable in this new element and why? How would it be different from the properties of current elements in our known universe? (Be detailed at the level of atomic and molecular structure!) How would it interact chemically with current elements in our periodic table? If your new element formed compounds, what properties would they have? (Anticipate those that may not be on your original list of desired properties.) Finally (and this might be difficult), how might you create such a new element? (You can imagine advanced technology that allows you to manipulate matter in different ways.)

That was the gist of it. I need to do some refining to this rough idea. To explore how this might play out, maybe I am interested in diversifying carbon-based life (okay, that’s a big one). In an earlier post, I sort of touched this area via a quick imaginary analysis by imagining the different range of diversity if there was no carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine (i.e., in the opposite direction – this would probably reduce diversity). So let’s start with the simple idea that to get more diverse molecules you want a new element like carbon, except that it can form up to five strong chemical bonds rather than four. Perhaps it should be a nitrogen analog (five valence electrons) but prefers not to have a lone pair. I think we’d want it still to have the electronegativity of carbon so that it could form strong non-polar bonds with hydrogen, and strong polar bonds with other electronegative elements. Let’s call it quintogen for now – the substance that generates molecules and macromolecular structures with five strong bonds.

Quintogen would form a lattice structure different from carbon’s diamond. The five bonds may make it a super-hard substance, and therefore it could cut diamond. There might not be a good analogue to graphite however since it is unclear if one would get the resonance stabilization of an equivalent hexagonal benzene ring. If each quintogen formed four bonds with an additional electron to delocalize, the molecule would not be flat and extended in two-dimensions. But if partial orbital overlap at different angles are sufficient, maybe it would have a diamond-like lattice that is conductive – aha! Perhaps there is an allotrope as hard as diamond but with conductive abilities. What if you had three bonds (hexagonally shaped) and two unpaired electrons. There could be a benzene like structure if the additional electron was not a fermion but a boson (so as not to be killed by the Pauli exclusion principle), but now this gets the student into much less familiar territory.

This suggests that the parameters may need to be more constrained so that students relate these properties to concepts they should learn in General Chemistry. Maybe the new element must have atoms that contain a nucleus and electrons. The nuclear particles could be more exotic (partly because there is much about nuclear structure that is still unknown). I’d personally have to learn a little more in this area. I know something about shell structures, quarks, the strong and weak nuclear forces, and I certainly teach students about the “belt of stability” for non-radioactive isotopes.

Would quintogen scavenge oxygen from the atmosphere? Quintogen monoxide would be reactive. Quintogen dioxide probably has a net dipole and therefore higher melting and boiling points – might it be a liquid at room temperature? Hydroquintogens (the analogue to hydrocarbons) could release more energy upon combustion. There is so much room to speculate – and maybe students will think very hard about the underlying concepts of atomic and molecular structure, and how that impacts chemical bonding and reactivity. Interestingly this speculation is a form of Alchemy. You don’t often see the word alchemy in chemistry journals but the computational chemists (my tribe) seem at least to have acknowledged that we do this. A Google search will lead you to applications structure-based drug design and searching for new superhard materials. This perhaps fits in very well with my typical first day of class featuring the Alchemists!

(More speculation to come as I refine this train of thought.)

Registration Madness

As an academic adviser, April and November are busy months. That’s the season when students are registering for their next-semester classes. Over the years, the process has gotten increasingly stressful for first and second years students as their preferred course sections fill up before they can register. The system at my institution, like many others, gives priority registration to students who have more credits. This makes sense because juniors and seniors need to enroll in classes crucial to completing their major.

This, however, poses a difficulty for younger students intending to major in the sciences, where the major is organized hierarchically. In my department, which has a traditional curriculum (that works well), students intending to major in chemistry or biochemistry take general chemistry their first year, organic chemistry and analytical chemistry their second year, and diverge into either physical chemistry or biochemistry their third year. Chemistry majors take two semesters of P-Chem and one semester of Biochem. Biochemistry majors do the opposite. There are also associated upper division labs for each major. If a student does not get into organic chemistry in the second year, but only takes it in the third year, the fourth year looks particularly nasty schedule-wise.

A significant number of biology majors and other pre-med students, however, plan to take organic chemistry in their junior year. It’s not as crucial that they do so in their second year, where they are taking more foundational biology courses. Hence, they register into organic chemistry before students who really need to take it their sophomore year (as part of their major) can get in. The chemistry and biochemistry majors, on the other hand, cause problems to the physics and engineering students. Our majors typically take their year of physics straddling the sophomore and junior years, i.e., they register before the physics and engineering students who take this in their first and second years. This results in students being very stressed at registration time. They have all learned to “watch the numbers” every day as classes fill up so they can plan alternate schedules. This is not helped by the gossip network that results in a fishbowl effect driving students into a frenzy.

Why is this happening? As students increasingly want to major or minor in the sciences, resources do not always move as quickly in the same direction. Ten years ago, while our enrollments were not low, there would still be open slots for students. In an extensive lab-based curriculum, you cannot go beyond the “cap” both for safety and resource/equipment reasons. Twenty years ago, enrollments were lower still, and it was a pleasure perhaps a luxury to teach a smaller group of students and to get to know each one more personally. Today, our classes are stuffed to the gills. There are more waiting at the gate clamoring that more sections be open. But we have neither the space nor the manpower in some cases, although we try our best to make accommodations. In the old days, I never had to manage a waiting list. Now it happens on a very regular basis, except for more specialized upper division elective courses. I also feel that the learning experience, in some cases, has become suboptimal for the students – particularly in the math-laden physical chemistry class that I teach regularly where we try and get as many students in as need the class so that they graduate on time.

Could registration be done differently? Can class scheduling be done on demand? Should students be able to get into the classes they need and want most of the time? Is there a centralized way to do this more efficiently and with less stress for the students? In an unrealistic and perhaps idealized world, students would submit their course preferences and a complex algorithm would maximize scheduling times (to make sure there are no conflicts) and spaces. Resources will then be appropriately allocated, again taking into account a complex set of constraints. I can already envision many difficulties that will arise in the calculus. So maybe this is just a pipe dream for most institutions particularly as one scales up the problem in terms of system size and diversity.

I did this once on a small scale when working for a startup institution. While not officially in my job description, I essentially acted as the Registrar/Scheduler by putting together a plan for Year 2. I had to anticipate the slate of offerings that the first cohort of students would be taking as sophomores, while building in the schedule for the second cohort of first-year students. Since the system size was small, and the context was a residential liberal arts college, the constraints were considerably looser. I conceived a mock schedule based on core and major requirements, resources, and a host of other factors. Then I worked with capable I.T. folks who wrote a web-app where students indicated their preferences for courses (no times or instructor names were given, just the course titles and descriptions). When the data came in, I roped in some help to assemble a timetable that would work. We worked sort-of like manual computers as we divided up the data and pored over spreadsheets. I had devised an algorithm that each of us went through to find any schedule conflicts.

It actually worked, and is one of the things that I am proud of accomplishing! What helped considerably is that I had assembled a preliminary mock schedule based on student surveys and informal information put together from many conversations. I had carefully thought through the different permutations and potential problems before the data came in, and I was very fortunate that my forecasting turned out to be quite accurate for the most part. (There are always unanticipated issues that crop up but I had built in some flexibility and robustness to the plan.) But I learned one thing from my experience – it would be difficult to scale up this approach, so I set a task for the relevant faculty, staff and administrators, to plan something different for the next cycle as size, diversity and complex constraints increased. I was not there to see it take place, but students registered for their classes and life went on.

Here’s a picture in the midst of the planning process with a preliminary mock schedule on my whiteboard. Some of my students knew what I was working on and wanted to encourage me (hence, their colorful writing above the timetable). Looking back at it brightens my day!

Superforecasting Tips?

I just finished reading Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner. Here are links to part 1 and part 2 where I discuss things that jumped out at me from the book.

The appendix is titled “Ten Commandments for Aspiring Forecasters”. There are actually eleven commandments listed, the final one being “Don’t treat commandments as commandments.” How apt!

Here are the two that really struck a chord with me, because I’d simply like to personally improve in these areas, and not even to be a better forecaster. Most of each commandment is quoted verbatim (with specific examples left out).

“#8: Look for the errors behind your mistakes but beware of rearview-mirror hindsight biases. Don’t try to justify your failures. Own them! Conduct unflinching postmortems: Where exactly did I go wrong? And remember that although the more common error is to learn too little from failure and to overlook flaws in your basic assumptions, it is also possible to [overcompensate]. Also don’t forget to do postmortems on your successes too. Not all successes imply that your reasoning was right. You may have just lucked out by making offsetting errors. And if you keep confidently reasoning along the same lines, you are setting yourself up for a nasty surprise.”

Over the years, I have gotten much better with the unflinching postmortem when I have gone wrong. I no longer try to justify them as much as I did when I was younger. I can still outline my reasoning as to why I made a certain decision based on the evidence available to me, but I no longer use it to justify a bad or wrong decision. On the other hand, I am poor at conducting success postmortems. I think about it for a moment, pat myself on the back, and then move on with renewed (and sometimes unjustified) confidence. This is an area that needs work. I’ve known about this blind spot before reading Superforecasting, but it was a good reminder. Tetlock and Gardner call hindsight bias the cardinal sin in forecasting.

“#9: Bring out the best in others and let others bring out the best in you. Master the fine arts of team management, especially perspective taking (understanding the arguments of the other side so well that you can reproduce them to the other’s satisfaction), precision questioning (helping others to clarify their arguments so they are not misunderstood), and constructive confrontation (learning to disagree without being disagreeable). Wise leaders know how fine the line can be between a helpful suggestion and micromanagerial meddling or between a rigid group [and] an open-minded one.”

As I have taken on more administrative roles, I have been learning to be a wise manager and leader. I made many mistakes and learned things the hard way. I’m fairly good at perspective taking. I’m not as good precision questioning and constructive confrontation, simply because I sometimes get too “cold” in my effort to be methodical. When making the helpful suggestion, I need to improve on the delivery, so that the listener hears it as “helpful”. Otherwise I can make all sorts of suggestions that, as helpful as they might be, are not heeded. Tetlock and Gardner have a chapter devoted to “The Leader’s Dilemma”. It was insightful, drawing great examples from the Prussians and the Wehrmacht of all places. (To my elder brother the military history aficionado: If you’re reading this, Helmuth von Moltke is the star of the show!)

I have some strategies (honed through experience) for bringing out the best in people in teams that I’ve worked with and directed. On the other hand I don’t have good strategies for letting others bring out the best in me. Sometimes it happens, but I suspect it happens less often than it should. That’s something to work on.

A final vignette that the book might be working its influence: Today in my General Chemistry class, as we talked about factors affecting acid strength (by analyzing the Lewis structures of the conjugate bases), I delved in deep with the students running through arguments and counterarguments – a little further than I usually go. This ate up more time than expected. Hopefully this helped sharpen their thinking rather than making them more confused. We’ll see when exam time comes around

Probability Predictions

I am now midway through Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, a new book by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner. So here’s part 2 of my sharing interesting things that jump out at me. See my most recent post for part 1.

How do you make a probability prediction and what does it mean? The authors provide a great example: “If a meteorologist says there is a 70% chance of rain and it doesn’t rain, is she wrong? Not necessarily. Implicitly, her forecast also says there is a 30% chance it will not rain. So if it doesn’t rain, her forecast may have been off, or she may have been exactly right. It’s not possible to judge with only that one forecast in hand. The only way to know for sure would be to rerun the day hundreds of times. If it rained in 70% of those reruns, and didn’t rain in 30%, she would be [spot] on.”

Well, that makes things difficult since we aren’t stuck in Groundhog Day. While Punxsutawney Phil might have seen his shadow in all the reruns of the day experienced by Bill Murray, I suppose it is possible that the flapping of a butterfly could have changed whether Spring arrived early or not. But if you’re stuck in Groundhog Day, then you don’t know if Phil is a superforecaster. A USA Today story from February suggests that at least in recent years, the groundhog is no better than random.

The problem is that it takes a while to accumulate once-a-year predictions to get a decent sample size. Meteorologists doing daily predictions on the other hand get a shot at it 365 days a year. Every day, one could predict the chance of rain the next day, and quickly build up a scorecard for prediction accuracy. But that’s different from being able to rerun the day because “initial” conditions might have changed due to a pesky wing-flapping butterfly. Can you rerun the day? You could in a simulation. Who thought it was a waste of time to play games?

As a computational chemist, I don’t play computer games for recreation because I spend enough time in front of a computer. It’s not just my research. Increasingly, activities related to teaching are in front of a computer. Over the years I have slowly converted my “lecture” notes and activity plans from handwritten to electronic. Service and administrative work is mainly e-mail, teleconferencing, writing and vetting documents, and even academic advising involves me and my student advisee looking up their degree audit, course registration, timetable, all on the computer or other mobile device.

That’s probably part of why I turned back to boardgames as a hobby in the mid-to-late ‘90s. Two games in particular attracted me back to the fold, Richard Garfield’s RoboRally and Klaus Teuber’s The Settlers of Catan. I used to keep statistics in those days. For example, having played over 200 games of Settlers, I could tell that there’s more than half-a-chance of winning if you have the longest road (which gives you 2 out of the needed 10 points to win the game). Having the largest army (also 2 points) doesn’t do as well. But I no longer keep such statistics. Unless I was playing solitaire, it diminished my game-playing enjoyment with other people after a while, at least for certain types of games that were not “simulations” or did not have a strong story arc.

However for certain types of games, such as historical simulations (often wargames), the statistics are interesting. I recently blogged about how the new game I’m playtesting, Bios Genesis, allows one to “replay the tape” of life’s origin. Interestingly the feedback loop resulted in a honing of strategies given the constraints of the rules. I even lost sleep calculating the probabilities as described in another post. In my last five games, that have been quite robust (now that there is a relatively stable ruleset), the Yellow player won four of the games, and almost won the fifth. The game is interestingly asymmetric as each of the players represents an important feature needed for life to get going: Red – metabolism, Blue – genes, Yellow – compartmentalization, Green – negentropy. Does this mean that compartmentalization is the key feature for getting life started (at least within the constraints of the game rules)? Of course if you’re trying to design a game, if you make it too “one-sided”, it won’t sell.

That being said, games are a great way to test how important a particular feature might be. I enjoy games that have a mix of strategy and luck. There needs to be some randomness to keep things interesting, and this has the further advantage of allowing one to test and quantify predictions. Suppose I think a rule-change might increase the chances of having a runaway leader. (This means that if someone takes an early lead, it becomes exponentially harder for all other players to catch up.) I could make a probability-based prediction and then run the tests by playing games to see how the predictions bear out. If the game has random moving parts (a shuffled card deck, rolling the dice, etc.) then there are a range of outcomes, and therefore the predictions are probabilistic.

Tetlock and Gardner work their way through a number of features of what superforecasters have in common, and how they are different from the rest of us who are not so good at making predictions. I discussed one in the last post – foxes do better than hedgehogs. Here’s another. The authors call it the “perpetual beta” – continuing to persevere and improve without there being a final version. “There is always more trying, more failing, more analyzing, more adjusting, and trying again.” So there’s the “grit” part of it. Turns out, superforecasters also tend to be numerate, i.e., they have good quantitative reasoning skills. You don’t need to have a degree in math. You don’t need to know Bayes’ theorem. But you do need to use it qualitatively. One might make a baseline prediction. But then with new data, one adjusts the baseline taking into account both the new data and the strength of the prior probability.

So how could I get better at predicting the future? While there are no magic wands or crystal balls, there are some general principles laid out by the authors. But even those, they claim, might improve your ability my 10% (a prediction that they may have tested). Turns out that you have to practice, refine, and practice some more. Funny how this sounds similar to what I tell my students learning chemistry. Turns out that getting quick and repeated feedback is important. Funny how this sounds similar to what I should do as an instructor to help my students improve.

I will close this post with the continuation of the meteorologist story from the authors described up in the second paragraph. “Of course we’re not omnipotent beings, so we can’t rerun the day – and we can’t judge. But people do judge… they look at which side of ‘maybe’ (50%) the probability was on. If the forecast said there was a 70% chance of rain and it rains, people think the forecast is right; it it doesn’t rain, they think it was wrong.” This fundamental error, according to the authors, can have far-ranging negative consequences particularly in the world of high-level political discussions and decisions. (They provide some examples.) I guess no one wants to sound wrong, and therefore vague hedging is the norm. Sounds like fortune cookie forecasting. Amusing, perhaps. Helpful, no. Dangerous if followed, possibly.

Foxes and Hedgehogs

Can you predict the future? Do you have what it takes to be a “superforecaster”? While my answer to the first question is a clear No, I’m intrigued by the second question. This is the premise of a new book by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. In the mid-1980s, Tetlock devised a methodology and started a long experiment to get a first approximation of how accurate people are at forecasting. He asked for specific predictions (not too easy, but not too difficult) on global political issues. The results were published in 2005 in a treatise titled Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (abbreviated EPJ).

While Tetlock tried to corral as many “experts” as possible to participate, the most famous pundits declined. This is perhaps not surprising – very high-profile experts did not really want their expertise tested. The results are now well-known and oft-quoted (out of context and misinterpreted in many cases): “The average expert was roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.” (This got a lot of press at the time.) What is often left out is that there were “two statistically distinguishable groups of experts.” One group did not do better than random guessing (actually slightly worse). The other did, but not by a large margin. The authors write: “Why did one group do better than the other? It wasn’t whether they had PhDs or access to classified information. Nor was it what they thought – whether they were liberals or conservatives, optimists or pessimists. It was how they thought.”

The authors define these two groups following the philosopher Isaiah Berlin (and an ancient Greek poet) as foxes and hedgehogs: “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The foxes are “eclectic” experts, while the hedgehogs are “Big Idea” experts. In the EPJ results, foxes beat hedgehogs. More importantly, they did it in the two key areas (calibration and resolution) that the authors define in their text (with useful graphs). The problem is that the hedgehog “knows one big thing…  and uses [it] over and over when trying to figure out what happens next.” They liken it to the green-tinted classes had to wear when visiting the Emerald City in Oz. Sometimes they can help accentuate a feature that might be missed, but more often that not, they distort reality. Even worse, acquiring more information doesn’t help and even “increases confidence… but not accuracy.” The EPJ results were very telling. Hedgehog experts were actually less accurate in their area of expertise.

Perhaps this is why high-profile experts did not want to participate in EPJ. In fact the results “revealed an inverse correlation between fame and accuracy: the more famous an expert was, the less accurate he was. That’s not because editors, producers, and the public go looking for bad forecasters. They go looking for hedgehogs, who just happen to be bad forecasters. Animated by a Big Idea, hedgehogs tell tight, simple, clear stories that grab and hold audiences. As anyone who has done media training knows, the first rule is ‘keep it simple, stupid.’ Better still, hedgehogs are confident...” This reminds me of an excellent presentation I attended by science communicator Randy Olson (I mentioned his book briefly in a post sometime back.). It can be quite challenging to communicate nuanced positions, but there are key things you can do in the narrative to hold the attention of the audience or at least keep them interested.

This also connected closely with my most recent post on Ambiguity. Tetlock and Gardner continue: “With their one-perspective analysis, hedgehogs can pile up reasons why they are right without considering other perspectives and the pesky doubts they may raise… For many audiences, that’s satisfying. People tend to find uncertainty disturbing… The simplicity of the hedgehog impairs foresight, but it calms nerves – which is good for the careers of hedgehogs.”

On the other hand, “Foxes don’t fare so well in the media. They’re less confident… and are likelier to settle on shades of ‘maybe’. And their stories are complex, full of ‘howevers’ and ‘on the other hands’… This aggregation of many perspectives is bad TV. But it’s good forecasting. Indeed, it’s essential.” This is scary. Especially if you consider what you see in today’s political circus. I’ve noticed that many of my students have a narrow view of science classes having to do with finding the “correct” answer. They get distressed if they aren’t making progress towards that goal. “Is this right?” is the most common question I get in office hours, after I help point a student in a direction that may help them “solve” the problem. I’m hoping that one takeaway from my class is that scientific inquiry is particularly interesting and helpful in studying complex problems. You need to aggregate data from a variety of sources to make headway, and even then there are so many unknowns.

I’d never really thought carefully whether I’m a fox or a hedgehog. I’ve only reflected on this for about a day, but I can see that in some areas, I’m definitely fox-like, but in others I’m a hedgehog. In fact my thinking can be quite compartmentalized in different situations depending on what I’m dealing with. Sometimes hedgehog behaviors are helpful, but the data do show that forecasting is not one of them. Hopefully I can help my students unleash their inner fox!

P.S. I've quoted extensively from Tetlock's book because the writing is excellent, and I couldn't paraphrase it any better.

P.P.S. For some reason this makes me think of Zootopia, which I watched last weekend. It is excellent and highly recommended.
 

Ambiguity

With a title like Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing, it’s hard not to be curious about this book by Jamie Holmes. The main thrust of the book is ambiguity – where it may be important and how to use it to your advantage. The ambiguous title is fitting. How can Not Knowing (Ignorance, perhaps) be powerful in a positive way? It sounds like Nonsense. In my previous post, I highlighted the BBC documentary about the Michel Thomas method. I learned about it in Holmes’ book. Even the book cover looks intriguing (shown below).

Holmes starts out by discussing puzzles. I happen to enjoy puzzles tremendously! Every day I faithfully work on the New York Times (NYT) crossword puzzle. When I first started, I could occasionally finish the Monday puzzle, but even then I sometimes needed help (from my spouse). After about a couple of years I could consistently finish the Monday through Wednesday puzzles relatively quickly without assistance. Now I can consistently finish the puzzle every day although the Friday and Saturday puzzles can be stumpers without a guiding theme. I will also happily work on logic puzzles, rebus puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, and more. However with limited time and energy, the crossword has been my mainstay.

Puzzles tickle the brain, and the NYT puzzle is cool because there are some rather interesting themes and variations. The Monday through Wednesday puzzles, and the Sunday puzzle, have relatively strong themes. Some of them are quite clever. I also find delight in the ambiguity of the clues – they could mean one thing, but they could mean another thing, or if you twist your mind around maybe yet a different thing. The question mark in a clue alerts you that there is a twist. The answer is not likely the first common thing that comes to mind. The Thursday puzzle is where you get some very creative and interesting variations. The first time I encountered a puzzle that had multiple letters in a box as part of the theme, I was actually offended. I thought it “should not be allowed by the rules”. (I found this out when I looked at the answer the next day after failing to solve the puzzle.) The irritation however gave way quickly to admiration. I started looking forward to Thursday puzzles and their brain-tickling twists. There’s a pleasure to it. Holmes classifies it as the pleasure of ambiguity. It’s hard to explain but there is something humorous about putting together things that normally don’t go together. Holmes cites the popularity of the game Mad Libs as a first among many examples.

According to Holmes, it is important to learn to live with some level of ambiguity, and not seek closure to quickly. A number of psychology experiments have shown that those who have low tolerance for ambiguity try to reduce the “uncertain feeling” by being decisive even in an area that may not be connected directly to the ambiguity. For example, data show that in the one-year period following a natural disaster there is a spike in the number of marriages and also the number of divorces in that specific area compared to non-disaster years. The most sobering story that Holmes details is the Waco standoff. While the chief negotiator, with a high tolerance for ambiguity, was attempting to get more Branch Davidians to leave the compound, uncertain and ambiguous actions by David Koresh, led the tactical team to push for more decisive action (by charging in). Much loss of life might have been prevented, although we won’t know exactly what might have been, if different choices were made.

In the final section of his book, Holmes outlines strategies of Embracing Uncertainty. He praises tolerance for ambiguity because it can lead to creativity. Apparently being fluent in a second language can be correlated to creative solutions (on standard psychological tests). Holmes describes how bilinguals find delight in juxtaposing words from different languages whose meaning might differ. Being multilingual, I can attest to this – I get a strange amusement in a Mad Libs way by mixing up or translating phrases from different languages so they sound silly. I wonder if I’m above average in creativity, but I haven’t taken one of the standard tests yet.

There is a small section on higher education. Holmes writes: “In the typical college classroom… the teacher runs through the material using clear, declarative statements. Lectures are not usually designed to help students grapple with ambiguous problems. Professors don’t generally include games in logic for students to fill in, or contradictions to work out, or pauses that encourage students to reflect. Most lecturers do ask questions to engage students, but their questions are too often rhetorical. That’s because teachers get nervous or impatient and then answer their own queries… Traditional lecturing, more importantly, encourages an approach increasingly at odds with the challenges graduates face. Have you ever had a lecturer highlight the necessity of stumbling, errors, and luck in developing breakthrough innovations?”

I believe there’s a benefit in clear lecturing in short bursts. One also needs to strike a balance between working on ambiguous problems (in the sciences) and providing enough structure so that the student isn’t completely flailing. Finding that sweet spot in the zone of proximal development is not easy, and it changes from year-to-year with a different class of students. Contradictions are an important part of my class although I warn the students beforehand. I sometimes respond to a student answer (to a question I posed) with “I’m going to try and distract you” at which point I come up with a spurious explanation that contains some half-truths, and let the students puzzle this out. It sharpens their thinking so they can drill down beyond an initial vague but “on the right track” solution. In my first year of teaching at my present institution, I sat in on many of my colleagues’ classes. In one of them, my very experienced colleague posed a question and was greeted by silence. This was early in the semester so no surprise there. He simply told the class that he was willing to wait, and leaned against the wall patiently. And eventually the silence broke. Since then I’ve done the same thing.

Overall I found parts of the book quite interesting, while other parts felt more like pop psychology. Let me include one last vignette that I found intriguing based on studies by Piotr Winkielman and others. They found that “when people were in a bad mood they found comfort in the familiar.” When happy, however, they quickly get bored with the familiar and seek novelty. Holmes writes: “Novelty was threatening only when the adults were in a defensive state of mind. An upbeat mood can apparently turn a confusing idea into an interesting one. By rebranding failure and confusion as not merely normal but also indispensable, teachers can go a long way toward changing students’ emotional attitude towards uncertainty.” It seems as if he’s implying that creativity and innovate thinking can be catalyzed by a good mood. I wonder how that plays out in the classroom. Inject small jolts of humor perhaps? Or is this all just nonsense?