Reviews Archives - Page 8 of 12

Thinking Strategically

As I was mentioning a couple of weeks back, I have been reading Thinking Strategically by Avinash Dixitt and Barry Nalebuff. This is a pretty old book, being first published in 1991 and the version I was reading is the 1993 paperback re-issue – there was no more revisits to this book by the authors since then but it’s been in print until now. I believe it’s largely used as readings for undergraduate economics students as well as students of business or management schools.

The 2 authors are great teachers of Game Theory in Princeton and Yale and have often adapted the principles this somewhat mathematical subject to the less mathematical real world. Thinking Strategically is a great attempt at discussing strategic thinking that follows from game theoretical analysis for the layman.

The good thing about ideas on strategic thinking is that their principles hold even when the examples they are attached to often become obsolete or arcane – that is not to say that Thinking Strategically features arcane examples. Most of the examples used to bring ideas across in the book are simple, often bordering trivia but they illustrate the essence of the concepts and can be used to explain the principles for similar but more complex issues. One of the case studies brought up that I particularly love is the one about a three-way duel where we have 3 shooters of varying abilities.

Each shooter fires at someone (or something) each round; there’s is fixed order as to who gets to shoot first. The one who’s allowed to shoot first is a poor shooter with an accuracy of only 30%, the second has an accuracy of 80% and the last is a sharp shooter who shoots with an accuracy of 100%. The question is that if you’re the first shooter and allowed to go first, who would you choose to shoot?

An analysis of this “game” gives us a surprising but convincing result. If you choose to shoot the average shooter, and succeed, you will definitely lose because the next in line would be the sharp shooter and he would shoot you. If you choose to shoot the sharp shooter and hit, the average shooter will shoot you, leaving you with a 20% chance of survival. And even if you survive, you only have 30% chance of hitting him later. You might say, this mediocre shooter is so lousy, he’ll probably have to lose anyways. But you can actually raise your chances of winning by choosing a more intelligent strategy: To fire into the air.

This way, the average shooter will get his turn and attempt to shoot the sharp shooter since shooting you and succeeding mean he’ll have to die when the sharp shooter’s turn comes. If he succeeds, the mediocre shooter gets to try his hands at killing the average shooter. If he fails, the sharp shooter will immediately kill him and that once again, leaves the mediocre shooter with a chance of 30% to kill the sharp shooter. The somewhat counter-intuitive strategy of shooting at no one raise the chances of the mediocre shooter winning substantially.

The principle alluded by this example is that if you’re a weak player; it is wise to allow the stronger players to make their moves and get rid of all each other before making a move and fire your best shot at the one left standing. Now that we surface the principle, the logic of such a choice becomes more intuitive.

Thinking Strategically is a great read for students who likes to think and don’t mind re-reading some of the statements in the book a couple of times to understand the explanation behind some strategic moves. It teaches an important skill of looking forward and reasoning backwards and shows you the power of its application in all sorts of “games”. The book might make you feel like you’ll become smarter but trust me, it’s not that easy to apply strategic thinking that quickly in real life and often, we need a degree of foresight that we would almost definitely lack.

Random Issues

In this holiday season, The Economist discusses Joel Waldfogel’s Scroogenomics with a little humour. Of course, the signalling effect of gifts is once again ignored.

Emily Yoffe writes about sibling’s “rivalry” on Slate.com. The article explores the love-hate cycles that siblings undergo through the lifetime and considers the influence of parents. In general, the article’s inclinations is that having siblings is generally better than not having any; children benefits from unintended ‘guidance’ from older siblings especially through even the mildest verbal bullying. It helps to have someone close to your age beside you most of the time when you’re young because it prepares you for social interaction and also helps you understand the mind of another. Perhaps most importantly, having a sibling makes an ego that blooms out of a single child less possible.

The small number of psychologists who study sibling relationships say that their intensity in childhood helps prepare us for the adult social world we will someday need to navigate. After, all every day siblings teach the necessary, if painful, early lesson that you are not the world’s most important person.

Pop-Science seem to be poking fun at Avatar; suggesting that the film is made possible by technologies and science that would be impossible in a world that is implicitly advocated in the film. It is interesting to note that several of the film’s actors have signed on for potential sequels and as my sister rightly points out: these actors, like Sam Worthington and Zoë Saldaña are not exactly going to appear in the future films since they’re all Na’vi anyways and merely helping to generate the computer graphics if not offering their dubbing services as well.

Julian Baggins

A trip to the bookstore introduced me to two books by Julian Baggini, who turns out to be a ‘philosopher’. It’s rare to find anyone with this title to their names but he is by a large a journalist or writer from my point of view given the works he produce. The two books I stumbled on, which I found immensely useful to students of General Paper in Junior College level is The Duck That Won the Lottery and 99 Other Bad Arguments as well as The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten and 99 Other Thought Experiments.

The Duck is about arguments and rhetoric, which are aspects of writing and presentation that is usually missing in our General Paper classes. We have extremely few lessons where we truly tear apart arguments and examine rhetoric used by writers, politicians, activist. Getting to know how to avoid bad arguments and thereby make good ones would not only help lawyers in court but an ordinary student when it comes to presenting his/her ideas during lesson, trying to engage peers in a project/idea as well as General Paper writing.

The Pig, on the other hand, examines arguments made by others – basically a GP lesson for each of the text or passage examined in the book. It claims to hold thought experiments but basically Baggini is merely making readers think twice about arguments or scenarios presented and the ideas behind them. I didn’t quite read the books but simply browse through them. Even if they don’t present the topics well, they are good starting point for how you should actually be studying GP.

Baggini writes a lot of other books, perhaps more related to philosophy than the two I pointed out. In addition, he also does a magazine, TPM: The Philosopher’s Magazine, which looks pretty impressive.

The Value of Pessimism

I felt a bit vindicated to read in the Lexington column in The Economist‘s Christmas edition that two writers have decided to tackle ‘the American tendency towards mindless optimism’. Being a habitual pessimist it does feel good occasionally to read about people who are pessimists and stand up for their views instead of let themselves be bashed by optimists.

The two writers mock the optimists for being too positive and too dependant on positive thinking to help them in their lives, from defeating cancer to not gaining weight. I like that the example of the banking crisis was used to justify when one should listen to ‘the killjoys’ and stop letting the bubble inflate. Optimism apparently blinds sometimes, and this is where pessimism comes in. I like how one of the writers allude pessimism to ‘foul weather’ like thunderstorms: it might be dampening and depressing, but to some it refreshes and energises them. It can wake people up from their daydreams and their eternal sunshine (even though many people love thunderstorms because they can sleep comfortably through the cool weather).

But of course, there needs to be some optimism. Ultimately, Lexington argues that pessimism should be taken like a pinch of salt, just a pinch / ounce and not too much. For instance, one of the writers (a conservative) argues that mass immigration will not benefit America, but ultimately ‘America was built on the mass immigration of optimists’. I guess there needs to be a balanced dose of both sides.

On a side-note, reading The Economist makes me feel more and more pessimistic about the world… is it because of the coverage, or are world affairs really that gloomy and glum?

Science Bits

White Gramophone — Blasting out in 60, 59, 58...

It’s Christmas today and I have no Christmas gifts for my readers besides a new discovery. Scientific American offers a great podcast series called ’60-Seconds Science’. It offers bits of scientific discoveries from recent research within 60 seconds; the information is smaller than bite size and definitely don’t require much chewing, which makes it perfect for anyone tuning in to look for an anecdote for a speech or introduction for an article.

‘If Time flew, you had fun’ is a pretty interesting one and the same can be said for Caffeine Merely Masks Alcohol’s Effect. The narrator delivers their science bits in the most entertaining way for something so academic. For people who fancy social sciences and the less technical areas of science, the podcast is a wonderful window to the science mankind is engaging in today.

For other intelligent content delivered in 60 seconds, check out 60-second Psych and 60-second Earth. Who knows, you might just pick up some bits of interesting facts to start a conversation with a stranger.

Leadership Review

ERPZ explores quite a lot of stuff; from matters about studying smart to the huge issues surrounding economics and the environment. This are the efforts to cover what students need to learn about and know (true to our objective of ‘Educating students about being students’), but we seem to have missed out something really important in today’s world and that’s “Leadership”.

I started out reading a recent issue of Fortune Magazine, which featured an article on How to build great leaders, uncovering the different MNCs methods of identifying and grooming leaders for their organzation. A second article on leadership discusses the leadership during a crisis or recession. Talent on Tap, an article from The Economist talks about the increasing trend of getting temporary big bosses to sit in the autonomous firms and thus helping to tide the firm over a crisis or avert one.

Finally, an article from Knowledge @ SMU discusses the implication for leadership in individuals with different degree of self-monitoring. They suggested how high self-monitor individuals stand out as informal leaders although the low self-monitors are the ones who ends up in position of authority. I like to think that high self-monitors are suitable for ad-hoc leadership roles or to lead during special circumstances, perhaps why firms need temp bosses. In long run, during ordinary day to day management and leadership, the consistency of low self-monitors probably stand out and will become more important. If you’re interested to find out whether you score high on the self-monitoring scale, you can check out this test.

Progress or regress?

An article from The Economist‘s Christmas special edition examines the idea of progress of humanity, especially in the past century and this. I had problems reading this initially as it feels rather heavy on philosophy, but in essence I gather that in terms of health and economic growth we have made tremendous progress, but in terms of our humanity our progress is questionable.

It even raises the possibility that the concept of progress could be misguided or abused. Take, as mentioned in the article, how Hitler used ‘progress’ and subsumed it into ‘the shared destiny of a (German) nation’. All the more reason to question what progress is. So what exactly constitutes progress?

It seems like to be able to determine whether we have really ‘progressed’, we need to examine different parameters, such as in terms of science, in terms of material wealth… I never found progress this difficult to define until I encountered this article. I examine and read this from a very layman and not from a philosophical point of view, so pardon me if I appear naive or ill-informed.

Corporate Responsibility

Corporate Social Responsibility — More ideas to have more trees

While we tinker with the idea that governments and politics are important sources of forces for the good when it comes to climate, corporations are already doing loads in the real world with the advent of Corporate Social Responsibility.

To be frank, CSR can sometimes be make-up for the company’s public face but there are still substantial number of firms who are doing real big good stuff and tackling different aspects of social costs the company might have inflicted on the society. Knowledge @ Wharton introduces the CSR moves of Campbell, which covers not only environmental actions but also social programmes (mostly to do with employees).

The Economist thinks little of CSR but highlights the ordinary good that firms and companies does by just doing their own stuff (manufacturing, marketting, improving, innovating). The newspaper argues that business people should probably trumpet these achievements of fostering innovation, cooperation between groups and individuals across the globe besides being so engrossed with CSR.

Sometimes I guess if you look on the bright side, everyone is probably doing good through being selfish – the central idea of economics.

Tiger Trouble

Tiger Woods look like he’s really in deep trouble; James Surowiecki traces the reason how Tiger Woods’ image is going down with the scandals and gave a thorough analysis on how the image of these celebrity figures are tied to products and firms they endorse or act as the public face for.

He even did a follow-up on his New Yorker blog to highlight the trouble Woods got into with the different firms and brands linked to him. He decided that Woods’ image is quite wrecked for the professional sponsorships from non-golf related stuff would probably cut back quite substantially.

John Cassidy did another analysis of what went wrong for Tiger Woods in the entire episode and explains why Tiger Woods need to get back into Professional golfing fast – assuming he’s able to maintain his focus and discipline.

Meaningful, I’m not so sure

Key states have announced what they call a “meaningful” agreement at the Copenhagen Climate Summit to tackle climate change. The agreement between the US, China, Brazil, India and South Africa would set a mitigation target to limit warming to no more than 2C and, importantly, to take action to meet this objective.

The five-nation brokered deal promised to deliver $30bn of aid for developing nations over the next three years, and outlined a goal of providing $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poor countries cope with the impacts of climate change. The agreement also included a method for verifying industrialised nations’ reduction of emissions. The US had insisted that China dropped its resistance to this measure.

However, it seems that only the US and China are supposedly “happy” from a meeting which seemingly had a “positive result”, or rather, what I term as a poor return from the 2 weeks worth of discussion.

In the face of a globalized world and the many challenges that we face, what the US and China put forth together seemingly only benefits them. For instance, nothing is done about limiting carbon emissions and on a legally binding treaty, something which sort of “liberalizes” the major powers in the form of US, China and India. With US out of Kyoto and the lack of a legally binding contract, China and India can be said to be free to do whatever they want, with all three nations insisting that national sovereignty comes first.

Now, I’m not saying national sovereignty should be ignored, but as we attempt to tackle a problem that we should have been engaged in long ago, we realize that the Copenhagen Accord, as Jo Leinen, chairman of the European Parliament’s environment committee described, is a completely “disappointment and below our expectations”.

Selfish interests of the global powers dominated the discussion table in Copenhagen, while the rest of the world are let down by their inability to co-operate and come up with a more radical approach to the problem. Yes, this is progress from what has come before, a necessity, but whether it will truly solve the problem, no. The roots of the problem ultimately lie in the countries’ inability to break out of their shell – their inability to come to a solid-enough compromise, and their covert belief that the economy should come first. This inability to commit to this cause from the US, China and India seemingly portrays them in a green limelight.

Progress has been made, yes, but it’s no longer about the ability to make progress, that almost didn’t happen, but rather, how fast we can reach humanity’s goal.

The clock is ticking.