A pre-post post on Bob Dylan, the Monkees and the perils of reading business books

Andrew Gelman has a post that refers to this passage from business guru Seth Godin:

Let me first describe a distinction between the Monkees and Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan gets laughed or booed off the stage every ten years, whether he wants to or not. He got booed off the stage when he went electric and again when he went gospel, and most recently with his horrendous Christmas album. The Monkees never get booed off stage, because the Monkees play "Last Train to Clarksville" exactly the same way they did it 30 or 40 years ago. Here's the thing: Bob Dylan keeps selling out stadiums and no one goes to see the Monkees, because the Monkees aren't doing anything worth noticing. There are people who have succeeded who just keep playing the same song over and over again, whatever that is that they do.

This got me thinking about adaptation and fitness landscapes and all sorts of other interesting topics but before I get into that I really should take a moment to point out that, like so many examples from business gurus, this is complete bullshit.

Big stadium shows are dominated by heritage acts singing decades-old songs. Almost none of these acts have done significant work recently; many of the biggest (the Stones, the Police) haven't even released a full studio album in the past decade. Dylan is an tremendous anomaly here. He's not quite unique (Neil Diamond also recorded some of his most critically and commercially successful material in the past decade), but he is spectacularly unrepresentative.

Just to sum it up:

1. Loads of acts from the Sixties,Seventies and Eighties are selling out concerts;

2. Two or three of them are trying something new;

3. All the rest are coasting by on greatest hits.

From this Godin implies that the key to success is not repeating yourself.

Some mathematical humor from Jeff Mallett's charming strip Frazz.

Social Norms

Justin Alexander has an interesting post on the case of Twixt; a media professor named David Myers decided to play in an online game. He decided to deliberately ignore the social conventions of the game (it being an online role-playing game) and focus entirely on what the rules would allow (even if doing so irritated, annoyed and frustrated his fellow players).

For me the key quote was:

Given the adaptive value of individual play in exploring and revealing system characteristics, the social pressures against this sort of play in CoH/V seem drastically and overly harsh, even unnatural.

This approach ignores that, in most societies there are two layers to behavioral constraint. One is the use of actual laws while the other is social norms of behavior that apply to interactions. These social norms act as an important break on places where the rules do not apply. Would we not have concerns with an person who used an innovative approach to the law in order to committ pre-meditated murder? Would we decide that this was an important legal innovation and encourage more such innovation? Or would we be seriously concerned about the actions of the person involved.

I think that this issue is central to understanding how to make innovation work well; ideally innovation needs to be both an improvement and be accepted by the potential users. While the Twixt case was rather extreme, it does have some important issues for Epidemiology. When we diagnose risk factors for disease, we also have to decide what the current social context accepts as a reasonable implementation of these findings. Some ideas, like standing desks, might take a while to gain social acceptance. Others, like smoking, may require decades long public health campaigns to finally reduce the levels of exposure, despite the potential health risks involved.

Innovation is a complicated business . . .

Advice on meeting people

Prof-like substance has a great post on how to break the ice in unfriendly departments. I rather suspect it would work just as well in speeding up the process of getting to know people in friendly departments as well. However, I am not a bench scientist and there is a sharp limit to the number of statistics books I can borrow.

Any ideas how how to generalize this advice to the epidemiology world?

Effect and cause: Hollywood edition

From New York Magazine:

How Toy Story 3 Scored: Even though the kiddies all clap their palms raw whenever that silly cyclops of a desk lamp hops out to squash the "I" in "Pixar," Disney still faced a conundrum: Those tykes who were in first grade when Toy Story first hit theaters in 1995 are now seniors in college.

However, instead of writing off the twentysomethings as too jaded to come, the studio targeted them, knowing that the Woody/Buzz bond was ageless. "Pixar went out of their way to ground the movie in the idea that the character [Andy who] you knew as a kid was now off to college," explained David Sameth, Disney's senior VP of marketing, "It’s only natural to pick up the same idea in marketing, and translate it into our terms." That meant courting the keg-stand-performing college kids directly: In the run-up to TS3's release, Disney sponsored a special "college cliff-hanger campaign," screening two-thirds of the finished film for undergrads at some 80 colleges nationwide, which kicked off the positive buzz from the Twitter set. The studio also crafted a viral YouTube campaign — fake period ads for one of the movie's new additions, Lots-o-Huggin' Bear — that is still being discovered.

Helped by a 100% favorable rating on RottenTomatoes.com, not only did those former grade schoolers come running back to make this Pixar's top-grossing opener ever (helped by 3D pricing), but so did everyone else: Its audience was 46% over the age of 25, and roughly equally distributed between males and females. Who went? With 4,000 plus theaters showing it, "Everybody," said Chuck Viane, Disney's distribution chief. But what about "franchise fatigue" and all that? Says Disney's Sameth, "People don't go to see franchises; they go to see movies. This is a great one."

I'll buy that last part. I haven't seen the film yet but based on the reviews, the talent and most importantly, the standard of work from Pixar, I will be surprised to see anything less than excellence.

I would also have been surprised to see the picture fail to bring in dump trucks of money. This kind of long-awaited sequel tends to do well (think of how many people went to see Harrison Ford hobble around in Crystal Skull or George Lucas burn off what remained of his legacy in Phantom Menace). Pixar films also tend to bring in big money (Up grossed nearly three quarters of a billion worldwide). Add to that the fact that after three films built around gifted but non-bankable character actors (Oswald, Asner, Plummer) and uncomfortable themes (rats preparing food; the destruction of the environment; old age, loneliness, and even miscarriage), Pixar played this one safe with a big star in the lead and familiar thematic territory. It is probably the least adventurous film from the studio since, well, Toy Story 2.

Given all this and the significant traditional media marketing, there is no evidence here that targeting college students brought in anyone who wouldn't have seen the film anyway. This type of alternative, targeted marketing can be highly effective for movies and other products you might not have otherwise heard of (Kick-Ass, Defendor, OSS 117 would all be reasonable choices). The techniques are much less effective for well-publicized films and they aren't scalable; a good twitter/viral video campaign can push a small film into wider release which can take you from a gross of five million to ten or twenty million, but when you're talking about opening in thousands of theatres and having to gross two hundred million just to break even, this kind of non-traditional marketing is usually a waste of time.

But the entertainment industry loves to tell itself these stories: marketing to twenty-somethings helped make Toy Story 3 a hit; the Hangover shows that people want gross out gags and Apatow-style humor; Electra, Catwoman and Charlie's Angels II all bombed because they were female superhero movies with dark themes. None of these stories stand up to any scrutiny. All can be replaced by more credible explanations (usually starting with the quality of the script). But the industry still embraces these unbelievable accounts because of what they say about replication and risk.

William Goldman famously observed that when it comes to how well a movie is going to do "Nobody knows anything." That's not quite true. There is an optimal strategy: start with a strong script; keep people (particularly studio executives) away from it as much as possible; hire a competent director and a cast of good actors who fit their roles; provide an adequate marketing campaign that gives the potential audience an accurate impression of the film.

As straightforward as this may seem, this strategy gives little comfort to people in the industry for two reasons.

First, this is difficult to replicate on a large scale. There are writers who can turn out strong scripts (Goldman being the most obvious example) but they are hard to find and can take a long time to cultivate. To put together a team comparable to what Pixar has is a monumental task.

Second (and this is where Goldman's observation really kicks in), there is a great deal of unpredictability in the system. Sometimes film-makers will do everything right and the film will just fail to gel artistically. Other times a film will come out perfect but for some reason won't get the reception it deserves.

This need to find a comforting explanation for success and failure is not limited to Hollywood. Many if not most companies spend a great deal of time retroactively assigning causes to major successes and failures. There is usually little empirical evidence at work and quite a bit of politics and score settling, but even the most dubious of explanations have a way of making it into the official unofficial history.

For years (perhaps even to this very day), executives at McDonald's would tell you with absolute certainly that the deluxe line failed not because it was based on over-hyped, under-impressive menu items but because the ads showed Ronald playing golf.

Credit Hours

Dead Dad has an intersting take on congress trying to make the credit hour a standard measure to qualify for student aid. The real issue here is not the productivity paradox that he defines but, rather, the issue of creating clear metrics in higher education. The original impetus for the move was a poor decision on the part of an accrediting body; but the truth is that, so long as there is so much money at stake, there will be entities that try and exploit the rules.

Switching to an outcomes based approach is a tempting idea until you realize how hard it is to measure outcomes in education clearly. Do we want to create perverse incentives to select only strong students because they are the most profitable group?

It's a really tough problem!

Co-authored work

This is a major tangent from the post that inspired it, but going radically off topic is on of the tropes of the internet. In the post plus comments, a post-doctoral fellow expresses some frustrations about troubles getting a co-authored piece of work to publication.

One of the hardest things in academia is having the discipline to let the leaders of co-authored work (first and senior) author focus on the process of moving a paper to final publication. It's hard to stand back when you are excited by a piece of work and it is easy to be frustrated. But it is also the only way I can stay sane is to trust my co-authors and to be available to provide help as needed.

But I admit to preferring to be in the thick of things . . . :-)

Dying is easy; comedy is hard -- journalism edition

"When they see us coming, the birdies all try an' hide,
But they still go for peanuts when coated with cyanide."

It started with poisoning pigeons in the park.

Maybe I should be more specific.

It started a few weeks ago when I heard the song "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" as part of a Tom Lehrer* tribute on Prairie Home Companion. Impressed by the wit of the lyrics (the man rhymed cyanide, for God's sake) I decided to see what a professional song writer would think about Lehrer.

My go-to guy in these matters is Brad Kay, songwriter, music historian and former mystic knight. Brad can be a tough critic, particularly if your name isn't something like Gershwin, Waller or Ellington, but if I was expecting him to be dismissive of someone who was just a comic songwriter I was in for a surprise.

Brad had literally nothing but praise for Tom Lehrer. He talked about how graceful and apt Lehrer's choice of words was and about profoundly he understood each of the genres he worked on. This led to discussions of Spike Jones (who was an accomplished and successful percussionist before he started using gunshots and noisemakers in his music) and P.D.Q. Bach (who as Peter Schickele has composed a large number of well-regarded symphonies, musicals, and film scores). All of this suggested that the first requirement for creating comic music of more than passing interest was being a good musician.

It's probably not surprising that the general public has trouble taking the creators of comedy seriously, but their peers have no such difficulty. P.G. Wodehouse counted George Orwell among his fans. Any number of dancers and acrobats have commented on the grace and athleticism of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton (Keaton was particularly remarkable having mastered that most difficult of athletic feats, the controlled fall, by age three). As for acting, it's almost a truism that comic actors can easily do drama while dramatic actors often struggle with comedy.

So if the best musicians, writers, dancers and actors can be found doing great comedy, how about journalists?

The following clip is a thoroughly typical segment of the Daily Show. Take a look and consider it from a journalistic standpoint. Look at how clear and concise Stewart is. Check out how important but underreported facts are introduced and how everything is placed in a relevant context. I wonder how many hours of cable news you'd have to watch to meet the standards of just another Daily Show?

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Indecision 2010 - Primary Victory for Women
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

*Arguably the world's coolest mathematics professor.

More on impacts of Research

From FemaleScienceProfessor comes a really nice comment on publishing in important journals:

I have absolutely no problem publishing in a disciplinary journal with impact factor of 2-4. These are excellent journals, read by all active researchers in my field. It is bizarre to compare them unfavorably with Nature and Science, as if papers in a journal with an impact factor of 3 are hardly worth reading, much less writing.

This is entirely correct. Several of the key journals that I real all of the time are in this category: Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety and Statistics in Medicine, to name a couple of obvious ones.

I think, to some extent, this is the dark side of a focus on impact. A finding that is of interest to a broad audience may not necessarily be a good measure of the importance of a finding to a sub-field. There are a lot of papers, to use an example, that say "further work in this direction looks challenging". This is important information to let other researchers know but it's likely to be heavily cited.

Now, there is a case to be made for the volume of research publications that are made being harder and harder to follow with time. But this can also be a benefit -- many clusters of researchers working in different directions may be able to better find optimal solutions that would otherwise be overlooked.

It is a complex issue but I'm definitely in favor of discipline specific publications and some of my favorite papers are in this type of niche.

No subtle and profound scientific insights from Olivia Judson this week

Just a sad and straightforward account of people contemplating an act of tragic stupidity.

Socio-economic Models

Mark has a great comment on issues with interpreting what a dollar is worth. This idea is worth considering in Epidemiological studies as well. When trying to model socio-economic status, it can be tempting to treat income as a linear variable. Even worse, it can be tempting not to account for differences in costs of living. This reluctance to try and account for cost of living is an understandable temptation as the data on cost of living is extremely hard to generate and very context specific. How do you handle Manhattan (where a large house is unlikely to be even available, let alone affordable) when you compare it Duluth, Minnesota. Economics have some clever tricks, but they replace one source of error (incorrect standardization) with another one (modeling errors in the cost of living models).

But it is worth remembering that just because it is a clean number doesn't mean that you should just introduce it into the model "as is". Think long then model!

I'm not asking for money...

I'm just casually mentioning that much of the best reporting on the financial crisis has come from the good people at This American Life and that same crisis has hit TAL really hard.

It's not like I'm trying to guilt you into send a buck or two to their website.

When is a dollar not worth a dollar?

Joseph and I have been putting up a number of post on compensation recently (many inspired directly or indirectly by Felix Salmon), but there is something important that's been left out of the discussion both here and on the other blogs I've been reading on the subject:

Some dollars are worth more than others.

Having bounced back and forth from statistician to teacher to entrepreneur over the years, I've seen plenty of large fluctuations in income and I've developed a pretty good idea of what it costs to live comfortably as a single person in various cities.

In LA the cutoff is somewhere around thirty thousand. For that money you can get a decent apartment in pleasant neighborhood and still have enough income left over both to meet your basic needs and to get out and have some fun. (LA is one of the world's great cheap-eats towns)

If you go from mid-thirties to mid-nineties (which I did at one point), you will see a significant change in your lifestyle but it is nothing compared to the change you'll feel if you go from the mid thirties to the low twenties. Below thirty you start facing some ugly compromises. You may have to move to a rough part of town, Food becomes a larger part of your budget. Costs associated with work (wardrobe, transportation) remain annoyingly constant. Going out with friends becomes a great luxury (it's hard to convince the bartender to sell you two-thirds of a beer)

This discrepancy in lifestyle suggests the need for a different metric. Here's an example. To make the numbers come out even, let's talk about three incomes: 21K, 30K, 90K with our hypothetical Angeleno starting in the middle. In both absolute (60K) and relative terms (200%) the jump to the top tier dwarfs the jump to the bottom (9K/30%) but in impact on quality of life, the exact opposite holds.

What does all this mean? For one thing, it means that expected value and marginal changes are not the right tools to look at compensation, at least not in the way we normally use them. It means that the problem requires more of a piecewise approach.

Reputational Capital and Operational Definitions

The following obviously demands a longer post (or series of posts or articles or maybe a book or two) but I'll throw this out in the hope that someone else will do the work for me.

Rajiv Sethi has a characteristically strong piece on "Reputational Capital and Incentives in Organizations" which includes the following:

How, then, might a firm accomplish the subordination of short term goals to long term objectives in practice? There are two possibilities: one could hire individuals who are predisposed to behave in a principled manner even in the face of incentives not to do so, or one could design compensation schemes that adequately reward actions that preserve or enhance reputation. Economists, being fervent believers in the power of incentives, usually tend to favor the latter approach. But in this particular context, there are two possible problems with this. First, the contribution of any given transaction to the reputation of the firm is generally much more difficult to ascertain and quantify than any contribution to the firm's balance sheet. This makes it difficult to assign reward appropriately. Second, in order to serve as credible commitments to clients and customers, compensation schemes must be easily observable and not subject to renegotiation after the fact. This is seldom the case.

Which leads to today's essay question:

20 points

Are organizations biased toward properties that come with operational definitions? If so, can this bias lead to economically irrational behavior? (if you need extra space you can continue your answer on the back of the blog)

Delta -- "We love to fly; we just hate the passengers"

The airlines seem to be conducting an industry-wide experiment to determine just how badly you can treat customers and still sucker them into coming back.

From The Consumerist (h/t to Felix Salmon):

On Sunday, Andy emailed us from his seat on Delta Flight 2744 from Minneapolis to Washington, D.C., to let us know that he had no idea where his flight was going to land. The ticket he purchased said he was flying to Ronald Reagan National Airport, but Delta said it would all depend on whether they could beat their scheduled 10:19 arrival time and get there before the ten o'clock airport curfew--otherwise they'd have to land at Dulles. Strangely, they didn't mention this 10 p.m. curfew to Andy before he bought the ticket.