Skepticblog

[webmaster broke last week's post into two parts and added new photos to this part]

Day 2. November 8, 2008

“Memo to all American speakers: At some point during your talk please apologize for George W. Bush and make a joke about his stupidity, then thank God for Obama (even you atheists) and mention that you voted for him.” Although no such paper memo was distributed to the speakers, by the second day I began to wonder if it was a tacit agreement nonetheless, since nearly everyone did it. Except me.

On this day the German ethologist and evolutionary psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, author of the excellent book, Gut Feelings, began with a funny story about an economics professor who was struggling to decide if he should take a new job position at another university, when a colleague told him to just compute the value and diminishing marginal utility of each option and then calculate the decision, “just like you teach your economics students to do.” The professor’s response: “Oh, come on, you don’t understand, this is serious!” His point was that when it comes to real life most of us make most of our decisions under great uncertainty. We use our gut feelings instead, and more often than not that works just as well as complex models. Gigerenzer’s most notable example was an economist (I believe it was Harry Markowitz) who received the Nobel Prize for his complex model of how best to make investments, but when it came to his own portfolio Markowitz reverted to a simple 1/n formula of the equal distribution of funds over a large number of investment tools.

Continue reading…

I have never kept a diary — the narrative recounting of daily events — mainly because most of my daily routine is uneventful and uninteresting. Like everyone else, I’m a creature of habit. If it is Tuesday or Thursday morning, I’m doing the “Barry Ride” with my cycling buddies (so christened because it was started in the 1980s by Barry Wolfe, a National Champion cyclist who passed away a couple of years ago), a two-hour loop through the hills of Glendale and La Canada. (I may someday write a book entitled Tuesdays with Barry, recounting the conversations we have had during the ride over the past 20 years on all manner of topics from the sublime to the superficial.) After the ride I pick up a 20-oz. Latte at the Coffee Gallery in Altadena, stop by the P.O. Box to pick up the Skeptics Society mail, then go into the office for the rest of the day. If it is Wednesday we ride our bikes to Mt. Wilson, a 20-mile climb (followed by a 20-mile descent), then I hang out at the Starbucks in La Canada for a couple of hours, writing and editing without phone interruptions, then to the office. If it is Monday I work all day in the office. If it is Friday I write at home for a couple of hours, then take my step-dad out to lunch, trying out different burger joints around Southern California (and, when needed, drive him to his various doctor appointments, which have grown more common now that he is in his 80s). If it is Saturday morning I’m with the boys again, hammering through a 4-hour ride in the mountains, rotating weeks through four different routes, one flat and the other three monstrous leg-breaking climbs. Sundays are my secular Sabbath, just hanging out at home and doing my best to be unproductive. Best of all, every weekday morning I drive my daughter to school — the best 20 minutes of my day — as we get uninterrupted time to talk and/or listen to audio books (latest one — The Year of Living Biblically by A. J. Jacobs, an hilarious account of trying to literally follow the hundreds of commandments in the good book). As I said, nothing to write home about.

Continue reading…