Here’s another power-law.

Apparently the distribution for the interval between epileptic seizures is a power-law.  The long intervals are rare.  There are lots processes that give rise to a power law distribution.  The proposed model in this case involves a cascading failure in the  network of neurons.

I don’t think this next paper has undergone peer reviews, but in  this paper they look at the interval between a serial killer’s murders.    That’s a thin data sample.   The interval between his crimes is power-law distributed.

Interesting example of impulse control, will power power, etc.

I wonder if we have other data on brainstorms?   Brainstorms of a less horrific kind:  interval between blog posts, emails, phone calls, code commits, sales closed, etc. etc.   What if we took the top hundred poems Robert Frost wrote and measured the interval between their creation?    Would we see that as power law distributed?  With enough data we could probably look into the effect of coffee on brainstorms.

My favorite bit involves a shocking idea.  Language evolved so we could talk to ourselves.  Or, I’d say, so our various inner daemons could talk to each other.  I even find myself wondering if one of them didn’t stumble upon it and discover it now had a huge competitive advantage over it’s siblings.

The less shocking, but still fascinating, is that one way to keep your attention focused is to talk – preferable out loud – about what your doing.

There are services [1] that allow you to store your stuff, using the mail for deposits and withdrawals.  It would be easy for such operations to add commitment services.

Users of complex tools are familiar with this bimodal problem.  if you use any powerful desktop application (a Microsoft product, or an Adobe product for example) then you’ll have often experienced the second mode.   We have all lost a day or two trying to figure out how to make page numbers work, the bibliography to appear correctly, etc. etc.  These are examples where our skills and the tools conspire to push us into the second mode.  The no progress mode is being made mode.

The more you push the edge of your skills or adopt new tools, or work on fresher problems the higher the chance your going to fall into this second mode.  I suspect some trades spend large portions of their work lives in this second mode.

It is trivial for an outside observer to misdiagnosis the second mode and describe the situation as not working.  He’s happy to point out that no progress is being made.  Duh!  And he’s happy to dust off all the usual suspects; e.g. moral failings of various kinds.

You can see occasional hints that this or that an organizational scheme addresses this by the appearance of terms like “management reserve,” “friction.”  In Scrum the use the term velocity.  But none of these dare to admit that work falls into the second mode.  None of them speak to the puzzle of how to estimate the probability of entering the mode.  None of provide any advise for picking apart what is happening in the mode, which is a precondition for getting out of it.

The skills for thriving in this mode might be called persistence.  That’s really a distinct skill from skills that keep you on task in simpler times.  At least I think so.  The will power to maintain focus is somehow different than the willpower required to survive a long period this second mode where no measurable progress is being made.   And while persistence is one strategic approach an alternate one could be named agility, aka change course.  Again the moralistic outside observer might see that as quitting.  The complementary pair of persistence and agility reminds me of Levy walks.

If you keep your eyes open you will notice assorted tools for self binding.  To do lists, reminder services, and date books are simple examples.  There are software applications that will lock out your internet access.  There are savings plans that include a penalty for early withdrawal.   In Arizona you can sign onto a list that requires the casino to deny you access.

Some of the promise keeping aids involve enlisting a third party.  There is a horrible scheme that addicts fall into where they enlist a friend and license him to punish them in some awful manner if they break their promise.   For example they might write a letter which will ruin their professional life if revealed and then give it to the third party.   Once you introduce the third party there is all kinds of risk for abuse.  The third party might extract a promise from a victim during an irrational moment by coercion.  A light weight example of that is how the salesman at the health club pressures customers into signing up for a subscription.   And then, there are chastity belts.

Some of these promise or binding technologies are designed to remove the temptation entirely.  For example: living in the dry town, never buying the liquor, and avoiding the pub.  And those come in degrees – for example moving the ice cream to the back of the freezer.

I’ve been stewing on what might be the lightest weight service a third party could offer to help individuals with this class of problems.  And I have a theory.  It’s based on the time-lock example used for bank vaults.  In that case the bank want’s to remove any possibility of opening the vault for some period of time – usually while the bank is closed.   While obviously the bank’s intent is to keep criminals from stealing their money they actually promise not to open the vault under any circumstances.  They are self binding.   They could of locked the vault with a one time password and given it to a trusted officer of the bank.   They don’t trust themselves.   Apparently the only thing they trust is the people who built the vault.  It’s interesting that if you look at pictures of these time locks they are usually in transparent cases so anybody can visually inspect the mechanism.  They are over engineered and simple which encourages that inspection.

Say you wanted to lock up a present for christmas day.   You put it in a safe, put it under the tree, and christmas morning you hand the key to the recipient.  But what if you want to wrap up a present for yourself and you don’t trust yourself not to open it too soon.  Now what?  You could ask the help of a friend, but that’s got other complications.  Can you solve this problem without a third party?   You could if you could buy a time-lock.   I’d love to know of a vendor.  I’ve not found one.   I find that bizarre; surely there are lots of people who’d like to lock things overnight etc.

Anyhow, I’ve built one for you.   It’s based on a bit-o-crypto.  You lock up things up by encrypting them, and later when the timer runs out you can decrypt them.   Frustratingly this does involve a third party, my little service.   You get the means to encrypt by going to the service, and later once the timer has run out, you go back to get the means to decrypt.   This depends on public/private keys.  You use the public key to encrypt and the private key to decrypt.

For example say you want to make it much harder to play that damn addictive video game until next tuesday.  You go grab the public key for next tuesday and lock away the damn game by encrypting it.   Next tuesday, or sometime after, you go grab the private key and decrypt the stupid game.

Of course this requires that you trust me to keep the service running and not loose the keys it gin’d up.  I wouldn’t recommend trusting me, yet.  For example I really haven’t tested it much .

Here’s the service http://hang-on.appspot.com/.   I’d love to hear suggestions for things to do with this, or ways to improve it.

From Aspen Aerogel, click to enlarge.

I’m also liking Aerogel insulation.  When I was a kid it was well know that the down of goslings, preferably from a Scandinavian goose, provided the worlds best insulator.  Man had yet to create a better tangle for capturing air and frustrating heat.  Nature is still doing well in that race and  I still own a down winter coat.  But, it was lie.  In the 1930s chemists invent this stuff Aerogel.  It’s a solid consisting of nothing but fibers of silica.  It’s rigid, almost transparent, quite brittle, and extremely expensive.  But it’s practically opaque to heat, so NASA wanted to use it and they funded a mess-o-research.  These days you can buy small insulating panels of it so when you ship whatever in dry ice you only need to put but a tiny bit of ice in the box and it will stay cold for days.   You can get insulating batts of this stuff in various forms for around 3-4$ a square foot from Aspen Aerogel.  But those aren’t as perfect an insulator as the solid blocks.  You can also buy it in granular form for poring into spaces (Cabot).  Not as fine an insulator as the insulating batts this stuff can be nearly transparent so it gets used in skylights, exterior wall panels, and inflated or tension roofing.  You can also buy a slice of it wrapped up into liners for your shoes, a pad for sitting on the cold bench at the game, or for keeping your hot laptop from scalding your legs.  My favorite application is in these personal air heat exchangers.

There is a nice overview of various kinds of insulation here, which shows that the aerogel products have some near competitors; not mentioned though are these delightful batts of wool insulation, I like ‘em.

I like this video demonstrating the hyperbolic discounting problem.  But the popular articles about this experiment are horrible.  They don’t actually explain how universal the problem is nor do they bother to give any hints on how to deal.  In this video the only means left to these kids is manipulation of attention, and even that was incredibly limited.  I assure you, this experiment would work just as well on adults.

Oh, The Temptation from Steve V on Vimeo.

And, I’m liking my name sake, I need to make a visit.

So this raise the idea that the rich have all their impulsive desires met, well before they get into serious money.  Well serious money for them.  For most of their money they then act in accordance with the more functional exponential discounting.  It’s not that the rich are different from the poor, they are just luck enough to be able to pay the tax demanded by their inner dysfunctional investor.

Amusingly this implies that people have say a hundred units of stupid dysfunctional behaviors they will do if they can fund them.  For example ruin their dinner with junk food rather than wait for the good meal.   The poor get to do some subset of the stupid; but they run out money before their done.   The rich get to do all 100 units and then move into the more rational game.  So, the rich do more stupid than the poor.  Ironically they then turn around and mutter – ‘Yeah, why are you doing those stupid things!”

The authors suggest using Pigouvian taxes as a way to reveal the true costs of their $7/day externality.  Sin tax is the common name for Pigovian taxes, i.e. taxes that are designed to bring market forces to bear on behaviors that are high cost in the big picture but  appear to be costless as they are being engaged in.   The authors suggest a gas tax or a change in how insurance is priced.   Per-mile charging would be preferable to per-year charging.

There is a trick some groups use to get people to show up on time.  They set out a jar and if you show up late for the meeting your required to quietly deposit a dollar in the jar.  That’s a Pigouvian tax.   Otherwise the guy showing up late is inflicting a coordination cost on everybody in the room.  He’s getting a free lunch.  Later you can buy everybody a free lunch with the content of the jar.  This can backfire .

Tax design is a fascinating puzzle.  Lots of dimensions!  One dimension that is often ignored is how easy it is to avoid the tax.  Back when I lived in NYC it was common to observe cars who’s license plates signaled that my neighbors had registered the car at their summer place in Vermont.  Here in Massachusetts it’s common to slip over the border into New Hampshire to buy larger items sales tax free.  A friend of ours reports that the current tight credit situation has move more of her income into the cash economy.

In practice it is easier to tax immovable things, like real estate.  Pigouvian taxes are hard to implement because behaviors are hard to tax compared to capital assents. To first order it’s behaviors that cause externalities.  A consumable (beer, cigarettes, gas) can help with that.  Profiling can help, i.e. if we know John runs red lights, a smokes, a he’s a heavy drinker…

Just as we are doing more behavioral advertising, as technology lowers the cost of close monitoring and erodes our privacy we can do more of behavioral taxation.  Charge those guys that grab a free lunch by darting thru the intersection after the light’s changed.   The public will have mixed opinions about all this, but framed right they are likely to like the idea of taxing behaviors that have high externalities.   The congestion pricing schemes for cities are an example of this.  Are we at a tipping point for this stuff?

I’m surprised that the current crisis hasn’t triggered any (?) moves in this direction.  How hard is it?  For example, most states have managed to get most of their drivers to adopt their drive-by toll collection systems.  They could make that manditory and institute a mess-o-tolls.   I’m confident it wouldn’t be hard to repurpose that system to catch red light scoff laws.

Or states could use their drivers licenses to raise taxes on people who have a problem with alcohol.  They could even do that entirely on an entirely volunteer basis, following the model that Arizona uses where people can sign up to be barred from entering casinos.

I’m amazed that not a single state has raised their gas taxes.  Many states have raised their sales tax.  Treating undifferentiated consumption as a greater sin than driving seems bizarre to me.  Sales taxes are also a very regressive tax.

I don’t know how this will work, but you can play the design your own Pigouvian tax game here.  That uses moderate.google.com, which lets you post issues, collection ideas, etc.  I’ve posted some things that have short term pleasures for those who do them, but longer term costs for the rest of us.  Feel free to add others and possible Pigouvian taxes to compensate.

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 closer to your goal, and slowly you begin to think of your self as actually a sword swallower.

Or imagine you want to be a small businessman.  You print up some business cards.  You pick a name for your business.  You register with the town, open a bank account. You buy a suit and start wearing it.  Again each of these is a step toward constructing your new identity.

Wait!  Printing up business cards doesn’t make you a small businessman.  Owning a sword you intend to swallow does not a sword swallower make.   Intention is a far cry from being.   But, people get confused and questions arise.  How often to we declare success based only on our good intentions?   Do we confuse the means with the end?  Of course we do.  And, while the worse case delusions are obvious – a good costume doesn’t make yo a superhero – in most cases the lines are quite fuzzy.

What kicked off that musing was this wonderful article reporting four studies reported in Psychology Science: “When Intentions go Public” (pdf).  I was interested in this paper because I’m interested in privacy.  What happens if I show other people that sword I’ve bought?  What happens when students sign one of those honor codes?  What happens when a hacker publicly reveals some source code he’s working on.   Does it help?  Are we more or less likely to get a sword-swallower, an honorable student, or a open source contributor? 

Obviously, we think that public revealing strengthens identity.  We certainly wouldn’t be asking students to sign honor codes if we thought otherwise.  But what if!  What if it undermines their aspirations to be honorable people!   I was already suspicious because of story we tell for why these things must work.  I.e. that this public revealing raises the stakes, that it puts our reputation at risk.  If everybody knows we have started a small business or taken up sword swallowing then we risk embarrassment when down the road we have to admit it all was a sham.  But I have my doubts about that, since I doubt that stakes is an effective means to controlling behavior.

So here is the surprise.  These studies suggest that public revealing of our intentions undermines our follow through.   These studies are all very simple.  Let’s look at one.  They get a group of students who really want to become psychologists and having them filled out a survey.  On the last page they ask them to write down what the intend to study next week in service of their goal.  The subjects are randomly split into two groups public, and private.  The kids in the private group are told that intend-to-study question was included by mistake, the experimenter tears it off and throws it away.  For the public group the experiment reads over the survey with the kid.  Nominally this is to check for errors, but in reality it just assures the kid knows that the experimenter knows of his study plans.

A week later they have the kids fill out a form to on which days they studied.  Those who’s intentions remained private studied 40% more!

What’s going on?  The theory suggests that we are keeping score on our progress toward achieving out goal.  Naturally we take credit for various steps along the way.  We give our self some credit for opening that business bank account, or buying that sword, or signing that honor code.  The bizarre bit is that these students apparently gave themselves some points toward achieving their goal as a consequence of having it be known to another person that they intended to work on toward the goal, and feeling that they were closer they didn’t work as hard.

This is worse than confusing the means with the end.  Worse than confusing having business cards with being a businessman.  In this case the just telling somebody your going to buy some business cards creates a sufficiently powerful fantasy that you are a businessman that you stop working on the project.

Now if this is all true it suggests that asking students into signing honor codes make them less likely to follow through on becoming honorable.  It suggests that asking your staff to outline their plan for the next week actually makes it less likely they will follow through on that plan.  It suggests that signing a contract undermines rather than increases the chance the parties will do the work agreed.  How weird is that!

It’s interesting that nobody I’ve told this story to finds this particularly surprising.  They all agree, revealing their intentions seems to undermine their follow through.  It’s all just too delightfully weird!

Here is an another attempt, coming at this from the currently popular puzzle of what might stop the free-fall of newsprint and it’s codependents (i.e. investigative reporting, PR, local advertising, etc).  He blocks out four reasons why we expend resources to accumulate new information:

• Entertainment – is everybody animated now?
• Deciding – in a yellow wood?
• Staying Expert – sort of a service contract model i guess
• Paid To – diagnosing, trained, flattery?

These are not independent.  For example, the author of a highly technical paper targeted at a community of experts will often include a significant amount of entertaining content since he knows that makes the material more memorable or more viral.  But one reason it’s clear these are disjoint categories is how when your goal is drawn from one category it can be irritating to have content from one of the others popping up.

I found it disconcerting and then amusing that what I’ve labeled “paid to” he named flattery.

I’m not particularly comfortable with this framework.  Why do fans pay attention?   But, it is fun to compare it various other schemes: story templates, selling scripts, etc.   For example in the typical fairy tale our hero is cast out of one’s home, goes on a quest, and then returns home.  That has all four elements.  For example when we are influenced by the use of social proof in a situation that has elements of deciding; but helps to highlight how there is a social aspect to all four.  When we tell a story by opening with a mystery to hook our readers, a standard bit of teaching advise which I used in this posting, then we are pulling on a few cords from all four.   And where does the phrase “breaking news” fit into that framework?

And what’s up with cliff hangers?  People do pay to have those resolved.  Did Ben find a job yet?  Tune in tomorrow!

based on The 4 reasons anybody ever consumes information…