Dr Stevens

How To Work Better

2010-03-27T07:18:00.000-07:00

how to work better

1   do one thing at a time.
2   know the problem.
3   learn to listen.
4   learn to ask questions.
5   distinguish sense from nonsense.
6   accept change as inevitable.
7   admit mistakes.
8   say it simple.
9   be calm.
10   smile.

Is it worth it?

2010-02-14T18:32:00.000-08:00

I just read this comment on reddit, and I really came to think about this.

Since you want to talk about money, instead of diamonds... let's do that.
I think our system of using money as a medium of exchange is a superb one. And I think that the fact that money has no intrinsic value (unlike other currencies people have used - when they exchanged salt, or cows, or what have you) makes the whole system fairer. Money is not worth anything, unless you pass it along to someone else.
Of course, just like when sitting down at a family board game or card game, we see that if a person doesn't ever put his heart into playing the game, he won't do very well. And when folks are distributing resources and the bounty of the world, those who opt out of playing the money game are doing something which is tantamount to going on a hunger strike. Altruists who produce free software, and writers who blog for free are producing something and not gathering the resources they need to do a better job tomorrow with their work. They're poor schmucks.

I invest quite a lot of time for blogging and getting higher Pageranks. But what for? This all doesn't generate any revenue right now. Will there ever be a project that get me more money? Certainly some aspects of blogging are very unseful; for example blogging about topics which were talked about at the university.

There are many blog posts on the hacker-news (by ycombinator.com) are about failing/success in life or just in your field of work. But you even can think too much about your next year in your life.

Business School is a joke

2010-02-14T13:31:00.000-08:00

I’m enrolled in a top-5 undergraduate business program, one consistently ranked beside MIT’s, UPenn’s, and Stanford’s. 99.5% of my classmates will graduate with a full-time job offer in hand, with about a quarter of those working at places like McKinsey & Co. and Goldman Sachs. The facilities are impeccable (we just got a $100M donation), the student groups rich and varied, the class sizes relatively small. By all traditional metrics, the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan is exceptional; I should be proud to attend.
But I’m not. I’m actually sort of embarrassed about it, though I don’t hide the fact I go there for the simple reason that most people think it’s commendable. The goal here is to fight that misconception.

I’ll start with a slice of a typical afternoon.

Last week I attended a presentation by Zingerman’s deli, hosted by the b-school student group BOSS (Business Organization for Strategic Skills, whatever that means). It was about their corporate strategy, and I gave the event a chance because Zingerman’s is my favorite place to eat, and one of the more profitable sandwich places in the country despite having a tiny footprint in the outskirts of Ann Arbor. In fact, it was named the “coolest small business in America” by inc. magazine. Nice.
Most of the audience was dressed in business casual, and students mingled and exchanged e-mail addresses over chips and soda before the head of BOSS introduced the first speaker. He was a fifth-year Ross student, and he gave us a primer on “corporate strategy.” He mentioned that he was going to work for Merrill Lynch. He read directly off of a few slides (pie charts, flow charts, bullets). It was painful, but excusable because it was so short. I waited for the real meat of the event.
The main speaker was introduced as one of the deli’s twelve managing partners and their head of corporate strategy.
During her 45 minute PowerPoint-guided presentation, she said the word “growth” eleven times; she talked about deliverables and accountability; she went over their various systems, their management structure, and their mission statement. She didn’t mention sandwiches until I asked her which one she liked the most. She didn’t mention that the owners traveled extensively picking ingredients at tiny farms and bakeries, or brag about their customer service (their founder wrote a best-selling book about it), or describe their massive mail-order sales, or explain the seminars and tastings from which they generate a substantial profit, etc. In short, she didn’t really say anything at all, and yet the kids around me were taking notes.
That’s the root of the problem. That’s what the business school teaches us to do. Not once has a professor told us to “make great products” or “do something people love.” Why? For one, it’s harder to teach engineering to a marketer than it is to teach marketing to an engineer (take Google). The thing is, we’re designed to be investment bankers and management consultants, the professionals who guys like Warren Buffet will tell you are just “friction” in the economic system. And this coming from a guy who has created more wealth than almost any human ever. From the Berkeshire Hathaway 2005 annual report: “For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion increases.”
You won’t see something like that at Ross. Nor will they ever show us a diagram with “middle management” and “consultant” next to our names; they never tell us that for the most part we’ll just move, play with, analyze, and talk about wealth, rather than create it. That’s for the engineers, the guys who they anachronistically think will work for us in fifteen years. What’s worse, you’ll see an absolute torrent of stuff like the Zingerman’s presentation. In fact, we’re taught to relish that kind of talk, to produce it ourselves. So what’s the problem? How could this possibly happen?
Let’s start with admissions.
The application is designed for students with good GPAs in introductory classes who spend their spare time earning titles (”Marketing Director,” “Head of Student Relations,” “Executive Vice President”) in clubs. They go to meetings where they design posters, e-mails, and flyers to attract kids to more meetings. It’s not their fault. Since the admissions committee only uses a student’s first year at Michigan in their analysis, and since it’s difficult to differentiate oneself from others taking the same prerequisite classes, kids are encouraged to join organizations that do nothing but promote them and itself. Like my buddy said, “It’s just something you gotta do.”
And despite an applicant pool of under 600, there are no interviews or recommendations - in fact, if you submit a recommendation you are guaranteed to not get in; odd, considering the main (the liberal arts one) college’s admissions department reads about 100,000 recommendation letters. So in this system, the stuff I do, like take hard classes, talk to professors, read books, websites, and Wikipedia, and write, is of essentially no value. Their emphasis is on

having enough activities to fill up your activities sheet/resume,
spacing your fonts correctly,
not mentioning high school, because they condescendingly told us in mandatory pre-application sessions that everything we did before university was worthless.

I played the game. I joined, but didn’t regularly attend, a couple of clubs (Michigan Economics Society, Michigan Billiards, Students for the State of America [ASS backwards!]). In my essays, I wrote well about essentially made up stuff. My “example of teamwork or team-building” was loosely based on pick-up basketball games I played once every few days, my “most important activity outside the classroom” was about a business plan I had drawn up just a month before and hadn’t really developed, my “reason for applying to Ross” was based on a career path - private equity - that I hadn’t really settled on. In short, my application was bullshit. Proof:
.

While the details of my future remain hazy, and while I expect any number of wrinkles to send me off my course, I certainly have a relatively well-defined impression of what I’d like to do. The education I hope to gain here at Ross will serve as an extremely stable foundation upon which to build that career in finance and private equity, the steadfast and solid guide to inform difficult decisions at each crossroads of my career. Indeed, it is a key component – if not the very core – of my future plans.

.
At business school, it seems, bullshit wins.
I took five classes in my first semester. Three were economics classes to finish that degree: Game Theory, Econometrics, and International Trade Theory. The two others were mandated by the BBA program: Accounting, and Operations Research and Management Science (OMS).
It was clear from the first few minutes of lecture that the business school got what it asked for: friendly, busy kids with mediocre math skills. The accounting class was like any other, though it crawled along, and exams were simple rearrangements of the practice tests; the book was put together nicely, so there was no reason to attend class, though the lectures I went to were unbelievably boring (think Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). OMS was, for this little essay, a perfect case in point.
We learned what took 45 minutes in my Econometrics class in an entire semester. We spent three weeks discovering that flipping heads with a fair coin three times in a row has a probability 1/8. We powered through Excel spreadsheets that could average long columns of data. We learned Bayesian statistics by plugging numbers into tables. There was no rigor - for instance, when we learned the basics of optimization we were told to visually solve problems by moving a sloped line away from the origin and note where it hit the other lines, rather than tackle a system of equations or (aha!) do simple calculus. All the while we were told that what we were doing related to business through oversimplified case studies where we served as consultants to Firm A. Using the word “Science” in this course’s title is insulting.
There’s nothing wrong with introductory classes. Basic concepts, after all, need to be addressed early on. The problem was (a) the lack of rigor: we were taught to “plug and play” numbers (in accounting, too) rather than understand them. We studied hypothesis testing without mentioning research design or understanding variance, we saw conditional probabilities as a few fields in a table and ignored set theory, we were taught to answer questions about Excel Solver output by saying “If this number is 0, then it means ___” without being told why (the answer had to do with negative marginal returns). If you’re rigorous, answering not just the how but the why, you can get even remedial kids to do great things; if you only hit the surface level, if you only teach procedures, you make everyone a monkey. And (b) the attitude: I’d lose 30% credit on a problem set for not simplifying equations, or skipping two steps of algebra, or writing VBA code to solve problems instead of drawing a decision tree. There were no opportunities for acceleration, and the focus was on terms and processes, templates and formatting.
I think there are a couple of things at work here. The main thing is that the professors are by definition not right for their position. At least Math or even Economics professors (at the top universities) are leaders in Math and Economics; they publish important papers, work for the Federal Reserve, and teach really smart kids in their spare time. B-school professors use buzzwords, follow slow but tried-and-true curricula, and make sure that in submitted work your group’s names are in alphabetical order. They don’t run companies or make great products, and they’re not even consultants!
Interestingly, group work is the supposed sine qua non of the undergraduate business curriculum. It’s what gets us high marks in the Wall Street Journal rankings, what consistently attracts recruiters to our school; it’s our bread and butter.
Without getting into a lengthy discussion of what I think every reasonably intelligent person knows about mandatory group work at the undergraduate level, I’ll point out the obvious: it’s counter-productive. But it’s also illustrative of the whole problem I’m getting at here.
Mandatory group work teaches you how to manage, and thus it’s at the heart of a curriculum designed to build professional managers. What this really means, though, is that it teaches kids how to assign tasks to people who aren’t capable of doing them, how to schedule wasteful meetings to re-format and explain individuals’ work, and how to make bad and inconsistent PowerPoint presentations. I’ve read enough Dilbert to know that the b-school model of management is accurate, but that doesn’t make it good.
In fact, it makes it a joke.

The Secret of Life: Shut up and shovel the fuckin' gravel.

2009-09-28T13:02:00.000-07:00

The entire secret of life, of power, of everything, was taught to me when I was a teenager, by a man, a farmer. And he taught it to me in the way that is so typical of men: three sentences, no more. I contend that the real conflict today is not male versus female, but urban versus agrarian values. When people forget where their food and fiber comes from, when they forget the natural processes and timetables that produce them, when they start looking for someone else to "hand over" what they want and stop taking the responsibility for producing it themselves, when they replace hard work with belligerence and aggression, they lock themselves into downward spirals of helplessness, powerlessness, and anger.

I taught this same lesson to a woman "friend" of mine. It took me two years. During the entire time she was doing her best to manipulate and harass me into a "romantic" relationship that I had absolutely no interest whatsoever in allowing to happen. It took many screaming matches and finally the threat to throw her out of my life for her to "get it", but she finally "got it" and today she credits me with saving her life, her soul, and her sanity, and has become a friend.

The farmer's name was Griff. I was a "townie" (population 300) and made good money for a teenager as a "hired hand". One day when I showed up for work he said "We're going to pick up a new truck." We got in his car and the entire 40 minute ride to the dealer passed without either of us saying a word: One of those easy comfortable silences that men often use to communicate more than words ever can. We picked up a new 4-wheel drive ¾ ton pickup and headed back to the farm. When we got back, he pointed to a large gravel pile by the barn and told me to fill the truck bed with gravel and go fill in a hole in the entrance to one of his fields.

I said "But that gravel will ruin the paint on the bed of this brand new truck." He looked at me silently for about a minute, his expression eloquently saying that I was the worst idiot he'd ever been burdened with having to tolerate in his life. Without saying another word he picked up the shovel and, with a swing that would be the envy of every major league baseball hitter, he swung it around and smacked the side of the truck sending paint chips flying in ever direction and leaving a huge dent. He looked at me again with that same "I can't believe you are such an idiot" look and said: "City boy this is a FARM truck. I didn't buy it to look pretty, I bought it to DO WORK, same reason I'm payin' you. Now it ain't new no more, so shut up and shovel the fuckin' gravel." Then he turned around and walked off, leaving me to feel foolish and gain wisdom.

Of course it took the entire context and circumstances for me to understand the full significance of the lesson: not with my head but with my spirit. In the same way, cultures world wide and throughout history have used ritual space to teach the great lessons to the young. Complexity and too many words destroy the lesson, because the very heart and soul of the lesson is that words accomplish nothing. Words do not put in crops. Words do not harvest them or get them to market or prepare them or put them on our plates. No one eats unless someone shuts up and shovels the fuckin' gravel.

The entire secret of male power is that men do, men have, shut up and shoveled the fuckin' gravel. Men shoveled the gravel that built all the hydroelectric dams which provide the electric power which everyone today takes for granted; some of that "Patriarchal technology" that some women are so fond of sneering at. Men put their sweat and, about 50 of them, their very bodies into Hoover dam. Then they "handed over" the result to women to make their lives more comfortable. The millions of tons of gravel which went in to building the transcontinental railway were shoveled by men. And hundreds of their bodies went into it as well. Women and men living today would have none of the conveniences which make their lives so comfortable if millions of men had not shut up and shoveled the fuckin' gravel. All the lawsuits and affirmative action programs in the world could not have built them. Those men did not wait for someone to "hand over" those dams or that railroad to them, they shut up and shoveled the fuckin' gravel and built them. Hoover dam is "male dominated", the transcontinental railroad is "male dominated" because men put their time, their work, their sweat, and their very bodies into building them. Everything that we see in the world today, from business to the military, that is "male dominated" is so because men died to build it.

That is both men's power and their powerlessness.

They shut up and shoveled the fuckin' gravel.

I disagree with homeschooling

2009-04-04T12:00:00.000-07:00

I am a public school teacher. Let me tell you why I disagree with homeschooling (especially once they've reached the middle school age).

I bust my ass to create an environment in my classroom where kids want to learn. Sure, I'm somewhat constrained by standardized testing and such. But I'll be damned if any one of my students finish my class at the end of the year and regret taking it. I teach content, but more importantly I'm dedicated to teaching them what it means to be a productive citizen. I'm young, I'm full of enthusiasm, I'm extremely well versed in my content area. Just because you may have had a bad experience in public schools doesn't mean they're all like that.

Socializing is so unbelievably important to these kids. You can homeschool and monopolize your kid's perspective all you want, but someday they'll become adults and they are going to have to enter the real world. The real world has a lot of nice people and also a lot of assholes. Learning how to work and socialize with people that are different from you is an invaluable life skill. I just don't see how homeschooling gives kids this kind of experience.

There were a lot of public school teachers I had in the past that sucked. But there were also a lot of teachers I had that were amazing, and showed me ways of looking at the world that I never dreamed of. I like to think that a big part of knowledge is exposing yourself to many different perspectives, and then grabbing a little bit of your personal conceptual framework from each of them. I just don't see how this can be accomplished through homeschooling.

If you live in an area where the public schools are atrocious, that's one thing. I'm not saying there aren't a lot of good reasons to homeschool your children. But to paint a brushstroke across the entire public school system is ridiculous. There are a lot of young teachers out there like me that are trying to make a difference. Keep in mind too that pedagogy has really changed a lot since when your former public school teachers went through college.

I don´t know who this is...

2009-03-26T04:46:00.001-07:00

...but my friends say he´s cool

The dangers of the internet for the governments

2009-03-25T12:58:00.000-07:00

Governments are starting to realize the dangers the internet poses to their powers.

-Citizens in different countries are interacting together in ways they never would have before.

-People are reading news articles written by 'the other side'.

-Commentators and websites who aren't loyal to (filtered by) any large corporation are shifting the opinions of thousands.

-Politicians can no longer just say "I never said/did that" and have the country believe them. Within hours videos of them saying or doing that spring up all over the internet.

They'll try to reign the internet into their control under the guise of 'saving the children' or preventing terrorism, but they will fail. Pandora's box has been opened, and people have gotten too used to the internet as it is. They should have been where they are now 15 years ago to have any chance.

Oppose internet censorship

2009-03-19T07:23:00.000-07:00

It's not just the English speaking countries that have fallen into apathy; it's happening everywhere in the western world. The ones who dare to oppose Internet censorship quickly get labeled as freaks who support child porn.

Matti Nikki, the most vocal opponent of the Finnish censorship system was slapped with a law suit ("spreading child pronography" when he published the filter list) and his site was censored. Nobody except us geeks care. Some of my non-geek friends are actually okay with this, since it's "FOR TEH CHILDRANS."

Fucking morons are happily giving away their freedom, and for what?

Travelling with a bike

2009-03-05T16:30:00.001-08:00

I’m now in my early 60s. I’ve taken a number of week-long and two month-long tours. I guarantee three things: First, you’ll find that bike touring is unlike other forms of travel and that people will respond to you differently. Some jerks will be even greater jerks than usual, but the vast majority who otherwise would have ignored you, will embrace you. Second, there will be days of sheer misery when you will be cursing and asking yourself what on earth you were thinking. Third, it will give you memories and stories to last a lifetime.

in a fire a few years ago, we lost all our bikes, including a tandem. The financial turmoil, meant that I passed up the cross-country trip that my best biking buddy took, but with the insurance settlement, I had Peter White in NH, build me a new one with a Rivendell Atlantis frame. I’m admiring it as writing this, ignoring the snow and rain out my window and imagining being on the road again.

This past weekend, my wife and I conducted a ritual we’ve done every five years or so. We sit down over bagels and write out on napkins, our priority lists of the adventures the next few years. Our lists are now on the fridge and mine includes “on more bike tour,” (as in big).

Picture of the day/week

2009-03-02T19:14:00.000-08:00

Go to work, send your kids to school. Follow fashion, act normal, walk on the pavement, watch TV. Save for your old age, obey the law, repeat after me:
I am free.

2 Idiots protesting.

The other side of the story

2009-03-01T18:48:00.001-08:00

About 18 months ago, I was awoken at 6:00 am on a Friday by someone hammering at the door. It was a swat team in full gear, weapons in hand. They pulled me out of my house and in front of my gawking neighbors, questioned me intently, raided my place, and took thousands of dollars worth of stuff from my home including my computer and a video camera, and being a working class schmuck, I still haven't replaced it all.

When I finally got served the warrant, I was shocked that they were searching for child porn. I have never looked at, searched for or collected anything of that nature. But it was my word against theirs. They said they'd been monitoring my internet connection, but apparently their software sucks because I don't own or look at child porn.

After months of tortured waiting, they came up with nothing, and didn't bother to let me know until my lawyer contacted them and asked. In the meantime, I had to tell my family and closest friends that I was being investigated for this- and now I still wonder if the people closest to me trust me, even though nothing came of it. I have nephews and nieces who are kids, and now my brothers and sisters get to wonder if they can trust me around them, even though I have taught kids in several jobs and passed numerous background checks.

To top it off, they took all of my photos, and my back ups of those photos, dating back more than a decade- they're all lost now. I had been working on several short stories and a book- years of writing, gone, with their back-ups.

I also suffer from anxiety and panic attacks now, and feel enraged by the mere mention of the police. They screwed up my life and my relationships with my closet friends and family without apology. I wonder how many innocent people got treated the same way so the cops can play hero?

War on videogames

2009-02-23T18:11:00.000-08:00

China the communist

2009-02-23T18:10:00.000-08:00

Well, China is communist in its official name, but it possibly has more fascist traits than communist ones.

China promotes hypernationalism, while true communist ideology is very internationalist in character. The psychotic nationalism promoted today in China harkens back to the way Germany was under the Nazis. Everything has to be sacrificed to protect national pride.

There is constant obsession with "national security", and anyone and anytime can be charged under very vague rules. You criticize the government, and you become a national security threat...

Even the word "democracy" is censored and filtered as undesirable...what more can we say?
At least true communists used to allow the use of such concepts, although they always twisted its meaning, and gutted it empty. The Nazis did not like democracy. "Democracy" was openly declared a dirty and suspect concept under Hitler...much like in China today.

In communism the economy is state owned, while in fascism it is privately owned but subservient to the political monopoly...as in China.

A communist country tries to provide a wide social safety net, in spite of being poor (see Cuba). But in China the safety net is nearly non-existent anymore. Chinese people pay out of pocket for almost every social service - and they pay even more than the "capitalist" USA. Their sky high savings rate is due to the fact that people need the money for such expenses. Chinese people cannot rely on the state for their retirement or for their medical expenses. If they do, they will die in the slums.

Yeah, China the "communist"...