The October Challenge & Black Swan Sandy

ast month I challenged myself to start and finish a screenplay. I can now announce that I have written a complete draft of that screenplay. It will take some revising, but I am, for the most part, content with where it starts and how the story does not stray from its premise. Following an old teacher's advice, I pushed on throughout never stopping to go back. Rather, I kept a list of items to address, flesh out, include and fix which I'll tackle in the second draft.

Up next? Another month, another screenplay. I'm also editing the cognitive psyche kids' stories I wrote. One, pertaining to Black Swans, is particularly apt in light of Hurricane Sandy. Some folks said they didn't evacuate because they had lived in their neighborhoods for decades and had no experience with such a terrible storm and so found it hard to believe such a thing could either exist or do so much damage. They couldn't imagine such a storm because they had no first hand experience with one. It didn't matter what others told them be they meteorologists or folks who had experienced such weather elsewhere; those who had yet to experience such a storm themselves stuck to their pre-existing bias against a storm of such size.

Needless to say, that's a strong and potentially deadly bias. If we can become aware of that bias and loosen the grip we have on it, hopefully we can save some lives and stop making mistakes we seem to repeat generation after generation.

And now for my next trick...

ears ago friends introduced me to the work of German painter Gerhard Richter. Richter often layers paint which he then scrapes away at giving the piece a third dimension. What I like about Richter's approach is how he literally digs deeper.

In carving up my tome of a children's book on financial education, I settled on a single story that transcends financial education. This made me wonder - have I dug deep enough or have I just scratched the surface?

The depth of my exploration of this topic became particularly clear as I read Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money. Make that the book's afterword. For as good as the book is, the afterword is even better because of Ferguson's discussion of cognitive psychology - particularly our ability to avoid biases such as overestimating success and underestimating risk and failure - and its impact on our ability to make good financial decisions on a daily basis. 

Question is, how many of us will ever read Ferguson's afterword? How many will read the 26 page study by Eliezer Yudkowsky that the afterword is based on? 10% of the population? 1%? How many of us have read all our email? Exactly.

In the last few years Rockabye Baby! started putting out albums called "Lullaby Renditions of..." various musical artists. They've done Radiohead, Bob Marley, Adele, Journey, Kanye West and many more. In each case they replace vocals with xylophones and other kid-friendly instrumentals. These renditions did for pop music what Baby Einstein did for classical music.

Yudkowsky's study discusses eight points in particular that are just as interesting as the findings of the marshmallow test. In a series I'm simply calling, "Big Ideas, Little Books," I will now for my next trick write a 32 page children's book for each of the eight ideas discussed in the study. And I will write them all in the next eight days. If DiMaggio can get a hit in 56 straight, I can write 16 rhyming couplets for eight days straight.

Knock-Knock

ertain events come with time stamps. Off-hand, I recall three: 9/11, the death of J.D. Salinger, and the first knock-knock joke by Syd, aged 2.

Master Syd's delivery of the joke is particularly notable because till then he preferred to stop after the initial "Who's there?" response and break out in laughter as if holding the punchline hostage was joke enough.

Just when he had conditioned us to expect his premature guffaws, he surprised us with the whole joke:

Syd: "Knock-knock."
Audience: "Who's there?"

Syd: "Syd."
Audience: "Syd who?"

Syd: "Syd down, you're rockin' the boat!"

The delivery of the punchline - on time and with gusto - brought the house down.

The knock-knock joke has made us laugh or roll our eyes since at least 1936. It survives as a corny hand-me-down from one generation to the next thanks to its tight five line formula; a formula that is so rote and delivered so quickly that the only bit in question is the last few words which we run up to like a cliff only to fall over like a lemming every time.

How did I get onto knock-knock jokes? Good question. After working on the marshmallow test story, I learned the importance of distraction from temptation. Writing knock-knock jokes is a good distraction. Telling them is even better.

Distractions are particularly important in "hot" times, that is, times when folks are apt to make poor decisions based on emotion (arguing balls and strikes after getting rung up only to get tossed) rather than better decisions during "cool" times (returning after a long walk following a disagreement).

Chapter after chapter and situation after situation, be they in the marshmallow test story of Cookie-Wise Pablo or an additional series of Pablo stories I'm outlining based on cognitive psychology studies regarding heuristics and biases, the hot/cold dichotomy appears frequently. Often it seems that will power and intelligence aren't so much required to make good decisions as the ability to distract oneself from temptation or "hot" scenarios.

So, in one story Pablo distracts himself by going for a walk. In another, he writes and tells knock-knock jokes. What do you do to cool down?