Kids are random

We're born with a number of false cognitive intuitions that we shed later in life. Young children (especially those before the age of six) tend to make bizarre cognitive errors in controlled experiments, errors which older children will have learned to avoid. For example, young children tend to believe that pouring liquid from one container to another can change its volume: experiments were done in which kids were presented with a choice of one glass of orange juice out of two, which contained the same amount of juice, but of which one glass was taller than the other, and they almost invariably chose the taller one. What's more, when experimenters showed kids that the volume of liquid in both glasses was the same by pouring juice back and forth from one glass to the other, most kids remained unconvinced and still believed the taller glass had more juice in it.

But there's one specific area that I know of in which kids start off right but then, at about age five, acquire a new intuition, one that is wrong. This area is "mimicking randomness." Adults are notoriously bad at it. For example, when a group of adults is asked to write down a sequence that they think could be a likely result of tossing a fair coin 20 times in a row, they give answers quite different from sequences that are generated by actually tossing a fair coin 20 times in a row. Those differences are systematic, and three of them are repeated by almost everyone: 1) sequences given by participants are much more likely to contain 10 tails than actual random sequences, and much less likely to contain more than 12 or less than 8 tails; 2) they contain much less instances of two or more identical outcomes in a row than true random sequences and 3) the series of same outcomes are noticeably shorter than in actual random sequences; for example, the participants almost never write down sequences containing more than four heads in a row, whereas in true random sequences series of five or even six heads in a row are quite common. In other words, sequences provided by participants resemble the underlying stochastic process much more than sequences that were actually generated by that process. Or, in yet other words, people tend to believe in "the law of small numbers:" that small samples have the same properties as large samples. But what's interesting is that, apparently, people do not start believing in that law until they are older than about five. Most four year olds give sequences which do not exhibit those three systematic mistakes. It's a case of cognitive bias that is learned.

Imma strategize!

If you follow political news in Poland, you'll hear the phrase "The problem of Poland's government has always been a lack of long-term, strategic thinking" about four times a week. The truth is exactly the other way around: there's been way too much strategic thinking going on. According to a report written by deputy minister Jerzy Kwiecinski in 2007, between 1989 and 2006 the Polish government has officially launched a total of 406 strategies, of which 250 were still in effect at the time of his writing.

Because it's beautiful

This post is a propos absolutely nothing. It is about the artistry of the first touch in soccer. Below is a video with a compilation devoted to a very specific element of soccer technique: the "touch-fake," where a player receiving a pass uses just one touch to bring the ball under control and wrong-foot the player who marks him at the same time. Watch and admire. Note especially the very first goal, which I think is one of the most amazing ever scored.

Look, your evidence is rather biased

OK, so this post will not be very productive. I'm just venting. I am so tired of people who try to convince everyone that the world is beautiful and good because look, it's got rainbows and sunsets in the mountains and love and music and Christmas dinners. Have you ever heard of confirmation bias? Why don't you look at pancreatic cancer, a tapeworm, a botfly, mass starvation, the Wola massacre, or Robert Mugabe, and put this stupid argument to bed for once?

Some forecasting

Poland's public debt is on its way to become a problem. The debt-to-GDP ratio is now at about 50%, is rising quickly, and many economists worry that it will soon exceed a threshold of 55%, at which the government and parliament are required by law to enact a budget that would lower this ratio (which, in practice, would mean very large tax hikes and/or spending cuts). Fortunately, according to a forecast recently published by the government, by 2012 the debt-to-GDP ratio will cease rising and stabilize at 54.99%.

Why you can't make a passenger plane out of a bomber

Here's an example of how thinking about economics can be helpful in evaluating claims that, at first sight, don't have much to do with economics. Do you remember the Polish presidential aircraft crash of April 10, 2010? If not, here's what happened. On April 10, 2010, the Polish presidential aircraft, a highly customized version of Tu-154 (a Russian-made commercial airliner that began service in 1972) crashed on approach near a small military airport in Smolensk, Russia, killing all 96 people on board. Among the victims were the President of Poland Lech Kaczynski, his wife, the military joint chiefs of staff, the director of Polish central bank, and many other VIPs.

Recently, the late President's brother and leader of Poland's largest opposition party Jaroslaw Kaczynski, gave an interview in which he talked about the crash and the ongoing investigation thereof. One of the things that Kaczynski is wondering aloud about is the extent of damage suffered by the aircraft's fuselage. The plane did not lose lift until it was 20 meters (about 66 feet) above ground, and yet it completely shattered on impact. Kaczynski suggests that this should not have happened because the design of Tu-154 is based on a Soviet bomber and its fuselage is therefore much stronger than that of a typical airliner.

Now it's certainly true that the presidential Tu-154 was in fact structurally stronger than your average commercial aircraft. VIP planes are highly customized with safety in mind. Air Force One is technically a Boeing 747-200, but it's really modified beyond all recognition. So I am not going to talk about that particular Tu-154; instead, I want to criticize the claim that the structural fuselage strength features of a regular, mass produced Tu-154 are adapted from a bomber. You don't need to know much about aircraft engineering to realize that it's unlikely to be true. All you need to know is that commercial airlines have to be profitable while the air force does not.

Passenger aircraft are designed to be sold to commercial airlines. The airlines have to make a profit operating them. That means the aircraft they use have to be fuel-efficient. An aircraft design that puts too much weight on fuselage strength is likely to make the aircraft too heavy. Too heavy means it's using too much fuel to pay for itself. Bombers, on the other hand, don't have to pay for themselves. Designers of bombers can afford to make them able to withstand high-energy impact. Designers of commercial jets cannot.

The meaning of life

In an interview for the New York Times, Deepak Chopra says:

I was trained as a medical doctor. I went to medical school because I wanted to ask the big questions. Do we have a soul? Does God exist? What happens after death?

Perhaps he should have talked to an academic advisor before applying.

(HT: Kids Prefer Cheese.)

Headbutting in soccer

Remember Zinedine Zidane headbutting Marco Materazzi in the 2006 FIFA World Cup final? Of course you do. Headbutting is actually quite widespread in the game (for anecdotal evidence, see here, here and here). I have trouble understanding why that is though. Why don't they punch instead? The penalty for headbutting someone is the same as for punching them: immediate expulsion from the game. If someone made you mad enough to headbutt them, they probably made you mad enough to punch them, and if you find yourself in a fight, your first instinct is to punch not headbutt anyway.

Corporate-speak: what's it good for?

A Marginal Revolution reader writes them with a great question:

Why does the corporate world use language so inefficiently? Why turn a simple thing like "talking to a client about their needs" into a five-step process (distinguished, no doubt, by an acronym)? Do companies think that they create net value when they brand a common thing like human conversation as a one-of-a-kind, complex process – even after the costs of being opaque, jargonistic, and long-winded are taken into account?

To which Tyler Cowen replies:

People disagree in corporations, often virulently, or they would disagree if enough real debates were allowed to reach the surface. The use of broad generalities, in rhetoric, masks such potential disagreements and helps maintain corporate order and authority. Since it is hard to oppose fluffy generalities in any very specific way, a common strategy is to stack everyone's opinion or points into an incoherent whole. Disagreement is then less likely to become a focal point within the corporation and warring coalitions are less likely to form.

This answer seems unsatisfying to me, mainly because I don't think this use of corporate-speak would justify its costs. Because of its transparent stupidity, corporate-speak is highly demoralizing; your employees aren't going to be very happy if you ask them to show up to work wearing clown suits. In addition to this, corporate-speak is used not only for assertions, but for instructions as well; why would you instruct your employees in such incoherent and inefficient ways?

For more possible answers, see the MR comments. My own hypothesis is that I have no idea.

Department of WTF!?

There have recently been severe storms and occasional flash floods in Poland, which scared the life out of the inhabitants of affected towns, because the terrible flood wave that swept through the country back in May this year is fresh in everyone's memory. People are especially scared that the levees will start overflowing again, just like they did four months ago.

Fear no more though; the probability of that happening again is very low. How low? Well, the director of a nationwide natural disaster warning agency held a press conference about the state of the levees in one of the flooded towns and said that "The probability that they will overflow is nearly zero, meaning it's less than thirty percent."

I'm not making this up. I rewound three times to make sure I've heard it correctly.