Things They Should Study: does sibling resemblance run in the family?

I recently saw a picture of a large family where all the children are blond, and my first thought was that it was kind of creepy but I couldn't articulate why.  After some thought, I realized it's because I'm not accustomed to seeing a whole family of blonds.  All the blonds in my own family, as well as nearly every blond kid whose siblings I knew growing up (I can only think of one exception), have at least one brunette sibling.

Siblings tend not to resemble each other especially closely in my own family.  My sister and I don't share colouring, shape, bone structure, or any distinguishing features.  Among my relatives, siblings who share colouring don't share bone structure, and siblings who share features have them in different colours. If you put us all together collectively you can see that some people might be related to others, but you'd never be able to tell who is siblings with whom.

And yet, siblings with strong resemblances do exist.  And sometimes, like with the family of eerily similar blonds, all the siblings in a given family resemble each other.

It would be interesting to see if there's some kind of genetic reason why some families have strong sibling resemblance and others don't.

Things They Should Study: what circumstances or conditions lead people to be blinded by popularity?

As I wrote about in my previous post, this whole plastic bag thing reminds me of elementary school group work, because in both cases I have a better solution than what's popular, and it's being automatically written off because it isn't the thing that's popular. I find this particularly irritating because I have to suffer the consequences of the worse solution despite having come up with a better solution and duly communicated it to all involved.

As I also mentioned in my previous post, I am able to convince people to use, or at least try, my ideas far more often than would be attributable to pure chance. In my previous post, I took this as a sign that my ideas are not without merit and I'm not entirely incapable of being convincing.

But what if people are more likely or less likely to be blinded by popularity under certain circumstances or conditions? What if there was some common condition present in my elementary school classrooms, in LCBO leadership, and in Toronto City Council that wasn't present in my workplaces and my high school and university classrooms?

One thing I have noticed, although it's possible this is subject to confirmation bias, is that others seem more likely to be blinded by popularity in cases where it is not logistically possible for me to implement my idea myself. In my job, I can do things my own way unless specifically instructed by my boss or a client to do otherwise. I don't need others to agree, I just need the people who can boss me around not to disagree. Nevertheless, nearly every idea I share in the workplace gets at least tried by at least one person. And, of all my ideas (not just in the workplace, but in life in general), the ones that get picked up the most are my mnemonics, and it makes literally no difference to me whatsoever if other people use them.

But when it comes to something like changing plastic bag policy, which I can't in any way make happen by myself and am dependent on governments and retailers to implement, I'm automatically dismissed because I'm advocating for something other than the most popular idea.

What if there's something in here that's indicative of a broader pattern of when people are open to ideas vs. being blinded by popularity?

Things They Should Study: most essential petroleum derivatives

I previously theorized that we should stop using petroleum for fuel so that our planet's limited petroleum reserves will be available for plastic. After all, lots of important things (computers, sterile medical equipment, hygienic food packaging) are made of plastic.

Someone should study and quantify this. Which things that are made of plastics and other petroleum derivatives most need to be made of these non-renewable materials? Do we even have a way to manufacture computers or keep syringes sterile without plastic? Is it possible but unwieldly? Is it possible and reasonably user-friendly but expensive? Or are there whole functionalities that we'd lose out on without plastic?

Now that I think about it, they could do this with fuel too. Electric cars are possible, renewable power generation is possible, but do we even have a renewable option for jet fuel? If so, how feasible is it?

Once they've done all the research and quantified everything, they can put it all in order of the importance of petroleum to the product and the importance of the product to society, and we'll have a better idea of whether we're really making the best use of our non-renewable resources. They could also use this information to target research into finding renewable replacement for petroleum derivatives. If, for example, there's some key medical application for which we don't yet have any alternative, maybe they should work on that first.

Things They Should Study: what percentage of the population can read on trains but not on buses?

One of the reasons why Transit City is of particular interest to me is that I get carsick reading on buses but have no problem reading on trains. A trip in any kind of rail vehicle - even the old-fashioned streetcars they have downtown which are nowhere near as awesome as LRTs - is an opportunity to relax and get some reading done. A trip in a bus, it's at best lost time, and at worst a struggle against nausea. Transit City maximizes the number of potential trips that can be taken by rail, thus maximizing multitaskability.

As I've blogged about before, multitaskable commutes increase productivity, and multitasking in a vehicle generally involves reading of some sort. I'm not the only one who is more prone to carsickness in buses than in trains, but I can't find any data on the percentage of the population to whom this applies. If it's a large percentage of the population, this should be a factor in transit planning - or at the very least it should be public information so we can make an informed decision about whether to take it into consideration.

The first page of google results gives numbers ranging from 33% to 90% of the population being prone to motion sickness, so the number of people affected is probably not negligible. Someone really needs to research this so we can get some real numbers.

Things They Should Study: best use of charitable donations

There is a lot of information out there about different charities from the perspective of the percentage of money raised that goes to the cause vs. administration. And there's a lot of information about how to optimize tax incentives etc. But I'd really like more information about the best general strategic approach to take.

Would you get better results by donating to a charity, or by donating to a political organization that works to obsolete the need for that charity? Would my charitable dollar help more people if I donated it to a third world country (on the assumption that the cost of living is lower there, so therefore they could buy more stuff with it) or if I donated it locally (on the assumption that less of it might get lost in transit?). Callous as it sounds, do you get better long-term results by saving lives or by improving lives? Do you save more lives, or improve more lives, with food or with health care? Or health research? Or education? Or literacy? Do microloans get better results because of their relendability?

The same could apply with volunteering. What's the best use of general volunteer labour? Which sectors benefit most from a donation of time, and which benefit most from a donation of money? What about donations of specialized professional services? What about in-kind donations?

Some might object to this way of thinking on the basis that it might lead to a dearth of donations in areas that, while still worthy causes, are found to not to be the very best use of charitable donations. I'm not sure whether this would be the case, because people donate for all kinds of reasons. People donate to research into the disease that killed their grandparents or the disease whose genes they carry. People donate because a friend is doing a charity run. People volunteer for the humane society because doggies are awesome. People donate because they're asking for a loonie at the cash register and they're getting a loonie in their change. People donate because they have some stuff in their house that they want to get rid of. It isn't all calculated.

But, in cases where it is calculated, it would be useful to have information on the best strategic approach.

Fear and respect

Before the G20, I respected the police and was not particularly afraid of them.

Since the G20, I'm afraid of police and find it very difficult to respect them.

It appears that, in my emotional matrix, fear and respect correlate inversely, and might even be mutually exclusive.

I'm more inclined to cooperate with people when I respect them than when I fear them. Respect makes me actually want to cooperate, whereas fear makes me just not want to get caught not cooperating. (Nuance: fear doesn't make me not want to not cooperate, it just makes me not want to get caught not cooperating.)

It would be interesting to study how universal these feelings are.

Things They Should Study: income range for which additional tax credits would actually make a difference

All this election talk of tax credits makes me wonder how many people they're actually useful for.

People at the low end of the income scale hardly pay any tax anyway, and most of what they do pay gets refunded, so they wouldn't achieve any additional savings with additional tax credits.

But the more money you have, the more the savings from a tax credit become negligible. For example, I currently don't feel the tax credit I get for my TTC Metropass. If it disappeared, I wouldn't notice. However, I still feel my RRSPs. Someone who makes ten times what I make might not feel their RRSPs either.

Tax credits whose goal is to modify behaviour (fitness, home renovation) tend to apply for things that require a certain amount of disposable income. If your budget is so tight that you just can't find room for a kickboxing class or a new kitchen, you aren't going to be able to benefit from these.

And, of course, the more tax credits you already have, the less impact any additional tax credits will have. When I was in university, my tuition deduction and educational tax credits were huge (relative to my income at the time - now they'd be nothing more than a nice little bonus). But because of this, any additional credits would have been useless to me. I was already paying no taxes and getting money back, there was nothing left to deduct!

So someone should do research: for what segment of the population are tax credits useful, and for what segment are they useless? How big do they have to be? How many people have room for those kinds of expenditures in their budgets?

Things They Should Study: how comprehensible are phone answering scripts?

I'd say about half the time I call a business or office where an actual human answers the phone, I don't understand what they say when they answer. They just rattle it off so quickly I can't catch the information I'm looking for.

And, conversely, it's quite possible I rattle off my own phone answering script so quickly that people can't understand it. I recently had a guy repeatedly call my work number wanting help with his phone card, and I couldn't seem to convince him that I couldn't help him and he had the wrong number. In retrospect, he probably didn't catch a word of my greeting and thought he was calling the phone card place.

I think this problem might be due in part to the fact that callers don't always know how the phone is going to be answered. I could answer my phone with "Hello?" or with my name or with "Translation" (and, because it's translation, I could answer in another language that the wrong number is totally unprepared for.) But conversely, because we answer the phone several times a day, we tend to rattle it off automatically, like how most people rattle off "ThanksHaveANiceDay" at the end of a cash register transaction.

Someone should research this

Things They Should Study: the origin of the neener cadence

Picture a small child taunting his friend, tongue sticking out, thumbs to temples, fingers waving, saying "Neener neener neee-ner!" or "Nanny nanny boo boo!"

You know the exact cadence with which he's neenering, don't you? It's close to the tune of Ring Around the Rosie.

Why does everyone neener with the exact same cadence?

Someone needs to find out where this came from and why it's so universal.

Things They Should Study: kindness patterns

I blogged before about how I find that smaller kindnesses are bigger than bigger kindnesses. In my own life and experience, in the way my own mind and emotions work, the bigger kindnesses come more readily and with less effort, and feel like less of an imposition, whereas for the smaller kindnesses don't come readily and require more conscious effort (and, actually, use up more spoons for my introvert brain).

I'm thinking of all this because of a couple of people who have been in the news here in Toronto lately. (I know it's obvious who I'm talking about, but I'm not naming names in this post because I'm repeating hearsay and speculating on other people's thought processes. I don't want to slander people or propagate rumours or presume to know what's in their brains, but it happens that the inspiration for this idea and the best example of what I'm trying to explain is these specific individuals, so I'm compromising by making sure that this post isn't in their google results.)

The individuals in question have, with some frequency, very loudly and publicly made statements that I think we can all agree are ungenerous (in the sense of anti-generous rather than non-generous) about other people or groups of people. They are on public, often televised record calling names and yelling.

There are also many anecdotes of individual kindnesses and generosity perpetrated by these individuals. There are stories of them going far more out of their way than necessary to help someone who's having a problem. I know someone personally who has witnessed the more famous of these individuals making a specific effort to do something for a young fan despite the fact that he was going through a difficult time in his own life.

This juxtaposition is interesting. The fact that these people make ungenerous statements, yell, and call names often enough that they're known for it means that these ungenerous and rather angry thoughts are in their heads. After all, you don't utter something if the thought has never entered your head. But, at the same time, despite the ubiquity of the ungenerous thoughts in their heads, they're able to do the small kindnesses frequently enough to develop a reputation for it. I literally cannot fathom how a person's mind could possibly work that way, how both ungenerous thoughts and ease of inclination towards small kindnesses can coexist in the same brain, but it looks like it exists.

I certainly can't claim to be an objectively generous person, but I've never had thoughts as ungenerous as these individuals' public statements. I'm not saying this like it's virtuous or anything, it just doesn't occur to me. But despite the fact that my thoughts are less ungenerous, the smaller kindnesses for which these individuals are known don't come as easily to me. But, at the same time, bigger kindnesses and more macro-generous baseline behaviour (voting for the greater good, not speaking ungenerously about people in public) are default, practically second nature. I'd have to put thought and effort into not doing them. I can't say I never yell, but when I do it's more defensive. It's something like "Shut up and go away and leave me alone!" or "Why can't you just not hurt me?" rather than outright attacking someone. Again, I'm not claiming any of this as virtue, it's just how my brain works. And other people whom I like and with whom I identify seem to have brains that work this way too.

So this has me wondering: do different people have different patterns of generosity of thought vs. ease of small kindnesses vs. ease of big kindnesses? If so, does it correlate with some other factor? (Age? Gender? Wealth? Politics?)

This also has me thinking of something else I've noticed. There are some adults who consider a child polite based on the social formulas the child has been trained to use. If the kid says "Please" and "Thank you" and "Sir" and "Ma'am", they are deemed polite, without even thinking about looking at their actual behaviour. I find this odd because I, personally, don't care about the formulas at all. If a kid calls me by my first name and says "Can I have a cookie?", but they aren't a bully and don't wreck stuff or bring home a cockroach to keep as a pet, I consider them good and polite. I wonder if this correlates in any way? My gut instinct tells me that preferring children to use the correct social formulas regardless of actual behaviour would correlate with favouring small kindnesses over big kindnesses, but I have no evidence or anything.

Things They Should Study: what would it cost to make critical workers unbribable?

Apparently border guards might soon be authorized to strip search airport and port employees because they think these employees might be involved in smuggling illegal drugs.

This makes me wonder about the economics of the situation from the employees' point of view. How much money do they make? How much bribe money or whatever would they get for helping to smuggle drugs? How much bribe money can drug cartels afford to pay them? How much of a pay increase would it take to make this bribe money negligible to them? What if they offered the workers financial incentive greater than the bribe amounts for fingering known drug smuggling operations?

Has anyone done the numbers on this yet? If not, someone should.

Things They Should Study: do countries' political positions correlate with the strength of their economies?

Quick, name a European country that's having economic problems. Just keep the name of that country in mind when you click the link further down in this post.

A while back, I was pondering the fact that when we hear about European economic problems, we never hear about Scandinavian countries. We keep seeing articles about how this economic crisis shows that the European socialist model is unsustainable, but Scandinavia, which is generally considered the epitome of European socialism, is never mentioned.

Now think of the countries that are mentioned in conjunction with the economic crisis, like the country that you thought of at the beginning of this post.

Now click here to see where European governments fall on the political compass.

At first glance there seems to be a correlation, doesn't there?

I don't have the economic or political knowledge to conduct a proper analysis and determine definitively if there is in fact a correlation. But it would be really interesting if someone who does have the knowledge could do this.

Things They Should Study: what percentage of medical appointments are due to red tape?

Most of the medical appointments I've had in my adult life have been to renew my birth control prescription. Red tape requires that I see a doctor to keep taking the same medication I've always been taking.

My employer requires a doctor's note if you want to get your workstation ergonomized. My insurance requires a note from your primary care physician before it will cover the services of certain specialists.

After getting strep throat every year for most of my life, I can recognize it. However, I still have to go to the doctor to get a prescription for antibiotics.

Gardasil required four doctor's appointments: one to get the prescription, and three to have the doctor administer it.

Apart from a minimal amount of psychiatry, all the medical attention I've received in my adult life has been because of red tape. I didn't actually want or need to go to a doctor, I already knew what I needed, the doctor was just the gatekeeper.

In light of the idea that was recently floating around in Quebec to have patients pay a user fee every time they go to a doctor, I wonder what percentage of all medical appointments are like this? It really is not fair at all to make rules that the doctor has to be the gatekeeper even when you know what you need, and then charge people for going to the doctor.

Things They Should Study: economic return on refugees

My grandparents came here on a boat 50 years ago with their gaggle of children. They did manage to find jobs and be self-supporting, but if they had been economically dependent the entire time they were in Canada, plus their children had been economically dependent until adulthood, there would have been about 150 total person-years economically dependent on the state.

My grandparents' direct descendants have, so far, put in nearly 200 total person-years of full-time gainful employment, plus an additional 60 total person-years of part-time work like you have as a student.

The majority of their grandchildren are still in school. I'm the oldest and I'm not yet 30. The youngest is still in high school. Parity between my grandparents' hypothetical person-years of dependence and their descendants' person-years of productive employment may well have been reached before I even finished university. Barring mass unemployment, we're going to reach 300 person-years of productive employment within the next decades.

Wouldn't it be interesting to do research and see to what extent this pattern holds throughout the general population?

Edited to add: It has also been pointed out to me that some of my grandparents' descendants have run businesses and therefore created jobs, and some have been responsible for teaching or training future members of their own fields. (To say nothing of the fact that some have saved lives.) So our ROI is greater than just the taxes and consumer spending produced by our salaries.

Things They Should Study: the impact of gender imbalance on future generations

A while back, I read a book called Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived without Men After the First World War by Virginia Nicholson. So many men died in WWI that there were an enormous number of women of that generation who never married because there were simply not enough men to go around. (I'm trying to find the percentage of missing men but can't - both 10% and 25% come to mind, but there's an anecdote in the book where a teacher at a girls' school tells her class that only one in ten of them will get married.) Apparently this was historically unprecedented (which seems odd to me - there have always been wars - but that's not he point of this post). The book explores the situation of the women who never married, which was rather interesting, but today I found myself thinking it would be interesting to study this situation from the opposite perspective: what impact did this gender imbalance have on marriage and then on future generations?

(To explain what I'm trying to say here, I'm going to have to make a lot of gross generalizations. I'm taking a heterocentric, heteronormative approach, I'm reducing people's appeal as a spouse and as a human being to a number on the classic 1 to 10 scale, I'm presenting as a given the assumption that people are only "worthy" of spouses who are close to them on the 1 to 10 scale, and I'm assuming that children only look to adults of their own gender as role models. I do realize that human beings and relationships are a lot more complex nuanced than that, but I'm just trying to outline the general concept that I think someone should study so it gets silly to insert appropriate qualifiers into every single sentence.)

We can assume that the missing men were distributed evenly over the 1 to 10 scale. So normally only someone who is a 9 or 10 can get with another 10. But with all these men missing, there weren't enough 10 men for all the 10 women, so 10 women ended up with men as low as 8 or even 7. But meanwhile, 10 men never found themselves having to stoop to a 9. So you've got a whole generation of marriages where there are a significant number of wives who are objectively out of their husband's league, but few or no husbands who are out of their wife's league.

The thing is, people might not notice this is happening. The pool of prospective spouses available just…is. It isn't really something you question. For example, I have never in my life met someone, even in passing, who is independently wealthy. (I know that such people exist, I've read about them in books, but I've never met one in real life.) Therefore, if I were to write down everything I want in a prospective mate, it would never even occur to me to write down independently wealthy, any more than it would occur to me to say I want someone with a flying car. That just isn't something that happens in real life.

So because no one notices this is happening, as everyone comes back from WWI and that cohort starts to get married, the 1 to 10 scale gradually gets realigned. 10 women keep ending up with, say 8 men, so eventually a marriage that objectively consists of a 8 man and a 10 woman is assumed to be a fair match. And, as this new normal takes over, people look at the couple, figure they're well-matched by general social standards, there's no way he's a 10 and there's no way she's an 8, so they must both be 9s.

So then some time passes and all these people have children. The children look around, see their parents and their friends' parents and the other grownups around them, and blindly accept these misaligned matches as normal because they don't know anything else. They see the woman who is objectively a 10 and the man who is objectively an 8, and unquestioningly accept that both these people are 9s. So this creates a situation where women have to be "better" than men just to get the same number of points, but this children don't realize this because the whole world has always been like this for them.

So what impact does this have on the children? Does it cause girls to underestimate their worth and boys to overestimate their worth? (Or, alternatively or in addition, does it cause society as a whole to underestimate girls' worth and to overestimate boys' worth?) What impact does it have on the mating and dating game? What impact does it have on the next generation of children?

It was beyond the scope of the book I read, but, as we know about a generation after WWI there was WWII. Did this also result in a shortage of men? If so, did this exacerbate even more this now-socially-internalized idea whereby a woman has to be objectively better to be condsidered a 10 than a man does? How did this affect their kids (i.e. the Baby Boomers)?

Writing this out has given me a theory. Not sure how good a theory it is, but it's a theory that I have. You know how they keep talking about how boys are falling behind in education, how schools aren't serving them well etc.? What if it's really this idea, internalized and multiplied over several generations? Maybe boys feel "good enough" at a lower level of achievement than girls do? Maybe boys are just as happy with a 60% as girls are with an 80% for the same reasons that a man who, just a few generations ago, would have been considered a 6 is now considered evenly matched with a woman who, the same few generations ago, would have been an 8?

I have no idea how much of this is true or valid, but it would be an interesting thing for someone to research if they could figure out a methodology.

Things They Should Study: do kids see parent-child relationships as typical of all relationships?

A recurring theme in my relationship with my parents and how that affected my social skills is that as a child I took how my parents treated with me as an example of how I should treat others. To use one of the milder examples, if I didn't say "please" when asking for something, my parents would say "What do you say?" Therefore, in the rest of life, if someone asked for something without saying "please", I'd say to them "What do you say?" Not so very good for general social interaction with peers or elders, but I truly thought that was What's Done. When I first read Miss Manners in my early 20s, I was quite genuinely surprised to learn that it's rude to correct other people's manners. It would never have occurred to me.

This has come up in conversation with other people who happen to be parents (haven't discussed it with my own parents) and they all seemed surprised that it wouldn't occur to me that parenting is an exceptional circumstance. But I can't imagine how it would have occurred to me. That was life as I knew it, that's how the world had been every day of my whole life.

It would be interesting to study a bunch of children and see how many of them see parent-child relationships as typical of all relationships, and how many of them see them as exceptional.

Things They Should Study: gender ratios of different neighbourhoods

The other day I was sitting in my hairdresser's chair looking out the window, and I noticed that about 80% of passers-by were male. This morning, about 75% of the people in my section of the subway platform were female. I haven't made any other observations (I think this is going to lead me to walk around counting though), but it would be interesting to study whether there are patterns in different neighbourhoods or different places or different times of day.

Things They Should Study: is ESL harder when both parties are ESL?

I overheard a conversation today between two people, from two different countries, both of whom spoke English as a second language, speaking to each other in English because it's the lingua franca here in Toronto. They seemed to be having some difficulty, and I wondered if it's because both of them spoke English imperfectly in different ways, and they weren't accustomed to each other's imperfections. I didn't hear enough of the conversation to tell if this was the case, or if they would have had as much trouble with a native speaker of English.

However, it also occurred to me that it might be easier when both parties are ESL, because both their vocabularies evolved the same way, from textbook English. I was once told (by an expert in my field) that the typical speaker of English as a Second Language in their professional life has an English vocabulary numbering in the thousands of words, whereas a native speaker of English has an English vocabulary numbering in the hundreds of thousands of words. Most of the time we don't notice this. If someone speaking ESL knows words like "good", "great", "excellent", "fantastic", "wonderful", native speakers probably aren't going to notice that they don't know "groovy", "copacetic", "the bees knees", "gnarly", etc. But native speakers can sometimes come up with words like that and confuse ESL speakers, whereas other ESL speakers most likely wouldn't.

When I was in Germany, there were exchange students from all around Europe there, and how well I managed to converse with them varied based on the quality of their German (and, I'm sure, the quality of my German.) I can't identify any general trends. (My other languages were basically canceled out by the German immersion. After two weeks there, I couldn't even speak French, even though I could still understand it perfectly. When I reached for a French word, it came out in German.)

It would be really interesting to do research on this.

Things They Should Study: does athletic success correlate with religious faith?

Watching Joannie Rochette's short program, I found myself coveting whatever sports psychology she does. I wish I had that mental resilience and focus!

Coincidentally, the next day Rosie DiManno wrote a column about sports psychology, and I realized it would never work on me. I know some people who swear by visualization or mantras or positive thinking, but it doesn't work on me because I know that it's just visualization. I'm not actually doing anything, I'm just picturing stuff in my head.

Within my own mind, in terms of the thoughts and feelings I experience, my inability to do visualization come from the same place as my inability to have religious faith. I know that it is powered solely by believing in it, and because of that I'm unable to believe in it.

Elite athletes are obvious able to believe in it. I wonder if this also means that they're more likely to be capable of religious faith?

Things They Should Study: what is the impact of xmas on flu pandemics?

Public health officials are being accused of overinflating the flu threat get rid of extra vaccine doses, with the thinking that the flu threat is currently winding down.

But it seems to me that xmas could exacerbate the spread of the flu just because people tend to travel back to their families of origin.

By a quick mental head count, over xmas eve and xmas day I'm going to be seeing, talking to, and eating with (in rather close quarters) people from about 20 different households and 15 different schools/workplaces, including a few medical institutions. They could carry in viruses from any of those places, and any viruses brought in could be carried back to any of those places. And this is happening in many many families all around the world.

Surely that would have some impact on the spread of the flu?