The Professor and the Demagogue

Stardate 99592.99.* Who would you prefer to captain the starship Enterprise? Charismatic James T. Kirk or Analytical Vulcan Spock?

You might be surprised to know that a heavy game-theory-laden article addressing this question was published recently: “At the Helm, Kirk or Spock? The Pros and Cons of Charismatic Leadership” by Benjamin Hermalin.

In our ‘superstar economy’ era, the Kirks seem to get widespread exposure. You don’t hear much about the Spocks – wonky low-profile folks who can’t seem to fan up any flames of enthusiasm. In my own area, higher education, I increasingly observe that leadership searches implicitly or explicitly prioritize charisma. Kirks rather than Spocks get the top jobs, and increasingly so.

Would the typical space-cadet prefer to have Kirk or Spock as captain? As you might have guessed, the answer is “it depends”. Hermalin’s article explores (1) why charisma is viewed as a positive attribute in leaders, and (2) why charismatic leaders don’t always do well. The game theory formulation is dense (to a neophyte like me) and the typical reader will be bogged down by equations, propositions and lemmas. I won’t go into any of those details, but instead highlight some of the interesting conclusions from the model.

The main point: There is a tradeoff between inspiring your followers and giving the hard facts in a challenging situation. Hence, a leader needs to make a choice between when to provide more information and when to dial down the information and give more inspiration instead. When times are good, charisma matters much less. Everyone’s happy hearing all the positive-sounding facts. But when times are bad, it gets trickier. Hermalin explores the calculus that a savvy leader (one who knows the hard facts) and is able to maximize the highest output by figuring out the balance between inspiration and information.

But that’s an ideal situation. We all wish our leaders, or we ourselves, are ideally savvy. Hermalin then explores two polar opposites: The professor is either a low-charisma leader or one who rarely utilizes emotional (inspirational) appeals, and therefore mainly opts for the information approach. (A low-charisma leader utilizing inspiration almost always is viewed suspiciously.) On the other hand, the demagogue does not have good access to the facts, and can only make emotional appeals. Interestingly, ‘rational’ followers, i.e., those who recognize when someone is making an emotional appeal and not providing many facts, are less suspicious of a higher charisma leader who often makes emotional appeals compared to a lower charisma leader. Thus, in a challenging situation, it seems that having a charismatic leader potentially leads to better (productivity) outcomes.

In contrast to the rational followers, ‘emotional’ followers fall into different categories and may respond more positively or more negatively to the demagogue. The article goes through the different possibilities in more detail, but then comes to the conclusion that a highly charismatic demagogue will tend to outperform the professor, while a less charismatic demagogue may elicit a weaker outcome than the cold hard facts approach of the professor. This is scary, because it suggests that from outward appearances, highly charismatic demagogues will outwardly be perceived as more effective – and we might expect to see such types increase in leadership positions of highly complex organizations.

Why is this potentially dangerous? Hermalin’s analysis suggests that “a highly charismatic leader is tempted to substitute charm for action… less likely to learn relevant information and, on certain margins, works less hard…” to the detriment of the organization. While the real world is certainly full of nuances and complexity that may not be captured by Hermalin’s ultra-theoretical model, his broad conclusions don’t seem far-fetched. But this may be a “that’s obvious” response from a casual reader.

In a leadership role, my core personality and approach fits well with the professor category. I can turn on the inspirational charm when I think it’s absolutely needed, but am very reluctant to do so because I find it emotionally draining. I’d like to be more of a savvy leader; I have a lot more to learn in this regard. As a follower, I’d like to think I’m particularly skeptical of demagogue leaders, but this article made me consider that I should pay attention to the charisma-level of a leader and how often emotional appeals are made from said leader. It’s a good reminder to be aware of one’s own implicit biases.

*Stardate calculated from this website based on the article’s publication date, assuming noon.

The Lost Elements

In 1786, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) wrote “Chemistry can become nothing more than a systematic art or an experimental doctrine, but never a true science, because its principles are merely empirical and… are incapable of the application of mathematics.”

Thus begins an early chapter of The Lost Elements: The Periodic Table’s Shadow Side, by Marco Fontani, Mariagraza Costa and Mary Virginia Orna. 

Merely empirical. A strange phrase given that empiricism is king in today’s scientific endeavors. Show me the empirical data! But experimental data can be very messy, and it turns out that the application of mathematics both helped and hindered the development of the periodic table. Shortly after Kant’s statement, Antoine Lavoisier elevated the importance of measuring data as precisely as possible. Such measurements would be used to distinguish chemical elements, and guide their placement in the periodic table.

Relative mass was a key guiding principle in arranging the periodic table prior to Moseley’s groundbreaking work in 1913, at which point atomic number dethroned mass as the organizing principle. But it was early work by Dobereiner who noticed that elements with “similar chemistry” formed a triad whereby the middle member possessed a relative mass midway between the lightest and heaviest members. (The figure below is taken from the excellent resource, the Chemogenesis WebBook. Dobereiner’s triads are superimposed on the modern periodic table.) It’s a nice example of the application of mathematics, perhaps a step towards turning a systematic art into a true science. This strategy helped Mendeleev to predict the existence of yet-undiscovered elements by noticing such mathematical “holes” in the relative properties of known elements.

In a typical chemistry class, you’d hear of how the periodic table came to be in a cleaned-up story that focuses on the productive discoveries along the way. You hear little of the messiness of actual events; it’s as if the beauty of the periodic table was revealed from on high to a few chemical geniuses who saw the light and shared it with humankind. You hear about the successes but not the failures. The Lost Elements tells the story of the latter. The authors have painstakingly collected information of many no-name people who thought they had discovered new elements, only to find out they were wrong. The path to our modern periodic table is littered with the detritus of elements you’ve never heard of: siderum, australium, erythronium, bithium, nosandrium, wasium, and hundreds more. It’s the shadow side to the story of the periodic table.

The book consists of mostly short vignettes of each “lost” element along with a brief story of its supposed discoverer and why he or she thought something new was found. The stories reinforce the difficulty of measuring tiny quantities and figuring out if those differences made an actual difference! Tiny atoms can’t be seen or handled directly, and therefore ascertaining their properties requires indirect approaches. In the nineteenth century, there were four main approaches: blowpipe analysis, qualitative/quantitative analysis, electrolysis, and emission spectroscopy. We teach the latter three in introductory college chemistry; hardly anyone today has heard of blowpipe analysis.

I’ve mainly browsed and skimmed over the vignettes. Unless you’re very interested in the history of the periodic table, you might find the book boring. The authors have tried to liven things up with catchy vignette titles. I think the cleverest one is: “If Anyone Has a Sheep, Wolfram Will Eat It.” My main take-away from the book was an appreciation of how challenging it can be to separate elements from each other and recognize when you have a pure element that can no longer be further separated. It’s not as easy as it looks, and any separation examples you’ve done in chemistry class are the very easy cases.

Is Vibranium an element? Or is it a compound – an admixture of elements? Could it be found naturally as an ore? Could it be synthesized? Chemists are constantly inventing new materials with interesting properties. Combining elements to make compounds is perhaps even more interesting than separating compounds into their elements. But, if you were to discover a new element, you would have the privilege of naming it! I had my first semester G-Chem class explore this idea for their final project, and it was neat to see their creative ideas. 

Several years ago, I put together an Alien Periodic Table class activity. I’ve now used it multiple times, and I think my students have gained some tiny appreciation of the messiness of how the periodic table came to be. While it incorporates many of the challenges faced by the early scientists (including two episodes where relative mass can trip you up), I have not yet thrown in a “lost element”, but now I’m tempted to try! We’ll see how it goes over with the students.

Far From Home

I’m on sabbatical an ocean away. Far from home.

My hope is that immersing myself in a new and different environment sparks new ways of looking at things. Many preparations were needed prior to the big move. Visiting a faraway place for two weeks is very different from adjusting to a new, albeit temporary, home for a whole year. I seem to have recovered from jet lag. My office is mostly set up. I’ve been meeting lots of people at my workplace. And, per my sabbatical proposal, I am starting to learn new and unfamiliar things that will (I hope) contribute to my long-term research goals.

No major flashes of creative insight have appeared yet. I’m plodding my way through learning some new methodology, with its attendant software packages, all of which I’m unfamiliar with. I’m finally teaching myself python as part of the learning process; I’d survived on perl and shell scripts for two decades or so. I’m also working my way through research papers filled with jargon I’m not as familiar with. All this feels somewhat similar to my last sabbatical, except this time I’m also far from home. Previously I camped out at the research university ten miles away from my college, which coincidentally was closer to home distance-wise, but with a much worse parking situation. (I took public transport.)

Before the move, I was working hard to finish a full draft of an article based on a research project three of my students worked on over the last two years. That allowed me to leisurely work on draft revisions while recovering from jet lag, and after submitting the paper I was able to shift my concentration to my new learning project. There’s one other paper on the backburner – my student made all the key figures – but I’ve yet to write it up because I haven’t settled on the story’s angle.

Sabbatical is also a time for rest and renewal. This means exploring my new environment at a leisurely pace. The country I’m in is not unfamiliar; I’ve lived here for short stretches. However, many things change over the years, and there are many new spaces I no longer recognize amidst the familiar things from time past. I even watched a movie! You might have guessed it – Spider Man: Far From Home. But in a different sense, I’m closer to home. My country of birth is across the border, not an ocean away. I still have family and friends in the area, and I’m enjoying catching up with folks. I’m visiting an institution I helped set up. In a sense, Spider Man: Homecoming might be the more appropriate title for this sabbatical.

Music, Transience, Life

Can you imagine static everlasting music? Sounds oxymoronic. Imagine a single musical note sounded forever without change. Not only does this seem boring, it was almost impossible to generate before the advent of electronic music. The sound of a plucked string fades. The breath of a horn-blower expires. The clapped cymbal, loud on impact, disappears into the wind. But the dying sound of a musical note is what gives rise to the experience of music. One dying tone gives way to another tone, which in turn dies as yet another is given birth. And this tickles our ears with delight!

If the first tone did not die and new tones were simply added to it, you may briefly have harmony, but eventually added dissonant sounds will lead to cacophony. Distinct tones are lost; all becomes noise. There may be troves of hidden information in the overlapping waves, interfering with each other constructively and destructively, but the human listener cannot discern any underlying patterns. It’s the sound of a high entropy state, seemingly more dead than alive.

Perhaps there is an analogy between music and life where transience plays a key role. Just as music is alive when one tone gives way to another, so chemistry becomes alive as molecules transform from one to another, their concentrations constantly changing over time in a dynamic dance. A turns into B, which turns into C, then D, then E, then F, then G, and then A*, an excited form of the original A, its chemical bonds vibrating at double the frequency of the original. You might call it a scale or a cycle. The scale establishes a musical key while the cycle establishes a key metabolic process.

What makes music pleasurable? Anticipation, Expectation, Surprise, Resolution. The masterful composer cycles through themes – and for the greatest pieces of music, we do not get bored listening to them again and again and again. The dynamics that make the music so alive are rooted in larger underlying structures, cycles within larger cycles. The maestro teases us by building anticipation. An expectation is delightfully thwarted to reveal a surprise. And the resolution, when it comes later than expected, is savored.

How much time passed before seemingly simple molecules, handfuls of atoms connected by chemical bonds, turned into specifically themed repeating structures? I don’t know. But these delightful polymers, when located within an energy flow, build up and break down. Repeating units are taken apart and put back together. The prelude to this grand opus starts in simplicity – how can it not? We don’t know where it is headed. The maestro may have many hidden surprises. But as the chemical music proceeds, we begin to see the themes and the repeating structures, but before the first cell, it would have been difficult to predict how chemistry would give rise to biology – endless forms most beautiful, yet with the same underlying chemistry.

All living things die. Those that do not die, we do not call alive. But it is death that gives way to life. Without the transience of life, there would be no living. Dynamism is the feature of life. Dynamism is the feature of music. Music must be performed and listened to. It must be experienced bodily – not just through tiny hair-like structures in the inner ear, but through the cavities and substances of our entire human body. Waves of different frequencies resonate through different structures. You can read a musical score, see the squiggle of notes on a static page, and analyze its themes in great detail. But to truly delight in the music, you must bodily experience it. The notes don’t truly come alive until you experience them as transient tones passing through time.

In my lifetime, I’ve drawn many chemical structures on paper. I connect them to each other in complicated schemes. My mind’s eye imagines how these molecules, too small for me to bodily see, transform from one to another in an elaborate dance. One day, the community of scientists may draw out a grand scheme and call it “the chemical origins of life”. It might seem like a huge intellectual achievement, but it may be akin to writing out the score of a grand musical opus, one that has been played again and again, but it’s taken us so long to develop the notation. Drawn chemical representations are like musical notes. Are physical molecules like the tones of music?

Asking the Right Questions

In the 2004 movie I, Robot; detective Del Spooner investigates the death of Dr. Alfred Lanning by speaking to an A.I. incarnation of the deceased. You might think that the A.I. is some archaic early version that doesn’t know very much because when queried, Lanning’s hologram often replies: “My responses are limited. You must ask the right questions.” This is frustrating if you are the questioner.

I wonder how students would respond if I imitated Lanning’s hologram. Most of my students seem nervous about asking questions; there is often a self-effacing preface to the question. I’ve always encouraged students to ask questions as much as possible since it helps them to learn, and it helps me gauge where they might be confused. Sometimes my response is a clarification; sometimes I ask a question in return to sharpen a particular point. I’ve never said “That’s the wrong question.”

While there might not be any ‘wrong’ questions per se, quality may vary – some questions are better than others. I’ve been pondering this issue in relationship to what it means to learn a particular subject area. As an academic adviser, I regularly chat with my students about how their classes are going. One point I try to emphasize: Learning a subject area is about how to ask good questions about that field. Instead, students are more often concerned with finding the right answers. However, what’s more important at the tertiary level is asking the right questions.

So perhaps Dr. Lanning’s seeming unhelpfulness is a way to focus on what’s important: learning how to ask the right questions! A good question should lead to another good question as one deepens down the rabbit hole. What might such a series of questions be in my field?

What is chemistry?

A fundamental question. What makes chemistry distinct from biology or physics? My students have tackled the issue of definitions – and oh, what a tangle it is! While chemistry broadly deals with the interaction of matter, the conceptual crux of chemistry is relating these interactions down to the tiny scale of molecules. We’re talking nanometers here. It doesn’t help that we cannot see anything so small; we have to use models, analogies, and mental pictures, to help us understand what’s going on. There are small molecules, there are big molecules, but fundamentally chemistry is about molecules interacting with each other. That leads to the next question.

What is a molecule?

A molecule is two or more atoms ‘bonded’ together in a specific way. These connections between atoms lead to a three-dimensional structure that has specific properties. Chemistry takes place when molecules exchange atomic partners by breaking existing chemical bonds and making new ones. Bond-making and bond-breaking are at the heart of chemistry. The type of exchange that takes place is dependent on the overall structure of the molecule and also its specific bond connections. But this begs the question of what causes the exchange of atoms to occur.

What controls bond-making and bond-breaking?

Fundamentally this has to do with energy. But it’s tricky because energy is a slippery concept: We don’t really know what it is, but we can count it! I’ve rearranged my introductory chemistry course to center on the bond energy curve. We start with the generic picture of a chemical bond and then burrow our way down to what makes a chemical bond weaker or stronger. Later we talk about collisions between molecules and the sources of energy needed to break chemical bonds and start a chemical reaction.

That about sums up the first year of college chemistry. We build upon this foundation in subsequent courses. Or at least I hope we do so systematically. Folks in my department talk to each other regularly, and I think I have a good sense of what goes on in other classes (including ones I don’t teach) so that I can make forward-looking connections in my general chemistry course. In my physical chemistry courses, I can make backward-looking connections: “Remember when you saw X in G-Chem?” (Many students don’t remember, so reminding them often is very necessary.) “Now we can delve into why X…” then segues into the topic of the day.

I’ve started asking my physical chemistry students to write mock exam questions in an effort to help them prepare for the exam. I think there was a payoff to students who put in the effort to write good questions, but I haven’t assessed this systematically. I need to consider how to get students to pose those important fundamental conceptual questions. Maybe one test is that if the question leads to a very limited response – yes, no, maybe so – then perhaps it’s not a very good question, at least for fundamental learning rather than simple clarification. In that sense, Lanning’s canned statement is a little deeper than at first glance. “My responses are limited.” The sign of a less useful question perhaps? It requires more work to ask the right questions.

First Instinct Fallacy

You’re taking a multiple-choice exam. Looking at one of your answers, you begin to second-guess yourself. But you’re not still not sure. It seems like a 50-50 toss-up. Should you switch? Or should you stick with your first guess?

Most people prefer to stick rather than switch. Even though this is often detrimental to your exam score. Several studies have shown that switching from a wrong answer to a right answer is significantly more probable than switching from a right to wrong answer. Hence, those who switch score better on the exam, on average.

Yet the belief persists that it’s better not to switch. A Barron’s GRE Prep guide (from 2000) even reads: “Exercise great caution if you decide to change an answer. Experience indicates that many students who change answers change to the wrong answer.” This is known as the First Instinct Fallacy.

Why does the first instinct fallacy persist? That’s the subject of a 2005 paper by Kruger, Wirtz and Miller (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 88, no. 5, pp. 725-735). The title and abstract are shown below.

The authors present experimental data arguing that this fallacy persists because when you switch from a right to a wrong answer, it is both more regrettable and more memorable, compared to when you didn’t switch (even though your answer was wrong and your second guess was the right answer although you didn’t ultimately choose it). This is one of those explanations that seems obvious after-the-fact, but in reality the causal link is not easy to tease out – hence the need for clever and sneaky experiments. I recommend reading the paper in full if you are interested in all the details.

I have not taken a high-stakes exam in a while that ‘counted’. (I do take the exams I have written to ensure they are of the appropriate length and difficulty.) But I do grade plenty of exams every semester. Very few of my questions are multiple choice or true-false, however I have observed many times the regret of students who seemingly believe the first instinct fallacy. When the graded exams are returned, there is plenty of groaning and ‘if only’ self-recriminations. I have very rarely observed a student bemoaning not changing their answer. Part of this has to do with attending only to what is easily observable in front of you, although there are occasions when a student writes out two solutions and then scratches out the first one.

Reflecting on what I do as a grader, I might be exacerbating the first instinct fallacy by explicitly writing comments about the student’s crossed-out first answer being correct. Perhaps I should stop doing so. I’m surprised I had not heard of the first instinct fallacy until alerted to it from a recent blog post by Tim Harford. I suspect that if I had taken an exam, I would respond with similar groaning as my students. More importantly, when taking an exam, I would likely also resist making a change in a second-guess situation – probably to my detriment.

I think I need to alert my students to this fallacy and add it to the list of learning tips and strategies in my syllabus. Since I am trying to improve student metacognition, I could couple it with the importance of looking over your exam after you think you’ve finished it. Would such an alert be of any use? The authors question this in a sobering final paragraph:

“The most obvious implication of this research, however, is that test takers should be warned that sticking with one’s first instinct is an ill-advised strategy. Even with such exhortations, however, people may be reluctant to switch as often as they should. Students who have been explicitly instructed to switch as often as they should. Students who have been explicitly instructed as to the invalidity of the first instinct theory are no more likely to change their answers – nor receive higher test scores – than test takers who do not receive instruction [many references included]. The (misleading) personal evidence garnered from a lifetime of test taking may be difficult for test takers to overcome.”

Human beings are not robots. Things that affect us more significantly, and lodge in our memory, can be blind spots that we’ve learned only too well.

Remaking the News

When I was young, our family subscribed to two newspapers. Not that there was much choice locally or nationally. I didn’t listen to the radio and we didn’t have a TV until I was in my mid-teens. TV news was read by newscasters with little supporting video; I found it boring and preferred the newspaper – mainly for the comics and the sports section.

Nowadays, I consume my news through the Internet. My main topic of interest is world affairs, and I typically read a variety of international sources – Reuters, Associated Press, BBC, Channel News Asia. I occasionally read articles from The New York Times (my spouse has a subscription), sometimes CNN, and I nibble on NPR and a smorgasbord of online articles that catch my eye. I rarely stream video as I much prefer reading text at my own pace. I avoided Buzzfeed. My social media usage is low, and I almost never click on any news links in that stream.

The death of traditional news media has been making the news regularly over the last decade or two. Fake news and alternative facts have muddied the waters, as a plethora of news ‘sources’ vie for your eyeballs on the Internet. Are there guardians of the truth any longer? Were there ever? What is truth anyway?

In her new book Merchants of Truth, Jill Abramson juxtaposes the stories of four news outfits: The New York Times, The Washington Post, Buzzfeed and Vice Media. Four different philosophies guided the rise of each, but as you would find in any good story, they face various travails and challenges, and each has evolved with the times to stay fresh, to stay afloat, and to keep you coming back to them. This is where things get interesting.

Before the heated competition of the Internet, the venerable New York Times kept its business arm separate from news content. It was considered a conflict of interest for the ad and revenue folks to strategize with the content folks – the journalists and editors, the marquee defenders and guardians of the truth. Buzzfeed’s strategy was to first steer eyeballs to its web content – by hiring quick-hack editors to speedily repackage original content from sources such as the New York Times, but with catchier headlines and ledes. Costs are low because you don’t need to pay journalists to find original news-breaking content. Once you have the eyeballs, you can steer ad revenue to your site.

The effectiveness of these upstart strategies, particularly in cooperation with Facebook and gaming Google page-rank, was devastating to traditional newspapers – many of which have closed shop in the last two decades. Vice Media’s early focus on video content, and the blending of content and advertising from auteurs such as Spike Jonze, further hastened the economic precipice facing traditional media. Where the eyeballs are concentrated is where the advertisers flock. Traditional media, having built its empire on the willingness of advertisers to cough up huge sums of money for ad placement, was thrown into crisis as revenue dried up. It was simply too expensive to maintain a stable of journalists and editors to keep up the delivery of new content. But then new media realized that to thrive, they needed to generate news-worthy content, and they began to add old-school type journalists to their ranks.

The death of traditional colleges and universities has also been making the news regularly over the last decade or two. Is it getting too expensive to maintain a stable of professors and administrative staff to keep up the delivery of content? Worse, isn’t most of it just old recycled content? Users are supposedly paying to ‘learn’ the content. So how does one learn anyway? Reading complex material is hard work. The more background you have, the easier it becomes, but the early stages can be tough-going. Perhaps if the material is presented in an ‘interesting’ way, it becomes ‘easier’ to learn; at least that’s the premise of new media’s approach: repackage and jazz things up with video.

I dream of the magic bullet that will make my students understand chemistry. They dream of it too. The content of a standard college chemistry curriculum has been known for many, many years. You’d think that our various leaps in media technology would have ushered in a golden age of learning osmotically – efficiently imbibing new content into our consciousness. But new content doesn’t stick unless conceptually mapped to old content, made and remade in the hard work of learning. Complex content is even more challenging with layers upon layers of knowledge, built hierarchically and dynamically, in our three-pound brains in a process that remains mysterious.

If as a society we are no longer willing to do the hard work of complex learning, or to take time to understand the complex issues of today, we are in trouble. Subsisting on listicles, personality quizzes, and celebrity voyeurism – all excellent eyeball-attention-grabbing moneymakers for ad revenue – will lead us down the road to idiocracy. Perhaps that is one takeaway message from Merchants of Truth. The merchants may end up defining truth. Or perhaps ill-defining it. Remaking the news remakes more than just the news.