Marshmallow is Not Soft

Buckets of ink have been spent on the “marshmallow study”. Walter Mischel started the test in the 1960s; finished it in the 1980s and people have been buzzing about it ever since.

The most famous version goes like this. A 4-5 yr-old child is placed in a room with a marshmallow. She is told that she is welcome to eat it now, but if she waits until the adult comes back, she will get two marshmallows. The wait was usually 15 minutes, all alone, in a bare room with a table, two chairs and a plate with a marshmallow. (You will find no shortage of (very cute) videos on this study.)

• The result: decades later, the kids who resisted were dramatically more successful.
• The moral: self-control is they key to success.

The study’s fame grew until it is now one the ten best-known stories in psychology, maybe the best. Then, in 2018, Watts published a study claiming Mischel’s conclusion was too simple.

Popular press articles exploded: the marshmallow study is wrong! Debunked! There were lots of takes. One says that it’s really about education: kids from poor families have less willpower. Another says it is about trust in adults: kids from un-trustworthy parents didn’t believe they were ever going to see that second marshmallow. Well, Watts never really thought his study “dubunked” the original, just that it told a more nuanced story.

Well, now a study from New Zealand, originating back in 1972, says...self-control is an excellent predictor of future success. We’re sorry, Walter Mischel.

Visualizing Mortality

The Author is 34 and expecting to live to 90. If you are 17 expecting to live to 73, you have half as many X's and exactly the same number of winters. Your odds of living past 73 are pretty good but the shocking lack of infiniteness is unchanged.

Notably, the number of days you get to spend with your parents is probably already past the halfway mark. OTOH, the number of days you deliberately choose to spend with your parents may be much, much below halfway.

Wi-Fi Might Have Made Us Smarter

Instead it has spawned an industry with the largest research budgets in history and the smartest people in the world dedicated to making us addicted.

Almost all Americans own a smartphone or a computer.
Each device contains the library of Alexandria.
The sum total of all world knowledge.
You can learn anything. Why don't you?
Too busy tracking social status.
Too enthralled by imagery your evolution can't resist.

Sex Differences in Sports

	Here is a run-down on male-female differences and how they might affect sports performance. Oh, and here's one comparing athletes' bodies to average men.

Professionalism and Professional Success

We like to think they go together. Here is an example of a doctor for whom they conflict.

“Why wouldn’t I give patients a Percocet prescription? It makes their life easier and my life easier.”

Cyborg Drummer

This guy drums like no-one else. Literally. Cyborgs are coming.

The Great Unlearning

Look at the picture. Consider big game hunting. Reflect upon your thoughts.

Bill Whittle pieces these notions together in "The Great Unlearning" (7-1/2 min).

What You Think You Know of Star Wars ... ... is Wrong

A long time ago, a galaxy far, far away was governed by a republic. Government was passable, but decaying, and growing more corrupt every year. Dishonesty grew while the freedom and security of the people declined. “Rule of law”, the root of the word republic, became a faint memory and a bitter joke. One group, wanting to be left alone, declared itself a trade federation as it sought peaceful autonomy.

It was not to be. There existed a small clan of people who pass on enormous powers of violence and destruction in their very bloodline. They destroy the federation's ability to police itself and leave the galaxy, like Somalia, a chaotic disarray of squabbling warlords.

(July'19) Skywalker was a full-on communist-inspired, slave-owning, religious terrorist, killing hundreds of thousands to protest dad’s firm but fair rule? 

Watch Me! Watch Me!

Some students, excited about dance routines sent me here. This makes me sad: the thin gruel you put up with as entertainment. Imagine if Bruno Mars had the dance moves of Fred Astaire.

ISIS is Glamorous

At least that's what Virginia Postrel says

Confronting Islamic State requires an exercise largely unfamiliar to the American military’s hardheaded pragmatists: thinking carefully about the elusive, seductive magic of glamour. Making that task all the more difficult, it also demands recognizing the allure of ideas and images that baffle, offend or horrify most Westerners. As beauty is in the eye of the beholder, glamour is in the mind of the audience.

...

“What inspires the most lethal terrorists in the world today is not so much the Qur’an or religious teachings as a thrilling cause and call to action that promises glory and esteem in the eyes of friends. Jihad is an egalitarian, equal-opportunity employer: fraternal, fast-breaking, glorious and cool,”

Unfortunately your average wannabe jihadist is in for a shock

It’s drudgery, subordination, infighting, hypocrisy and general messiness. “The reality on the ground is a world away from the glamour of well-produced recruitment videos,” wrote Maher, noting complaints about boredom and guard duty.

Oh and by the way, once they have you, you are not getting out.

Personally, I’m not sure there’s a worse fate than quitting your comfortable job to run off and join the caliphate, all psyched to defeat the infidels, only to be told you’re being stuck on the graveyard shift at the IT desk, and you start tomorrow, oh, and if you don’t like it they’ll put you in a cage.

Introducing Men Without Chests

C.S. Lewis wrote some of the most astoundingly insightful commentary on the modern world (which came before our present postmodern one). The Screwtape Letters or The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe are light and fun. The Four Loves or The Abolition of Man are more logical and demanding. Even more so for a troglodyte like me who misses half of the allusions. C.S.Lewis Doodle helps the flow with illustrations. Here is the first chapter of “The Abolition of Man” ending with this:

We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the spirited element: the head rules the belly through the chest ...It is an outrage that [men without chests] should be commonly spoke of as intellectuals. ... Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary. It is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so. ...We continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. ...we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and demand of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

Related: How Men Without Chests predicted the modern university's unsoundness

Rippetoe

And Now for Something Completely Different

Playful imagination and abundant talent: Postmodern Jukebox.

Major Success

College major success rates, that is. Who earns, who works, who is full-time, who is in his field. Ben Casselman of FiveThirtyEight has compiled a list of 173 college majors and correlates it to how much new grads earn and how likely they are to use their degrees.

His method has a pretty big flaw (which he addresses in the details) that you should not miss. As long as you keep this in mind, the results are useful: is it possible that the average petroleum engineer is smarter, harder-working and more motivated than your average library science practitioner? Casselman compares average earnings for university grads to high-school only grads. Is that a similar pool of people?

I've made similar posts before.

Do You Buy It?

"The internet is making our children stupid."

The Hidden Benefit of a Really Crappy Job

The best job I’ve ever had was cleaning deep fryers at McDonald’s at 4:30 in the morning. By “best,” I don’t mean most pleasant. Each morning, I would take a filtration device (basically a heavy bucket with a filter, on wheels) up to each deep fryer, empty the fryer’s oil into it and, while it churned away, I would scrub the sides and bottom of the fryer. After the filter was done working, I would pump the filtered oil back into the fryer and turn on the heating element to prepare it for that day’s cooking.

Read on.

How Much of Human Nature is Optional?

Rachel Ryan doesn't feel like a man... but she feels a little guilty of that fact. She thinks that gender is not a social construct and discovered that makes her transgressive!

Nowhere is this oppression more apparent than in the workplace. God forbid

a young, ambitious career woman admit to wanting romance and a family as much as she wants that corner office. Instead, feminist champions of our gender-neutral society encourage “single young women in their sexual prime” to suppress conventional female desires in favor of “more-important things… such as good grades and internships and job interviews and a financial future of their own.”

Since entering the professional world, I’ve found amusement in openly admitting to wanting a family in the not-so-distant future. After all, I’m a fan of shock-value, and this statement is almost always guaranteed to raise eyebrows.

She is also a social science type and reads journal articles.

Ready for Bed

Swiss researchers say that screen time before bed makes it hard to sleep. It's not just that reading and thinking gets your mind wound up (though I am sure that's part of it.) Exposing yourself to light messes with the body's melatonin production. Having a low level of melatonin keeps your body in daytime mode and keeps you from being ready to sleep.

The new research shows that light from laptop screens, cellphones or tablets causes more disruption of melatonin than other lights. I don't see any mention of what the control lighting is: incandescent? CFL? LED? television?

Teenagers, already susceptible to confused sleep cycles, are especially affected.

My first thought: profitable app opportunity. Second thought: the app world is way ahead of me. From the comments:

"As for apps that filter blue light, I would recommend f.lux for OSX, iOS (iPhone/iPad) , Windows, and Linux, and Twilight or Lux for Android. I have tried others, but those are the best." -Andy

Go Play

They say parents these days are awfully protective, awfully afraid to take risks. Maybe we can relax a little.

Why You Need to Understand Statistics

While this is "honest" in the sense of not being fraud, it is not honest in the sense of giving you the truth. If your skill in logic and statistics is weak, you will certainly walk away believing a falsehood. I'm not sure that is accidental.
More likely, it's a battle: an epic struggle between universities and student. You, to get their education and degree. They to get your money. Their side seems more sophisticated.

 Once upon a time, we marketed law schools with a printed brochure or two. That changed with the advent of the new century and the internet. Now marketing is pervasive: web pages, emails, blog posts, and forums.

With increased marketing, some educators began to worry about how we presented ourselves to students. As a sometime social scientist, I was particularly concerned about the way in which some law schools reported median salaries without disclosing the number of graduates supplying that information. A school could report that it had employment information from 99% of its graduates, that 60% were in private practice, and that the median salary for those private practitioners was $120,000. Nowhere did the reader learn that only 45% of the graduates reported salary information.