The past isn’t gone

/

I survived Hitler’s horrific death camps. People ask me, "How did you learn to overcome the past?" Overcome? Overcome? I haven’t overcome anything. Every beating, bombing, and selection line, every death, every column of smoke pushing skyward, every moment of terror when I thought it was the end—these live on in me, in my memories and my nightmares. The past isn’t gone. It isn’t transcended or excised. It lives on in me. But so does the perspective it has afforded me: that I lived to see liberation because I kept hope alive in my heart. That I lived to see freedom because I learned to forgive. 

Auschwitz survivor Edith Eva Eger in her book The Choice

Who is best at predicting the future

/

(In a contest involving hundreds of geopolitical questions) a small number of forecasters began to pull clear of the pack: the titular “superforecasters”. Their performance was consistently impressive. With nothing more than an internet connection and their own brains, they consistently beat everything from financial markets to trained intelligence analysts with access to top-secret information.

They were an eclectic bunch: housewives, unemployed factory workers and professors of mathematics. But Philip Tetlock (who teaches at the Wharton School of Business) and his collaborators were able to extract some common personality traits. Superforecasters are clever, on average, but by no means geniuses. More important than sheer intelligence was mental attitude. Borrowing from Sir Isaiah Berlin, a Latvian-born British philosopher, Mr Tetlock divides people into two categories: hedgehogs, whose understanding of the world depends on one or two big ideas, and foxes, who think the world is too complicated to boil down into a single slogan. Superforecasters are drawn exclusively from the ranks of the foxes.

Humility in the face of a complex world makes superforecasters subtle thinkers. They tend to be comfortable with numbers and statistical concepts such as “regression to the mean” (which essentially says that most of the time things are pretty normal, so any large deviation is likely to be followed by a shift back towards normality). But they are not statisticians: unlike celebrity pollsters such as Nate Silver, they tend not to build explicit mathematical models.

But superforecasters do have a healthy appetite for information, a willingness to revisit their predictions in light of new data, and the ability to synthesise material from sources with very different outlooks on the world. They think in fine gradations. 

Most important is what Mr Tetlock calls a “growth mindset”: a mix of determination, self-reflection and willingness to learn from one’s mistakes. The best forecasters were less interested in whether they were right or wrong than in why they were right or wrong. They were always looking for ways to improve their performance. In other words, prediction is not only possible, it is teachable.

Prediction, like medicine in the early 20th century, is still mostly based on eminence rather than evidence. The most famous forecasters in the world are newspaper columnists and television pundits. Superforecasters make for bad media stars. Caution, nuance and healthy scepticism are less telegenic than big hair, a dazzling smile and simplistic, confident pronouncements.

From a review in The Economist of the book Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner

When Optimization Rules

/

A focus on optimization can lead technologists to believe that increasing efficiency is inherently a good thing. There’s something tempting about this view. Given a choice between doing something efficiently or inefficiently, who would choose the slower, more wasteful, more energy-intensive path?

The problem here is that goals such as connecting people, increasing human flourishing, or promoting freedom, equality, and democracy are not goals that are computationally tractable. 

Rob Reich, Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein, System Error

 

Goodhart’s law

/

Once a useful number becomes a measure of success, it ceases to be a useful number. This is known as Goodhart’s law, and it reminds us that the human world can move once you start to measure it. Deborah Stone writes about Soviet factories and farms that were given production quotas, on which jobs and livelihoods depended.  

Numbers can be at their most dangerous when they are used to control things rather than to  understand them. Yet Goodhart’s law is really just hinting at a much more basic limitation of a data- driven view of the world … there’s a critical gap between even the best proxies and the real thing— between what we’re able to measure and what we actually care about.

Hannah Fry writing in The New Yorker

Advice on choosing a job or career path

/

When my graduate students ask me for advice on choosing a job or career path, I don’t tell them to find the best possible fit between their interests and specific job duties. Obviously, they shouldn’t sign up for something they hate. But I tell them that satisfaction can be found in all sorts of vocations. After all, how many kids say, “When I grow up, I’m going to be a quality-assurance analyst”? Rather than relentlessly pursuing a “perfect match” career that they’re sure will make them happy, a better approach is to remain flexible on the exact job, while searching for the values and culture that fit with theirs. 

Arthur C. Brooks writing in The Atlantic

False equivalence

/

False equivalency means that you think (or are told) two things should have equal weight in your decision-making. If one opinion has solid data supporting it, but the other opinion is conjecture, they are not equivalent in quality. 

False equivalence leads people to believe two separate things are equally bad, or equally good. A look into how damaging this thought process is can be found in Isaac Asminov's article, "The Relativity of Wrong." Asminov wrote, "When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together. The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that ‘right’ and ‘wrong are absolute; that everything that isn't perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.”

Stephanie Sarkis writing in Forbes

Tuesday Tech Tools: 22 places to start learning to code

/

Want to learn some coding? Here are some places to start:

Code Cademy
Learn to code for free. Formal. Good reviews.

The Code Player
Learn to code through videos demonstrating actual typing of code to create items from scratch.

Coursera
This online learning platform includes many coding courses from accredited universities. The courses are made up of lessons with multiple video lectures, along with readings, practice exercises, homework quizzes, and assignments. Most are free but have a cost if you want a certification. Limited help options.

Data Camp
Practice coding. See progress as you go. Free sign up.

FreeCodeCamp*
Founded by a schoolteacher turned programmer. Free, user-friendly hands-on online courses for beginners. Most courses run 300 hours. Positive reviews.

FurtureLearn
UK-based online learning platform. Earn a certificate with 3 or 4 classes (in 10 to 12 week blocks of learning). Mostly novice level content for job education. No phone apps and limited support. Some free tracks.

Google Code Playground
An advanced educational tool of Google’s Javascript APIs (application programming interfaces that simplify software implementing). Available for anyone to try out and tweak the code. Free but not for beginners.

Hands on Programming with R (free book)

jQuery
Build coding projects to include in your portfolio, and collaborate with other members. A 4 question quiz matches you with the best course for you and your goals. Free 7 day trial if you enter a credit card number. $40 per month for unlimited courses.

Kaggle Data Sets
A database of some 29k data sets for learning data science. There are more than a dozen free micro-courses for learning Python, machine learning, data viz, etc. Share/collaborate with others on the site.

Khan Academy
Free coding lessons with reputable content.

Learn Python the Hard Way
A book that introduces readers to Python.

MIT OpenCourseWare
For beginners. Textbook.

Mozilla Developer Network
Beginner friendly. Have to sign up to see. Positive reviews.

R for Data Science
Free Book. Good reviews for beginners.

Scratch
MIT-developed site tilted for children (but adults too) to learn coding basics focused on helping people create interactive stories, games, and animations. Free.

SoloLearn*
Free lessons on coding but with ads.

Stack Overflow
A popular programming problem-solving sites despite a number of negative reviews. Ask your coding questions as you learn or find chunks of code. Low as $5 a month.

StoryBench
Not hands on, more of an explanation of projects. Positive reviews.

TeamTreehouse
Tuturals on web design, coding, business, etc.  Students sign up for annual subscriptions.

Udacity
User-friendly online school focusing on job-related skills. Users give glowing reviews but it is expensive. $79 a month.

W3Schools Online Web Tutorials*
Learn HTML, CSS, etc. Easy-to-use. Navigate.

Find more tools here

Tossing Worries into the Sea

/

I conducted a religious service on board the SS Lurline on a recent voyage to Honolulu. In the course of my talk, I suggested that people who were carrying worries in their minds might go to the stern of the vessel and imaginatively take each anxious thought out of the mind, drop it overboard, and watch it disappear in the wake of the ship. 

It seems an almost childlike suggestion, but a man came to me later that day and said, “I did as you suggested and am amazed at the relief it has give me. During this voyage, he said, “every  evening at sunset I am going to drop all my worries overboard until I develop the psychology of casting them entirely out of my consciousness. Ever day I shall watch them disappear in the great ocean of time. Doesn’t the Bible say something a out ‘forgetting those things that are behind”?” 

Of course, emptying the mind is not enough. It is necessary to refill the emptied mind or the old, unhappy thoughts which you have cast out will come sneaking in again. 

To prevent that happening, immediately start filling your mind with creative and healthy thoughts. Then when the old fears, hates and worries that have haunted you for so long try to edge back in, they will in effect find a sign on the door of your mind reading “occupied.”

Norman Vincent Peale, The Power of Positive Thinking

The Gospel of ‘Work as Fulfillment’

/

The problem with the gospel—Your dream job is out there, so never stop hustling—is that it’s a blueprint for spiritual and physical exhaustion. Long hours don’t make anybody more productive or creative; they make people stressed, tired and bitter. But the overwork myths survive “because they justify the extreme wealth created for a small group of elite techies,” Erin Griffith writes.

If you were designing a Black Mirror labor force that encouraged overwork without higher wages, what might you do? Perhaps you’d persuade educated young people that income comes second; that no job is just a job; and that the only real reward from work is the ineffable glow of purpose. It is a diabolical game that creates a prize so tantalizing yet rare that almost nobody wins, but everybody feels obligated to play forever.

Derek Thompson writing in The Atlantic

In the Grip of Bitterness

/

During my hitch in the Marine Corps, my wife and I rented a studio apartment in San Francisco from a man crippled by a World War 2 injury. Captured at Wake Island and later confined for years in China, he was left partially paralyzed when an enemy solider struck hi with a rifle butt.

When I visited with this landlord, he'd tell me one story after another of how barbarically he'd been treated. With vile language and intense emotion, he spoke of the tortures he'd endured and of his utter hatred for the Japanese. Here was a man who had been horribly wronged-without question. The constant misery and pain he lived with could not be measured. My heart went out to him.

But there was another factor which made his existence even more lamentable. Our landlord had become a bitter man. Even though he was years removed from the war.. even though he had been safely released from the concentration camp and was now able to carry on physically... even though he and his wife owned a lovely dwelling and had a comfortable income, the crippled an was bound by the grip of bitterness. He was still fighting a battle that should have ended years before. In a very real sense, he was still in prison.

His bitterness manifested itself in intense prejudice, an acrid tongue and an everyone's out-to-get-me attitude. I am convinced that he was far more miserable by 1957 than he had been in 1944. There is no torment like the inner torment of an unforgiving spirit. It refuses to be soothed, it refuses to be healed, it refuses to forget.

Chuck Swindoll, Killing Giants: Pulling Thorns

Managers and Leaders

/

The manager is more tightly linked to an organization than is the leader. Indeed, the leader may have no organization at all. Florence Nightingale, after leaving the Crimea, exercised extraordinary leadership in healthcare for decades with no organization under her command. Gandhi was a leader before he had an organization. Some of our most memorable leaders have headed movements so amorphous that management would be an inappropriate word.  

John W. Gardner, On Leadership