Random thing I wrote a few weeks ago

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I saw the sky transition

It is interesting to note how memories of certain natural/meteorological phenomenon can always stick with you. I remember the first time I saw the setting sun as finished the ascent up a hill on I-94; that same trip also saw my first instance of hydroplaning during the heavy heavy rain that blanketed central Wisconsin.

Today’s memory is so distinct that I think I could be able to recreate a rough sketch of it five years from now. I was reading ACF Winter 2010 packets when I glanced outside the window of the bus. Curiously, the western sky seemed to be composed of two colors and the division between them was crystal clear. The western portion was dull blue, reminiscent of dusk on a normal sunny day; the eastern half, however, was a burnt orange, and some wispy, low lying clouds separated these two phases. The transition zone did not appear to be very large, and as soon as we entered the eastern region, we were enveloped with rain. There were a few flashes of lightning. The cloud cover diffused the light emanating from the bolts of thunder, but they did accentuate the pale orange color of the sky.

Unfortunately, I cannot describe to you the sights and sounds. My confinement in this controlled environment renders it impossible. I

Why Money Makes You Unhappy | Wired Science | Wired.com

[...]

But the statistical disconnect between money and happiness raises a fascinating question: Why doesn’t money make us happy? One intriguing answer comes from a new study by psychologists at the University of Liege, published in Psychological Science. The scientists explore the “experience-stretching hypothesis,” an idea first proposed by Daniel Gilbert. He explains “experience-stretching” with the following anecdote:

I’ve played the guitar for years, and I get very little pleasure from executing an endless repetition of three-chord blues. But when I first learned to play as a teenager, I would sit upstairs in my bedroom happily strumming those three chords until my parents banged on the ceiling…Doesn’t it seem reasonable to invoke the experience-stretching hypothesis and say that an experience that once brought me pleasure no longer does? A man who is given a drink of water after being lost in the Mojave Desert may at that moment rate his happiness as eight. A year later, the same drink might induce him to feel no better than a two.

[...]

The study itself is straightforward. The psychologists gathered 351 adult employees of the University of Liège, from custodial staff to senior administrators, for an online survey. (I should note that it remains unclear whether happiness and other aspects of well-being can be meaningfully measured with a multiple choice test. So caveats apply.) The scientists primed the subjects by showing them a stack of Euro bills before asking them a bunch of questions which attempted to capture their “savoring ability.” Here’s how the savoring test worked:

Participants are asked to imagine finishing an important task (contentment), spending a romantic weekend away (joy), or discovering an amazing waterfall while hiking (awe). Each scenario is followed by eight possible reactions, including the four savoring strategies referred to in the introduction (i.e., displaying positive emotions, staying present, anticipating or reminiscing about the event, and telling other people about the experience). Participants are required to select the response or responses that best characterize what their typical behavior in each situation would be, and receive 1 point for each savoring strategy selected.

Interestingly, the scientists found that people in the wealth condition – they’d been primed with all those Euros – had significantly lower savoring scores. This suggests that simply looking at money makes us less interested in relishing the minor pleasures of life. Furthermore, subjects who made more money in real life – the scientists asked all subjects for their monthly income – scored significantly lower on the savoring test. A subsequent experiment duplicated this effect among Canadian students, who spent less time savoring a chocolate bar after being shown a picture of Canadian dollars.

via Why Money Makes You Unhappy | Wired Science | Wired.com.

Robert Solow’s Testimony to Congress

It was given to the House Committee on Science and Technology and in it, Solow attempts to describe why modern macroeconomics in general and Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models have “failed and [are] bound to fail.”

Solow_Testimony. (pdf)

“Economic theory is always and inevitably too simple; that can not be helped. But it is all the more important to keep pointing out foolishness wherever it appears. Especially when it comes to matters as important as macroeconomics, a mainstream economist like me insists that every proposition must pass the smell test: does this really make sense? I do not think that the currently popular DSGE models pass the smell test. They take it for granted that the whole economy can be thought about as if it were a single, consistent person or dynasty carrying out a rationally designed, long-term plan, occasionally disturbed by unexpected shocks, but adapting to them in a rational, consistent way. I do not think that this picture passes the smell test. The protagonists of this idea make a claim to respectability by asserting that it is founded on what we know about microeconomic behavior, but I think that this claim is generally phony. The advocates no doubt believe what they say, but they seem to have stopped sniffing or to have lost their sense of smell altogether.

[...]

The DSGE school populates its simplified economy – remember that all economics is about simplified economies just as biology is about simplified cells – with exactly one single combination worker-owner-consumer-everything-else who plans ahead carefully and lives forever. One important consequence of this “representative agent” assumption is that there are no conflicts of interest, no incompatible expectations, no deceptions.

[...]

An obvious example is that the DSGE story has no real room for unemployment of the kind we see most of the time, and especially now: unemployment that is pure waste. There are competent workers, willing to work at the prevailing wage or even a bit less, but the potential job is stymied by a market failure. The economy is unable to organize a win-win situation that is apparently there for the taking. This sort of outcome is incompatible with the notion that the economy is in rational pursuit of an intelligible goal. The only way that DSGE and related models can cope with unemployment is to make it somehow voluntary, a choice of current leisure or a desire to retain some kind of flexibility for the future or something like that. But this is exactly the sort of explanation that does not pass the smell test.

[...]

The point I am making is that the DSGE model has nothing useful to say about anti-recession policy because it has built into its essentially implausible assumptions the “conclusion” that there is nothing for macroeconomic policy to do. I think we have just seen how untrue this is for an economy attached to a highly-leveraged, weakly-regulated financial system. But I think it was just as visibly false in earlier recessions (and in episodes of inflationary overheating) that followed quite different patterns. There are other traditions with better ways to do macroeconomics.”

A good read. A good reason why I’ll continue to be taking my econ course material with a grain of salt.

–Gautam

Cheap-ish bikes I should check up on. (Craigslist edition)

http://minneapolis.craigslist.org/hnp/bik/1856617406.html

http://minneapolis.craigslist.org/ram/bik/1856531815.html – Not all that cheap but within budget

http://minneapolis.craigslist.org/ram/bik/1856489783.html

http://minneapolis.craigslist.org/dak/bik/1856256995.html

http://minneapolis.craigslist.org/ram/bik/1856215713.html

http://minneapolis.craigslist.org/csw/bik/1856104716.html

http://minneapolis.craigslist.org/dak/bik/1856035490.html

http://minneapolis.craigslist.org/hnp/bik/1856000254.html – may be the same as one of the above ones?

http://minneapolis.craigslist.org/dak/bik/1855713717.html – This one is a beauty

I’m a sore loser

My legs ache now from the run/bike session today.

Also, I weigh ~169 lbs. right now. This is the first time I’ve registered a sub-170 number in several years.

I am indeed a sore loser. Life is good. My target for July 23 is 167. 2 lbs in 15 days seems reasonable; let’s hope I can manage that much.

–Gautam

I am indeed a sore loser. Life is good.

Solitude

For whatever reason, I feel lonely. I had a hard time accepting the feeling, but here I am.

It’s not like I’ve been physically alone all the time. I’m in lab for 5-6 hours of the day during which there are many other people milling about. The machine by the information desk in Coffman logs in the hours I spend there. I also attend quizbowl practices for an hour every Tuesday/Thursday. In all these things, though, I feel like I’m lacking a “best friend.” I’d never thought I’d come to such a realization during my undergrad career.

Whenever I do something outside of work, I feel a kind of loneliness starting to kick in. I go running alone; the few hours I spend at my apartment go by mostly without talking to my roommates; any impromptu decision I’ve made to step out has involved me being pretty much alone. It’s not like I’ve not thought about asking people to hang out with me… it’s just that there aren’t all that many people on my contact list who I’d like to hang out with and/or with whom I wouldn’t have an awkward time convincing them to spend their free time with me. Conversely (I guess “naturally” fits just as well,) I get very few calls from people asking to hang out. (Note that I’m not complaining, merely observing. I don’t hate people for not calling and suggesting I spend time with them.)

Throughout, I’ve always been playing defense when it comes to making friends. With any major transition I end up taking a year trying to determine who are good people to hang out with, who share similar aspirations as I do, who’d help me realize my shortcomings and capabilities, and so on. I have met most of my friends through classes I have taken. There certainly are other activities and channels through which I’ve made friends, but the overwhelming majority I’ve initiated contact with have been through classes.

However, (and I realise that this is coming embarrassingly late in my life) I’ve come to the not-so-erudite realization that the critical turnover timescale of friends is smaller than my preferred timescale. By “critical turnover timescale” I mean the amount of time over which the set of people I’m likely to interact with (or have the chance to interact with.)  That is, if I meet someone new right now, there’s a distinct possibility that I will not meet him/her after the end of the ongoing semester. Unless, of course, we become good friends, in which case I do whatever possible to maintain contact.

Sitting on a park bench, or in Bruegger’s Bagels (which I’m doing right now,) isn’t randomly going to facilitate my interaction with a future good friend. I realise I have to be more proactive about this. But, honestly, I haven’t found the time to invest in myself, and it seems too much to meet 10 new people a day in the hopes of making a good friend.

I think I’m doing some things right. I’ve restarted running on a frequent basis, and I’ve been going to the rec with regularity. I’ve been practising my Tabla at least twice every week and I intend to continue. People in the lab have been supportive, and I guess I should just give some time for my SUA job to “blossom.” I’ve no doubt that by the end of the summer, I’ll be a different individual than I was prior to its commencement.

I’ll clarify that I didn’t have any ulterior motive (such as craving attention, or whatever have you) in making this post. I don’t expect anyone to call me in a couple of hours suggesting we hang out/have a good time. I just needed to spend a few minutes thinking of the course life has taken so far, and how my indifference curves should be modified.

Gautam