Praise for effort, not smart

This article is quite insightful. Here is a quick excerpt.

“When we praise children for their intelligence, we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes."....They’d chosen to look smart and avoid the risk of being embarrassed.

"Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control, They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

[...t]hose who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.

[...p]raised students become risk-averse and lack perceived autonomy. The scholars found consistent correlations between a liberal use of praise and students’ “shorter task persistence, more eye-checking with the teacher, and inflected speech such that answers have the intonation of questions.”

[...r]esearch on overpraised kids strongly suggests that image maintenance becomes their primary concern—they are more competitive and more interested in tearing others down. A raft of very alarming studies illustrate this.

To some degree I was a 'victim' of being overpraised: I was always told being the smartest kid in the school up to high school, by my parents and relatives. Fortunately my parents always pushed me to work hard at the same time. Yet I can still trace some of my behavioral patterns -- like putting up a good image, staying away from something I think I am not good at it -- back to it. But by and large, my philosophy on success leans toward effort and luck, not innate abilities.

The curse of risk aversion

This idea came to me while I was in my Micro class: we were talking about risk aversion and utility function: basically most of us are risk averse because our utility function is concave, i.e., we have a diminishing marginal utiltiy. In plain English, the disutility of losing one hundred dollars is bigger than the utility of gaining one hundred dollars.

Now suppose we have two people Johnny and Joe, they both are risk averse, but Joe is more so than Johnny. To put in another way, Joe's utility function is more 'concave' than Johnny's, and Joe needs more wealth than Johnny to reach a same level of utility. But this is unlikely to happen: our competitive society generally rewards risk-taking, not risk aversion, so Johnny will most likely do better than Joe. Hence there is the curse of risk aversion: you need(or want?) it more, but you will have less of it.

The question I wan to ask then is if our risk preference is more innate or cultured. I am leaning toward the latter, for that matter I guess we will all be better off when we are more willing to take risks.

How often do you want to fall in love?

Not that often if you are a rational person:

[...When you are in love,]You're feeling intense romantic love, you're willing to take big risks, you're in physical pain, obsessively thinking about a person and you're struggling to control your rage. You're not operating with your full range of cognitive abilities. It's possible that part of the rational mind shuts down...

Fortunately(or unfortunately?) our brain is not wired to be rational. Here is the article in today's WSJ.

Bloggers on blogging

Why do we blog? And how does blogging change our life? Here are some rants & raves, from MR.

From Cowen:

Blogging, of course, is one of the ultimate forms of self-experimentation.

Blogging makes us more oriented toward an intellectual bottom line, more interested in the directly empirical, more tolerant of human differences, more analytical in the course of daily life, more interested in people who are interesting, and less patient with Continental philosophy.

From the comments:

1. The IT industry has an unusually high proportion of emotionally immature libertarians, and blogging (as a recent fruit of IT) seems to provide a strong outlet for self-indulgent reveling in one's own thoughts and self-congratulations on one's rational approach to life. Plus there are plenty of other libertarian bloggers out there to make the libertarian feel a solidarity in his or her selfishness.

2. Last night I was watching television with my wife and made a comment about a TV ad. She said, laughing, "you analyze everything...and figure out how you can use it in your blog!"

3. Blogging allows me to clarify my thoughts and put them into cogent arguments well before I am called on to use them in another context. It exercises analytical writing skills by putting you through the paces of analysis on a regular basis. As a law student, I have found that is a very valuable excercise. And, yes, it does provide for a better process of self-reflection than thought alone.... by putting my thoughts down and facing them over the passage of time, I am able to more correctly identify themes in my discourse.

4. I pay more attention to everyday stuff; and it demands more coherence in my thinking.

5. I can't go anywhere or do anything without mentally composing a blog post in my head about it.

6. It (blogging) seems to encourage or provide a forum for narcissism.

#2, 4 and 5 are kind of along the same line: we tend to live life to a fuller extent if we know we will blog about it, trying to make it a more positive experience than otherwise would. #3 would be my main reason to blog since most of my posts are not directly coming from my everyday life. Points made on #1 and #6 are very valid, but who is not a narcissist to some extent anyway?

Economists on happiness

This is not something new, but still worth reading.

In the past, economists assumed that an individual's choices were always guided by rational self-interest. Today they recognize that human foibles, biases and our hunter-gatherer origins can often be critical factors.

...[T]his unending cycle of serial interests and constant impulse to compare what we have now with what we might have in the future is wired into our brains, and there's an evolutionary reason for it, Rayo explained. Fifty thousand years ago, when we were hunter-gatherers, it served us well. To elude predators, our eyes developed the ability to judge moving objects and colors by comparing them with the background landscape. To ensure there would be enough food and water for everyone, our brains developed the ability to continually look ahead and press on to find new food sources.

...[t]he psychology literature and surveys clearly show that not all happiness is ephemeral and geared to endlessly moving targets. With nonmaterial things, the target does not move.

"Exercise will absolutely make you feel better. Your social network, family and friends can bring permanent happiness. Longtime relationships can bring long-term satisfaction."

If the goal is to impress your peers and friends, "You'll lose the race of winning and you'll be stressed,"...

The last sentence is very much true. I used to run 5 miles or swim for 40 plus laps non-stop 4 or 5 times a week, and I think a lot of motivation at that time came from the bragging rights. Later I bought into evolution fitness and realized that is not right way to exercise, I stopped jogging and started intermittent power training: I work out to be healthy, not to impress guys in the gym. But unfortunately a lot of runners/swimmers/triathlon trainers are still training for the bragging rights.

On predicatability

I use Google Reader to help me keep track of the econ blogs I am interested in. Over the time I've noticed that I actually read only five of them, for the rest I just skim them. Of those five blogs, I follow Econbrowser and Calculated Risk for their sound technical analysis. And I am drawn to the remaining three for their distinct take on social and economic issues: Mark Thoma of Economist View is surely on the left who is a constant linker to Paul Krugmen's articles, and Greg Mankiw is not shy of his Republic agenda. Tyler Cowen, the main guy behind Marginal Revolution, is my favorite and has the most influence on me. He is from the bastion of libertarianism, George Mason University. And I think he is labeled as a libertarian in the blog sphere, which would put him roughly at the right of the center.

But unlike Mark or Greg, Tyler is much harder to pin down on a specific issue: he is not that predictable on a given issue. There could be a few reasons: maybe he is just a natural(trained?) contrarian, maybe he does not have much ideological rigidities, or maybe he is just more curious and open-minded than others. In any event, I find him more interesting to read, more colorful, and often more insightful.

sleep on it

This is on the list of Harvard Business Review Breakthrough ideas of 2007:

Conscious deliberation, however long and careful, can be a surprisingly crude and ineffective tool.

Use your conscious mind to acquire all the information you need for making a decision—but don’t try to analyze the information. Instead, go on holiday while your unconscious mind digests it for a day or two. Whatever your intuition then tells you is almost certainly going to be the best choice.

Tired, fatigued or exhausted

This makes a lot sense to me:

...[T]iredness, fatigue and exhaustion ...represent various points on an energy continuum. The amount of energy a person has influences how easily he can adapt to stress that comes his way. Individuals who are tired still have a fair bit of energy, so although they may feel forgetful, and impatient, and experience gradual heaviness or weakness in muscles following work, this is often alleviated by rest. Fatigue, on the other hand, is characterized by difficulty concentrating, anxiety, a gradual decrease in stamina, difficulty sleeping, increased sensitivity to light and the limiting of social activities once viewed as important. Individuals with exhaustion report frank confusion that resembles delirium, emotional numbness, sudden loss of energy, difficulty both in staying awake and in sleeping and complete social withdrawal.

"It is important to recognize the difference between tiredness and fatigue, because fatigue is a marker that the body is not able to keep up...The onset of the manifestations of fatigue, particularly if these are not normal states for you, should be taken seriously."

Failing to understand the distinctions between tiredness, fatigue and exhaustion could result in the use of inappropriate interventions that inadvertently promote fatigue and exhaustion...While exercise appears to help those who are tired, it may decrease the ability to adapt in individuals experiencing fatigue and exhaustion. Long-term use of caffeine and other stimulants should also be avoided by people experiencing fatigue and exhaustion, as these substances "fool" the body into thinking it has more energy available than it really does.

The bottom line is that feeling a bit tired(not bored) might be a good thing, take a good rest you will be recharged and ready to go again. Fatigue is a warning signal that your body tells you to slow down a bit, and exhaustion is like the ultimatum from your body.