When introverts should drink coffee

In his book Me, Myself, and Us: The Science of Personality and the Art of Well-Being, psychologist Brian Little argues that introverts shouldn't drink coffee before an important meeting, or anything like it.

Why does coffee seem to have this effect on introverts?
This isn't my own research, but it's based on the theory of extraversion by Hans Eysenck and research by William Revelle of Northwestern University. It's the idea that introverts and extraverts differ in the level of neocortical arousal in the brain — in other words, how alert or responsive you are to your environment. According to this theory, introverts are over the optimal level — that is, more easily stimulated — and extraverts under the optimal level. 

It's more complex than that, but this is a useful model because it allows us to make some predictions. This suggests that performance will be compromised for introverts if they are exposed to stimulating situations, or if they ingest a stimulant (such as caffeine),which pushes them even further away from the optimal level. 

So when should introverts have their coffee, then?
Later in the day would be better; at any rate, they should try not to have caffeine right before something like an important meeting, as I say in the book.

Being cold as a weight-loss technique?

Is the fact that Americans can be warm year-round one reason they are so obese?

That's the theory of Ray Cronise, former NASA materials scientist.

Cronise’s latest ideas are laid out in a 2014 article he co-authored with Andrew Bremer, who was then at Vanderbilt University (he is now at the National Institutes of Health), and the Harvard geneticist David Sinclair, who is well known for his recent work on resveratrol (the “anti-aging” antioxidant found in red wine) and sirtuins—enzymes that help control metabolism. Sirtuins are active during times of stress, including when a person is hungry, and are thought to be related to the known life-prolonging effects of very-low-calorie diets.

Cronise, Bremer, and Sinclair propose what they call the “Metabolic Winter” hypothesis: that obesity is only in small part due to lack of exercise, and mostly due to a combination of chronic overnutrition and chronic warmth. Seven million years of human evolution were dominated by two challenges: food scarcity and cold. “In the last 0.9 inches of our evolutionary mile,” they write, pointing to the fundamental lifestyle changes brought about by refrigeration and modern transportation, “we solved them both.” Other species don’t exhibit nearly as much obesity and chronic disease as we warm, overfed humans and our pets do. “Maybe our problem,” they continue, “is that winter never comes.”

Their article joins a growing body of research on the metabolic effects of cold exposure, some of which I’ve reported on previously. Earlier last year, in the journal Cell Metabolism, researchers from the National Institutes of Health likened these effects to those of exercise, arguing that a better understanding of endocrine responses to cold could be useful in preventing obesity. The lead researcher in that study, Francesco Celi, published more research in June, finding that when people cool their bedrooms from 75 degrees to 66 degrees, they gain brown fat, the metabolically active fat that burns calories to generate heat. (Having brown fat is considered a good thing; white fat, by contrast, stores calories.) Another 2014 study found that, even after controlling for diet, lifestyle, and other factors, people who live in warmer parts of Spain are more likely to be obese than people who live in the cooler parts.

If you want to try this out for yourself, the article mentions a device called the Cold Shoulder, a vest that holds ice packs, which you can wear around the house to try to burn more calories. You can buy the Cold Shoulder weight loss vest on Amazon for $149.

This still all sounds speculative, but I do sleep much better in really cold rooms. When I'm in a hotel and need a good night's sleep, I always crank up the A/C and bury myself under the covers.

I came home from vacation in Del Mar to a 63 degree apartment in San Francisco today, and I'm not going to turn on the heat. Damn it is cold.

Elf on the Shelf

Not having any kids of my own, I had not heard of the whole Elf on the Shelf tradition until this Christmas break when I spent a lot of time with my nephews and nieces. Every morning my niece Averie would wake up and do a search for her elf, whose name I've forgotten already. I had no idea this had been all the rage with young kids since 2005.

Some researchers have studied the cultural phenomenon and concluded it may be a troubling way of acclimating children to life in a surveillance state.

Through play, children become aware about others’ perspectives: in other words, they cultivate understandings about social relationships. The Elf on the Shelf essentially teaches the child to accept an external form of non-familial surveillance in the home when the elf becomes the source of power and judgment, based on a set of rules attributable to Santa Claus. Children potentially cater to The Elf on the Shelf as the “other,” rather than engaging in and honing understandings of social relationships with peers, parents, teachers and “real life” others.

What is troubling is what The Elf on the Shelf represents and normalizes: anecdotal evidence reveals that children perform an identity that is not only for caretakers, but for an external authority (The Elf on the Shelf), similar to the dynamic between citizen and authority in the context of the surveillance state. Further to this, The Elf on the Shelf website offers teacher resources, integrating into both home and school not only the brand but also tacit acceptance of being monitored and always being on one’s best behaviour--without question.

By inviting The Elf on the Shelf simultaneously into their play-world and real lives, children are taught to accept or even seek out external observation of their actions outside of their caregivers and familial structures. Broadly speaking, The Elf on the Shelf serves functions that are aligned to the official functions of the panopticon. In doing so, it contributes to the shaping of children as governable subjects.

Parents who have enthusiastically embraced Elf on the Shelf are likely rolling their eyes right now. I'm no parent, and I stay far away from teaching folks how to raise their kids, but linking Elf on the Shelf to the Benthamite Panopticon was too much to resist.

I am intellectually curious about the impact of childhood culture and mythology on children's personalities, however. For example, should we teach our kids to believe in Santa Claus?

Will Wilkinson plans to.

Well, we’re atheists. I don’t intend to proselytize atheism to my kid, because I’m not interested in getting him to believe anything in particular. What I’m interested in is teaching him how to reason in a way that maximizes his chances of hitting on the truth. Now, one of the most interesting truths about the empirical world is that there are all these powerful systems of myth that are kept afloat by a sort of mass conspiracy, and humans seem disposed to pick one from the ambient culture and take it very seriously. But it can be hard to get your head around the way it all works unless you participate in it. Santa is a perfect and relatively harmless way to introduce your child the socio-psychology of a collective delusion about the supernatural. The disillusionment that comes from the exposure to the truth about Santa breeds a general skepticism about similarly ill-founded popular beliefs in physics-defying creatures.

Tyler Cowen has contemplated this issue as well:

I say why not leave them guessing, hovering in a state of Bayesian Santa doubt?  My parents never told me Santa “was real,” but they didn’t tell me he “wasn’t real” either, so I slid rather gracefully into my Santa non-belief.  I don’t recall ever feeling disillusioned by a sense of loss and in fact those presents kept on coming.  I even had a clearer sense of the appropriate channel for making gift requests, what’s not to like about that?

This all seems rather harmless, and I do think in many cases, as with fairy tales, fiction offers a smoother psychic transition to some of the harsher truths of the world. For example, if you're getting a bitter divorce and have young kids, I doubt the best way to break the news to them is to explain that the institution of marriage is an unnatural and brittle one, or that their mother or father had an affair with someone they picked up at the corner pub. It takes time to build up that armor.

However, I am suspicious of the behavioral enforcement effectiveness of the Santa Claus and the Elf on the Shelf mythologies. The whole idea of a naughty or nice list, or the Elf on the Shelf observing you and reporting back to the North Pole, I've yet to see any evidence it encourages kids to behave any better. Perhaps that's not the point, and I don't know any parents who've ever withheld gifts from their kids. If so, why keep that whole naughty list panopticon surveillance state portion of the mythology at all? Why not have the story be about unconditional love?

Personally, I think it would be just as miraculous to teach kids about Jeff Bezos instead of Santa Claus, and about how Amazon delivers a gazillion packages worldwide through a vast coordinated interconnected system of computers, people, and vehicles. Sometimes the truth is magical.

(h/t Clive Thompson)

Can we move past pure outrage?

Eric Meyer's Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty got a lot of traction over the past week. He discusses how Facebook's Year in Review app confronted him with a photo of his daughter who died this year.

Yes, my year looked like that.  True enough.  My year looked like the now-absent face of my little girl.  It was still unkind to remind me so forcefully.

And I know, of course, that this is not a deliberate assault.  This inadvertent algorithmic cruelty is the result of code that works in the overwhelming majority of cases, reminding people of the awesomeness of their years, showing them selfies at a party or whale spouts from sailing boats or the marina outside their vacation house.

But for those of us who lived through the death of loved ones, or spent extended time in the hospital, or were hit by divorce or losing a job or any one of a hundred crises, we might not want another look at this past year.

To show me Rebecca’s face and say “Here’s what your year looked like!” is jarring.  It feels wrong, and coming from an actual person, it would be wrong.  Coming from code, it’s just unfortunate.  These are hard, hard problems.  It isn’t easy to programmatically figure out if a picture has a ton of Likes because it’s hilarious, astounding, or heartbreaking.

Jeffrey Zeldman wrote a follow-up titled Unexamined Privilege Is The Real Source of Cruelty in Facebook's “Year In Review”.

UNEXAMINED PRIVILEGE is the real source of cruelty in Facebook’s “Your Year in Review”—a feature conceived and designed by a group to whom nothing terrible has happened yet. A brilliant upper-middle-class student at an elite university conceived Facebook, and college students, as everyone knows, were its founding user group. The company hires recent graduates of expensive and exclusive design programs and pays them several times the going rate to brainstorm and execute exciting new features. 

...

But when you put together teams of largely homogenous people of the same class and background, and pay them a lot of money, and when most of those people are under 30, it stands to reason that when someone in the room says, “Let’s do ‘your year in review, and front-load it with visuals,’” most folks in the room will imagine photos of skiing trips, parties, and awards shows—not photos of dead spouses, parents, and children.

At least in my Twitter timeline, I saw plenty of people jump on Zeldman's post to excoriate Facebook engineers for being privileged and heartless. Were there other posts like Zeldman's? 

I was really happy to see Meyer do a follow-up where he urged folks to put away the pitchforks and cage the outrage monster the internet loves to summon.

Yes, their design failed to handle situations like mine, but in that, they’re hardly alone.  This happens all the time, all over the web, in every imaginable context.  Taking worst-case scenarios into account is something that web design does poorly, and usually not at all.  I was using Facebook’s Year in Review as one example, a timely and relevant foundation to talk about a much wider issue.

...

What surprised and dismayed me were the…let’s call them uncharitable assumptions made about the people who worked on Year in Review.  “What do you expect from a bunch of privileged early-20s hipster Silicon Valley brogrammers who’ve never known pain or even want?” seemed to be the general tenor of those responses.

No.  Just no.  This is not something you can blame on Those Meddling Kids and Their Mangy Stock Options.

First off, by what right do we assume that young programmers have never known hurt, fear, or pain?  How many of them grew up abused, at home or school or church or all three?  How many of them suffered through death, divorce, heartbreak, betrayal?  Do you know what they’ve been through?  No, you do not.  So maybe dial back your condescension toward their lived experiences.

Second, failure to consider worst-case scenarios is not a special disease of young, inexperienced programmers.  It is everywhere.

A voice of sanity online? Elsa is working her magic in Hell.

I don't mean to imply there isn't privilege of all forms, or that more diversity isn't a good thing. I believe strongly in both. But if there's one thing that exhausted me about the online community in 2014 it was the never-ending cycle of outrage. And if there's one thing I wish we'd see more of in 2015 it's more reasoned, nuanced debate.

That begins with not misreading Zeldman's post, either. The paragraph that came between the two I quoted above was this:

I’m not saying that these brilliant young designers are heartless, or that individuals among them haven’t personally experienced tragedy—that would be mathematically impossible. I have taught some of these designers, and worked with others. Those I’ve known are wonderful people who want to make a difference in the world. And in theory (and sometimes in practice) a platform like Facebook lets them do that.

Both of Meyer's pieces are worth reading in their entirety, as is Zeldman's piece, whose title and opening paragraph are far more extreme than the rest of the piece.

It feels good to create the “other.” Humans love the ingroup-outgroup dynamics. It's so psychologically comforting to belong to one side and channel one's rage to demonize a common enemy. I'm not asking for artificial harmony but a shift towards more rational, unemotional debate.

How? I'm not sure, but the next time you feel the urge to unleash the rage monster, step back from the keyboard and try to pass Bryan Caplan's ideological Turing test. It's not perfect, but I don't have any better ideas. It takes two to have a reasoned debate. You count as one. Empathy creates the other.