Roman Interlude

The most apalling thing happened....it rained the whole weekend. I was dreaming of my trip to fabulous Rome since two months, dreaming of the beautiful Bernini statues in the sun, and guess what! The statues were still beautiful but no sun...
We reached Termini station and I hauled my heavy laptop and luggage out of the train to find that there was a deluge, and I had to walk through the deluge to our little hotel (Santa Chiara) behind the Pantheon. The hotel made up for it...we could sit and chat in the night on the steps of the Pantheon. Built as a Basilica to the , it ultimately became a tomb to the most famous Roman artists like Raphael, Carracci and Corelli.

I could only collect the images of Rome: cobbled streets much wider than you would expect...the statues at every corner, the bookshops and the restaurants advertising American breakfasts. We made our way to the churches to find the paintings of Caravaggio and Michelangelo culminating in the Vatican's Sistine Chapel. Oh and the cars: so tiny they fit everywhere. The Fiat Cinquecento (?) was ubiquitous.

On the way, when it rained we dashed into a bookshop: here we had coffee with Dante Alghieri looking down very sternly...

And the Vatican? We waited in the line for the museum and to my surprise it took only half an hour to get inside...no wonder because we were packed like sardines in the museum. A very nazi-ish looking guard yelled "Silenzio"!

boredom

In his 1995 essay “In Praise of Boredom,” Nobel Prize–winning poet Joseph Brodsky wrote: “When hit by boredom, go for it. Let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is, the sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.” Adds Vodanovich: “If you don’t succumb to its negative effects, boredom is a great motivational force.”
Thats taken from a Scientific American article on boredom.

So easy to say. I dont think its true. Boredom is a debilitating condition. It arises from a disconnect between what you want and what you are doing/getting, a fundamental disconnect between values and actuals. But this is not consistent with the fact that there are some people who are NEVER bored and some who are ALWAYS bored. So if its a temporary disconnect then this should not be the case...unless it has to do with self awareness. people who are self aware know what makes them bored and they avoid it? They live life according to their values?

And the self help guys say: if you are bored then stop being a boring person...if you cant be interested in the little things around then something is wrong with you. I agree but Im too bored to find out what is wrong!

Neuro enhancing drugs

This subject is fascinating to me. We can visualize a world where these drugs exist and competition between people will be dirtied by the drugs. Someone gets an AER and you say" Oh well, its the drugs, look at the size of her head (brain)! Thats not normal.." We will be like olympics athletes and before you can get an article published you would need to get a drug test?? Hows it ever gonna work?? Or are they going to announce the drugs they took and that can be published along with the article...why not? Nothing wrong if they increase your creativity! Problem is so far they only seem to increase concentration rather than creativity. Theres the ADHD drug Ritanil: you can, BTW, buy it without a prescription at:
http://www.freedom-pharmacys.com/rxdrugs/ritanil.html.

But so far apparently there is nothing that actually INCREASES creativity!

It doesn't matter though...my colleagues are working on lab experiments that show that a small happiness boost leads to an increase in "productivity". This I believe! So, heres a new advertisement for prozac: "Free yourself to be the best: happy people are successful people" or something like that!
Actually, what would I not give to be in the shoes of one of my super satisfied colleagues (SSC to keep it anonymous).. those that seem infinitely satisfied with themselves, those who interpret everything that happens to them as uniquely challenging and those who know they can overcome any challenge. It would simply be heaven. Thats all I can say....

Regret, disappointment, and learning

Been reading a lot (as usual) about this...apparently there is a huge difference in psychology between feeling regret and dissapointment. You could feel regret for various reasons, maybe you missed out on a large prize because you didn't pay attention to what you were supposed to do or because you didn't put in enough effort or you could feel it if you gave too much and you could have gotten away with "less money on the table"...Whatever. On the other hand if you simply lost something due to bad luck you just feel "disappointed" but you do not feel regret since there was nothing you could have done.
Why do we even care?? If all of these motivations led to the same behaviour then one should not care -- however it seems that thats not the case. You can learn from mistakes only if there is regret. Thats why its important to know when you have regret and when not.

Im trying to think of the last time I faced regret. Thing is it never happens like that since everything in life is a complicated combination of luck and effort...I never really know if it was my (lack) of effort or whether it would have happened anyway...most likely I think its always the latter. So the point is that two different observers (myself and an antagonist) would have different perceptions of who made the lesser effort and whether luck played a role: so its so subjective that there IS no pattern...

Finally what about the winners curse? Is it disappointment or regret? It could be regret that you overpaid given the new information revealed. But you would not have known that before anyway. So no regrets, only dissapointment?

And how can you test the difference?

Relativity and happiness

I learnt some interesting things this weekend...some of the latest research in Neuroeconomics and relativity. What do people care about? It seems they care very much if someone beats them in a game of skill but not so much when its a game of luck (Aldo Rustichini, a professor at Minnesota did this experiment using fMRI machines and Minnesota students). So, lets say someone wins a lottery, research shows that they are not very happy in the first few years as perhaps they attribute it to luck rather than skill (and it would be difficult to argue with that, unless choosing random numbers requires skill). But after some years they convince themselves that they do deserve it after all, and become happy. What are the implications of this? If you want to increase happiness, this means the state should equalize skills rather than money... i.e. what outcomes SIGNAL about skills matters more than itself. Together with the recent book by Richard Nisbett “Intelligence and How to Get It," ( see http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/opinion/07kristof.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=iq&st=cse) this suggests that equalizing educational opportunities is the key to equalizing "skills"... intrinsic talent is really not that important as was always thought...

Another interesting piece of research by Claudia Senik in Paris suggests that the inequality in levels of happiness reported by couples is a very good predictor of whether the relationship lasts or not: so the longest lived marriages are those where either both partners are equally happy or equally unhappy! You know the old saying "misery loves company"...well misery loves company but only if its equally miserable, you dont want to be with someone who is excrutiatingly happy while you are dying...
(see e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/opinion/07kristof.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=iq&st=cse)....

Finally, I never thought there was anything good about the sex ratio imbalance in China or India (in 2006, there were 120 boys born for every 100 girls, in India 930 women to 1000 men) but a new theory and some supportive evidence claims that it is indeed the imbalance that is responsible for the high Chinese savings rate...this is how the logic works: the competition for young women to get married to, is getting harsher given the imbalance. Hence parents of boys start saving early so that they can compete in the bride price and showing high status for the boy when he gets married...at the same time, since in China the boy and his wife look after parents in old age (no social security), while girls go away, this also increases the incentives of the girls family to save more for their old age! Hence savings goes up as a whole assuming that people have children at the same rate as before: save during the first 20 years then splurge...

On the control of hot emotions

I read a really interesting article on a psychologist who is interested in personality. There are a lot of pop psychology personality tests on the web and the underlying premise is that personality is a fixed thing. Well, this may not be quite true, personality may be different in different situations. Some features of a person's character however seem to be very important and this he says is the ability to control emotions...he carried out an experiment with children who were given marshmallows which they could either eat straight away or wait a bit and get another one. they were left in a room with the marshmallow and given a bell to ring when they could not wait any longer. Some of the children waited and got the reward while others rang the bell in almost no time. He followed these children into adulthood and found a high correlation between those who waited and those who were successful in life! Its not so much the ability to resist temptation for a longer run payoff thats important but the ability to control their desires. The successful kids did this in a variety of ways but essentially they did it by suppressing thoughts of marshmallows and distracting themselves with other things. Moreover this ability can potentially be learnt but requires diligent practice. Having the right parents can help a lot!

I've only recently become aware of this ability and it certainly rings true to me. People who are able to turn off their hot emotions are much more advantaged.
So, go on, I would say" Dont eat the marshmallow" !!

Happiness

I follow various happiness blogs now. Important things I learnt: (1) Flow activities are important: like writing a blog. The end is unimportant, only the process matters. So also, climbing scary mountains will qualify, matter of life and death activitities too (bungee jumping?, sky diving) (2) Heard the story about the wise guy...a man came to him asking for help in being happier. He told him to buy some goats and keep them inside his house for a week and then come back. So thats what the man did. He came back in a week totally sick of the smell of the goats and their little pebble shaped turds all over the house...and complained about this to the wise guy (WG). Well WG says" Now get rid of the goats. You will be happy!" .(3) Connections to others: close emotional bonds, good friends.

Also funny: from facebook: one of my friends posted this: a cure for very happy people:
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/fda_approves_depressant_drug_for

Vindicated...and the Bankers Conspiracy theory

Sarkozy criticized Gordon Brown's VAT reductions. I feel vindicated.
A new conspiracy theory has emerged in the Physics Dept at Oxford: Why are bankers paying themselves huge bonuses despite public outrage? Why is Ed Balls saying that the recession will be much worse than it is now? Do they (govt+bankers) know something we dont? Is everything going to collapse? They will care about reputation unless its the end game. So it must be the end game say the Conspiracy theorists....

VAT reductions? Why?

I saw an article by James Suroweicki in the New Yorker, this was the first justification I saw of the VAT cutting exercise of the Labour government and the proposal to cut withholding tax by the Obama govt...till now I was convinced that it was nonsense. Why try to increase spending indirectly by cutting taxes on consumers: the reductions in price due to VAT are minimal, I for one never noticed anything and they rely on consumers deciding to spend instead of save. Why not instead just increase spending on public works -- we do need better tracks for the trains, we need better hospitals, universities etc. So, why?

Well, Suroweicki cites the behavioural economics stuff: people tend to spend more when they perceive a windfall gain to be an increase in income rather than an increase in wealth. Hence if the government wants people to spend they should increase income, i.e. give small increases in monthly take home pay but not large lump sums...all very well. But I still dont understand why its not easier to simply increase spending on public works, because that will surely not be saved at least in the first round..

While on the topic of the financial crisis: Its still quite amazing that almost none of the CEOs who led the way to financial ruin for so many are held accountable. They are not being taxed, its the middle classes as usual who bear the brunt...who else pays withholding tax? Madoff was surely only one Mr Ponzi....so if banks are nationalised will they actually change their incentives to punish those who take these risks?

A few people I have heard, have taken this to mean the end of capitalism as we know it. They are buying sustainable ways of living: having your own kitchen garden to grow produce, solar panels for electricity and hoarding food. the idea is that when the end comes it will be too quick to be able to survive without planning...governments will not be able to tackle the problems....money will be worthless...