| Wednesday, April 13, 2005 |  |
| How much will you give me for my $20 bill |
 Various experiments have been done to try to figure out how people value things and make decisions. Psychologist Max Bazerman says that during the past ten years he has earned more than $17,000 by auctioning $20 bills to his MBA students at Northwestern University. In the course of almost two hundred of his actions, the top two bids never totaled less than $39, and in one instance totaled $407.
Now, that's when it is very clear what you get for your money. A 20 dollar bill. Logic should dictate that no reasonable person would bid more than $20 for what obviously is a $20 value. But all sorts of other factors might enter into the calculation. The fun and excitement of the bidding, the prestige of being the winner, the expectation that there might be some kind of valuable hidden bonus, etc. A similar, but somewhat more complex type of auction would be if you're not entirely sure of the value you're betting on. If, say, it is a glass jar full of coins, which you aren't allowed to count. If people make blind bids written down on paper, the average bid will tend to be less than the actual value, as most people are trying to avoid the obvious risk. But some people will over-estimate the actual value, so the winner of the auction would typically be somebody who ends up paying more than the actual value. And then there's the particularly sneaky variant, the Entrapment Gam. Let's say that everybody who bids in an auction must pay the amount of their bid, whether they win or not, but you're allowed to continue over-bidding each other. People will start really low, like 0.50, as most people feel they can waste that. Bidding continues up to around $10 and pauses. Then the people who've bid $8 or $9 must decide whether they'll lose that or they'll continue. It will continue up to $20 when again there's reason for pause. One might realize that one now is likely to lose quite a bit. So maybe if one throws in a few extra dollars and wins, one will lose less, so it might be worth it. And it might go on quite a bit like that, as at each step one must evaluate whether one might avoid a loss by paying a bit more. Even if one ends up paying a lot more for the 20 dollar bill than it was worth. This was apparently the game Mr.Bazerman played with his students. There might be surprisingly many situations in life that are similar to that scenario. Competitive sports, the making of business deals, buying a house, etc. You might have invested a certain amount of time and effort and money, and even if you know you won't get back the equivalent, you might think that just a little more would get you what you're going for and minimize the losses. More here or here. [ Patterns | 2005-04-13 23:06 | 7 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| Connection |
 My DSL connection was down all day. Which is always a time where I panic about how dependent I am on being connected, and I regret that I haven't prepared any backup solutions. I could very well have things arranged so I could do a good deal of my work while I'm online, but I don't. Suddenly I realize all the stuff I'm missing. Not just that I can't communicate with people, but most of what I need isn't on my computer. And say I wanted to arrange an alternative way of getting on the net, I can't, because I'm not on the net. Like, how would I quickly find a dial-up provider if that's what I decided I needed? I'd, duh, search on the net. I'm blind.
When France Telecom finally answered the phone, after disconnecting me dozens of times, I got a dose of the bureaucratic madness I've tasted before. The lady told me they were working on the lines, so of course I was down. They're be doing that until the 29th. I needed her to repeat it several times, but she insisted, my line would be down for the next 2 and a half weeks. And, besides, I'm not even supposed to have DSL, because I'm too far from the central. That's an old story, which was a big deal when I got the line. You know, DSL providers usually have a website where you can put in your phone number and it tells you whether DSL is available to you, and at what speed. If you put in the numbers of either of my neighbors, it says, sure, you can have a high speed DSL line. If you put in my number it says, sorry, DSL is not available in your area. It took an enormous amount of hassles to get the line originally, only because I managed to find an ally who could see the crazyness in that and help me insist that of course I could have a line too. But now that's the kind of thing the service people can bring up when it suits them. You're not really supposed to have that line, you're putting too many bits through it, so if it doesn't work, it is your own fault. So, now, if you don't have DSL the next couple of weeks, tough luck, good bye. I decided not to believe her, to keep my sanity, so instead I played with my router settings. And, somehow, switching it from "PPP over Ethernet", which it normally is set at, to "PPP over ATM" made the difference, and I got my connection again. But it doesn't take more than 10 minutes to forget about the pain of not having the connection, and go right back to normal. Otherwise, my wife had been looking forward to that I'd clean up my desk and help her in the garden and go to sleep at normal hours for the next couple of weeks. [ Diary | 2005-04-13 23:59 | 1 comment | PermaLink ] More > |
| Automatic Academics |
 Some clever grad students have used an automatic computer science paper generator to create a gibberish paper, which they've gotten submitted to a conference. They now plan on randomly generating a gibberish speech which they can go and deliver there.
Now, I generally think such pranks are hilarious, and very useful in blowing the cover of people who take themselves too damned seriously, but who accept things that look and sound right, but which aren't. I remember examples like a comedian succeeding in passing himself off as a doctor and giving a speech at a medical conference, saying nothing but gibberish, and nobody noticed. And there are those guys who made a fake WTO website and managed to be invited to conferences where they created quite a havoc. And, hey, that paper is pretty damn good. I don't understand a word of it, even though I understand most of the words. But it kind of sounds like it is saying something, and it is kind of a lively read. There are a few akward sentences that might give it away, but they're well hidden. I don't know what kind of expert one has to be to catch that this isn't real, as it isn't entirely clear what it is talking about in the first place. And that is probably one of the factors that let's things like that slip through. Lots of people are experts in a particular field, but not in many others, and they have no time to check everybody's references. So if you hear something that isn't exactly in your field, and it sounds like that kind of things should sound, you think it is real. But now I notice that their agenda actually is to put down a certain type of conference which they regard as fake, because they accept papers that aren't reviewed. Which, for that matter, it says clearly on their website, so it isn't really that big a caper to succeed in submitting a paper. Anyway now I notice, somewhat to my horror, that the conference they would like to embarrass is the Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics. Which I don't know, so I can't make any statement about whether it really just is fake conference for money making purposes as they say, but I notice that I know some of the affiliated organizations and a number of the people listed as advisory board members, so I would guess it is what it says it is. Systems thinking is probably a field that some hardcore scientific types would love to debunk. And they might feel they have an easy time at it in a multi-disciplinary setting where organizers are trying to be open to different types of views, and where it isn't a criterion that everything you say has to be proven years ago. For that matter, systems thinking doesn't necessarily go well with the approach of taking things apart into their components and analyzing them and proving them and peer reviewing them. And it is full of angles and possibilities that easily can be ridiculed by materialist folks who'd like such things to not exist. The Gaia Theory, morphogenetic fields, implicate order, synergetics - there'd be plenty of folks who'd find all of that to be utter nonsense. Evolution would be in the same category if it didn't happen to be juxtaposed with creationism. One of the items listed from the hoaxers' site is the wellknown "Sokal Hoax". Which was a physicist who wrote a paper he meant to be utter nonsense, and got submitted to some prestigious scientific journal, based on his own considerable reputation, in order to then embarrass them. Except for that his article is pretty good, and not as utterly nonsensical as he pretends. But it refers to a bunch of these things that the author considers new age nonsense, like morphogenetic fields. So he considered that anybody who'd accept that he'd write about such things and not be up in arms about it would be a complete idiot and worthless academic. Which reminds me of a caper that "Amazing" Randi did once. He's a stage magician who's a wellknown materialist "sceptic" who tries hard to disprove that anything supernatural exists. Often by the approach that if he can make some kind of magic trick or hoax that does the same thing as what somebody says they can do, they were obviously frauds too. Anyway, he had gotten an ally to pose as a channeler at some kind of new age expo. The guy put on a show of going into a trance and delivering some very general mumbo jumbo about the world changing and spiritual influences. And the audience seemed quite happy with it all, which was taken as a success by Randi, in showing that they're all gullible idiots. Anyway, the joke about it is that after Randi's ally triumphantly announced on the stage a little later that it was a hoax and he was just faking it, nobody really minded. The audience thought it was fun too, and they thought the channeling had been pretty good, whether he thought he faked it or not. Because it really didn't matter at all, unless you had some kind of point to prove. The result mattered. So, in case that conference there is really for people who're into systems thinking and informatics, I think they might actually enjoy and appreciate the joke of somebody delivering a randomly generated paper and a speech. It certainly is a good comment on how human systems work. The ways in which false information often is accepted provides some insights into how systems work. Better targets might be the types of folks who really take themselves too seriously, and who would freak out and be greatly embarrassed by being hoaxed like that. [ Information | 2005-04-13 23:59 | 4 comments | PermaLink ] More > |