Filed under: miscellaneous | Tags: advertising, edward bernays, Freud, manipulation, propaganda, psychology
I am currently into psychology and I have read books on how techniques that take advantage of inherent human psychology can and are employed for personal gain and corporate profits. These include books on body language (Barbara and Allan Pease), reading people (David Liebermann is a good choice for Machiavellian techniques) and advertising (Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is a must-read classic).
Recently I stumbled upon an interesting documentary by Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self on (where else?) Youtube. The documentary traces the development of the use of academic psychology (specifically Freud’s studies) in the world of consumerism and political persuasion. It puts what I have learned from my reading in a historical context.
The central figure in this documentary is Edward Bernays, who is often seen as the father of public relations. He applied Freud’s theory of the ego, super-ego and id to his various propaganda and advertising jobs to great success. I must admit that prior to watching this documentary I had no idea who was Edward Bernays. He played a crucial role in transforming what used to be a economy of need to a economy of desire, in which corporations manipulate and capitalise on the inherent psychological desires of humans for their own profit. Consumers now buy on the basis of desire instead of needs, and this trend seem to be a permanent feature of our consumer landscape.
Filed under: miscellaneous
At a class gathering last week one of my JC friends told me casually that the ratio of females to males for my batch of university students entering university this year is a whooping 7:3. That comment got me standing at attention (metaphorically) since it means that the girls outnumber the guys by 133.33%, which is absolutely fantastic from a guy’s (ok, to be more specific, bachelor’s) point of view. The economic laws of scarcity is working in our favour, 21-year-old manfolk of S’pore.
Fortunately MOE has this thing called the Education Statistic Digest, which I chanced upon after clicking around the Singstat website, which was my first destination when I wanted to find statistics. Here’s the link: http://www.moe.gov.sg/esd/ESD2006.pdf
There is this part which lists pre-university enrolment by level. The dragon babies are born in the year 1988, and hence they should be in JC1 in the year 2005. Hence the number of female students enrolled in JC1 should be able to give us an approximation of the number of students that will be enrolling in university in 2007.
Let’s define a few variables first:
Let S be the number of female students in JC1 in 2005
Let E be the real number of female students entering university in 2007
Let X be the approximated number of female students entering university in 2007, using our standards of extrapolation and inferencing from previous data as will be shown later.
Let Y be the estimated number of female JC2 students in 2006.
The main problem is that E < S but there is no data source for E. Hence we are finding a approximate of E, which we label conveniently and provocatively as X.
Here’s a step by step methodology to find X from S.
- Find S from the data source
- Find the average percentage change in the number of female JC1 and JC2 students from year to year for 9 years (the data stops at 1996). Hence we will average the percentage change in number of female students from JC1 in 1996 to number of female students in JC2 in 1997, 1997 to 1998, 1998 to 1999 and so on. This will reveal a rough way of estimating the number of female JC2 students in 2006 by using the average percentage change to discount S. I will name this discount rate the Dropout Rate.
- Find the average percentage of students who are in JC2 out of the number of university intake for the next year, from 2000 to 2005 (the inclusion of SMU intake in 2000 reduces the amount of accurate data we can use). Let’s call it the Intake Rate.
- Apply the average percentage in step 3 to Y to obtain X.
I can’t find data of the number of dragon females (sounds weird) who are in JC2 in 2006, which would have made a better approximate of E since there will be JC1 students who drop out of JC or are not allowed to progress on to JC2.
From data,
S = 8350
This is going to get real messy.
Dropout Rate = (1/9) x ( (100-(5269/5456)(100)) + (100-(5813/6064)(100)) + … )
= (1/9) x (3.427419355 + 4.139182058 + 4.251674194 + 3.607332939 + 4.34298441 + 5.781946794 + 6.38206739 + 7.319065512 + 6.658929349)
= (1/9)(45.910602)
= 5.101178%
Y = 8350 x ( 100 – 5.101178)(1/100) = 7924.051637
Intake Rate = (1/6) [ (5762/6148)(100) + (5854/6520)(100) + ... ]
= (1/6)( 93.7215354 + 89.785276 + 95.2270081 + 94.32022197 + 94.8909562 + 89.0441061 )
= (1/6) (556.9891038)
= 92.8315173%
Hence
X = (Intake Rate)(Y)
= 7356.017366
I am currently only half way (Chapter 9) through Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s latest book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, which is the sequel to the fantabulous Fooled By Randomness and I am actually bothering to write a post to gush about just how great I think the book is.
Once again Taleb manages to open my eyes to the very human inability to grasp probabilities and the various mental quirks we have that reduces our ability to grasp the role of chance and randomness in our lives. The book confirms some ideas I already had regarding the role of randomness in our lives and for most of the time gives many perspectives on the same subject.
Taleb’s book is based on two pillars of thought that reinforces each other: the problem of induction and the human inability to view empirical reality without biases.
The problem of induction has plagued philosophy and scientific thought ever since David Hume first used his example of the black swan in his writing. The simple explanation goes like this. Everyday, you might observe white swans in the lake outside your house in Europe. This might lead you to the conclusion that all swans are white. Then one day, you just happen to move to Australia, and when you look out the window of your house, you see a bunch of black swans. Which refutes the knowledge that you have arrived at through inductive methods. The problem with induction is that one can never ever be totally sure of the absolute truth and reliability of the conclusions derived through observations and inductive reasoning.
The problem of induction is related to our inherent biases when it comes to judging the impact of probability in our lives when it is combined with the flaws of the human (and very primitive) mind that has not evolved too much. Take the example of the fallacy of “beginners’ luck” in gambling, as cited in the book. Beginners’ luck do not exist because of the survivorship bias. If a new guy play one game and wins, he is said to be “lucky” or to have “skill”, but one cannot make any conclusions because of this single observation. And if the guy loses at the next round, he will probably quit. Those who keep winning will stay, and they are the ones who are most visible to most gamblers. This lead them to the flawed conclusion that beginners have all the luck, since they do not take into account the beginners who lose at their first games and subsequently leave the casino.
Of course, Taleb cites many flaws in human judgement of probabilistic outcomes. I am recording some here as a means of quick reference:
- Silent evidence: the selecting only positive outcomes and ignoring “failures” and negative outcomes. e.g. Assuming that to be a millionaire and successful entrepeuner one must possess certain qualities like preseverance and drive when those who fail to become successful have these qualities too. Basically ignoring evidence that states otherwise, hencing leading to false conclusions because positive evidence stands out much more than “non-evidence”.
- Confirmation bias: looking for evidence that supports a hypothesis, hence leading us to ignore evidence suggests the contrary.
- Treating absence of evidence as evidence of absence: Not having evidence that something is there doesn’t mean it is not there at all.
- The narrative fallacy: The human tendency to simplify reality and impute set chains of causation to make random event seem less random through the concoction of narratives. e.g. Historians.
There are more points but these are the main ones.
Humans like the tangible, the observable, the positive. Hence we tend to ignore the intangible, the unobserved, the non-event. Hence negative empiricism is a good way to compensate for biases by telling us that what is not true. Observing that green pens exist leads one to the conclusion that it’s wrong to believe that all pens are non-green. We almost always know what is wrong more confidently than what is right.
One of the paragraphs that touches me most is the one at the end of Chapter 8, in which Taleb wrote about the main problem about the present education system in most countries. Students are made too often to impute causations in events that they study, to simplify complex events by framing them awkwardly to fixed chains of causation.
This is one serious problem that has been plaguing the Singaporean education system. For example in History, students are made to write about the most important factor that led to say, the outbreak of World War II. Or the main reasons why Hitler was about to rise to power in Germany. Or how one event/factor/person caused the rise/fall/destruction/outbreak of X event. It is really a load of bull because firstly students are made to over-simplify reality, and secondly they are trained to give untruthful and unrigorous opinions and reasons without much thinking and research.
Which leads me to think about just how predictable world events and history is in general. Things always somehow seem to make sense when looked at backwards. Hindsight bias is everywhere in the study of history; historians magically fit seemingly-sound explanations for every historical event without ever pondering the non-linearity of the events. Think about it: if the world is really as predictable as it is shown to be in textbooks, why can’t historians predict historical events before it happens?
As I write this post, I flipped the papers and realised the recent tragedy of two of our national servicemen losing their lives in an accident in a training base in Taiwan. Months before, an old man died of infection by flesh-eating bacteria after being pricked by a crab. I can’t help but think that the world is truely a random place.
Even my own existence is a product of chance. For Earth to exist and the proper ecological conditions to exist for life to prosper, the Earth must be at precise distance from the Sun. For me to exist, the correct sperm must meet the correct egg. For the sperm and egg to meet, my parents must marry. For them to marry, they must somehow meet each other first. Of course, I am simplifying the chains of causation through my narrative here. For that I must apologise because it greatly understates the role of chance. But language and narration seems hard-wired in us and it seems to be the only way we can articulate and described an otherwise fluid and infintely complex reality, isn’t it?
Filed under: miscellaneous
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www.mozilla.com/thunderbird
Filed under: miscellaneous
Several significant moments occurred over the last few months that prompted the creation of this blog: my release from a year and ten months of compulsory military service for my nation, my twenty-first birthday, my decision of university course and my purchase of my first stocks.
All these events gave me a heightened sense of my entry into adulthood, a life of responsibility and unfolding possibilities. I feel a strong need to document my thoughts and actions as a means to grow and understand myself. As George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
This is exactly what this blog is for: a means to deposit my thoughts about a range of subjects I am interested in, a journal of my trading and investment exploits and a database for my education in finance and economics. The human memory is fallible and selective, mine notwithstanding, and this blog will serve as a repository of my thinking, actions and mistakes and an avenue for me to reflect on the past and my thinking and formulate new thoughts and ideas.
Writing and maintaining a blog is like talking into a hole in a wall, a soliloquy between an individual and the digital wilderness. You never know who might be on the other side of the wall listening, but it doesn’t bother me if anyone chances upon this blog and reads the entries; the blog is largely for private consumption with no compelling need for an iota of publicity.
