1- Music Theory was particularly fun, because our teacher wrote a 6-part Latin jazz song and we performed it as a class, with some people singing notes, some people tapping desks and some people sliding pens across the spiral binding of a spiral-bound notebook. It was cool.
2- My humanities teacher cancelled our class on Wednesday for so reason at all, though we still have to turn in essays.
3 - I read a book for Democracy and the Social Sciences and I actually understood it.
4 - I heard a talk by Steven Levitt, U of C economics professor and author of Freakonomics. The room (it was actually in the lounge of another dorm) was totally packed and I was practically standing outside - that's outside the building, not just the room - but it was very interesting. He talked about a few topics; the one I fond most interesting was about the Dictator Game to study altruism, and why it is a pointless test.
5 - I wrote, with Daniel Green, my first article for the Chicago Shady Dealer, the satirical newspaper on campus. It will be published sometime in around 3 weeks, I hope.
6 - I had my first cup of Ramen soup as a college student.
In summary, today = yay.
Oh yeah. I also asked Professor Levitt what it was like to be on the Daily Show. Two things you may have wondered - Jon Stewart writes all his questions for the interview, nothing is done for him; and he reads all the books that authors go on the show to discuss.
8 comments:
So why is the dictator game no good?
Ah, a good question, and one I would have answered last night except it was late. If you want the short answer, scroll to the end. The long answer is here:
Basically, John List and Steve Levitt were talking, and Levitt said something like "It's great that people in the test want to give 30%-40% of their money away, but how come I've never once been on the subway and had someone come up to me and say 'I just got $10! Have some of it!'"
So List designed a new experiment - one where the "dictator" can either give $0-$10 away, or take a dollar from the other person. The results: Many, many people did nothing, a few still gave some money and a few took the dollar. Basically, the bell curve shifted to have most people do nothing.
This suggests that most people don't want to give money away, but they also want to seem like nice people because people, the scientists, are watching them. When the option of not stealing anything becomes "a nice thing to do" (whereas before it was the most selfish) most people would rather have more money.
Another experiment had people choosing between giving $0-$10 away and taking $0-$10 from the other person. The results were that people usually took around $5, which made not look terrible, at least in their minds, but still got them a lot of money.
The last experiment he told us about was where people first had to stuff envelopes for an hour and then they got $10. After that, they could choose whether they wanted to give any money away or take some from another envelope stuffer. Most people choose to keep their own money and not take anyone else's. This result satisfied Levitt because it does mirror reality - most people don't randomly give away money if they feel like they earned it, and they won't take other people's money if they think the other people earned theirs.
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Short answer:
The dictator game doesn't work because people will have different levels of altruism when they are being watched by scientists, so it's not a good experiment.
And with that, I think I should get some kind of prize for the longest comment on the blog so far.
Very thorough, thank you. That read like a wikipedia entry. In fact, you should go there and add it because the article on dictator game sucks.
Anyway, I never thought about the dictator game measuring altruism, but more about it measuring irrationality. If I offer you a $99-$1 split, you're making a dollar, and yet a lot of people would refuse that on the grounds that it's insulting. So people raise the split to what they seem to think is about fair, like a $60-$40 or something like that.
Still very interesting.
You should read the wikipedia article on the Pirate Game. There is a link at the bottom of the dictator game page.
Also - the dictator game doesn't have one person choose to accept the money or not; there doesn't even really need to be another person at all, as long as the subject thinks there is.
OK, then maybe I was misunderstanding the dictator game. The way I heard it, it was as follows.
Person A has to make an offer to person B of some split of sum C. If Person B accepts, they both get the money. If Person B declines, they both get nothing.
So if you do it with $100, the most typical splits were $60-$40. But that doesn't make sense. First off, why is the offerer more entitled to the money than the responder? They both are playing an equal role. On top of that, why wasn't it $99-$1? Responders would reject 99-1 offers because they felt insulted, as if it wasn't fair. But they were getting free money!
That's the game I thought you were talking about - I think it's a more complicated version of the dictator game.
No, that's not how I heard it. That seems like a more complex version of what Wikipedia calls the Pirate Game. In that one, 5 pirates are divind up treasure and the senior-most pirate proposes a solution, which the others vote on.
Ya, I read the pirate game you told me about. It's really cool.
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