Americans, adjust your reality

A particle physics textbook I once enjoyed reading (And just for the fun of it — I found it in the public library in Gambia during Peace Corps!) once explained reality as this:

Reality is that which all of us share in common.

Well, nearly all of us. The following infographics present a jarring discontinuity between how many Americans see their own country and how the rest of the world sees America.

Side note: I just had a de ja vu. I saw myself posting this blog in dream about three weeks ago. Suck on that, science! I am a scientist that regularly has de ja vus. I don’t deny them just because I don’t understand them. To observe is scientific; to reject facts because they are messy is fanaticism. Science is not yet all-knowing, and America is not factually the greatest nation on Earth. Here’s why…

Maternity Leave

American law guarantees ZERO weeks of maternity leave to women. 

No, these 15 countries are not an anomaly. In fact, every country on Earth but 5 require some maternity leave. (Source: wikipedia)

And most importantly to my thesis in this post, the perception of American men is that there is no problem…

USA Healthcare

USA Healthcare is the most inefficient system in the industrialized world. We spend more and get less. And if you’re under 50, it is even worse. Source: Profit Is A Barrier: US Comes Last In Healthcare

Last in obesity, nearly last in costs, last in teen births, but almost #1 in time spent talking to doctors.

And for the kicker,  most Americans love our last-place system even more than other people love their better-performing healthcare systems. Reality has become detached from fact:

It all depends on which narrow “frustration” questions you ask, and believe me, there are plenty of people paid to distort our reality…. (remember we spend more time seeing doctors than people around the world but end up remaining sicker. Canada wins on “respect” and “affordability” and actual health outcomes. Perhaps 50 weeks of paid maternity leave helps too.)

And while we don’t trust our legislators to improve our failed system, nobody else does either. Somehow, all these other countries still manage to deliver better health outcomes.

And compared with the level of government distrust elsewhere, Democrats are actually more supportive of government-mandated health reform than are people anywhere else. Did you know that? Or was your reality distorted by the absence of facts?

STEM

(That’s science, technology, engineering, and math – you know, the stuff that makes your life comfortable though you seem to have forgotten that it takes intellectual discipline to sustain a life filled with such comforts.)

This infographic points out the amazing opportunity that government STEM investments will yield in coming decades. And clearly, America has been doing better in STEM than in healthcare or maternity leave, but we still rank 18th, not #1.

We used to be #1, right?

[No image available]

I looked for half an hour for an infographic here, and couldn’t find one. It seems that we’ve been lied to about this. We were always an average country in math and science, according to Mother Jones:

Those negative numbers circled in red are how many standard deviations below the mean most Americans performed. We’re better than in 1964, but still below average.

The myth that we’re #1 in STEM is partly based on USA spending more on our education than anyone else. We have always invested more of our GDP into science research than any other country. Some of this research is bleed-over from our military industrial complex. We do, however, lead the world in educating foreigners. Many of these people return home and spread America’s ideals and philosophy about investing in the future through education:

And like maternity leave and healthcare, Americans are satisfied with the quality of our science education, despite actually being average.  In a 2006 survey only 48% of parents were NOT satisfied with their kids’ science education, compared to 32% in 2005. Only 25% of students think lack of emphasis on science and math is a problem for their future.

Only a quarter of kids think we lag behind in science and math.

In similar polling, half of parents are satisfied with education, but notice that the only thing that moves parents’ opinions is debate about legislation (No Child Left Behind Debate in 2000). The actual changes to education in subsequent years left no mark on opinion polls, because parents are not making opinions based on performance:

Our perception of the future is much more positive than our actual performance. And though I too believe we’ll remain #1 in science output in the world, it has much more to do with being the easiest place to find science grant funding, and not because our students are the best prepared:

After all, when asked the same question about USA healthcare, we are just as positive about ourselves. We seem to think we’ll become or remain #1 at everything.

Funny how 47% of Americans believe we will always be #1. That number 47 keeps coming up.

Other issues

About half of those who benefit from all these social programs don’t believe they have ever been the beneficiary of any socialist government programs (and presumably oppose them):

• Pell grants, lifetime learning tax credit, G.I. Bill
• Home mortgage deduction
• Social security, medicare
• Head Start

Again,  a majority of Americans hold an opinion that is contradicted by the facts. Source: Social Reform Issues by Suzanne Mettler

Gun violence

You probably expected this. We have a lot of guns and a lot of gun deaths, but very low support for gun control.

Did I mention we have a LOT of guns in America?

And there never was an assault weapons ban in America in 1994. Hundreds of models were exempted and there was never a gun buy back program, such as was used in Libera and Sierra Leone to get guns off the streets (successfully). I believe all existing assault weapons were allowed to remain in circulation (but the folks at the criminaljusticedegreeschools.com advocacy group are checking this fact for me):

So any arguments for or against gun control that are based on the 1994 law are pretty useless. It is better to compare ourselves to the rest of the world, and to ourselves:

UPDATE:

After posting this blog an advocacy group emailed me and requested that I include their infographic about what kinds of guns are assault weapons, including the weapon used in Newton, CT in 2012. So here is their info: http://www.criminaljusticedegreeschools.com/assault-weapons-in-america/

If you were wondering why there is such strong resistance to gun control, it isn’t the 2nd ammendment. It is the people who profit from selling guns to the world: Our military industrial complex.

And more than 50% of Americans will continue to oppose gun control for the same reason they oppose health care reform, maternity leave, and harbor a delusions about how great our education system is performing: We need our reality to be adjusted by facts. Guns are not killing us, our inability to make decisions based on evidence is.

For too long we have let others shape our reality with their “facts”. Education has failed to train the citizenry in how to recognize when others are manipulating them. Distorted views start with people who profit by deceiving us.

We would be a better country if we provided universal healthcare, legal maternity leave, restricted guns, reinstated a mental health system that treats the ill with dignity, and rated our experiments in education against global standards, not local, state, or even national ones. We need to adjust our perception of reality itself. Healthcare is a failure. A non-profit effort to find health cures and provide loving “hearth care” to those in need would free up our economy to grow. That economy is also doomed so long as it depends on war, weapons, and the high cost of security.

Maternity leave, health care, gun violence, education, and our mental health system are all suffering from the same disease. It is a disease with a simple cure: Look outward, at the rest of the world and ask yourself if you are prepared to accept what you see as reality. 

Or you can go on believing in the perceived threats that we’ve been told to fear:

But if you do, this distorted perception will then shape your entire world view, eventually killing you as you stand guard against another terrorist attack, while heart disease and cancer take their toll:

Fighting global terrorism: Let Empathy replace Sympathy

While empathy has not overtaken sympathy yet in google search trends, empathy is on the rise. Apathy is holding steady – it doesn’t care about sympathy, though sympathy cares about empathy.

This RSAnimate video explains why more empathy will make the world a better place:

I’ve summarized the talk in screen shots:

Empathy is about creating the human bonds that make life worth living.

Empathy (replacing sympathy) brings about a revolution in human relationships.

Empathy is a mirroring of human emotions.

Or empathy is about stepping into someone else’s world.

Social policy change requires us not just to empathize with the “down and out” classes of society, but more importantly, to empathize with the rich and powerful who run the world. Only if we understand how they see the world, what their career aspirations and ambitions are, and how they rationalize leadership decisions against their internal value systems, can we affect them on a personal level. This mode of analysis is precisely how one could have predicted why Obama would not concede on the “preexisting condition” clause in Obama care. It also explains why he will support a Keynesian style multiplier-effect economic stimulus but not care so much about the rising disparity between rich and poor. Both decisions map to his own view of power and wealth in different ways. The “preexisting condition” affected his own Grandmother, but the rich-poor disparity is just a vague trend that individuals within the class (like himself) have managed to thwart through their own toil and hard work (which is Ben Franklin’s philosophy on how society prospers).

He proposes an empathy museum where you can borrow a person to talk with, or a sweat shop where you can work a day for $1.

And in fact the “hello peace” hotline in Irsael-Palestine has already connected a million strangers together to facilitate dialogue. This idea is a rich area for exploration.

History is the story of the rise and fall of empathy on a mass-population scale.

My insight: Thus, empathy intersects with complexity as it is emerges from the zeitgiest (ideas that groups of people absorb and share over a brief timeframe). This definition is computationally useful for calculating and visualizing empathy around particular causes through social media.

When we can calculate the empathy zeitgeist we will be able to track (quantitatively) the transition from this idea:

USA: We must fight global terrorism with machines, military, and physical defense barriers.

To this idea…

We must fight global terrorism by undermining the misinformed ideas and racist/sexist attitudes that form their foundation.

But we must also apply the empathy zeitgiest lens to ourselves.

Americans don’t work for economic justice around the world, and many USA corporations rely on the world’s poor for their profit margin. This is exploitation, plain and simple, and it plants the seeds that grow into terrorism generations later…

Evolution and Complexity demystified by goats

I was having tea with a professional goatherder the other day (who else would you expect to meet in Portland?) and I asked her,

“So tell me what you have learned from the goats?”

“Well,” she began, herding her thoughts together, “Whenever I want them to go to clear some part a field, I can’t make them do what I want. The goats will always cluster in some edge of the field near the fence and work their way across from left to right around the perimeter.”

(For context, Briana gets paid to set up a fence around some acres of land, bring in her herd of goats, and have them clear all the brush and weeds from it.)

My jaw dropped as she explained the pattern her goats naturally fall into for eating the field. The pattern turns out to be the same as what Melanie Mitchell’s genetic algorithm predicted as the best strategy for a very similar task.

(r)evolutionary programming

This approach to writing computer algorithms, which Melanie Mitchell calls ‘genetic algorithms’, copies evolution. Instead of programming the solution itself, it takes the problem and makes a game out of it. Games have a set of possible “moves” and a way to “score” the individual players. Some combinations of moves perform better than others. Winners are mushed together (AKA python-code-sex). A few (1%) are mutated, and these winning programs play the game again. The scores get better with successive generations, though they rarely get better in each generation. It might take 100 generations of no-improvement before the code has a breakthrough. Here is an example from Complexity: A guided tour by Melanie Mitchell:

So imagine that the room full of empty beer cans that Robby the robot needs to clean looks like this:

Some sets of moves do better than other, regardless of where in the room the trash is laying. The robot has five possible  moves, and a very limited set of information it can work with, fully summarized in this chart under the Actions:

So the “logic” that the robot can encode as a move depends on what is in the adjacent squares or whether there is a can in the current square. This is the situation that provides input and feedback. Note the robot has no memory of where it has been, only what is right next to it in the room.

The “individual” robot that plays the game of cleaning this room is nothing more than a series of 200 random moves. In the first generation all 200 moves are random, but in later generations these strings of moves will be some combination  drawn from previous robots that performed better than the rest of the pack (say, top 20%).

So the “346″ in the beginning of Individual #200  means “move up, move left, pick up can”, and so forth for the whole string. The overall design to any genetic algorithm (what I prefer to call evolutionary programming) is summarized here:

So how well did the best robot strategy do? Melanie first wrote one “smart program” do have something to compare the evolving programs against. It moves randomly (but not backtracking), picks up a can if it is present, then moves to an adjacent site if there is a can there, and picks that one up. Her “smart” program got a score of 346. Anything higher is a program that performed better than what a human can intelligently design.

So what was the most evolved robot doing to clean the room? Melanie writes:

[The best] Robby moves east until he either finds a can or reaches a wall. He then moves north, and continues to circle the edge of the grid in a counterclockwise direction until a can is encountered or sensed.

Second, Robby skips over cans in the middle of the room. Later, the can he didn’t pick up on the last move acts as a marker so Robby can “remember” that there are cans on the other side of it. He goes on to pick up all the remaining cans in the cluster when the perimeter has been circled.

Left: a highly evolved solution. Right: Melanie’s intelligently (human) designed solution

(In her explanation below, GA is the robot ‘genetic algorithm’ and M is the default human-designed strategy with a score of 346):

And remember Briana’s goats? The ones she used to try and direct to clean certain parts of the field before the parts near the fences she’d erected? Well they actually do the same thing as the robot! Herd them as she might, they look for a the fence and eat along the perimeter, then the middle!

Goats and robots aren’t “smart” in the sense that the herd doesn’t consciously discuss their plan for eating, but they still follow the optimum strategy because of evolution. What began as random movement became synchronized and directional because they ate more food faster and avoided getting eaten by predators (herding behavior). All it took was a million years of goats needing to eat more efficiently in order to survive.

This is what I am here in Portland to learn this month. Melanie Mitchell teaches here at Portland State University, and I needed to isolate myself to learn something radically new, like (r)evolutionary programming. Watch it work:

You can see that this programming example is also taught at Duke University. And yet, in my 20 years of schooling, including a PhD in Neuroscience and two bachelors of Chemistry & Biochemistry (minors in psychology and biology) I never encountered this idea of copying evolution to solve real world programs.

Evolving, not designing, social solutions and government policies

The beauty of evolution is that copying the EVOLUTION PROCESS frees you up from the burden of believing you need to know the answers. You must become an expert on designing systems that learn instead. It turns out what matters is skill in making a “game” out of real-world problems, classifying “moves”, and then figuring out what defines a “good score” or a “bad score” in that game.

Scientists call the gamification of social problems “modeling” but I prefer to think of it as a game. Modeling is for control freaks who want to define everything and assign the importance of variables in their model. Evolutionary programmers want to model the possible moves and guess at the best way to score results (align the scoring with the actual thing you desire to happen). Good moves with a bad scoring scheme results in models that produce undesirable outcomes when applied to the real world problem. For example, Economists are excellent at defining great models with terrible “scoring”, leading to the whole field to being called the “Dismal Science”.

I’m interested in taking this idea and using it with data and language, to “evolve” more optimal ways of classifying sets of texts into a hierarchy. Stay tuned.

Read a book!

What enables individually simple insects like ants to act with such precision and purpose as a group? How do trillions of neurons produce something as extraordinarily complex as consciousness? In this remarkably clear and companionable book, leading complex systems scientist Melanie Mitchell provides an intimate tour of the sciences of complexity, a broad set of efforts that seek to explain how large-scale complex, organized, and adaptive behavior can emerge from simple interactions among myriad individuals.

2012 in memes

Here is the year 2012 in images, mostly of memes across advertising, politics, and social media.

2012 advertising memes

Sexy Jedi bubblebath

Meaningful anecdotes

Billy O’Brien, New Penn State Football Coach

The NCAA severely punished PSU for covering up a decade-long sex abuse scandal by its assistance coach Jerry Sandusky. They revoked all its football scholarships and eliminated barriers to existing players transferring to other top schools. They even allowed other schools to come in, evaluate, and recruit players.

Enter new, first time coach O’Brien, who was filling the shoes of 50 year legend Joe Paterno. And amid this cloud of scandal, he managed to keep the keep together. They actually had a winning season in 2012, but more importantly, he let the kids on the team know is was okay to win. They were not responsible for the scandal nor the cloud; all they could do was be a shining role model to others.

The coach said he gets his resilience from watching his 11 year old son, Jack, who is fighting Lissencephaly and faces 10 seizures a day.

O’Brien was named coach of the year, not for what the team did on the field, but for what he did to remind us what teams and sport and games are all about – building character, surmounting adversity.

Newtown, CT gun massacre. This update is from my friend Kevin about his daughter Zoe. It was the most moving thing I read from that tragedy.

In my view, we could ban guns and we could improve mental health care in America, and both would help. But neither would eliminate these types of events. The root cause is the absence of what I’ve come to call “Hearth Care.” That is caring for others as a community, and treating everyone as a brother who is someone’s son or daughter and not some stranger.

We need to end health care and replace it with health cures and hearth care. Mental Health cannot be cared for by a  ’system’ but only by a community.

In January 2012 Heather and I announced that we’d split up. This note is how I introduced my explanation of the journey. It still applies today, and for the future.

Japan’s 2011 earthquake continues to attract attention through 2012. Above: Blog activity around my Japan earthquake posts. Below: The $8.9 million Japan Earthquake relief fund that continues to get donations every day, two years later. This did not happen for the Haiti earthquake nor any other natural disaster in the past decade.

Politics

John Stewart compares the GOP’s counter-proposal to going over the fiscal cliff to Stalin F&@king the bald eagle.

The end of the world

Seems to have been on peoples’ minds throughout the year.

Santa Claus

Meta

Or the zeitgeist.

MSNBC finally does something right, twice in one year!

Two famous rants sum up the 2012 political year.

Rachel Maddow: Election Night Summary: Republicans Got Shellacked!

Lawrence O’donnell reports on the very unsexy but very significant last minute work of Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell to keep the country running for another year, executed in the 11th hour, and IGNORED by the media.

Perceptions around posessions

So last night I metroed half of my worldly possessions across DC to store in a friend’s basement. After I dropped off my suitcase, backpack, and a cardboard box of boardgames, I remember thinking “Now I have nothing. No wait. My remaining possessions still cost more than what a billion people earn in a year.” I took an inventory. I had my kindle (the $200 version), my cheapo Chinese semi-dumb phone ($30), keys, a wallet with $80 (an usually high amount for me), And the clothes on my back (probably around $100 worth). I am a very lucky person, to be able to have nothing and yet my nothing is worth so much.

But Life is not without a sense of human, er, I mean humor. On the way back I ate a burrito at Chipoltle and was reading my kindle when some teenager comes along and asks, “What is that thing?”
“Uh, you mean the kindle?”
“Yeah, what is it?”
Now I’m used to getting tis question in Kenya but never in DC. “I’m reading a book on it.”
“Does it have a touch screen? Can you get on the Internet?”
“No, I use these buttons to turn the page. It’s not a phone, and you don’t use it for the Internet. You just read books on it.”
“How much is it worth?”
“You can buy one across the street for $70.”
Then the kid next to him turned to me and mumbled something.
“What? I didn’t understand you, I said.”
“I’ll give you $600 for that. You wanna see my money?”
“No. Why don’t you just go buy one in Best Buy. They’re still open!”
“I don’t wanna walk over there. I’ll pay you $600 for it.”
“I don’t want your money.”
He looked baffled. I was baffled too. He seemed really interested in showing me his wad of cash, and in any equipment I had.
“You wanna see my 6 <bookz? wasn’t sure the word>?”
“What’s a <bookz>?”
“It’s a big stack of bills.” [Whatever his word was, I couldn't decipher it using the internet and the uban dictionary. But this post was interesting and related]

“I can show you $10,000 right here.”
“I’m not interested in your money,” I said, turning back to my book and burrito.
“I’ll pay you $600 right now, in cash, if you give me that thing.”
“I’m not interested in money. I wouldn’t sell my kindle for any amount.” Yes, I meant it too.
He was utterly surprised. The kindle wasn’t so important or valuable, but I was in the middle of a good book and wasn’t about to give up my books. I also assume anyone offering way too much money has got some scam figured out (counterfeiting, or using my Kindle credit card to take even more money from me).
“You got a smart phone?”
“You’re really interested in my equipment,” I said, laughing. “Sure, I got a $30 cheap chinese phone.” I took it out and talked him through all its wonderful features. Dual sim, unlocked, and I can get all the text messages I want from Kenya for free on it.
We wasn’t interested.

Eventually the two of them split, obviously disappointed I wouldn’t sell any of my equipment even for ten times what it cost. I felt awkward with no witty things to say back to these preposterous questions and offers. Like, most people would have taken the money no questions asked, but I had absolutely no interest in any amount of money, if it was offered in this way from a complete stranger who knew nothing about a kindle in a world where everybody knows everything about kindles and ipads. If it doesn’t compute and isn’t rational, I don’t care what kind of money someone offers – it is ill-gotten-gains at best or part of a scam to defraud me at worst. So in the worst case scenario, the other guy is playing me for the fool, by acting like such a fool himself.

I wished I’d said this: “You and I are alike. We both don’t care about money. If you did, you wouldn’t be offering me so much of yours for something you can buy new across the street.” But I don’t always think of the best things to say on the spot.

Some clear racial stereotypes surrounded my mental process of making sense of this episode later. Here you have two kids in the city with ridiculous amounts of money trying to throw around cash for stuff they claim to have no knowledge about. What else am I suppose to think? That they are not drug dealers? It’s so stereotypical it could have come from TV. I had wanted to turn the conversation in the direction of encouraging the moneybags kid to broaden his worldview. I mentioned the Kenyan cell phone number deliberately to try and start a conversation about whether he’d ever left the country, or even the city. Neil Degrasse Tyson once talked about growing up in Brooklyn and never seeing the country. These kids (ages 17-20) are probably no different.

Or I gladly would have discussed it if they’d asked “what are you reading?” instead of “what is that device and does it do X,Y and Z?” Whatever these two experienced in the past, they are very much a product of a culture that looks at devices and not ideas now. Capabilities are provided by products, and designed by invisible people who shape our capabilities. The designers are my kind of people; the consumers, not so much. I was actually reading about using evolutionary processes to optimize algorithms – a topic about building impossible and invigorating new stuff, not consuming stuff spawned by some other person’s idea. And even that $10,000 wad of cash was the child of someone else’s ingenuity, most likely. The first drug dealer was creative. The Nth one is just a factory worker in an assembly line life waiting to be told what the next big thing is.

I share this not because I am good person – but quite to the contrary – it makes me more aware of my internal assumptions: If someone half my age approaches me with wads of cash and no curiosity about anything beyond the financial value of devices, they are probably up to no good (and possibly a drug dealer?). I share this because the episode defies a explanation explanation, and maybe you have one.

In this moment I was certainly “minding my own business” in a restaurant I eat at every week, having just gotten rid of my stuff. I found I still had stuff that was worth way more to other people than to myself. I wonder if the kid with all that cash can even conceive that his $10,000 is fifty times more than what the poorest two billion people earn in a year, and how lucky he is…

Marc’s dating dashboard: Tracking Impact in International Development

Impact in International Development is like the weather; everybody talks about it; nobody is any good at predicting it. But here is how an “Impact Dashboard” can help.

Dashboards are supposed to provide real-time continuous information about the status of the organization as a whole, and trends about the direction it is headed. I’ve illustrated the idea below with my own 2012 dating history from OKCupid.com. This best demonstrates how to design a good dashboard for the work of any International Development Agency, along with my insights. I hope it is much more entertaining than the usual poverty alleviation stuff.

Common Dashboard Features (and limitations)

• continuous flow of quantatitive data and “indicators”
• sparklines
• inputs-outputs-outcomes framework
• visual symbols increase readability and scanning
• the engagement funnel (and on-ramp, retention, drop-off numbers)
• statistical correlations
• benchmarking (see the reference dashboard below it)
• cross-referenced qualitative labels provide context and insight to outcomes
• a bias towards using numbers that are easy to get over those that would best reveal the deeper truths
• incomplete picture – important data points will likely lie upstream and downstream to the numbers your organization is tracking.
• fuzzy math* – if your numbers are exact, they probably aren’t the best  description of the real world in which your organization operates.

*Note: deceptive numbers are not a requirement of dashboards, but they are a feature common to all real world dashboards. In this case, not all 214 conversations are shown, and many of the truly uninteresting data points (“Heheh… Hey baby!” emails) are omitted. For fairness, they are also omitted from the reference dashboard in similar proportions. So expect fuzzy math but work towards dashboards that cancel out the fuzziness with ratios and equally fuzzy reference data.

And now… Marc’s 2012 Dating Dashboard:

* Thanks to Dennis Whittle for the suggestion to build this dashboard

Note that the pink conversation bubbles indicate that the other person wrote that comment in an introductory email (usually the first line). Assume that narrative fragments without pink callouts are my own intro lines. The same is true for D’s dashboard below, but in reverse. All the pink callout bubbles for D are from guys, whereas mine are from women.

I previously posted a detailed analysis of the best (and worst) OKCupid introductions, if you’re curious.

The true utility of my Dating Dashboard came when I benchmarked my activities against someone else who was in the same boat. So below I present a reference dashboard.

And here is my best-matched reference dashboard, from “D”, a girl whom I met through OKCupid and became friends with:

D was very gracious in giving me access to her profile so I could count up emails, responses, replies, etc. I’ve tried to eliminate any personal information here. And since I am not D, I cannot fill in the “feel-o-meter” like I did on my own dashboard. Our outcomes (finding a boyfriend / girlfriend in 2012) were very different.

And a head-to-head comparison of Marc vs D on OKCupid:

As bad as my correlations look (If I initiate a conversation, there is a negative correlation with us eventually going out of a date), my response rate (44% replies) is much higher than the OKCupid average for white guys (29%).

Note that the very start of this process is omitted because I cannot count how many people viewed my profile or how many profiles I viewed in a year. It was probably 600-800 for me. I wrote to 6 women a week – typically 3 women on two nights a week. I realized that women use OKCupid on Sunday and Monday nights especially, so I focused on writing on those days and left it alone on Thursday / Friday nights when nobody uses it.

Observations

•  I had no reservations presenting most of this data, except the sparklines. Somehow drawing a line to represent my emotional rollercoaster experience for each girl felt much more revealing than the rest of the numbers.
• For me – no correlation between any of the stuff I do on the dating site and actual dates. And no positive outcome yet (AKA a girlfriend), though plenty of enjoyable companionship and friendship along the way.
• My best-matched female counterpart has a totally different experience. She is much more cautious and thoughtful about writing to people. For most of 2012 I’d write to 3 new women twice a week, and was 50/50 on ending conversations. She would give many more men a first date and size them up in person. And the men who wrote to her seemed like they needed more screening than the women who wrote to me. But without two dashboards, none of these insights would be possible. Reference data on dashboards is essential.
• Making D’s dashboard revealed some deeper insights to me. Though we’re very similar people, she made the effort to write back to nearly every guy that she dated and give him a wrap-up summary with encouragement and clear reasons for not going forward. “I like closure,” she said, when I asked her about it. I think it is also her nature as a former Chaplain and Seminarian to want to tend to the emotional needs of every person, no matter who they are. I on the other hand, tend to let the mutual silence following a date speak for itself. In the future I will make an effort to wrap up communications with someone that I don’t expect to date again, though it is not a joyful activity – I see that it makes me a better person. (In fact, just this week in starting to write those post-date wrap up messages, I opened myself up to receiving some very terse and blunt “We’re not a match, but good luck in life” messages back. Ugh. But I’ll continue this experiment.)
• Making D’s dashboard helped me walk a mile in her shoes, and see how much harder it is to be the girl on the site. After screening 100+ messages, I am (a) sooooo sure I’m not gay and (b) quite self-satisfied that my messages are way more interesting than the ones she receives from the average guy. I found maybe 1 in 100 guys that wrote her witty, attractive, and intriguing. For the woman on OKCupid, emailing is the beginning of a very long screening process. For the guy, if a woman writes you first, you’re halfway to the date, though my emailing to date conversion rate appears to be 10%, much to my surprise.
• On the selection of numbers – this OKCupid-derived dashboard does what most dashboards do: It selects the numbers that are easiest to get. Although I wished I could correlate match % to dates, I would have to drilled down deeper and none of these numbers are in a database where  I can do that. And that feel-o-meter is what I wished I could track quantitatively, but alas, emotions are not easily quantifiable, so as a proxy I have emails and dates. Also a sparkline of me-vs-her tit-for-tat email patterns would reveal more, but it would take hours to compile for each of the 200 conversations. These are examples of why Impact Dashboards in International Development are so frequently sparse; they go for the easy data, not the revealing data.

How would I apply this to a GlobalGiving Impact Dashboard?

First – decide upon an outcome or goal for the organization as a whole. We (GlobalGiving) seek to provide the means for more money and resources to make it to the higher performing organizations worldwide.

Higher performing can be defined in many ways, but let’s say that these organizations seem to learn from their mistakes and are in the process of growing and improving their work; they are an active member of a community of organizations and cooperate and collaborate with local partners; they listen to their community members and value feedback; and they have more access to power brokers in the world (and thus more influence).

The question for our Impact Dashboard thus becomes: Did their involvement over the years with GlobalGiving contribute to becoming a higher performing organization? And if so, what specific activities were important to that change?

To fill out that dashboard, we would need to track activities that represent the behaviors that I’ve just described as the definition of “higher performing”:

• Increasing organizational capacity (capacity here means reaching more people, getting more grants, and doing more work more efficiently)
• Learning from mistakes
• Active in a civil society made up for organizations and community members
• Collaborator, cooperative admin style
• Gathering and listening to community feedback
• Growing influence: Increasing access to power brokers; more organizations and community members aware of them

Many of these are “rates” and not traits, but all of them can be measured if we cast a wide net. That is the beginning of building an Impact Dashboard. I am firmly NOT interested in the “McDonalds Impact” approach of counting beneficiaries and adding up the people affected by Development Activities, such as loans or workshops. I call it the McDonalds Impact, because what you end up counting are people whose lives have been affected about as much as if you gave each of them a Big Mac. That’s not changing lives – and yet so many big organizations aim for this number. Acumen bragged in December 2012 of having Impacted the lives of 100 million. They’ve moved a lot of money, but I doubt they’ve got a weekly/monthly dashboard that tracks all of the things I’ve laid out here, and if they did, they’d be posting the kinds of surprising insights it would reveal like I just did for my own dating experiences.

Postscript

I enjoyed writing this post, and “D” who provided some of the data enjoyed reading it. My mother also reads my blog. She wrote:

“Dear Marc,

Don’t analyze your dating, at least not online, or your % dates are going to be much less than 10%. Love can not be programmed.”

In my defense, we are all searching for meaning. The bigger the questions, the deeper our search should dive. And many of us are curious when, where, and how we will come across the person who will become our life partner. And while I have enjoyed going on all of my dates, I think it would be foolish not to put my full faculties to work in understanding what dating and love is all about.

I was once married, and in a relationship for 9 years, and I’ve written all about it. I think I know a thing or two about love, but that doesn’t mean that I have any advantage in finding it in the next person I meet. The numbers at clear – there is no correlation between activities (emailing, dating) and outcomes (girlfriend), so you might as well enjoy the ride and keep an open mind to every girl you meet. Or study your next date’s ring finger.

Interesting related infographic: Breakdown of why there are so few quality prospects among black men

Start with the ending

“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.” -Maria Robinson

Note: Jump to 5:20 for the audio that accompanies this transcript below.

What would happen if we lived our whole lives starting with the ending?

Die first. Get that out of the way.

And then…

ENJOY your retirement. Travel… see the world.

I guess eventually you’d feel like giving something back. So probably time to go to work.

But that first day of work’s kinda cool. You get a gold watch. People all look up to you.

Doesn’t take long before you feel restless though, like you need to change jobs.

Start feelin like you need to be more street level, y’know? Not up in that corner window. So you need to be in a service kind of job.

So you look around. Eventually you find your true calling working in a summer camp.

It’s good. Probably the pinnacle of your career.

But when you decide that money’s not that important, maybe it’s time to give up on work. Cause it’s wisdom you’re after,

Knowledge.

So this would be a good time to go to college, right?

So you go to college. Wow. Probably take enough drugs until you’re ready for high school. But as you go through your education you find yourself learning simpler and simpler things. Until with that Zen-like simplicity you’re learning language itself.

Just how to say what you really mean.

But then you realize that anything really worth speaking simply can’t be spoken, so, you quit talking.

It’s not a big deal. You’re taking yourself a lot lighter these days.

You’re just a baby.

But when you decide this whole incarnation is just too much of a burden,

You decide to go out

as a glimmer in someone’s eye.

That’s a life well lived.

Because you started with the ending.

- David Wilcox

And when you’re thinking about how to end this chapter so a new chapter can begin, here are some things to think about:

Posts

[Making time for Life]

[The Richest of all have just enough]

[The Gratitudes]

This post is dedicated to and inspired by Susan Leigh.

Making Time for Life

I’ve realized that finding a good lifestyle balance means cutting out some things and adding in new,  better activities to replace them. Here is a picture of my current lifestyle:

 

It is full of many activities. I even forgot to include my weekly yoga practice, and going on dates. But I think it could be better if I cut out some of these things, and focused on the others, leaving the core of my life in tract:

My core lifestyle doesn’t take much money – just $1200 a month. And the time bank is another form of local salary. By doing tasks for others in my community, I store up good will I can cash in for others to help me later. One interesting side effect is that all time bankers are socialists – from the gardener to the CEO, we’re all given the same amount of time in life. It is how we use it that matters. That’s a good philosophy to apply to life itself. Your time is not more valuable because you have a PhD; it is valuable because you spent it doing good.

My life has few requirements – I need a job, and I depend on Obamacare to keep my lifestyle costs down. The difference each month is about $400 with or without Obamacare, so having Obamacare means I can work less, and control my expenses. Maybe that’s why the big companies don’t like it – they’ve been able to define our workstyle and lifestyle for us until now. They’ve also been the promoters of a philosophy that some peoples’ time is worth 1000 times more than other people. But is it really? If we were all university professors, we would surely starve, and none of the garbage would be picked up, and society would fall. And I think professors have done more good than CEOs. I can’t even begin to put an estimate on how screwed up the world would be if we were all CEOs.

We have to choose to make it a good life. And mostly that means cutting out entertainment to spend more time with ourselves and our search for what matters. This Buddhist cartoon comes to mind:

This post was inspired by and dedicated to @joyandfive on twitter, who wrote:

 You’ve regrooved my way of thinking on some things. And raised the bar for my own analytical approach. Cool to get your personal and spiritual views from that post (Love and Unexpected Bounty).

I love to groove…

GOP’s Free Market and Obama’s “socialism” are only hairs apart

This Time Magazine column grasps our country is threatened more by lazy political reporting than by the “Fiscal Cliff.” Just take another look at the 2009 stimulus plan, which Republicans successfully managed to get labeled by the press as purely Obama’s plan, and therefore “socialist”:

Fiscal Cliff Fictions: Let’s All Agree to Pretend the GOP Isn’t Full of It

“In early 2009, when Obama began pushing his $787 billion stimulus plan, the GOP began describing stimulus as an assault on free enterprise—even though House Republicans  (including Paul Ryan) voted for a $715 billion stimulus alternative that was virtually indistinguishable from Obama’s socialist version.”

Likewise, the difference between the “Fiscal Cliff” and the best possible compromise that would ensure our shared, long-term prosperity as a nation are just hairs apart. I’ve written about why here:

Making mountains out of molehills: Comparing the “Fiscal Cliff” to Greece to see that we’re actually doing the right thing, no matter what the reporters and TV pundits keep insinuating with their fear-speak.

Unfortunately, the most likely compromise would be far worse for everyone in the long term. That’s why the “Fiscal Cliff” is a good thing. It’s far from being an “Austerity measure” – and more like “Keeping our budgets in line with our revenues.”  If we can’t ever shrink, then the Economists saying that our entire system of government and capitalism itself cannot exist without constant subsidies and overspending. I DO believe Capitalism is sustainable without overspending, so I support the “Fiscal Cliff” plan.

Best (and worst) OKCupid intros

My blog was being under-visited lately, so here’s a shamelessly juicy collection of my dating opening letters from the last 11 months of OKCupid correspondence. From Dec 10, 2011 to Nov 24, 2012 I sent 463 letters to women and received replies on about half of those (higher than the expected reply rate of about 29%). As these are all my words and no names or accounts are included, I feel no guilt in publishing my sometimes inspired and often poor (but always amusing) attempts to woo the fairer sex.

Some brief intros:

• In a post-apocalyptic world, don’t you think skilled metal workers will be overrated? Do you harbor dreams of building solar cookers amidst the rubble?
• I’ll give you man’s inhumanity to man, but what proof is there that humankind has been given inhumane treatment to shoes?
• Hah! You cheated with an octopus? Taken out of the vegetarian context, it sounds really exotic!

• Ever wonder why so many people mention sense of humor as an important match thingy but it is the last thing they list, then suddenly it’s the most important? Am I guilty of that? Let me check… yup.

• It’s okay to love the Elements of Style. I may be one of the few quantitative types that can quote from it. Rule 13: Omit needless words….

• Wow! asymmetric architecture made it to #2 on your list of important things to like. I don’t know how I feel about it. I guess I like both kinds. Is there some building that you really dig?

• Oh no! Another WaWa activist. (or Wactivist?)…
• What does looking for love have to do with being a licensed social worker? maybe I misunderstood your profile
• [REPLY] Well the baby elephant photo is my one obligatory exotic photo.

• You’re still wiggling around? I’d a thought you were all settled by now.
• I don’t know if you know this, but I just ranked all the female profiles in the DC area by “profile rating” and yours comes out as #1. Have you got any idea why?

From girls’ profile: “My self-summary: There are two kinds of people in this world: those who masturbate to Jimmy Page, and those who don’t.”

My intro: Next time you are, ahem, masturbating to Jimmy Page, you might want to pause long enough to watch this documentary featuring the master:   [It might get Loud]

• So in the 1880s, was a bustle a butt or just an apparatus for making one’s butt look big and sexy?
• So do you carry around a doppler radar? I’ve never considered it to belong on my essential items list.
• Which Island are you trying to get back to?
• I just searched for “spork” and you came up. I guess that’s a secret magnet-word to finding other people who are little off kilter. You really pack a Titanium Spork?
• That story of the breakup isn’t nearly as scary as you make it out. If after a marriage you see the sun more than the rain clouds, you’ve grown.

[Side thought: An unfinished novel is full of possibility, and yet full of impossibility.]

• How is your pickle making project going? And what do you like to write about?
• Dude! I have that SAME shark hat (which is no longer your main profile pic by the way – you might need to modify your opening lines so as to not reference it).
• So another name you could add to your self-descriptors might be post-apocalyptic-literary-anthropologist.

You win!

(What did you win?)

My instantly popping into existence prize for the best profile to say a lot whilst revealing virtually nothing – demographically speaking.

[This girl did not reply.]

• Hah! Whenever someone on OK writes “Other and very serious about it” for religion I can almost assume they are a UU.

Kids are so tasty, it’s hard to control yourself!

REPLY: “Truth!”

This came up while discussing the Q: Do you generally smile at little kids who cross your path?

A: Yes

Her Explanation: “Or eat them.”

• The first thing I notice is that you certainly love [[tagging]] your profile! What’s your PhD in? Something like bioinformatics or “information engineering”*?

(*I just made that second one up).

• RECEIVED:  I like broccoli and mushrooms too….and cooking….and inspiring people too.
• “A 75-year-old man said, ‘You are not responsible for all the things that happen to you, but you are completely in control of your attitude and your reactions to them.’ An 84-year-old said, ‘Adopt a policy of being joyful.’  … and a 93 year old man said “Eh? what was that?”
• So do you eat Nutella on your morning run whilst listening to Morning Edition? IS that like an orgasmic experience for ya?
• It might concern you to know that google ads / OKcupid think that the perfect ad to display beside your (and only your) profile is “Battlefield 3″ – the shoot-em-up game for macho guys.
• Tell me, who pays you to ask everyone else what they’re doing with their life? So much is shrouded in mystery, your profile is.

My three best introduction letters:

(1) snowboarding as a metaphor for plunging into introduction letters

Seems like my first introduction did not elicit a response from you. I typically forget about a woman I wrote the prior week and whom showed no interest, but your profile really did spark my curiosity. Even if you don’t requite, let me entertain.

So I went snowboarding today. First time in 2 years. I forgot how much I missed it. It is the ultimate “zen” sport. Unlike skiing, which is about strength and speed once you master staying up, snowboarding offers up some interesting metaphors about life as you lazily swish and swash your way through tufts of childlike snow. You’ve got to balance much more, and like life, you cannot just grow a third leg or stop moving until you have yourself in order. You must lean into the slope and throw your weight forward down the mountain and learn to stay afloat while gaining speed. There’s no way to practice snowboarding while standing still. In fact, the surest way to corrupt your balance is to try and flatten your board against the slope for maximum stability. That stability just an illusion. As soon as you hit the smallest bump, you’ll flail spasticly if you’re flat footed. I think Nietsche wrote the same thing somewhere. You are most in control when you have the narrowest edge pressed against the mountain and you are dancing on your tippy toes. This is how you exercise your risk taking muscles – the same ones that help when launching a new company or life experiment.

It doesn’t matter which foot you lead with down the mountain, just so long as you commit to it and lean down that mountain. And I learned that twirling and spinning your way down gives you more control than keeping your sights straight ahead and bracing for the bumps. You can’t outbrace bumps, but you can twirl through them.

And turning -– don’t “prepare” to change direction; you must be ready when moment is right and you must act without hesitation. To turn well, you shift your behind in the opposite way of your legs to shift balance for a sharp turn. The whole thing is like making your body spin two parts in opposite directions like one of those ultra high speed jet engines, only more graceful. To keep control, you’ve got to leave yourself hanging out there – butt and legs going east and west – all while emptying your mind and enjoying the ride.

That’s a bit like introducing yourself to a stranger on a dating site. You fall down sometimes, but when you catch yourself and get your timing right, the feeling can be amazing.

Cheers.

(2) twinkies, flawed humanity, and my religious ideas book

[AS A REPLY]
I’ll try to avoid being a twinkie -you know- a tasty and everlasting perfectly machine-formed ovoid mentality built on the shortcomings of shortbread hopes with a too-sweet creamy center. Something about your ‘too good to be true’ comment got me thinking about the big twinkie experiment of 1998. My roommate and I constructed a shrine (or perhaps an altar of sacrifice) for said twinkie and watched it NOT decompose for 9 months. It did get a little bit dryer, but not smelly, fly-attracting, or gag-awful. It’s amazingly non-organic.

I on the other hand am a cornucopia of flawed humanity. I write one partially inspired manuscript after another in a vain (hopeless, not vanity) attempt to capture teen angst, or the deceptive nature of evil faking good-gasm. My next one will be a spy novel, inspired by that college roommate who spawned the twinkie experiment. He was offered the chance to be a super spy because he outwitted the FBI at age 17. They wanted him, even though he failed high school algebra 4 times. Examples of flawed humanity, like a beautiful sunset, are present every day – if only we make ourselves aware to both kinds of beauty.

Perhaps that’s why I write – I considered writing a book about religious ideas ten years ago. Then I realized I don’t read those books. If I have something important to say about life, death, and beyond, it will have to seep into the characters that populate my fiction, because I only write books I’m willing to read. So far at least one character in each book has said things that I liked reading. They are never things that the conscious Marc ever thought of – they take on a life of their own. That’s why I’m addicted to writing – I never know what will come out of my fingertips, and the surprises amaze me more because the pages are locked away in my own subconcsious – the Book of the Soul*, if you will.

(*Book of the Soul was the title of the religious ideas book I never wrote. But if I am finding pages of it in my fiction from time to time, then I suppose I am writing that book. Does this message count as part of that book too? I wonder.)

(3) 42, winkishness, and algorithmically developing intro letters

42

So would that be yet another “winkish” way to communicate? I actually have the skills to articulate things, but as you might notice, I don’t automatically know the right thing to say to start a conversation with every person on earth.

Now that I think of it, THAT would be a highly profitable phone app. Instead of giving me stalkish details about a person, just think for me and tell me what to say. On second thought I’d have more fun programming the thing than using it.

I saw a TED talk this week about program evolution. Instead of trying to write the best program, the guy was just feeding “words” into a program that was generating a billion random programs, then testing each one that actually compiles against some kind of outcome, like sorting numbers. Then he would iterate more conservatively on the ones that compile with a slower rate of mutation. The results are programs that are written in a very unusual way but a few of these work faster than the standard way.

I want to do that where the goal is to generate interesting dating introductions for use on OKCupid. Though I assure you this introduction was not generated by any robot, algorithm, or evolutionary design. It’s inadequacies are purely my own accomplishment (or decomplishment).

Wow, I’ve totally just gone off topic. I apologize. I liked your profile and I’d like to hear about your thesis. Maybe talking about your thesis on a dating site will focus you on finishing it!

Me

PS – you’ve got good taste in music. Heard of Fun. yet?

Enjoyed it? My dating profile is here.