The Lance Armstrong affair post-mortem part 1

I'm still not all the way through the USADA report on Lance Armstrong. It's old news by this point to most people, especially as most Americans only followed cycling for the years Armstrong was relevant.

This won't be my moral judgment on the whole affair, and anyhow that's probably the least interesting information I could offer up at this point given that most people have already affiliated themselves on one side or the other of the argument.

I did want to highlight, though, some more broadly interesting bits of the USADA report and Tyler Hamilton's tell-all book The Secret Race for those who didn't bother with them.

First of note, and I must confess to feeling deep guilt for being fascinated by this material, are some of the emails between some of the players in this affair. For example, here's an email exchange between Armstrong and then teammate Frankie Andreu from Andreu's wife Betty Andreu's affidavit (PDF). It won't take long to read, go ahead and power through it, and then come back.

Amazing, right? I don't mean amazing in the sense of inspiring (for example, in the sense of giving hope to millions of cancer patients). I mean amazing in the sense of how deeply trivial the whole argument seems and yet how heated it becomes, in the very real way that friendships and relationships often fracture in the real world. To be honest, it's a bit of a coincidence that this bickering email exchange is even included in the USADA report as it's only tangentially related to doping (and then only in the sense of demonstrating the retaliatory environment Lance threatened team members with, or at least that's the guess on the part of me with my zero law degrees).

I already have a deep fascination of this entire form, the emotional battle fought via email. A close variant are professional coaches or players who complain about each other to reporters instead of to each other. Or friends who bicker via text messages. These are all extreme forms of passive aggression, and passive aggressive people are both cowardly and riveting.

When I read these emails I picture people pounding away at their keyboards, faces constricted with anger. The same anonymity shield that enables trolling has enabled an entire class of passive aggressive warfare the likes of which the world has never seen.

If you ever planned to send an email like this, my advice is to not do it. Or if you write the email, don't send it. Keep it there, memorize it, then go find the person and speak to them in person, using your email as an outline. It will be far more productive, you will likely strip some of the most cruel attacks way down when speaking in person, and some time later you'll read the email, find it shockingly melodramatic, and delete it. Having been in the business world for a while now, I'm often convinced that half of becoming a senior leader in a company is learning to shed away layers of passive aggression.

But if you can't help yourself and must hide behind the technological veil of email, then at least lob grenades on topics of enough public interest that these emails surface to the public so we can enjoy hours of juicy textual soap opera magic.

The Andreu - Armstrong email exchange is interesting because two years later, Armstrong and Andreu have a more tender email exchange (PDF), with Armstrong prodding Andreu to return to racing.

Many of the emails are intriguing not for the nuggets about doping but for all the other human interaction that just happen to be packed into the email around them. For example, this email from Christian Vande Velde to Frankie Andreu (PDF) has only the briefest relevance to the doping case (It mentions "You'd be find for a day under the proper care of Louis" which is a one-line reference to Luis del Moral, a Spanish doctor among the central figures in the doping investigation). Surrounding it is a friendly check-in email that conveys much about rider psychology and the particular fabric of male camaraderie among the team, in the way that old letter exchanges between Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning tell us so much about the nature of not just their romance but all romances and great loves of their age.

Here is another rich transcript, this one an IM exchange between Frankie Andreu and Jonathan Vaughters, discussing their feelings about Lance's doping program. It's a riveting exchange, indicative of how much everyone inside cycling knew about how the doping worked, down to specific details, and how Andreu and Vaughters felt about Armstrong (as with most people not in Armstrong's inner circle, they thought he was an asshole), but even more remarkable to me in some ways is the sheer length of the exchange. I text a fair bit, but I have never had a single text message exchange of this duration. You can feel the intensity of emotion from Andreu and Vaughters rising off of these short bursts of text from this traditionally concise communication medium. Vaughters sense of guilt and remorse is palpable, and it makes his op-ed in the NYTimes  many years later (published in August this year) feel like the closing of a loop.

Today we collect and republish remarkable letters from years past at sites like Letters of Note. But for modern communication, we're not waiting. We have sites like HeTexted and Texts From Last Night commemorating communications in near real-time for public dissection. I hope we have sites in the future that publish email exchanges as well. It's the dominant long-form communication method of this age, and in so many ways it's the richest documentation of human interaction, especially within tech companies where it's the dominant communication medium.

I had an idea for a series of books documenting tech company histories comprised entirely of just emails sent to and from employees of that company. Maybe the series would be titled 1001 emails, and each book in the series would look at a different company, like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, etc. It will probably never happen given how secretive tech companies are, but that would be amazing, wouldn't it?

Until then, if you're just mildly interested in the Lance Armstrong case, I suggest the exchanges linked above, and if you want to dive in deeper, Appendix A (at the top of the page here) holds the majority of the most readable, general interest material. We may not get our hagiographic Lance Armstrong biopic starring Matt Damon anymore, but in this material is in some ways a richer vein of human drama.

Using coolness to age breakthrough technology

From a recap of a Neil deGrasse Tyson talk:

Tyson’s theory is that technology retains its coolness factor so long as it remains best-in-class. Therefore, whenever the coolest objects in a particular technology are decades old, that’s an immediate notice that we have essentially abandoned that technology. 

It's a simple but still appealing theory, that coolness can be used as a way of carbon-dating timeless and breakthrough technology and also to see which sectors we've abandoned.

The tech gadget I owned that elicited the most adoring throngs of people when I first purchased it is still the first iPhone. To me, no product embodies all that the modern Apple is about than that first iPhone. I wish I hadn't lost mine.

Pre-mortems, over-optimism as normal, and luck versus fortune

I like this bit from an interview with one of my favorite thinkers, Michael Mauboussin:

Yeah, so most people are familiar with a post-mortem, right? 
Which is a play off the same words, and a post-mortem is we bought this stock and it went down, so let's get around the table, talk about why we made the decision, how we got it wrong, as you pointed out, and see if there's lessons that we can glean from that. And again, post-mortems are very popular in different disciplines. 

A pre-mortem, and this idea, by the way, was developed by a social psychologist named Gary Klein. He has a very different concept. He says before we actually make the decisions, so we've not put any money to work yet. Let's launch ourselves into the future, and let's just say it's July 2013, a year from now. Let's say that we made the investment and it turned out badly. Now each of us independently should write down on a piece of paper, or maybe even write a little article about what went wrong. 

And it turns out when people go through that exercise, they are able to identify up to 30% more factors or variables than they would just standing in the present looking to the future. So somehow this idea of extracting yourself, putting yourself into the future looking back to the present, opens up your mind a little bit versus standing in the present and looking into the future. And it's a funny thing because you can think about all sorts of predictions people have made about the world, about whatever it is, about energy prices, gold prices, economic growth, what have you, and you can see it's very difficult to anticipate what's likely to happen, so pre-mortem can help open up your mind and get you to contemplate or evaluate these variables. 

Related is another impulse control hack for large purchase decisions, which is to not give in to your initial impulse. Instead, wait 30 days, let your initial fervor dissipate, and then see if you still feel the strong urge to buy.

Maybe someone will devise a way to enforce this for internet purchasing, where the time between purchase decision and follow-through can be so short. Instead of a 1-click button like Amazon has, this service would offer a 30-day-click button. You could use it on any site, and if you pressed it, the service would not purchase the item but instead send you an email or mobile notification once a week asking if you still wanted the item. If you ever responded no, your order would be cancelled. If you clicked yes every time, the service would finally process the order at the end of those 30 days.

Another snippet from the interview I liked, was Mauboussin riffing on Dan Gilbert:

We have more optimism than is justified by the facts. And in fact, it turns out that people who are depressed, which is obviously a very difficult situation, but people who are depressed are much more realistic about the future. Actually, normal, healthy, mentally healthy individuals is going to be too optimistic, but that optimism, as you point out in the Henry Ford thing is what gets you up every morning and gets you to get out there and try to succeed, so there's something to that. 

That is, a "normal, healthy" human being is calibrated to be over-optimistic.

One last bit I liked is Mauboussin clarifying his distinction between luck and fortune:

And I think this idea that I define luck very specifically, because you mentioned something else about him, so I'm going to define luck as having three sorts of features. One is it happens to an individual or a group, say sports team or what have you. The second thing is it can be good or bad, so there's sort of symmetry. The values don't have to be symmetrical, but there's good and there's bad. And the third thing is that it would be reasonable to expect another outcome, so what happened was not the only thing that could have happened. 

And so often people say, Well gee, I was lucky to be born into the family I was born, right? Or I was lucky to be born at the time, and by the definition I just gave, that would actually not be lucky; that would be fortunate, and that's important, but it wouldn't be luck as I'm defining it. So I think Buffett was fortunate to be born when he was born with the skills that he was born with. That would not be luck by my definition, so that may be semantics, but that's; it's actually a distinction that's useful when you think about predictions. 

Follow-up on the persistence of poverty

After coming across my post on his book The Persistence of Poverty, Professor Karelis wrote me a note. I'm including it here for those who might not revisit that post.

Thanks for blogging my book on poverty. I couldn't figure out how to comment on your post so am trying this route. There has been empirical work supporting my theory. Here is one reference, from October 2010 journal Frontiers in Neuroscience. Experimental subjects were (as I predicted, without knowing about the lab work) risk loving when they started in pain and were confronted with the choice of remaining in their original state and taking a bet that would either alleviate their pain by a certain amount or make it worse by that amount. I have to say I consider that pretty obvious and unsurprising, and as I argued in my book it has only escaped economists because the accidents of intellectual history caused them to pose the question in a misleading way. 

Regards, Charles

I agree with Karelis that the idea that those in painful situations might become more risk-loving rather than risk-averse is not surprising. You don't need to have lived in poverty to understand the impulse. Anyone who has taken a few bad beats at the poker or blackjack table and then started pressing has launched themselves off of the optimal risk-reward curve in a fit of emotion.

At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok points to a study (abstract) that also attempts to explain why the poor engage in economically self-destructive behavior. The abstract:

Poor individuals often engage in behaviors, such as excessive borrowing, that reinforce the conditions of poverty. Some explanations for these behaviors focus on personality traits of the poor. Others emphasize environmental factors such as housing or financial access. We instead consider how certain behaviors stem simply from having less. We suggest that scarcity changes how people allocate attention: It leads them to engage more deeply in some problems while neglecting others. Across several experiments, we show that scarcity leads to attentional shifts that can help to explain behaviors such as overborrowing. We discuss how this mechanism might also explain other puzzles of poverty.

The study's approach to poverty reminds me of the theory that we all have a finite amount of discipline to expend each day, and after it's gone, we turn into self-indulgent pleasure-seekers. Anyone who has collapsed on their sofa after a brutally long day at work and popped a beer and watched an hour of Sportscenter or Here Comes Honey Boo Boo instead of going for a workout can attest to the explanatory power of this idea.

I rely on Tabarrok's summary since the study's findings are behind a paywall.

SMS argue that immediate problems draw people’s attention and as people use cognitive resources to solve these problems they have fewer resources left over to solve or even notice other problems. In essence, it’s easier for the rich than the poor to follow the Eisenhower rule–”Don’t let the urgent overcome the important”–because the poor face many more urgent tasks. My car needed a brake job the other day – despite this being a relatively large expense I was able to cover it without a second’s thought. Compared to a poorer person I benefited from my wealth twice, once by being able to cover the expense and again by not having to devote cognitive resources to solving the problem.

Both this study and Karelis' work reframe the behavior of the poor in a way that is still logical instead of pinning it on the personalities of those in poverty. That's important, and as Tabarrok notes, we must be especially vigilant to guard against fundamental attribution error in analyzing the behavior of those in poverty.