Scott Adams's Blog, page 346

The War on Parents

Sometimes it feels as if our school system is at war with parents, and winning. The kids are just the ammunition.

Take homework, for example. Most schools load up the kids with hours of homework, which ruins a family's quality of life after school, putting parents in the position of being bad cops from the time school is out until bedtime. The kids are stressed, overworked, and tired. You might assume there is a scientific basis for assigning so much homework. Does it make our nation more competitive on the International playing field? Answer: Nope. In fact, the Charter School down the street, that presumably looked into best practices, gives kids time during the school day to complete all of their assignments.

Now suppose your kid joins a sports team, or band, or competitive cheerleading, or just about anything. You'll find yourself spending weekends out of town for tournaments and competitions. You might be booking hotels for overnight stays, and generally building your life around these occasions. I will acknowledge that for an elite student athlete/musician/mathlete/whatever, the opportunity to compete with the best in the state might help secure a college scholarship. But parents know early on if they have a scholarship-winning sort of child, and most do not. Most parents just want their kids to be active and stimulated, and to have some meat for college applications. For that, do they really need to travel across the state? Where is the scientific basis for the notion that Joe Average Kid is made into a better human being by playing soccer against kids that are six hours away by car?

Things don't get better after high school. The cost of college is absurd, and half of the value of the degree involves the brand recognition of the school. Worse yet, the best classes fill up early. If society started from scratch to design a system of higher education, I can't imagine it looking anything like the current system.

Interestingly, society probably has all of the knowledge it needs to fix the problems I mentioned. And parents are probably the strongest block of voters in the country. That tells me the real problem is a lack of leadership. Once again, I must reluctantly step into the void.

When I'm president, I will use the power of persuasion to encourage schools to adopt the best practices of the Charter Schools. I'm assuming Charter Schools have less homework and fewer unnecessary competitions on the road. But more generally, I'll follow whatever direction the science points to. I'll also use my powers of persuasion to come up with a useful ranking of colleges by value instead of brand. In time, that sort of comparison should drive down costs and perhaps attract innovative competition. Value rankings already exist, but making those rankings more important will require leadership.

Vote for me and I'll end the war on parents.

T-Shirt Opinion Results

After gathering your opinions earlier this week, I tested three t-shirt slogans on Eyecrowd.com. You can see the results at this link.

I text while you talk at me (33 votes)

With any luck, your soul mate won't be perceptive. (31 votes)

I'm toying with the idea of becoming a useful member of society. (28 votes)

And the top vote-getters from readers of this blog, from earlier this week, were these two, which I assume would have won on Eyecrowd also if I had listed them:

There's no kill switch on awesome.

and

I'm not lazy, I'm useless. There's a big difference.

The most dangerous idea in the world

What's the most dangerous idea in the United States? And by that I mean an idea that kills the most people.

My vote for most dangerous idea is the notion of "mealtime." When you live in a society that has two or three established mealtimes every day, you're almost guaranteed to be overweight in adulthood. We have meal plates that are a certain size, and we expect them to be full. And worst of all, we plan our meals to be leisurely, sit-down situations. That requires enough food to keep everyone busy. And that means eating more than you need. Sometimes we even intentionally overeat because our next meal might be hours away and we don't want to risk getting hungry before then.

Diet experts tell us that the best way to eat is by nibbling small snacks throughout the day. But society is organized to deliver food in big chunks, two or three times a day. The three-meals-per-day idea is so embedded in our social fabric that it's hard to imagine any other way to live.

The obvious problem here is that overeating leads to all sorts of lethal and non-lethal health problems. I'll bet the idea of mealtime has killed more Americans than all of our wars put together.

I assume the idea of mealtime made more sense in times of scarcity and communal living, and before the invention of refrigeration. And I understand the social and family benefits of coming together over food. But surely there are healthier ways to be social.

I wonder if mealtime will continue as an idea, or if it is already showing signs of disappearing. I put that question to you. How many "meals" do you eat per day?

Dilbert T-Shirt Slogan Update

Thank you so much for your opinions yesterday on the best t-shirt slogans. I tabulated your preferences below, sorted by the most popular at the top. Skip to the bottom to see which three slogans I decided to test on www.eyecrowd.com, a new site that pays citizens for their opinions.

There's no kill switch on awesome. (29 votes)

I'm not lazy, I'm useless. There's a big difference. (20)
[Shorter version: I'm not lazy, I'm useless. Big difference.]

I'm toying with the idea of becoming a useful member of society. (14)

With any luck, your soul mate won't be perceptive. (11)
[Shorter version: I hope your soul mate isn't perceptive.]

Goals are a form of self-inflicted slavery. (10)

Never mind. My phone took care of it. (8)

Did you learn to debate on the Internet? (7)

I can no longer resist the urge to text while you talk. (6)
[Shorter version: I text while you talk at me.]

Self-respect is like a prison for the soul. (5)

You might want to pick a defense that's less checkable. (5)
[Shorter version: Try picking a defense that's less checkable.]

I've decided to be more aggressive in blaming others for my lack of success. (5)

I tried to read your email but the signal-to-noise ratio was too low. (3)
[Shorter version: Your signal-to-noise ratio is low]

Notable Write-ins:

My philosophy is that anything worth doing is too hard.

And that is how Floyd became the first person to hold his breath and jump into outer space.

Which Ones I'm Testing on Eyecrowd.com:

The top two vote getters ("...no kill switch on awesome," and "I'm not lazy...") are so strong that I know they would also score highest on eyecrowd.com, so that would be a wasted test. I decided to test the third and fourth highest vote getters ("...useful member of society," and "...soul mate won't be perceptive."). Then I added my own wildcard pick of "I text while you talk at me." I think that's a dead winner as a gift item for teens.

While I like the sixth most popular slogan, according to blog readers, I'm uncomfortable with the word "slavery" just because of the tone. And it doesn't seem like a gift sentiment.

Thank you again for you opinions.

Your Marketing Wisdom

For years I have been trying to invent the ultimate Dilbert t-shirt slogan. Ideally, the text on the shirt should be memorable and funny, and work independent of the art treatment.

Today I'm calling on your collective marketing wisdom to help me narrow down my choices. I pulled some text from recent Dilbert comics that appear to have t-shirt potential. After I narrow down my choices from your comments, I'll pick three favorites to test on a new site called Eyecrowd, where people get paid for their opinions. You might want to check it out so you can stop giving away your opinions for nothing.

Okay, let's begin. Which of these slogans, derived from recent Dilbert comics, seems most marketable to you?

[Update: List is reorganized by length of slogan, and I dropped "Why do ghosts wear pants?"]

There's no kill switch on awesome.

Never mind. My phone took care of it.

Did you learn to debate on the Internet?

Self-respect is like a prison for the soul.

Goals are a form of self-inflicted slavery.

I'm not lazy, I'm useless. There's a big difference.
[Shorter version: I'm not lazy, I'm useless. Big difference.]

With any luck, your soul mate won't be perceptive.
[Shorter version: I hope your soul mate isn't perceptive.]

I can no longer resist the urge to text while you talk.
[Shorter version: I text while you talk at me.]

You might want to pick a defense that's less checkable.
[Shorter version: Try picking a defense that's less checkable.]

I'm toying with the idea of becoming a useful member of society.

I tried to read your email but the signal-to-noise ratio was too low.
[Shorter version: Your signal-to-noise ratio is low]

I've decided to be more aggressive in blaming others for my lack of success.

The Unaware

Recently I was wondering what it feels like to be unaware of your own incompetence. This led my frail mind to the disturbing realization that incompetence probably feels exactly the same as whatever I was feeling when I was pondering the question. Studies show that incompetent people don't know they are incompetent. Apparently incompetence feels exactly like competence. Uh-oh.

I have always assumed that my thoughts and opinions are correct about 80% of the time. That means a troubling 20% of my thoughts are batshit stupid and I am blissfully aware. Or is it worse than that? I have no basis for assuming I'm right 80% of the time. My estimate is based on a feeling, and feelings are not reasons.

Imagine you're a detective, and you have to solve the case of how incompetent you are. What evidence can you find to support the assumption you have about your own incompetence?

You could start the investigation by asking yourself what sort of people generally agree with you. Are they toothless hillbillies or Nobel Prize winners? I generally align my opinions with the consensus of experts, and I would expect the consensus of experts to be wrong about 20% of the time. But wait. . . I have no objective way to know if experts are usually right. All I know is that if feels that way, and feelings are not reasons.

I can look at my educational background, and my scores on standardized tests, but tests only compare me to the competence of other people in a limited and artificial way. Good SAT scores might not predict who can, for example, bake the best pie, or buy a new car at the best price. And since I don't know how competent the average person is, it doesn't help me to know I'm more or less competent than the average. Am I only slightly more competent than people who are wrong most of the time?

I could look at the success I've had over my lifetime as a gauge of competence. Smart decisions should lead to better outcomes. But my observation is that all success is born of hard work and luck. One needs a minimum level of competence, but effort and good fortune seem to make the difference once you're above the minimum. I became a famous cartoonist without much in the way of art skills, so apparently the minimum competence requirement for my field was quite low, whereas the luck requirement was sky high. When I launched Dilbert, the world was simply ready for a common employee's irreverent view of the workplace. The comics I drew were nothing more than my autobiography. If I had been a dancer turned cartoonist, my comic never would have been published.

When I blog, dozens of thoughtful people disagree with just about every paragraph I write. Most of you haven't had the joy of being publicly judged for your mental competence each and every day. It's a fascinating experience, and humbling in a healthy way. Luckily for me, my ego died years ago, so I don't mind being called an idiot by people who might be idiots themselves, or possibly geniuses. None of us can be certain which team we're on.

I also wonder why being awake is considered the preferred state of awareness compared to dreaming. We assume our waking lives are something approximating "real" and our dreams are fake. But that worldview assumes we can judge our own competence, which we know we cannot. By that I mean we assume our daytime perceptions are recording something about the universe that is mostly true and accurate, while our dreams are mostly random nonsense. But objectively, we have no evidence to support that view. Being awake just feels more legitimate and real, and feelings are not reasons.

Everyone reading this blog believes that he or she is right, and competent, most of the time. On what do you base your opinion of your own competence?

Redefining Intelligence

Now that many of us are connected to the Internet at all times, via our smartphones or computers, is it time to redefine what intelligence means?

Using the traditional measure of intelligence, two people who score the same on a standard I.Q. test are said to have the same level of intelligence, more or less. But what if one person has Internet access all the time, and the other has none? Can we truly say the person with no Internet access is just as smart?

We usually consider the question of intelligence separate from the question of Internet access. That made sense until the Internet found its way to my phone. Now the Internet and I are virtually inseparable. Ask me the capital of Moldova and I'll tell you it is Chisinau. Ask me to tell you the word for sweet potato in Vietnamese, and I'll tell you it is lang. Bam. It takes me less than ten seconds to answer most questions.

Now suppose you compare two people who have the same I.Q. scores, and both have blazing fast Internet connections, but one person is great at searching for information on the Internet, and interpreting it, and the other isn't so good. Now which of the two people is smarter? I would argue that the person who has the better Internet skills is effectively smarter, and possibly by a wide margin. Internet access means nothing if you don't know how to use it.

Consider two people with equal I.Q. scores, and equal Internet connections, but one knows about www.snopes.com and the other does not. If you're like me, you spend a fair amount of time directing your misguided friends and family members to snopes.com to squash their misconceptions. Simply knowing that snopes.com exists is the equivalent of learning an entire subject in school. The Internet is an intelligence multiplier, but only if you know how to use it.

If a typical extra-smart person twenty years ago had an I.Q. of 140, that same person connected to the Internet today has a functional I.Q. of 10,000 or more. (I realize it doesn't work that way, but you get the idea.)

I've always questioned why traditional I.Q. tests are timed, but let's assume someone has a good argument for why the person who gets the right answer in ten seconds is more intelligent than the person who takes a few seconds longer. Extending the speed-is-intelligence argument to the Internet, could you say the person who is a fast typist, and therefore can do a Google search faster is also more intelligent?

Measuring intelligence is a messy business because every form of natural talent (musical, artistic, social, etc.) can be defined as intelligence. You never get a pure apples-to-apples comparison of two people. But that said, I would argue that the Internet-connected person who knows how to search for information and interpret it is infinitely more intelligent than the person who has no Internet connection, or isn't skilled at using it.

If you have a smartphone with you at all times, and someone asks your I.Q., say it is somewhere in the 10,000 to infinity range. If you are met with skepticism, send the doubter a link to this blog entry.

The Apology Thing

Warning: This blog is written for a rational audience that likes to have fun wrestling with unique or controversial points of view. It is written in a style that can easily be confused as advocacy or opinion. It is not intended to change anyone's beliefs or actions. If you quote from this post or link to it, which you are welcome to do, please take responsibility for whatever happens if you mismatch the audience and the content.

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Apologies are fascinating things. Where did the idea of an apology come from, and what function has evolution given it?

In the case of two people who know each other, an apology is a quick way to lower emotions and get on the path to better relations. Interestingly, an insincere apology works as well as a genuine one, as long as the recipient can't tell the difference. I don't know what percent of apologies across the globe are fraudulent, but I'd guess it's a big number.

A sincere apology would take this form:

1.      I made a mistake.

2.      I didn't mean to hurt you.

3.      I won't do it again.

Realistically, most people think they have good reasons for doing what they do, even when the outcomes are unfortunate. When you think you didn't make a mistake, you can't honestly say that something similar won't happen again. The only truth in most fake apologies is that no harm was intended. And even then, the intent might have been to poke some fun, but things got out of hand. In other words, many apologies are lies that have utility for everyone involved.

An interesting variation on the personal apology is the demanded public apology. That happens when a public figure says something unusually offensive, or is taken out of context, and some portion of the public gets hopping mad. The offended person or group demands an apology! In that situation, what is the purpose of an apology?

The Limbaugh/Fluke situation is a good illustration. As far as I can tell, no one was injured by Limbaugh's "slut" accusations because everyone understood it to be an absurd analogy, albeit an insulting one. No matter how influential you imagine Rush Limbaugh to be, it's not likely anyone changed his or her opinion about the several billion people who engage in recreational sex. Nor can I imagine that Fluke cared enough about Limbaugh's opinion to be psychologically wounded by it. My best guess is that privately she thought it was amusing, and it was useful to highlight the issue she cared about. I might be generalizing too much from myself, but I'd feel good all day if Rush Limbaugh insulted me by name.

Some have argued that women in general were the targets of Limbaugh's "slut" insult, and that this was a clear case of misogyny that needed to be nipped in the bud. If that's the case, what is the function of the demanded apology? As we can see, no one accepted the apology, and it didn't help Limbaugh in any way.

Obviously Limbaugh hoped his apology would help him retain advertisers, and listeners. His goals are clear. But what is the benefit to the recipients of the apology? No one would expect Limbaugh's apology to make anyone feel different. Perhaps Limbaugh's apology is nothing more than a reminder to the world that coarse language has no place in public debate.

My hypothesis is that apologies are a way for humans to determine their status in society. A king and queen never apologize for their actions because they don't need to. But the server at your local restaurant apologizes even when he knows the customer is in the wrong, because the server has a lower status than his boss, who in turn has a lower status than the customers. When you're trying to determine the status of people, apologies are reliable markers.

In the Limbaugh/Fluke situation, society is asking Limbaugh to acknowledge that despite his many listeners, and despite his alleged influence on politics, his status is lower than that of the 3.5 billion women on the planet. Limbaugh's apology clarified his status, like a submissive dog lowering his head when a more dominant dog comes near. We humans have evolved in a way that makes us want to fight when our status is threatened. Limbaugh's "slut" comment was a full frontal assault on the status of women in society. And Limbaugh's apology was a form of symbolic surrender, and an acceptance of his lower status. I think someday Limbaugh's apology might be seen by historians as signaling the end of the conservative movement's supremacy in American politics.

 

The Limbaugh Fluke

Which of these two events do you find more distasteful?

1.      Rush Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke a slut for her position on contraceptives.

Or

2.      Activists are treating Fluke as a helpless victim who needs society's protection against the harsh words of an entertainer.

My interpretation of events is that Limbaugh saw Fluke as a capable adult, and a public figure, tough enough to handle some harsh language. The boycotters apparently see Fluke as more of an endangered child, or a helpless damsel in distress, threatened by a monster. Light the torches and launch the boycott!

One way to look at this situation is that Limbaugh is a misogynist bully who cold-heartedly attacked a young woman who was only trying to make the world a better place through her testimony.

Another way to look at it is that Limbaugh's brand of entertainment involves saying cruel and absurd things about any public figure with an opposing opinion. Fluke volunteered to be a public figure, and by all evidence, she's a capable adult (age 30?) who doesn't run from a fight.

Did I miss the part where Fluke asked society to fight her battles for her? What I saw was the opposite. Fluke willingly waded into the fight about contraception. The timid people stayed home and watched her on television.

From my point of view, Limbaugh treated Fluke like a worthy opponent, capable of handling a harsh attack. In other words, he treated her the same way he routinely treats the President of the United States. As I've said on other occasions, you haven't achieved equality until you're a legitimate target for humor. Obviously we aren't there yet.

Full disclosure: I don't agree with anything that comes out of Rush Limbaugh's mouth, but I have a great appreciation for his entertainment skills.

Is Economics a Real Thing?

I once worked with a woman who had a degree in economics. Her boyfriend drove her crazy by arguing that the entire field of economics could be boiled down to the notion of supply and demand. Everything else, he asserted, was an unnecessary complication of the obvious. It's funny, but how accurate was the boyfriend?

Before we go on, I should confess that I have a degree in economics. All I remember from my college classes is that the professors talked like Charlie Brown's teacher (mwa-mwa-mwa), and something was said about supply and demand. So I don't approach this topic as an expert. I'm just a curious observer.

Some years ago, I attended a wedding and ended up seated next to two young chiropractors. They described to me the many benefits of the chiropractic arts, including - they claimed with straight faces - the ability to cure both AIDS and the common cold by boosting a patient's immune response. I just listened and smiled. I was smug in my knowledge that these two gullible simpletons believed in some sort of magic, whereas my economics degree - which is more like a real science - would allow me to predict the future and become wealthy without any real effort. At that point in my life, the benefits of my economics training hadn't yet kicked in, but I figured it was only a matter of time. Science was on my side.

Since then, I've achieved some humility about the value of my economic superpowers. For example, when I first started making serious money from writing Dilbert books, I paid financial experts to manage my investments. They invested my money in Enron, WorldCom, and several other sketchy companies with high price-earnings multiples. This was right before the dotcom bust. Do you know who could have done a better job with my investments? Answer: chiropractors.

All of this makes me wonder how one would go about analyzing the field of economics to find out if it's mostly legitimate, albeit imperfect - like weather forecasting, or mostly psychological, like horoscopes. Let's dig into that question.

In recent years, the definition of economics has broadened, thanks to popular books such as Freakonomics. Now when we speak of economics we can include scientific studies and analyses on just about any interesting aspect of life, from crime rates to prostitution. I consider that a red flag for the legitimacy of economics. In my experience, whenever someone tinkers with the definition of a thing, it's because the original thing is broken and no one is willing to admit it. Back in my cubicle days, if we failed to achieve a goal, we changed the definition of success until whatever fresh hell that was happening on its own fit the new definition. When I became a cartoonist, and the public astutely noticed that my art skills rivaled those of an inebriated chimpanzee, I defined myself as more of a writer. Be wary of shifting definitions.

I'll grant you that our newly expanded definition of economics - the one that involves studying human behavior as opposed to business and money - is legitimate and useful. And I will grant you that the common sense elements of economics, such as portfolio diversification, and paying off your credit cards, are legitimate and important. What I'm skeptical about is anything that involves complicated models and predictions about the future of the economy.

In my corporate days, I wrote business cases and created financial projections. Over time, I observed how well my predictions matched reality. In my perfect models of the future, I could estimate the likely outcomes with confidence. In the messy real world, the surprises always dominated the results. We never knew for sure what our competitors were cooking up. We didn't know to what degree our vendors were lying about their products. We didn't know management would change priorities mid project. The stuff we didn't know was always more important than the stuff we knew. My predictions were only useful for short term budgeting and to give the decision-makers some buttocks-shielding.

In this presidential election season, we see more babbling about economics than usual. You'd think the experts could agree on the basic stuff, such as tax rates and stimulus packages. But politics will always dominate those discussions. And economists are rarely in universal agreement on anything complicated. So even if we imagine that somewhere in the world an economist has a model that accurately predicts the future, as long as you feed it accurate assumptions, it still does us no good because there is no hope that the assumptions will be accurate.

If I haven't convinced you that rotten assumptions ruin all predictions, allow me to take another path to the same conclusion. Let's imagine there is an economist who has, against all odds, reliable assumptions and a good economic model for predicting the future. How would the world identify this lone genius so we could take advantage of his skills?

By analogy, there are over 10,000 individual stocks you can buy in the United States. Your first instinct might be to hire an expert to do the picking for you. But what if there are more than 10,000 experts and all of them have different opinions? Given that past performance is no indication of future performance, isn't it just as hard to pick the right financial expert as it is to pick the right stocks? As long as there are thousands of economists with different opinions, and some portion of them have a good track record by chance, we have no way to know who can predict the future best.

My working hypothesis is that economics can be divided into three categories. There's the common sense stuff, such as supply and demand, and diminishing returns. Then there's the extended definition of economics that includes looking at statistics in fields unrelated to money. And there is the third category, which might be called pure economics, existing in a smeared state of being potentially legitimate, but giving us no way to know for sure.

Here's my advice: If you meet an economist, ask him to adjust your spine so you no longer get the common cold. Then ask him for some specific investment tips and do exactly what he recommends. Let me know which one works out best.