Great New Blog!

I have discovered some great blogs from reading the freakonomics blog. I discovered indexed.blogspot.com, a picture/diagram humor blog... the author and i seem to share the same sense of humor.

Today Freakonomics referenced http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com a British psychology blog which has many entries about decision making and happiness which seems to be mostly what i write about.

Overconfidence

There is a lot of academic research in behavioral economics on how individuals tend to be overconfident. This leads people to make irrational decisions which is basically what the field of behavioral economics is all about.

One of my favorite studies is a survey was given to college students that asked them about their own chance of positive events (ex: marriage, income, career success etc) and the chance of their classmates. On average people, rate their own chances for success/happiness to be much higher than their classmates. Here is a link to an abstract of the study http://content.apa.org/journals/psp/39/5/806

View from my hotel room in Sayulita, Mexico

Whenever I go on a beach vacation, I get hotel anxiety. Naturally, I always want to be near the beach, but when travelling to a unfamiliar place, you never really know what you are going to get. Is it worth paying a premium to stay on the beach even though staying on the "beach" could easily mean a dumpy piece of sand? Should I spend more as a form insurance that I will be next to a nice beach? Should I play it safe and stay inland and thereby avoid some beach premium cost?

On two visits to Hawaii, my beach hotel didn't exactly live up to my standards (dumpy piece of sand) and on a trip to Pismo Beach, I was right in front of the only beach in California that you are allowed to drive on (read redneck hangout).

I am in Sayulita, Mexico right now and my beach hotel is awesome. There is a patio area with two hammocks that look out onto the ocean. I can literally fall out of my room onto a great beach where i can go surfing or boogie boarding. I did the latter twice today and plan on going surfing tomorrow. The only downside is that it doesn't have hot water but it does have wifi... a trade I would take every day of the week.


Here is a picture from the hammock.

Feature Creep

There was a great article in the New Yorker in May about how consumer electronic products often have too many features and why this happens. The dilemma is that products with lots of features sell well but, at the same time, they are also the products that are most frequently returned. This puts consumer product manufacturers in a tough place because more features=more sales but it also means a poor user experience.

The most interesting part about this article is how people make purchasing decisions and don't seem to know what is in their best interest, or at least have a hard time processing trade-offs. Consumers overestimate how many features they will use and don't seem to take into account the added learning or complexity.

"The Key To Happiness is Lowering Your Expectations"

My own indexed diagram

My New Favorite Blog

I just discovered this blog Indexed (http://indexed.blogspot.com/) where the author, Jessica Hagy, draws diagrams on index cards to explain something usually in a humorous way.

Here are some of my favorites:

A Heart Warming Story

A story about how a charity has brought porn to small childrin in third world countries.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/21/olpc-brings-porn-to-the-third-world/

Facebook > MySpace

A UC Berkeley PhD student published a paper arguing that Facebook users are more socioeconomically advantage than MySpace users. As this blog entry explains, the findings are not very surprising.


http://www.freakonomics.com/blog/2007/06/27/myspace-v-facebook-the-class-divide/

Famous Video of Stephen Colbert Losing It On The Daily Show

When Viacom forced YouTube to take down all their content, most of the best Daily Show clips were removed. Fortunately for the website www.colbertondemand.com, the famous Stephen Colbert deep throating banana clip is back. Take a look:



View More Colbert Videos

Jane Fonda One Ups Stephen Colbert

Jane Fonda went on The Colbert Report last week and totally turned the tables on Stephen. Most hilarious five minutes of television ever.

eBay's New Widget Tool

Trying out eBay's new widget tool. I have been eyeing an orange Mini Cooper for a while so thought I would use that. Note: I work for eBay.

Low Expectations is the Key to Happiness

A study by a Danish epidemiologist found that for over the 30 years, the citizens of Denmark have scored higher than any other Western country on measures of life satisfaction. The author of the study attributed the finding to Denmark's culture of low expectations.

The New York Times wrote an article summarizing the study and you can link to the original study here .

Its a rough ride until 45

Slate published an article summarizing a recent study by David Blanchflower of Dartmouth and Andrew Oswald of Warwick which contains some sobering findings. The main finding, or the one i found most interesting, is how happiness evolves with age. Happiness over people's lifetimes is a U-shaped curve: there is a gradual decline from ages 16 to 45, you bottom out and then your happiness rises from age 45 on into old age.

I have mentioned this study to friends and everyone instinctively jumps to the conclusion that 45 is the age when your kids leave home. My hypothesis is that at 45 you have sufficiently lowered your expectations and have come to terms with the fact that you are not going to be as wealthy, famous, renowned etc as you expected and you learn to appreciate what you have. Perhaps we should all expect a little bit less out of life.