1935 Map of the Somerset and Dorset Railway

No more will I go to Blandford Forum and Moretehoe
On the slow train from Midsomer Norton and Mumby Road
No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat
At Chorlton-cum-Hardy or Chester-le-Street
We won’t be meeting again
On the slow train.

I used to live near Blandford Forum, and for the past forty-three years have had some reason to pass through regularly or visit.  My grandmother was born there; my aunt and her husband ran a market garden from Blandford St Mary (it fed the town for two generations at least); my wedding reception was held there. But in the past 12 months it has ceased to be a node in my life.

I remember when they tore up the line, because it ran behind our home (see map).  It was part of the Somerset and Dorset Railway, the “Slow and Dirty” as it was  known colloquially.  I got into trouble for accepting a short ride between Charlton Marshall and Spetisbury from the workmen on their tractor and trailer.  My mother banished me to my room in disgrace, without any tea.  I was only four.

A few weeks ago, when I heard Joe Stilgoe’s version (right mouse-click open in new window, play track) of the Flanders and Swann classic Slow Train, my ears pricked up. This sounded special. The song is about the controversial closure of the local British railway network in the 1960s, of which the S&D formed a resonant part.  Where the original song is light opera, the cover is all cool jazz ballad.  Joe’s management put it up on Myspace especially for us.  Enjoy.

There’s an argument — should it become necessary to mobilize a vast army of unemployed — to rebuild the railways.  If I put on my counterfactual-tinted spectacles, this network would never have been closed had the Brompton Folding Bicycle been invented earlier.   And there might not be a huge car industry now to drag us all into an even deeper crisis.  Just a thought.

Photo credit: Brompton Danny McL

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From Galleon-a-Go-Go, a Monkey Nuts story in the DFC Issue 22

I mentioned The DFC comic a few weeks back:-

There’s been a new Friday ritual in the Knackered household since May. A vibrant red-and-yellow A4 envelope, emblazoned with the letters “DFC”, drops through the letter slot to sizzle like a stick of cartoon dynamite on the doormat until the kids (8 and 13 years old) get home from school. They can’t wait to rip it open and devour the 36-page comic inside.

For newer readers (welcome aboard, me hearties!), this is a project from David Fickling Books and a large group of talented storytellers and illustrators aspiring to revive the children’s comic format, somewhat in the image of the adventure comics of the post-war period.

Our friends at The DFC have just informed us that copies will be available this week on a non-subscription basis for the first time. This gives you the chance to test out the comic on your kids, grandchildren, godchildren, nephews or nieces etc without requiring the full commitment to a subscription. So, for those who won’t take our word for it and sign up immediately, we’re happily spreading the message. Make a trip to Tesco between Nov 26-Dec 2 and be sure to pick up a copy for the modest outlay of £1.99 (it carries no ads, folks). Perhaps get one for your school too, and encourage them to subscribe. The enterprising DFC team is also looking for schools who would like them to conduct a comic workshop.

If you’re outside the UK, you can avail yourself of a subscription to The DFC online in any event. As a Christmas present that arrives every Friday throughout the year, and one that will keep the kids away from the TV and off the computer, what could be better?

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Jake Thackray’s Black Swan is about a pub and lost love. The opening verse is:-

Down at the Black Swan
We’ll go sing our love song
We’ll sit, we’ll booze
We’ve got nothing to lose
We’ve lost it all, lost it all.

Well, the last two lines speaks to our theme at least.

In the BBC documentary that I mentioned, one appealing observation made was that Jake had a preference for the nylon-string acoustic guitar over the steel, locating him more in that European folk tradition and away from the Anglo-Saxon (absent my long-lost Fender Telecaster, I console myself occasionally with a few arpeggios on such an instrument). Also, they said how fine his musical writing was. I’ll not disagree. And to prove again that YouTube, in the right hands, is not poisoning the culture, some good soul called Shaun Murray has arranged a medley of Thackray classics, demonstrating the quality of the music, independent of lyrics and author.

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The bad economic news goes on. But so does life. Consequently, I’m contractually obliged to indulge in yet more comic relief.

There’s been a new Friday ritual in the Knackered household since May. A vibrant red-and-yellow A4 envelope, emblazoned with the letters “DFC“, drops through the letter slot to sizzle like a stick of cartoon dynamite on the doormat until the kids (8 and 13 years old) get home from school. They can’t wait to rip it open and devour the 36-page comic inside.

The DFC, whose initials remain shrouded in mystery (alternative hypotheses are supplied inside the front cover each week, e.g. “Dracula’s Favourite Cardigan”, “Disco For Crustaceans”) is no ordinary comic: not that there are many of those left these days. This comic combines the talents of a rich mixture of graphic novelists, artists and storytellers, along with the literary demi-god of children’s fiction, Philip Pullman.

Mezolith, Stories from the Stone Age, illustration by Adam Brockbank

The weekend before last, the younger Chip off the Old Hack got to meet his heroes: a handful of the illustrators and storytellers were down at the Bath Festival of Children’s Literature, entertaining the kids and signing copies. I’ve never seen him shake with excitement, but that is how it was as he clutched his pride-and-joy, the very first edition, waiting for it to be initialed. Gratifyingly, the sight of the very first copy had the young illustrators cooing like parents over a newborn.

Well, if you haven’t heard of The DFC, publisher David Fickling wanted to recreate the great storytelling tradition of the heyday of British comics: names from the 1950s and 1960s like The Eagle and Bunty. I was lucky enough to be introduced to Fickling, someone who was, until that moment, an invisible hand in shaping the education and destiny of the two Chips off the Old Hack; he published Pullman and Jacqueline Wilson; he also initiated the Horrible Histories series. If you have kids, grandchildren, nephews or nieces of a certain age, these titles will probably be very familiar to you. The Knackered favourite in that imprint is the Murderous Maths series, and some eagle-eyed readers tell me that MM author Kjartan Poskitt provides the The DFC‘s puzzles.

Fickling seems to have an eye for the creative outlier. In conversation, it was clear that his passion is good stories and that when he finds them he’s prepared to take risks. Writer/illustrator partnership The Etherington Brothers put in several proposals, but threw in one completely off-the-wall suggestion with no expectation of it being accepted; this was Monkey Nuts, the tale of Sid (a tap-dancing monkey) and Rivet (a robot drinks-machine). Happily, it made the cut. Perhaps that typifies the joyously exuberant, anything-goes creativity that the publication is managing to foster. And young people (even slightly reluctant readers, in our experience) are equally motivated and enthusiastic to read it.

So, it’s a fair guess that something very special is happening over at The DFC. Already, some of the illustrators are generating interest from Hollywood; it’s said we should expect some of these storylines to find their way into future Dreamworks productions. And us paleo types can get excited, because Mezolith (above), written by Ben Hegarty, is the story of stone-age, hunter-gatherer Britons.

It is early days still. The publication carries no advertising, and (as I understand it) the forty-odd contributing creatives are part-shareholders in the venture. So, as a pioneering enterprise, it deserves your support. If you want the kids in your life to think kindly of you on a weekly basis, (and don’t we all?) I’d scurry over to The DFC website, and get them an annual subscription. Better than money in the bank!

Of course, if you are planning to go to the Cheltenham Literature Festival this coming weekend to see Nassim Taleb, the Etherington Brothers will be there for a The DFC comic workshop* too. Now what are the chances of that happening?

* The DFC would like to hear from any schools willing and able to host a comic workshop. You can contact them via the website or via their terrestrial address: The DFC, Oxford, England, Europe, Earth, Solar System, Milky Way, The Universe 31 Beaumont Street, Oxford, OX1 2NP.

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I thought I should point you in the direction of a new anthology of blog posts, written by some of the leading online proponents of ancestral fitness. It’ll soon be available at www.ancestralfitness.com and will make the ideal gift for the Neanderthal in your life in need of a little self-improvement.

For those unfamiliar with the concept of ancestral fitness, it describes a lifestyle philosophy which attempts to incorporate diet and exercise regimes consistent with our evolutionary biology. That translates as a diet avoiding “easy” carbs, and exercise revolving around high-intensity workouts. There’s more to it than that, naturally.

Of course, top of the list of contributors is Professor Art De Vany. But why they roped in the last guy is anybody’s guess. I bet he’s pleased to be in such illustrious company.

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Given that there is an obesity epidemic, you might expect that when one of the world’s leading science writers, Gary Taubes, addresses the subject — challenging thirty years of official dietary advice — it would get a lot of press coverage. That the book took five years full-time to write, and has a 60-page bibliography indicating that pretty much all nutritional science over the past 150 years has been examined, means that journalism owes a lot of attention to such a work. However, as Google is my witness, this still seems not to have happened. As far as I can tell, The Economist -- my news chamberlain — should also be ashamed of itself.

My own excuse for not reading it yet is that it’s a big book and I’m a notoriously slow reader. But I’m kicking myself too that I missed it when it came out, even though my favourite blogs made mention of it, and a pretty hot thinker gave it a nod at some website or other that sells books out in the long tail.

I will doubtless come back to the book in future, published as Good Calories, Bad Calories in the US last autumn, and earlier this year as The Diet Delusion: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Loss and Disease in the UK. And I can’t wait to read it, now that the publisher has sent me a copy — that’s if I can wrest it from the Knackered Hackette’s grasp.

As an appetiser, there are two online video presentations Taubes has done around the book, one here given to the School of Public Health at Berkeley last autumn, the one below to the Stevens Institute for Technology. (They’re over an hour long, so if it rains at Wimbledon, you have something else to watch rather than Borg v McEnroe again.)

The presentations are an interesting example of journalistic method. But then, Taubes is unusual in his thoroughness. You could say that he approaches the job of journalist like a scientist, or by simply applying his scientific training. His subject matter — diet and public health — could not be more important. It also speaks for the importance of books, which have been getting a bit of a bashing by some online mavens recently, who, like so many of us, live their lives increasingly through the Googleprism. Elsewhere Taubes describes how long it takes to produce such a thoroughly researched work, but it is that thoroughness which reveals the power of looking back through the science, journalism and politics of a subject to see how an idea was born, and then cascaded into a conventional wisdom. Perhaps the following passage from an interview six months ago with blogging academic and self-experimenter Seth Roberts helps partially to explain what happens:-

Papers, and its still the case, for the most part, today, the people who got those jobs weren’t the shining intellects on the newspaper, and the shining intellects didn’t want to be diet and health writers. If you’re a whip-smart young guy or girl who wants to go into journalism, you want to be an investigative reporter, a political reporter, or a war correspondent; you don’t want to write about diet and health. Or at least you didn’t. So I think that was one of the problems….

• …So now it’s 1977, the McGovern Committee and the USDA make these proclamations about what constitutes a healthy diet, and there’s simply no skepticism. (With the possible exception of Bill Broad writing in Science Magazine, which no one outside the field of science was reading.) So the government tells us that we should eat low-fat diets — and not even learned authorities in the government, but Congressman and USDA bureaucrats channeling 30-year-old congressional staffers — and lo and behold, all these health reporters decide it must be true. That’s the failure.

But I really liked Taubes’ self-indulgence, which seems fully justified in light of his own self-effacement:-

In my fantasy life, I get a call from the managing editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal and they say they’ve read my book and they want to know how they can improve their health and diet reporting. Because they can see, whether or not I’m 100% right, or 80%, or only 50%, surely their reporters did something wrong. Now there’s a fantasy for you!

I’d extend his fantasy and suggest there’s a lot that Taubes as a journalist could teach these august institutions and their readers. The difficult question these days is: will someone pay for it all?

The whole interview is worth a very close read because Taubes describes too how he approaches the process of science writing and, above all else, identifying bad science. He applies some simple heuristics to divine a bad scientist when those he is dealing with are notionally more qualified than he. For example, this is how he assessed one figure:-

There are all kinds of signs. He told me there was no controversy, when there was obviously a controversy. His side might have been right, but to deny there was a controversy was ludicrous. He talked about the legitimacy of throwing out negative data. You measure salt consumption one way; you don’t see any effect on blood pressure, and so you decide that’s obviously the wrong way to measure it. The implication of everything he told me was that he knew what the answer was before he did his experiments, and then he adjusted his experimental techniques and methodology until he got the answer that he wanted. And he believed this was legitimate science. There are other signs. I’m a stickler about the use of words like “evidence” and “proof”. So if someone tells you there’s no evidence for some controversial belief, you can be fairly confident that they’re a bad scientist. There’s always evidence, or there wouldn’t be a controversy. If somebody says that “we proved that this was true” or “we set out to prove that this was true” that’s another bad sign. The point here, as Popper noted, among others, is that you can never prove anything is true; you can only refute it. So researchers who talk about proving a hypothesis is true rather than testing it make me worried.

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So, I was fretting about underdogs in the last post. This past weekend, the Sunday Times Magazine ran a long interview with Nassim Taleb in which he was described as “now the hottest thinker in the world”, charging up to $60,000 per speaking engagement, with the great and good beating a path to his door — from the world’s leading banks to NASA.

Interestingly, the interview by Bryan Appleyard included lunch and, naturally, had Nassim following Art De Vany‘s dietary prescriptions of evolutionary fitness. Well, some of my most loyal readers will have heard it here first.

For other reasons (and by accident) I found an old email pitch yesterday that I made in 2003 to a magazine on corporate governance; let’s say this was during my ugly duckling phase:-

Also, I have an interview idea which you might be interested in. Have you heard of a book Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb–a maths professor and hedge fund trader from the US? He is in town in a few weeks and I thought I might try and get a hold of him. Although his background is in quantitative trading, he has some interesting things to say about luck and probability in a business context, and it has struck me that this could provide some interesting reflections from a corporate governance point of view. The underlying theme would be that over-remunerating senior executives is even more hazardous than we think if both success and failure may owe more to luck than judgement, backed up by a good dose of sound mathematics of course.

Let me know if you think it a bit too outlandish. My owns sense is that Taleb and others are leading market thinkers and their ideas will permeate downwards in due course.

I didn’t get a commission.

Back in those days, even though Fooled By Randomness was a bestseller, you could still turn up at the now-disappeared Financial World Bookshop in Bishopsgate and hear Taleb talk for nothing to a small and select audience of besuited quants and the odd unshaven, head-scratching scribe. And you try and tell that to the young people of today — will they believe you? No.

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The Economist this week has two stories back-to-back in its Science and Technology section on cognitive enhancement. Not surprisingly the first one, which is about the widespread use of cognition-enhancing drugs (such as Ritalin and Provigil) to help you pass exams or improve performance, and the expectation of more to come, has been given the greater attention by the wider press. It’s a scare story about competition and cheating and raises the possibility of the need to test students as potential drug cheats. But The Economist takes a controversial tack in its editorial, likening this to “harmless” coffee and arguing it is a good thing.

It falls on deaf ears here because this is a week when I did not drink or eat any coffee, milk, wheat product, potato, rice or any refined carbohydrate excepting that contained in one bar of 85% cocoa chocolate. I drank no alcohol either. I’ve been doing this as a stricter enforcement of a paleo-style diet to help regulate my weight, but above all else to enhance cognition, and for longer-term preventative health. As far as I’m aware, it is working. With one or two qualifications. Those qualifications being a coincident virus that caused a migraine which lasted longer than I’d normally expect, prompting a little hypochondria and Googling for ideas about nutritional deficiency — to no avail.

The paleo-style diet (or lifestyle) is hard to sustain and I can tell you that it has been a lot harder in the short run than popping a few pills. But my argument with The Economist‘s view is that the brain is a complex system: don’t mess with it if you don’t need to. My own experience seems to suggest that I’m a little insulin-resistant, with diabetes in the family, so a lower-carb diet is likely to be beneficial.

But the second story in The Economist pairing owes more to my approach than the pill-popping. This other story describing research that social position can be detrimental to cognition has received no mainstream attention elsewhere, as far as Google can tell us. It has been, thus far, editorially cold-shouldered, and subordinated, and yet by far and away it is the more interesting story for self-experimenters, self-improvers, collaborationists, diversity specialists, managers, teachers, coaches and parents.

Pamela Smith and colleagues from Radboud University Nijmegen suspected that a lack of social power might reduce someone’s ability to keep track of information and make plans to achieve goals in difficult and distracting circumstances. This seems like common sense, not least because I’ve seen a number of situations, for example, where even senior executives have lost confidence and status and then suffered a quite immediate impairment. I’ve even experienced it myself at significant moments. I once had to pitch for $30 million for a management buy-out having been booked into a shoddy lower-Manhattan hotel where the breakfast was served on paper plates. Not a good start to the day. The next day, for the next pitch, I moved to a different hotel and a waterside suite — ironically for much the same price.

The Economist says:-

To explore this theory, she (Dr Smith) carried out three tests. In the first, participants were divided at random into groups of superiors and subordinates. They were told that the superiors would direct and evaluate the subordinates and that this evaluation would determine the subordinates’ payment for the experiment. Superiors were paid a fixed amount. The subordinates were then divided into two further groups: powerless and empowered. A sense of powerlessness was instilled, the researchers hoped, by having participants write for several minutes about a time when they were powerless or by asking them to unscramble sets of words including “obey”, “subordinate” and so on to form sentences. The empowered, by contrast, were asked to write about when they had been on top, or to form sentences including “authority”, “dominate” and similar words.

Not much, you might say, to induce a sense of inferiority or superiority when compared with the real-life stress of a domineering boss or other confidence-draining circumstance, but nevertheless enough to make an impact on several cognitive tasks:-

In all three tests Dr Smith found that low-power participants made 2-5% more errors than their high-power counterparts. She argues that these results were not caused by the low-power volunteers being less motivated, as they had the same financial incentive as the high-power volunteers to do well. Instead, she suspects that those lacking in power suffered adverse cognitive effects from that very lack, and thus had difficulty maintaining their focus on the tasks.

A common problem in evaluating how well someone is doing relative to their ability is the often-mentioned fundamental attribution error: a pretty universal cognitive bias where we will tend to ascribe another‘s failure in a task to their personality rather than their circumstances — largely because we will probably have more data about their personality than the circumstances. Conversely, we judge our own failures more kindly because we know what extenuates them.

What Pamela Smith’s findings suggest is that when we are judging an individual for promotion, for example, it is quite possible that their performance will be transformed once they emerge from a subordinate position, and even more so if we have failed to motivate them properly. They may have been swimming hard against a tidal flow that we cannot see.

Of course, this applies from hiring manager to teacher, coach, and parent, and should require CEOs and other leaders to show a little more humility given the cognitive momentum their high status affords them.

While I love what the cognitive sciences are doing these days, I can’t help but be reminded of the existing literature on these matters. This one evokes the first record I ever owned: Hans Christian Anderson’s tale of The Ugly Duckling. And this YouTube rendering is not so different from the way I used to enjoy it nearly 40 years ago.

Take a look. And believe that you are a swan.

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I hope that this’ll be a first on the internet.

As previously reported, I sold a blonde Fender Telecaster to fund my 1986 language trip to Leningrad. How sensible of me! I came back with a huge weight of Russian poetry (books and records), iconography reference works, and some opera records — the glue in those record sleeves emitting some of the worst smells I’ve ever owned.

Oh, and I came back with lots of pictures of Viktor Tsoi, thanks to my Nikon FM and the fact that I’d loaded up with a decent amount of cheap, quality film courtesy of the geeks in the university Photography Society.

Well, there comes a time in every blog’s gestation that it attempts to monetise, and here is mine. In a lot of other blogs you’ll see the option to leave a tip, buy a coffee, a beer or a cocktail. I can take care of those on my own, thank-you. But what I really need is to get my Fender Telecaster back.

This is more than a simple loss. The guitar I sold in 1985-6 for £190 was an early ’70s vintage maple-necked beauty, and quite possibly older, though definitely not pre-CBS (if you know what I mean).

Where I live, there is a problem for the middle-aged man, and it is a shop called Vintage & Rare Guitars. I’m finding genes are switching on that I thought I either did not contain or that were well under the control of some higher moral fibre. But I know myself too well. I also know that ownership of a Fender Telecaster is probably going to mean not playing it much. So, yes, this is an entirely materialistic vanity project. Rather than keep it to myself, like a sensible mid-lifer should do, I thought I’d share it and engage you all, my small readership, in my quiet, hopeful quest.

Crowdsourcing is the new new thing. And while I’m not expecting you, my readers, to give me anything, by six degrees of separation I think some of you might know someone who might know someone who knows a Russian hedge fund millionaire, metals/oil oligarch or football club owner of a similar age who would have been a Kino fan in his youth, who owes his non-linear wealth in no small part to the freedoms that Tsoy and friends struggled for. Or, better still, some young Russian who owns a search engine, assuming using such a term won’t lose me friends or credibility . If we can just prevail on their guilt for long enough to get their wallet out, they might toss a small sop into my PayPal begging hat that, for a little while, I’m going to embed in the posts and in the sidebar of the blog. It’s an experiment, you know.

It’s good to have an excuse to present an iconic image, and the Fender Telecaster (like my Nikon FM) is an iconic object. It was the first solid-bodied electric guitar. Launched in 1950-1 as the Broadcaster, it was the AK47 of the garage musician. When Chris Anderson talks in his book The Long Tail about the electric guitar democratising music for the pop revolution, and in effect randomising the path from musical obscurity to fame and success, I imagine it is the Telecaster more than any other guitar — even Fender’s possibly more iconic Stratocaster — that he is thinking about.

Now, mine originally cost me £210, on which I made a loss. If I wander into Vintage & Rare Guitars today I can find one similar, although in rougher condition, for just short of £4,000. Ouch. If I indulge in a little fantasy and think mine was really a late ’60s model (possible, though less likely) I’m out of pocket more than £6k; the one below sold recently from an advertised price of £6,850.

What’s more, I made the mistake (due to lack of funds and too much homework) of not buying a real amp for the thing, which is why I never really got round to playing it much. Vintage & Rare have an extraordinary find which I must ask them about: a 1966 Fender Deluxe Reverb amp that has never been used, so the website says. As you can imagine, you have to inquire for the price on that one.

Well my current ambitions are somewhat more modest. The top pictured guitar can be had for less than £500. And I was surprised to learn that on a discount at my favourite tech store, Digital Village, a Standard Tele retails new for £275. That’s less than they were when I was growing up, I think. (Don’t worry, I know only too well that they are not the same.)

As anyone who has ever sent a cow or an African school or other gift through Oxfam etc will know, anchoring is important as a cognitive bias, so I’ll start small:-

34p buys a plectrum

£4 buys a set of strings

£10 buys a strap

£20 buys a stand

£22 buys a guitar lead

£55 buys a case

£279 buys a Standard Telecaster

£479 buys a Highway 1 Telecaster (top picture)

£549 buys a Vox AC-30 (but not the one below. Again, I could not dream of what that is worth.)

Of course, if you bought a Fender Telecaster in 1985-6 in Kettering for around £210 — blonde, white scratch plate with a slightly loose G-string — I’ll give you £210 for it. Do the right thing, won’t you?

I’m feeling rather guilty about this conspicuous begging, even though it happens to be my birthday today. Still, at least there are three links in this post to genuinely good causes. And you can’t blame a guy for not wanting another set of G-clamps.

Photo credits: Top Digital Village Rest: Vintage and Rare Guitars

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The Knackered Hack office window looks out onto Solsbury Hill (or more precisely Little Solsbury) made famous by our local bard, one Peter Gabriel.

If you strip Gabriel’s song down, it tells a story about options and decision-making, and a powerful one at that. It alludes to the turmoil the lead-singer of Genesis went through after he left that iconic band. He got out in 1975, just before punk arrived, though that was not his motive: more creative exhaustion, as I understand it (one of our broken things, you could say).

If you are my age, you’ll know that admitting to liking Genesis as a teenager amounted to what kids these days call “social death.” However, in our modern eclectic world, all the sins of the past are forgotten; my friend Andy (see Journey of a Lifetime) even went to the Led Zep concert, and he was a dyed-in-the-mohair punk, if ever there was one.

Solsbury Hill (Looking down on)

I doubt that the world of decision-making research is going to anoint Gabriel with any honorary degrees, and it’s a long shot that he might be considered for a Nobel Prize in Economics. But why not? Perhaps he could share it jointly with Paul Simon, who did pioneering work in spreading the understanding of the confirmation bias through the song The Boxer, with what I consider one of the best lines in pop:-

Still, a man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest”

But anyway, our options, and how we exercise them are really fundamental to success, or the avoidance of failure. So I was delighted when the Knackered Hackette’s cousin, Greg, brought to my attention the following New York Times story on Dan Ariely’s new book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, because it shows our aversion toward losing options — even when logic dictates that they will have no value to us. Ariely constructed a game to test how we respond to particular pay-offs. Players had to click on doors with rewards behind them:-

As each player went through the 100 allotted clicks, he could switch rooms to search for higher payoffs, but each switch used up a click to open the new door. The best strategy was to quickly check out the three rooms and settle in the one with the highest rewards.

Even after students got the hang of the game by practising it, they were flummoxed when a new visual feature was introduced. If they stayed out of any room, its door would start shrinking and eventually disappear.

They should have ignored those disappearing doors, but the students couldn’t. They wasted so many clicks rushing back to reopen doors that their earnings dropped 15 percent. Even when the penalties for switching grew stiffer — besides losing a click, the players had to pay a cash fee — the students kept losing money by frantically keeping all their doors open.

According to the report, what seemed to motivate was not the desire for future flexibility, but the pain of watching a door close.

“Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Dr. Ariely says. In the experiment, the price was easy to measure in lost cash. In life, the costs are less obvious — wasted time, missed opportunities. If you are afraid to drop any project at the office, you pay for it at home.

In my experience too, there is a lot of mental accounting that goes on just as the NYT says, and it takes real effort, or the words of a poet, to provide a consolidated view.

And because anywhere that the words diversity and complexity appear together Knackered Hack alerts go off, this is a treat for the weekend from a group called Hyannis Sound:-

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