I have decided to start a blog for several reasons not the least as an effort to increase my cool level. I went to college at a very geeky school. The students there find themselves attending an institution where their neediness and love for memorizing digits of pie made nerdiest nerds cool and the “normal” people on the outskirts. It seems like everyone has a blog and as an effort to be part of the trend I will post my rants and raves like millions of other people around the world for all of humanity to read and criticize. Why blogs are so popular? I have no idea, but I dreaded letting my teachers read my essays in high school but am now willing to allow everyone to criticize my words. I don’t know why following the crowd should make me cool but for millennia people have tried to fit in by doing what others are doing and it has worked for them so why stop a good thing. Second, I have a lot of free time on my hands. While it my by unlikely that anyone will profit from my senseless jabber there is the faint possibility that somewhere in the mess of rants the sequence of my words will be such as to strike a cord deep within someone’s soul thus changing their eternal fates for the benefit of mankind. I don’t have any more reasons for starting a blog so with that note I will go on to my first topic.
We Can Save Ourselves
I like to read, more specifically I crave new information but I hate spending the time it takes to read. I have never learned how to speed read, but I understand the point that a brain as complicated as ours should be able to process information much, much faster than the 300-400 words we read a minute. Speed readers claim that we are limited because we read the words in our mind and instead we should learn to read in clumps of words at a time. That process is intriguing but obviously not enough to entice me to do it. I can’t wait for the day when we will be able to download information into our brains, which shows how lazy I wish I were. That being said, books, movies, news, and tv consistently barrage us with ideas. Most of the time I forget almost as soon I hear or read something what was written and very rarely does it have any affect on my life. One author that has had a significant impact on my life is Michael Lewis. Yesterday, I read an article written by him about Shane Battier and what an essential role he plays on the Houston Rockets even though he has well below stats in every category. You can read the article yourself http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html?scp=1&sq=shane&st=cse though it is a few pages long it is worth the read. Shane is apparently the most unselfish player in basketball and he plays to improve the team’s performance and not his own. For this reason coaches have criticized his play but he plays a game of statistics on the court. He knows where he wants the opposing player to shoot from, with which hand, and what he needs to do to get him in that situation. It is an interesting concept that I’m sure will continue to spread throughout professionally sports as create a game of calculated probability much like that of a casino.
Michael Lewis has already written Moneyball which explains how statistical analysis has revolutionized the game of baseball. He claims that players who would have been considered mediocre at best 15 years ago are the ones who create championship teams. I’m and pretty sure that in life we all do the same thing. We overvalue the wrong information because we feel that it is important. How much do we really overvalue and how much is it really worth to us?
I took an optimization class in college. One of the assignments we had was to optimize someone’s diet based on their food interests, heights, weight, activeness, etc… and we would optimize the diet according to cost or the utility gained from a certain diet. I chose a professional athlete who had a high carb diet and optimized his diet based on costs. 80% of his diet was consistent of rice, 19% of onions, and 1% of other. Now I appreciate variety as much as anyone else, but as an effective diet it would have worked to get him the needed nutrients he needed for the lowest cost possible. While it is an extreme example it showed me how much I waste. In life, we all are not efficient whether it is the 30 extra minutes my wife needs getting ready so she looks absolutely perfect even though she would have looked great only spending 10 minutes getting ready. Or if it is the managing director at an investment bank who tried to push his bonus from $4 to $5 million while costing the economy a billion dollars in the process by packaging and selling CDO’s based on sub-prime mortgages.
Now this may seem like a random topic and realistically probably won’t matter for most people. But what if we were all 10% more efficient. There are people with way more schooling than I will ever have who say that to solve our energy crisis we could just become much more energy efficient instead of trying to develop new energy sources. Heck, unplugging electronic equipment when we are not using it will save us 20% on our electric bills. What if we all threw away 10% less food each year because we didn’t forget about it in our refrigerators? The change in demand not only would lower costs for all consumers but it could have serious global consequences. Maybe we could buy Starbucks one less time a week and spend the few hundred dollars we saved to donate to a charity. Maybe we could exercise 30 minutes a day since we could definitely use it and reduce 50% of our health care problems and solve the rising cost of health insurance. Now I don’t know how accurate it is but everyone that I have talked to in the medical field says that if we just exercised, ate right, and drank more water most of the needs for doctors would disappear. Hospitals would be empty, EMTs would be bored, and health care costs would tank. Even the poorest families could then afford health insurance and millions of lives could be saved. All it would take is for us to get off our lazy butts and go running for twenty minutes a day. Heck, Roger Bannister broke the 4 minute mile a feat that people said was impossible and he practiced during his lunch break to win the gold medal. So if all you get from this is that if you want to save a kid’s life in the slums of Detriot is to go running everyday that’s fine, but what you should really want is to be a Shane Battier. Someone who understands that even if he scores not points, gets very few rebounds, no blocked shots, or assists that he is the difference between a mediocre team and a championship team because he understands that what really matters often isn’t valued highly by others but it is vital to the future of us all.
