the perils of choice

During dinner with my parents last night, the topic of how people react to "too much" choice came up.  My mom said how she always felt too much choice was indeed too much, and kept her from making any choice, but thought she was unusual and that most people liked to have a lot of choice.  My argument was that people say that, but when you look at what they actually do, too much choice is bad.

Following my general rule of locating authorities for claims I made, I defer to Barry Schwartz, whose excellent Google talk addresses this in wonderful detail.

Some thoughts that come to mind while watching that:

Theory: Younger people, who have grown up in a world that inundates them with choice, have in reaction tended to become satisficers, because the alternative (maximizer) generally leads to unhappiness, for reasons explained by Schwartz.  Consequently, they are happier and more adaptable than those of us whose selection model was developed at a time when maximization was the preferred approach.  (In a situation with limited choice maximization, which is naively the preferred solution, is likely to be indistinguishable from satisfaction because the same choice meets both criteria while the few remaining alternatives don't even satisfy.)

Perfection is the enemy of good enough.  But "good enough" is the enemy of "great:".  Maximizers want "great".

Leakage: The experience of the context of a decision impacts the experience of the consequence of the decision.  Specifically, if you are stressed while making a selection, that stress remains after the selection is complete and you are moving on.  Consequently, you will be less happy with the results, and less likely to put yourself in a situation where you must make similar decisions.

Successful continuous bloggers, then, are those who do not spend hours agonizing over word selection and searching for the perfect phrase, because the people who do so are dissatisfied with the results---especially in the absence of external validation that would increase the return on their investment---and consequently their postings fall off and the blog is abandoned.

ah, snow....

We got about five inches of snow last night here, and I had to do shopping today or I'd be serving frozen waffles to my parents for Christmas dinner.  Store parking lots on Christmas Eve with snow.  Yuck.

In fact, it was pretty benign.  I had the foresight to get a Subaru Outback when selecting my car here: all wheel drive, eight inch clearance.  A little slippery, but no problems getting out and about, even in the side streets which St. Paul, in its infinite wisdom, decided didn't need to be plowed.  (They have belatedly declared a snow emergency now, which appears to mean that they're going to sit on their collective behinds until 9pm tonight, at which point they'll start plowing the five inches that accumulated yesterday, plus the 2-4 inches coming today and the 5-9 inches tonight.  Just across Hamline in Falcon Heights, all the streets including the side ones were plowed sometime before 8:30a this morning.)

The parking lot at the co-op, and in fact all the other stores, was well plowed and barely a third full.  I95 a little slow, but not congested.  University Avenue a total sloppy mess (St. Paul, again; Minneapolis plowed their stretch), but very few vehicles daring it.  The curb in front of Penzey's on Grand (St. Paul: wait for it...) actually had a cleared spot with room for two small cars---and a Jeep Cherokee Limited slapped in the middle of it.  But the Subaru easily drove over and out of the pile of snow left in the remaining spot.

By about 1030a, I was wrapping things up, and everybody else seemed to be getting to the point where panic had set in and they just had to venture out to buy that last wind-up parrot for Cousin Joe's rug-rats even if it meant trying to navigate their Ford Festivas through the drifts.

I love my car.  And...

Go SPUGs!

On the limits of the right to opinion

On a recent trip, I stopped at a news kiosk prior to boarding the plane and got a copy of the 24 November Wall Street Journal.  This was really so I could get change for the taxi at my destination, but I also tend to like the articles.

Apparently, though, I don't care for the editorials.  This was the issue that claimed to "reveal an effort to hide the truth about climate science".  The short of it is excerpts from email archives of certain scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, which include statements about researchers' efforts to block release of data under FOIA-type requests.  Since I happen to believe in the theory of anthropogenic climate change, and the editorial clearly shows the WSJ's position that global warming is bunkum, this rubbed me the wrong way.

I'm not going to support any attempt to hide raw research data.  But I do sympathize with the frustrations of somebody who is asked to release it to people whose qualifications to judge it are dubious and who will inaccurately present a selected view of it in a popular forum in such a way that sound conclusions are made to appear ludicrous or unsupported.  Ad hominem attacks and nay-saying is easy; science, properly done, is harder.

One of the fundamental problems I have with the whole global warming controversy is the number of people who make unqualified assertions based on applying their own common sense to issues that are, in fact, far more complex than they have taken the time to understand.  Take as an example (paraphrased, see original):

The claim that melting icebergs raise sea level is garbage.  My icewater doesn't overflow the glass when the ice melts.  Water expands as it freezes, and the amount of water displaced by an iceberg is equal to its weight.  So if the iceberg melts, the water level won't change at all.

On the surface, a compelling argument.  It appeals to common daily experience, so everybody feels they can judge its validity.  It references Archimedian principles of displacement, so has the air of authority.  When I read it, I thought "good point".  Unfortunately, with a little more research the argument is both specious and invalid.

It's invalid because it considers only the primary effect.  True: If an iceberg melts, the water it returns will not result in an increase in water volume.  However, if the iceberg melts, it presumably has done so because the temperature of the water has increased.  And thermal expansion means that the volume of the water will increase as well.  Sea rise.

It's specious because, regardless of whether the cited claim was represented properly (I didn't read the original paper to find out), the real argument is not that melting icebergs will raise sea levels, but that melting continental ice sheets will.  It's all that water currently above ground in Antarctica and Greenland that will provide us with beachfront property in Arizona if the temperature rises too much.

And that's a trivial example.  Get into three dimensional fluid dynamics simulations, advanced statistics, and chronological reconstruction from chemical analysis of ice cores and I'm not even going to try to make the effort that would be required to qualify me to judge detailed arguments made from first principles.

What I can, will, and have done, though, is read about those papers, and form my opinion based on the most compelling and best referenced analysis.  My belief in "global warming" is founded from reading pieces of the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  Not editorials in a national fish-wrap.  Not testimony from people of dubious qualification before politically-charged House or Senate panels.  Not blogs.  The Summary for Policy Makers and pieces of the summaries of two of the three working groups.

For due diligence, I tracked down the best rebuttal I could find of AR4, and read that.   Where AR4 presented positive arguments and falsifiable theories, the ISPM nit-picked.  Where AR4 listed hundreds of active researchers in climate science, ISPM had less than a dozen.  It just wasn't compelling.

So: Everybody has a right to their own opinion?  No.  You may have a right to an informed opinion.  Even then, there may be limits on that right depending on the depth of your information and the impact of your opinion, but that's a subject for another essay.

I believe that human activity has caused environmental changes that, if unchecked, will have significant negative impacts.  Some parts of the world may not be affected as much as others.  External events may ameliorate the effects in the short or even long term.  But on the whole, if things go as it appears they will, it's going to be our grandchildren who will have to pay for our self-imposed ignorance.

My opinion.  If somebody actually reads this thing and has further information I should consider, I'll take a look.  But it better have more behind it than anything I've seen so far.

frist!

Samuel Pepys I'm not, but something must be done to inaugerate this thing. So, I offer a simple dessert: about a quarter cup of frozen wild blueberries, allowed to thaw in a small bowl; pour in maple yogurt to taste; sprinkle with candied ginger. Very nice.