Perhaps if doctors hurt us more, we would be more loyal

by Paul Lowry

Why Do We Love Our Dentists?
[Via Wired Science » Frontal Cortex]

Last month, I went to the dentist. He delivered the bad news while looking at the x-rays of my teeth – I had a small cavity in a rear molar. But let’s engage in a hypothetical: What if, the next day, I went to another dentist for a second opinion. And let’s say that I showed Dentist Number Two the exact same x-ray of my molars. What are the odds that both dentists would agree that I have a cavity in that particular tooth?

The answer, according to the behavioral economist Dan Ariely (based on data from Delta Dental), is shockingly low: There is only a 50 percent chance that the two dentists will come to the same clinical conclusion. The reason, Ariely says, is simple: x-rays are ambiguous pictures, full of shadows and blurry spots. As a result, different dentists parse the images differently. Some stare at a tooth and see a cavity, while others see a natural indent.

This led Ariely to ask a provocative question: If dentists are so bad at diagnosing cavities, then why are people so fond of their dentists? As Ariely notes, people are much more loyal to their dentists than to doctors in any other medical field. We love the people who clean our teeth, even though it appears they are wrong (or at least disagree) about half the time. If my primary care physician had that kind of track record, I’d find a new doctor. Or I’d skip the doctor altogether.

What explains this irrational loyalty? Ariely’s explanation is rooted in cognitive dissonance, or the human tendency to react to conflicting evidence by doubling-down on our initial belief. (I wrote about cognitive dissonance and UFO cults here.) Here’s Ariely on NPR:

Dentistry is basically the unpleasant experience. They poke in your mouth. It’s uncomfortable. It’s painful. It’s unpleasant. You have to keep your mouth open. And I think all of this pain actually causes cognitive dissonance and cause higher loyalty to your dentist. Because who wants to go through this pain and say, I’m not sure if I did it for the right reason. I’m not sure this is the right guy. You basically want to convince yourself that you’re doing it for the right reason.

And it’s not just dentists: This cognitive quirk influences a vast amount of consumer behavior. It turns out that the more we pay for something – and the payment can take the form of money, time or physical pain, as with the filling of a cavity – we’re more likely to believe that the product or service is effective, and thus worth the cost. It’s perverse but true: pain makes us loyal, and the surest way to improve the performance of a product is to raise its price.

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So, the fact that we chose to undergo a very unpleasant experience makes it more likely we will convince ourselves how wonderful our dentists is. Almost makes sense.

We have to steel ourselves to undergo a process that can be horrible. We simply can not accept the possibility that we made a mistake and underwent something bad for no good reason. We see this all the time – it is really hard to admit we made a mistake, especially with something that can be painful.

Easier to simply say my dentist is great and would not hurt me without reason. Even if the data suggest that 50% of the time they do just that.

Political intimidation of scientists

by Polina Sergeeva

Michael Mann in Washington Post op-ed: “Get the anti-science bent out of politics”
[Via ClimateScienceWatch]

Penn State University climate scientist Michael Mann has a column in the Washington Post section this morning that begins: “As a scientist, I shouldn’t have a stake in the upcoming midterm elections, but unfortunately, it seems that I — and indeed all my fellow climate scientists — do.” And concludes: “My fellow scientists and I must be ready to stand up to blatant abuse from politicians who seek to mislead and distract the public.

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‘Kill the messenger’ has been a strong arm political tactic probably since mankind invented politics.

Anyone who watched the vilification of researchers working on the health effects of cigarette smoking will easily see it as a testing ground for the same approaches being brought to bear against climatologists. The main point is not to gain a better understanding about the world around us so that we can take better actions. It is to intimidate and freeze out those who might wish to study science in this area:

The ultimate goal is to make the process sufficiently painful so that the researcher cannot complete further research and so that other scientists are discouraged from conducting similar studies.

Scientists are perfect subjects for harassment by litigation. They often have little knowledge of the law and little patience for the slow and subtle workings of the legal system. The distraction and anxiety caused by depositions, legal costs, and court appearances can easily put an abrupt end to a promising line of research or a research career.

As discussed four years ago, some of the same people involved in the Big Tobacco efforts are now involved in climate change harassment. If a scientist’s time is spent on subpoenas and depositions, they can not produce any science that these harassers find distasteful. Why would any normal person want to enter a field where much of their time will be spent up paying lawyers fees if the results do not fit what the politicians or corporations want to see?

This should be about policy differences, where people of good-will can discuss what to do. Instead, these politicians attack the science and the scientists themselves, permitting them to refrain from engaging in any meaningful discussions at all.

The goal is not a good-faith discussion of what the data are telling us but is all about making political points and taking prisoners. Smearing non-public citizens with the same techniques used for political rials. It is to stifle a more complete understanding of the world around us. It is anti-knowledge. It is anti-American.

Political intimidation of ordinary citizens has been a black mark against American ideals of republican democracy for a long, long time. History will not serve these politicians or their operatives well.

Science has served American interests well because we have allowed people to freely investigate almost any problem dealing with the world we see. Now these politicos want to limit that free investigation and demonstrate to scientists that if they wish to examine certain problems there will be real life-changing consequences if the results do not match what the politicians want to see.

This will only hurt our abilities to understand the world. Their efforts will ultimately fail.

Because as with the Vatican almost 400 years ago, E pur si muove! Mankind will eventually have a fuller understanding of the natural world, but these politicians hurt us all with their tactics – thousands of people died before they stopped their stalling approaches with cigarette smoking.

But I like calling them Microbe so much

by Ivan Walsh

Will Microsoft Buy Adobe to rival Apple?
[Via RoughlyDrafted Magazine]

Hello readers, sorry for the long hiatus. I hit pause to enjoy life a bit. But now I’m digesting a story that is causing me to gag: that Microsoft and Adobe are going to battle Apple together in 2010 by resurrecting the 1990s. . The idea is that Microsoft was discovered to be holding talks with Adobe, and therefore the worlds biggest software company was imminently prepared (obviously!) to swallow the wildly overvalued conjoined twins of Adobe and Macromedia.

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Someone else who thinks Microbe would be an ultimate fail. ANd he is right on track. For starters:

For starters, I’d like to point out that while oxymoronic “conventional wisdom” holds that the solution to any corporate problem is to merge with another company, the opposite is often the case. Very rarely do you have a merger of two large companies that does anything but fail or marginally survive.

The best example of a good tech merger was Apple’s acquisition of NeXT, but that was more of a reverse takeover of a well positioned but ineptly run large company by a struggling but talented management pool of a relatively small company.

Microsoft may well play the role of a well positioned but ineptly run large company, but Adobe doesn’t offer any sort of talented management, nor even the futuristic technology along the lines that NeXT provided to Apple back in 1997. A merger of the two would be more like American Airlines buying Amtrak.

Microsoft has rarely leveraged a takeover into anything much. Adobe has been a little better but neither is known for getting cutting edge software out the door.

And both are mired in the desktop paradigm, showing little success in the mobile. The CEO of Verizon just said the Microsoft was not a big part of their mobile strategy. How would a merger synergize their mobile efforts?

Adobe got Flash four years ago by buying Macromedia, in order to get a better web presence. It may have done that but that web presence has not translated well to the mobile marketplace. How would a merger synergize their mobile efforts?

When the Onion becomes the future

by sam_churchill

New $5,000 Multimedia Computer System Downloads Real-Time TV Programs, Displays Them on Monitor
[Via Daring Fireball]

Google TV reminds me of this 1998 Onion classic. The underlying question has switched from “why not just watch TV?” to “why not just use a computer?”

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It is never good for a high tech product to be compared to an Onion article, in a positive sense. Twelve years old, yet they seem to have gotten pretty close:

Demonstrating the technology, Welborne stood proudly beside a prototype of the Presario 6000 as it displayed an eight-minute segment from a recent 3rd Rock From The Sun episode, downloaded from an NBC server in under 75 minutes.

[snip]

“This is incredible,” said Wayne Messers, a Huntington Beach, CA, systems analyst who sampled the Presario 6000 last weekend at the National Computer And Electronics Expo in San Diego. “I’m watching TV, but there’s a keyboard in front of the screen.”

Added Messers: “There’s also a disk drive to the left of the screen.”

“When I buy my 6000, I’m going to have all my co-workers over to view the first-ever Spin City episode downloaded from the Internet,” said Peter Rinaldi of Escondido, CA. “I feel like I’m a part of history just buying this product.”

Comedy gold.

What to do when you succeed too greatly

‘An Atom-Based Product, Developed in Bits’
[Via Daring Fireball]

Glenn Fleishman, writing for The Economist, on the Glif project’s remarkable success at Kickstarter.

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I mentioned this project a few days ago. Over 3200 people are sponsoring it now with a total of almost $82,000 pledged. There are still 25 days to go. They may have over $100,000 pledged by the end of this.

Fleishman provides a nice view of how this project got started, using a beta version of Mac software that was free:

They started with a computer model of the adapter, created with Rhinoceros 3D design software. The software is $995 for Windows, but they used the beta test version for Mac OS X, which is free. They tested their designs through rapid prototyping, uploading files to Shapeways in the Netherlands. It took about ten days for Shapeways to “print” each prototype in 3D, and a day later it would be in the designers’ hands in New York. Shapeway charges by material volume, so each each Glif test cost about $10. They would try out a few variants each time just to meet a $25 minimum.

They started this with very little actual investment of their own capital. Now they have an avalanche of orders to fill. They expected maybe 500 people to support the project. Now they have 6 times as many, all wanting to get their production Glif ASAP next month.

Some of the finish work they had expected to do by hand over the weekend. Not so now. Now they have to not only figure that out but work out mailing logistics, etc. I expect they will. Zero to $100,000 in 30 days. Nice!

And then they can start looking at selling these at retail because they really are well done. Some full time jobs created with beta software and a few hundred dollars. And jobs for several other companies along the way.

Creating companies can be so different today.

GPS a leading cause of Darwin Award winners?

by Mikael Miettinen

More Stories Of People Following GPS Blindly Into Dangerous Situations
[Via Techdirt]

We’ve had tons of stories over the years of people blindly obeying their GPS devices way too far, leading to dangerous results… and yet it keeps on happening. Here are two more examples, with one leading to a car stuck atop a mountain, and the other at the bottom of a reservoir. The first, sent in by btr1701, involves a guy in Switzerland who followed his GPS up a mountain on a road so narrow that eventually his car got stuck and had to be helicoptered out (there are pictures at the link).

Then there’s the guy over in Spain, who followed his GPS directions directly into a reservoir and drowned (the passenger in his car managed to escape and make it to shore, but the driver was apparently unable to swim). The report notes that the reservoir in question is Spain’s largest and has been there since 1989, so it seems like any GPS mapping system should be aware of the change by now.

Either way, it still does make you wonder why people believe their GPS over their own lying eyes.

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Now, I’ve gotten caught in Google Map directions where a neighborhood street that Maps showed open had been closed by a steel chain but these are pretty wild.

It is human nature to believe that someone must have vetted the computer map, rather than it simply being data placed in tables without any real connection to reality. Surely this goat path must eventually open up. Right?

How could the software miss the largest reservoir in the country? At least with Google Street View you know they did drive a van along that road. Maybe when Google has finally driven everywhere we can learn to trust GPS completely.

[Listening to: The Mystic And The Muse from the album "The Mystic And The Muse" by Renaissance]

A nice $4 million ‘hobby’

Apple TV sellouts seen as start of 1M sales per quarter
[Via AppleInsider]

Just a week after the new Apple TV went on sale, many of Apple’s retail stores around the U.S. are sold out of the set top box, with one Wall Street analyst predicting the device is on pace to sell a million per quarter.

[More]

This little device sold out in a week? I think Apple may have something here. A million a quarter works out to about $400 million dollars in revenue they did not have before. Not too shabby.

And if they could get more companies in line, they’d sell even more and change the way we watch video.

Couple with White-fi and you might not need cable or broadcast channels anymore to get content delivered. Goodbye Comcast and NBC. White-fi could have a range of 2.5 to 5 km from a base station. We just need to find a way to increase its data rate, although current levels should be good enough for streaming videos.

Of course, White-fi just might be a way for MS to remain relevant in a mobile world. Maybe the start of a new cycle. Perhaps MS will be the first to implement White-fi in a mobile device. BUt Google will also be there.

It still might be better than dealing with the cell phone companies or the cable guys to get content.

[Listening to: Bitter Sweet Symphony from the album "Urban Hymns" by The Verve]