Thursday, February 18, 2010
One of the things that puzzles me about the vast literature on organizational dynamics, self control, will power, etc. etc. is that it seems to ignore an important reality about actual work. In my experience work comes in two flavors – everything is going just fine v.s. stuck. In the first mode you think [...]
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Arising from my interest in impulse control, hyperbolic discounting, and will power I have been nursing an interest in how people enforce their personal rules. Say you wish to promise to go to bed at 10pm, or not to drink before 5pm, or to save 10% of your income, or call your mom once [...]
I’m liking these thin skinned vaults. People used to do amazing things with bricks and tiles, and folks at MIT are working to bring it back. In the US we have a lot of amazing tile/masonry buildings via the work of Guastavino. And, have look at these mostly abandoned buildings in Cuba, also via satellite. One contributor [...]
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Chris points out a provocative idea. No doubt I’m getting this wrong, I’ll need to read the paper (pdf). But the idea is that an animal’s problems with hyperbolic discounting are more severe for some goods v.s. others. Further the poor tend to live in circumstances where the goods most effected by the problem [...]
Cars get into accidents. Adding cars to the system increases the number of accidents. The paper discussed here argues that adding a car in a high traffic state adds about $2,500 worth of additional costs, almost $7 dollars a day! Here in Boston, a bus/subway transit pass costs a bit less than $2/day. My somewhat [...]
Wow! This a wonderfully counter intuitive bit of social science!
Imagine that you would like to be sword swallower. In service of achieving that goal you set out to accumulate assorted accouterments: a sword, some books on sword swallowing, you study your vocabulary, you watch some videos, you take a course. Each of these moves you [...]
Why do we read those blogs, email, chats, twitter, voice mails, newspapers, magazines, etc. etc. Presumably there is some logic to that. Some motivational schema. There’s money in the answer to this question. Will my students pay attention? Will my novel be a hit? Will my newspaper survive? So, surely this question has [...]
People lose control and act impulsively all time. It is important to forgive ‘em. If you never act impulsively then you seem humorless, uptight, officious, bureaucratic. When professionals act impulsively we wonder: should let this guy steer the ship? One scheme to temper impulses is to smooth things a bit using a group. When your managerial team act [...]
A little article on the idea that behavioral change can be achieved by raising the stakes. This is an idea that economists and lawyers like; so it’s unsurprising that the boffins referenced include one of each. To my mind and as a fan of the work on hyperbolic discounting this is just another example of [...]
So I was inordinately fascinated by a paragraph in Schelling’s paper “Enforcing Rules on Oneself”. This is a paper about personal rules, i.e. the rules we all adopt to reign in our behavior against the pest that is hyperbolic discounting. Since Schelling’s wrote the paper for a law journal he needed to outline why the usual tools of [...]
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