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Useless Optimization

2016-07-27T07:00:00Z

One of my favourite hobbies is optimizing the minuscule, insignificant parts of my life.

For example, this could be done by reading through all the labels on all the brands/flavours of ice cream at the grocery store, and deciding which one has the best value for my dollar. But another more interesting example is that I recently found myself doing this with credit card rewards. I have a Chase Freedom card which gives me 5% in selected categories, but only 1% on everything else. One of these 5% categories is wholesale clubs (e.g. Costco), but the gas you buy at Costco doesn’t count for the 5% (so it would only give me 1% back on gas). I found a loophole however: I could buy Costco gift cards, which would count for the 5%, and then I could use those to buy gas and get the full 5%. Problem solved (though you end up having to prepay for the gas).

Does this micro-optimization make sense from a rational point of view? Not at all. I don’t drive that much, so a generous estimate is that I spend maybe $500 on gas a year. So with all the effort of buying/safeguarding gift cards, I earned a measly $16. Given that doing this process takes quite a bit of time, I might not even earn minimum wage by jumping through all these hoops. If I were truly trying to optimize my finances, I could instead try to negotiate a lower price on the car/house I buy (doesn’t seem like it’d be hard to knock off an extra $20 on the price of those), or do my own taxes, and save quite a bit more money. It would be much more efficient to focus on the larger things in my life, and optimize even tiny percentages of those. But we humans have a focus on relative percentages, so it seems like saving 5% on $100 is better than 1% on $1000. So clearly what I do would make no sense to a emotionless, logical being.

But maybe there’s a good reason emotionally to optimize the smaller parts of our lives. If we could end up happier, who cares if we’re only up $16; you can’t put a price on happiness. Psychologists call people who optimize for the best decision “maximizers”, and those who take a strategy of searching for an option that’s “good enough” to be “satisficers”. When the decision making space is large (i.e. there’s a lot of choices), it turns out that maximizers tend to be less satisfied with their decisions and tend to experience more regret. An intuitive explanation of this result is that it’s unlikely you’ll pick the absolute best option amongst many, and you’ll keep wondering if you picked the right option (you probably didn’t). Thus you’re less happy. But this is all under the premise that you don’t enjoy the act of optimizing itself. It could be possible that if you enjoy trying to make these difficult decisions, your overall happiness would be higher even if you mess up and pick the wrong choice. But this thought might just be me trying to rationalize my irrational behaviour. The truly optimal way to optimize your happiness seems to be to not optimize the decisions that lead to your happiness - quite a paradoxical result.

Korean Risotto

2016-06-26T07:00:00Z

I have recently been learning how to cook Korean food. It’s quite tasty and many of the most famous dishes aren’t too difficult to make. While I do enjoy eating Korean food, cheese is the backbone of my eating career. So imagine how excited I was when I learned about Korean Rice and Cheese. I didn’t have all the ingredients on hand for that particular version (nor am I a fan of SPAM), and I knew I easily could adjust it to my own tastes. The result is something bearing quite a resemblance to risotto, but with a decidedly Korean flavour (and a euphoric amount of cheese).

One difficulty with this recipe is that most of the key ingredients (i.e. the kimchi, the gochujang, and the cheese) can drastically differ in flavour depending on the brand and likely the particular batch. This makes specifying the amount of each quite difficult, and makes it extremely important to constantly taste and adjust the amounts to your own liking.

Note: The picture has melted cheddar on top, but I later changed it to mozzarella to tone down the overpowering flavour of such concentrated cheese. Your eyes are not deceiving you.

Ingredients

3 cups white rice, cooked, dry
1 cup kimchi, chopped into bite-sized pieces
3 tablespoons gochujang
5 large shiitake mushrooms, sliced
1/2 cup milk
1/4 cup parmesan cheese, grated
1/4 cup medium cheddar cheese, grated
1/4 cup mozzarella cheese, grated
1 1/2 tbsp sesame oil
1 sheet nori (seaweed)
toasted sesame seeds

Directions

Coat a large wok (or pan) with oil and heat over medium heat. Add the kimchi and let it soften for a minute. Add the rice and gochujang and mix well. (At this point, you basically have kimchi fried rice.) Add the mushrooms and cook for another minute.
Add the milk, parmesan, cheddar and half of the mozzarella cheese. Stir periodically until the cheese has melted. Mix in the sesame oil. (At this point, this dish is done, and the remainder is optional garnish.) It is important to taste the dish now and add more gochujang, cheese, or salt as you see fit.
For each serving, transfer to a plate, sprinkle some of the remaining mozzarella cheese. Using either a broiler or a microwave, melt the cheese. Sprinkle some crushed nori and some sesame seeds for garnish.

Memoryless Memoirs

2016-06-13T07:00:00Z

I recently finished the book In Order to Live, which is a fantastic, engaging memoir from a North Korean refugee Yeonmi Park. A common criticism of the book is that the story she tells isn’t entirely consistent with what she has presented in interviews and other public presentations. Moreover, some say that since she was just a child/teenager, she wasn’t capable of remembering what happened to her.

It’s quite likely she doesn’t accurately remember every little detail of her harrowing journey. It’s actually quite likely she has some pretty big details wrong. Memory is inherently a reconstructive process; whenever we try to remember something we don’t simply produce some pristine copy from our minds, but rather we rebuild the memory using both cues from our brain but also external influences. For example, one psychological study, conducted by Loftus and Palmer, showed that being asked a leading question could change how you recall things. They showed participants videos of a car accident. They proceeded to ask “How fast were the cars going when they (smashed/bumped/contacted) each other?”. Depending on the word they used to describe the accident, participants would rate the speed of the cars quite differently even though they watched the same video. So it’s quite likely that in being interviewed about her experiences, Yeonmi’s memory of details would have altered.

But you might say: “These were horrific life-changing experiences she had to endure. I remember exactly what I was doing when 9/11 happened. So she should remember clearly too!” The truth is that you likely don’t remember what you were doing clearly. Memories that occur in such situations are called flashbulb memories, which feel extremely vivid and thus you think are extremely accurate representations. However, the psychologists Talarico and Rubin surveyed people immediately after 9/11 happened, and periodically after the initial survey. They found that people weren’t able to accurately recall what happened any more than a normal memory. Not only did their memories of 9/11 deteriorate at the same rate as any other memory, errors made in the recollection of their experience persisted the next time they were asked about it. This is another example of reconstructive memory leading us astray.

So where does that leave us? The absolute largest details in any memoir are likely to be correct, but it’s quite likely the details aren’t quite up to snuff. But knowing this, you can read autobiographies and memoirs with a healthy sense of skepticism and try to piece together the truth yourself.

Poker Life Lessons: Getting Your Money in Good

2015-04-19T07:00:00Z

One of the most important life lessons that you can learn from poker is how to measure success. One completely theoretical way to determine the quality of a player would be to hand them a truckload of money and see how well they do after an infinite number of hands (or tournaments). Unfortunately, this isn’t possible (if it is, let me know and I’ll gladly be your guinea pig), so we can simply take another approach - ignoring their results and looking at how they play.

In the game of Texas Hold’em Poker, even if you have the best starting hand (two aces), and you’re up against the worst possible hand (7-2 of different suits), you’re only a 89% favorite to win when all the cards on the board have been dealt. This means that even you are a fantastic poker player who can induce someone to make the worst possible decision and risk all their money in this most unfavorable situation, you’ll still lose about 11% of the time. But this of course does not make it a bad play if you can somehow accomplish this, even if you do lose a small amount of the time. Poker players will sometimes refer to this situation as “getting your money in good”, that is, putting your money in when it is a mathematically favorable situation for you. This is what you should strive for, in both poker and life - to make the best possible play at any given point. Even if you fail, it doesn’t mean you necessarily made the wrong move (though that is certainly a possibility to keep in mind). In the long run, your results will converge to the expected probability of success.

One caveat to adopting this mindset is that you may start blaming all your failures on bad luck or you may attribute all your successes to your own ability (i.e. you think that you got your money in good but you really didn’t). This is referred to by psychologists as the self-serving bias. Unlike in poker, it’s not possible to mathematically calculate your probability of success, so it’s quite an easy rationalization to arrive at. However, this clearly would prevent you from improving your ability at playing the game of life. One should be mindful and carefully analyze how well you “played”.

Because I Have to Make Copies

2015-01-02T08:00:00Z

How often do you think through your actions? If somebody were to ask you for a favour, what goes through your head when you decide whether or not to comply? It turns out that sometimes, it takes very little to persuade you to do something.

In 1978, the psychologists Ellen Langer, Arthur Blank, and Benzion Chanowitz conducted an experiment. In particular, they chose to experiment on people who happened to be using a photocopier at a library. When a subject used the photocopier, they approached the subject and asked them whether they could skip ahead of the subject and use the copier before them. They varied the question in two ways: the number of sheets that they needed to copy and what reason they gave. They either asked to photocopy 5 or 20 sheets. The reason they gave varied; they either gave no reason, a real reason (e.g. “I need to make the copies because I’m in a rush”), or a fake reason (e.g. “because I have to make copies”).

When the favour they asked was small (i.e. when they needed to photocopy fewer sheets than the subject), people complied to the request about 90% of the time as long as any reason was provided at all! (Comparatively, only 60% agreed when no reason was provided.) But when the favour was a larger one, the fake reason had no effect compared to providing a real reason.

So what does this mean for you? If you need to ask for a small favour, make sure you offer a reason for your request (no matter how trivial). As human beings, we tend to act somewhat mindlessly if the stakes are low. We assume that if you’re providing a reason, that it’s probably a good one; we don’t think to assess the validity of the reason until the stakes become a bit higher. And next time somebody asks you for a small favour, it might not hurt to give it a second thought before saying yes (or no).