clips of logic

Are we inherently altruistic? Philanthropists donate millions of dollars every year to charity. To understand this behavior, economists designed an experimental game named Ultimatum to see how 2 parties interact when asked to divide a sum of money. There are also variations of the game called Dictator and Trust Game.

Ultimatum – Alice is given $10 to decide how much to split with Ben. Ben can either accept or reject the offer. If he rejects, neither of them get anything.

Dictator – Similar to ultimatum but this time Ben can’t reject the offer. This is puts Alice in control hence the name.

Trust Game – Variation of Dictator game. An additional step is introduce before the 2 parties proceed with the Dictator game. Ben will offer an initial gift in hopes of getting more back.

All three games show that we consistently prefer fairness and mostly offer a portion of the initial sum to the other party. But things start to get confusing when an economist named John List tweaked the experiments a little.

Dictator 2.0 – Alice can additionally choose to take a dollar from Ben. This shouldn’t matter since most of the time Alice decides to share some with Ben.

It turns out that in this variation, less dictator decide to share and one out of five took money from Ben. What John List has discovered is that, with a little variation to the game rules, he can influence the behavior of the participants.

He didn’t stop there and did a bunch of other experiments to illustrate that the results of the experiment is affected by its set-up. You can read more about it in Superfreakonomics. I honestly do not know if we innately altruistic but I do hope you will donate to help the earthquake victims in Haiti.

Awesome animation and great music. Reminds me of the cat that got crushed by my auto-gate. It was alive when I free it but it might have turned into a zombie. Don’t mess with the cat zombies, they have 9 lives too.

One rainy afternoon, a certain ninja enlighten me with the art of Minimalism. A minimalist strives to live a simple, uncluttered and more sustainable lifestyle by reducing excess, removing distraction and focusing only on the most essentials.

Minimalism is about simplifying your life and detaching yourself from unnecessary possessions. The one aspect of minimalism that attracts me is the focus on things that really matters. Once you eliminate all the distractions, wastes and excesses, you are giving yourself the chance to go after your dreams.

So, if you are trying to clock up that 10,000 hours, it might be wise to water down your life with a little minimalistic juice.

In the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues that the reason for success lies in the accumulation of experience and practice on a specific task. He said in order to be good and successful at something, you need to spend around 10,000 hours doing it.

In one of his research, he discovered a disproportionate number of elite Canadian hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year. (e.g. January to April) The reason for this was since the hockey leagues determine eligibility by the calendar year, someone that is born in the beginning of the year will be bigger compared to someone born in December. This is often enough to identify the children as better athletes and once they get into training camp, they get an head-start in accumulating practices and experience. Gladwell refer to this as the accumulated advantage.

If he is right and if practice does in fact leads to perfection, shouldn’t you get started on what you always wanted to do and be good at? We don’t get to decide which month are we born in but we can decide when we start practicing. The best day to start was yesterday but starting today is definitely better than tomorrow.

One night, while I was waiting for the auto-gate to open so I can park into the porch, my car engine decided to go to bed before me. Later I found out it has something to do with the timing belt, but the first thing that came into my mind was, man it could have waited till I got my car into the porch.

Then as I was heading back to my room, I realized how lucky I was to have it died right in front of the house instead of anywhere else. Being a rational and logical person, I do not believe in luck. Or rather, I do not wish to believe in luck if possible.

A rationalist will argue that I should have replaced the timing belt before it had a chance to breakdown. I agree that I could have prevented the manifestation of bad luck from having my car breakdown in the middle of nowhere. But what about those lucky moments you experience in life like having it break down right in front of your house?

The way to look at this logically would be to consider them coincidence. If something can go wrong randomly, it can sometimes get lucky too. My gripe is that a lot of people do not attribute their success to being lucky. The world is very complicated and so inter-connected that how can you be sure it was all you that made it happened?

So, yes I do believe luck plays a role in both successes and failures. My stand would be try to minimize the chances of bad luck from happening (e.g. changing your timing belt on time) and put yourself in a position that you can enjoy the benefits when the planets decide to align themselves for you but most importantly, never ever rely on it.

Little did I know how a timing belt can remind me of how lucky I am sometimes and how there are things that you simply can’t do anything about. The Great Timing Belt indeed.