mathbabe

Have you read the recent article in the New York Times about how lower-status monkeys are less healthy and more stressed out than higher-status monkeys? Their gene expression actually responds to changes in social status. Does this resonate with your experiences with humans?

It does with me, and for us people I’d rephrase it this way: your concerns and ideas are given attention in direct relation to your status. Your stress levels rise as you realize your status is lower and your risks have grown.

Here are some examples from work. I’ve been disappointed to notice, time after time, that my ideas are considered important and innovative in direct proportion to how much they are paying me to have them. If I’m underpaid then nobody thinks I am all that smart; nevermind being a friggin’ volunteer (with some exceptions, but don’t stop me, I’m on a roll). This perversely makes me want to get overpaid just so I’ll get listened to.

Cuz why? Didn’t you ever notice that overpaid people’s ideas are about as good as anyone else’s but they are framed as pure brilliance? I have. It even works head-to-head: two people of different status come up with the same exact idea but the one who is more important was listened to and their idea championed. Oh yeah, I’ve seen it, and so have you (example: when I was at D.E. Shaw, we rated other people’s ideas with a “probability of success” in an effort to estimate their expected payouts; someone once showed me their idea, which was identical to one of Larry Summer’s ideas, but had come 2 years before and had scored about half as well. But my fried wasn’t an MD making $5 million per year so clearly his ideas weren’t as good!).

A similar thing happens with problems rather than ideas in a workplace. The worst examples of over-worked and under-appreciated situations clearly don’t happen at the top. For example, when I worked at MSCI, it seemed like the sales guys, who defined the top there, spent more time strutting around making sure each and every one of their efforts went appreciated than doing the actual efforts, whereas the lowly dev-ops guys, and the guys setting up the initial portfolios for the new clients, were treated as an afterthought, only noticed if something went wrong. They’d stay up all night fixing something, probably someone else’s mistake, and nobody would even thank them.

[It still seems so ironic that the most technical people there are also the least appreciated, since the product is essentially technical expertise. Or is it? Maybe I’ve got it wrong, and it’s really about selling technical expertise in a package that makes people feel safe and pious. Maybe the black box we’re selling doesn’t even have to work.]

If you are thinking that everyone at MSCI is in finance and is thus overpaid and pampered, then you’ve got it wrong, it’s a brutal atmosphere, like much of finance. If you don’t believe me, read my friend Katya’s blog, Left with Balls, where she talks about the spell of Wall Street.

Taking one step back, this kind of thing strikes me as unfair and frustrating. The idea that the lowest-ranked also has to deal with ridiculous stress and chronic health problems does not jive with my inherent concept of justice. Although it does seem like a natural response to a system that’s already been created (as in, as a consequence of being frustrated because my ideas are ignored, I want to get overpaid to get listened to, so I’m joining in on the perverted game and furthering the system), it doesn’t seem like we’ve done a particularly good job setting up these systems.

For a country that putatively considers itself a democracy, we seem to have a tremendous amount of respect for a rat-race corporate hierarchy. Is that a contradiction? Or is the American dream actually to start a hierarchy and to sit at the top? Do other people identify with the guys on the bottom or the guy at the top? Or the guys in the middle clawing upwards?

Question: is it really impossible to listen to and evaluate ideas based on their merit? How about anonymous polling of  problems? It’s certainly technologically feasible, but we don’t do it.

Question: Is it really impossible to appreciate people who make things work behind the scenes? How about we ask people to sit with other people in entirely different departments in a rotation to witness what other people actually do? I really think that would help with the appreciation problem (but not if the technical people in your company are in India and the salesguys are in New York).

For the record, when I start a company I’ll do these things. Of course, I’ll be sitting up there at the top thinking what a great idea I had to do them.

Who knows what I’m talking about with this story.

My husband dislocated his finger sledding with my son last January, so more than a year ago, and the hospital kept sending us bills for the event.

But here’s the thing, we were covered under my medical insurance, which had perhaps recently changed policy numbers when MSCI took over Riskmetrics. So probably what had happened was my husband had given them the old insurance card, but in any case, in the the end I knew I wouldn’t have to pay since we’d definitely been covered.

The hospital called once a month or so, and every time they got hold of me I argued with them and told them to check their records. They kept telling me that the insurance company was refusing payment under any of the policy numbers I gave them.

In the end, last month, I called up the insurance company myself and got them to admit payment, which wasn’t hard since they said they’d already paid for the X-ray from the dislocation on that date. I called up the hospital and straightened it out.

So yeah, I ended up doing their job for them, and that’s both annoying and exciting because now nobody thinks I owe them $2400. In fact I did a victory dance (at work, because you always have to do this during work hours for people to answer the phone).

But why I’m writing about it today is that it’s actually really infuriating how often something like this happens, and I can’t help noticing that I always get out of it but many people wouldn’t. I’m at a huge advantage in this common situation because:

• I worked as a customer service person so I know how to talk to customer service people. Turns out you should always be polite, but never hang up the phone until your problem is solved. Just keep asking, extremely nicely, things like, “Hmmm… that’s confusing, what do you think could have gone wrong?” or “What would you do if you were me?” or if those don’t work, “Do you think you could tell me who to talk to sort this out? I’d really appreciate it.”
• I am always covered by insurance, so I never worry that they are right. This is an enormous advantage over people who sometimes lose coverage between jobs or something.
• I keep all my old paperwork. Impossible for people who don’t have an incredibly boring stable lifestyle like mine.
• I have a job that allows me to make calls like this during work hours. Obviously huge.
• I am completely unafraid of forms and red tape. This comes from experience, but I know most people are afraid of such stuff, and that alone would probably keep most people from arguing.

I really do feel like I am relying on my professional skills in order to get my insurance to pay for setting my husband’s dislocated finger, when that should be a no-brainer. If you are inexperienced and poor, you’d probably be completely at a loss for how to deal with this situation.

I wonder how many people have their credit scores lowered by medical claims which should have been paid but weren’t due to crap like this. It’s a broken system, but it only leaks on the most vulnerable people, and I hate that.

I’m often accused by my family members of having no imagination.

I really don’t think that’s fair, I think it’s more that they have outrageous amounts of imagination, and I’m normal. My husband will say something at the dinner table along the lines of, “hey I was thinking about what it would be like to live on a planet that’s attached to another planet by a weird system of ropes,” and without skipping a beat one of my sons will start asking questions: “Are they going straight up in the air or slanted? Can you climb up to the other planet? How far away is it?”. Pretty soon they are, and I’m not kidding, arguing about how thick the ropes are and the question of traveling between the planets and the different civilizations that would evolve on these two conjoined spheres. I’m an observer.

When one of them says something directly to me along the lines of, “mom, what if we lived on a spaceship going to Mars and we could only eat a liquid diet and there were no books, only videogames?”, I am usually pretty stumped (fake example, I just made it up, but you get what I mean). It just doesn’t make sense to me, and I’m constantly going back to one of the assumptions and asking why – why no books? Can’t we get books if we have so much technology? This is when my kids roll their eyes and walk back to their room.

I can’t help it, I’m just a practical-minded person. I want to solve problems but I want those problems to make sense.

In pure defense of my own ability to imagine, I came up with the following thought experiment. For some reason, which doesn’t matter (although it can be fun to come up with ridiculous reasons), we are all put into the witness protection program, and have to move to a tiny little town in the south or the midwest and we have to blend in with the townspeople, and figure out how to make a living and how to make a home. Or at the very least, if we don’t blend in exactly, we have to come up with a good story to explain our eccentricities, and it can’t be, “we’re in the witness protection program!”.

The first question is how we can make a living. I usually imagine waitressing at first, then learning how to be a car mechanic. I think of being a car mechanic as the coolest, nerdiest thing you can count on being able to do in a small town. Plus I love those jumpsuits with the grease stains, I would totally rock my jumpsuit, kinda like these guys:

My husband is a bit harder to place. He’s kind of a huge math nerd, with no actual practical skills, so the best we’ve come up with is that he can be the guy who goes around to people’s houses and helps them with their computer set-ups. But as people are getting better at computers, and as wireless systems are getting easier to set up, this plan is becoming increasingly weak.

Then there’s the issue of his Dutch accent. The idea that our story is that we’ve just moved like 60 miles, so we’re supposed to be heartland Americans, and the accent totally messes up that story. Sometimes (in my mind of course) I make him mute, other times we explain it with some weird speech impediment or maybe a stroke. I know it’s ridiculous, but it’s a toughie!

Finally, there are my kids. They are going to have to play along with the story too, but the problem there is that they’ve been raised (intentionally) to be pretty smart-assed. I’m trying to imagine them going to some random school and not giving away that they’re from Manhattan, watch the Colbert Report every night, and have strong opinions about the GOP race (and those opinions are not positive). Put on top of that the atheism thing, and I’m getting worried. I haven’t spent enough time in little towns (say, in Iowa) to really know how weird that would be, but I’m guessing pretty obviously not-from-around-here weird.

This is one of my favorite dinner topics, I suggest you try it.

I’ve come to pretty much despise the word “innovation.”

First of all, it’s painfully overused, whether you work in finance or a start-up.

In finance, when people complain that banks and hedge funds should be regulated because they take dangerous risks that they don’t understand and that taxpayers have to backstop, the response, typically from a chorus of business professors and economists, is “don’t over-regulate, you might stifle innovation!”

Never mind that if you dig down to what is meant by financial innovation, it usually consists of creating weird mathematical instruments or contracts that require a complicated computer algorithm to price. So, pretty much the stuff that gets us into weird messes in the first place.

If I needed to write a sign to sum this up, it would read something like “Please stifle financial innovation!”. Actually, Volcker said it best: “the only useful banking innovation was the invention of the ATM.”

As it’s used in start-ups, the word “innovation” is also mostly painful to experience. For the most part it’s baldly used as a buzzword, by someone with a spiffy presentation who is clearly not himself (or herself, don’t want to be sexist) planning to be innovative.

In such a buzzword context, innovation becomes meaningless. At best, it’s their attempt to encourage and cajole the people around them to be innovative, and then perhaps take credit for such innovation. At worst, they fetishize Steve Jobs, which usually means channeling his perfectionist asshole side, thinking that may spur extra innovation.

What’s particularly sad about the abuse of this word is that it is inherently meaningful, and that I see and read about true innovation every day, mostly gone unnoticed by the spin doctors. Maybe that’s because most of it is too technical for business guys to get their heads around.

Another thing I’ve noticed, is that usually the most innovative people are also the most high maintenance pain-in-the-ass people to work with. Sometimes (often) downright hostile in fact.

I’ve come to enjoy this phase of “creative hostility” as a way of getting through skeptical or openly suspicious questioning incredibly efficiently. If I propose something and my most innovative, hostile critics immediately jump down my throat, that’s a sign my idea was a good one. I know that sounds weird but it’s true.

Actually maybe it’s not so weird. I watched this TED talk by Brene Brown where she talks about shame, vulnerability, and innovation. You should watch it, it’s only 20 minutes and it’s good.

Specifically, she talks about how, in order to be innovative, one must make oneself vulnerable. Even though she didn’t have time to really argue this, it resonates with me. The most innovative moments I’ve experienced are when everyone involved is willing to be wrong (vulnerable) and to smell each other’s bullshit (skeptical). Opening yourself up to other people’s skepticism takes courage.

She also describes how cultural norms can come into play at moments of shame or vulnerability or courage. In particular, this thing where men cannot be seen as weak. I think it explains why, when I see innovation, I also tend to see overt displays of macho behavior.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. I say that because I’m pretty sure the alternative is passivity and indifference, which is totally unappealing.

Here’s what I think. Real innovation is a mess and brings up all sorts of things that people don’t actually want to talk about. That’s why we only hear about some watered-down a posteriori description of it.

Yesterday I read this article about a mother, Dara-Lynn, who put her daughter Bea on a diet, tiger-mom style, and then triumphantly wrote about it in Vogue, and more recently got a book deal. This brings up lots of stuff for me personally, and I think it’s time for me to write about it.

First of all, I would like to address the issue of why people care so much about parenting issues in the first place. I mean, I guess if you aren’t a parent and don’t plan to be one, this doesn’t matter quite as much (even though you of course were yourself parented, so it should still be somewhat relevant).

My message is basically, don’t dismiss parenting discussions- they expose who we are and what we aspire to be as human beings. Questions of how we parent and what values we choose to impose on our children, who are of course vulnerable to such things, are question of how we individually form and inform culture, creating a tiny piece of the larger culture inside our homes. As parents we want to both affect that culture and prepare our children for the larger world, and it’s a tricky balance.

So given that, what values are we imposing on our kids when we put them on a diet? I can infer that somewhat from the article but I can also speak from personal experience, because my parents put me on a diet when I was 10. My parents set up system whereby I’d be punished (by losing my allowance) if I didn’t lose at least a certain amount of weight each week. They also explained to me how calories worked. That’s it. They let me loose with that information and ultimatum. (ooh, just remembered: the reward for losing 5 pounds was, ironically, a candy bar.)

It was a little strange, in retrospect, for a few reasons. First, I had been chubby since soon after birth. My parents are both and were both chubby. My grandmother lived with us off and on and constantly hoarded bags of candy and fed them to us constantly while watching soap operas. My older brother was also somewhat chubby. In spite of this, I was the only person on this regimen, and nothing else about our eating habits changed besides that I was expected to keep track of the calories I ate- the food itself was still hamburgers, boiled vegatables, and spaghetti with butter.

I guess this may have been my first experience dealing first-hand with a misleading, pseudo-quantitative model. I was told by my parents that losing weight was a simple concept of calories in and calories out, and thus must be simple to deal with. I was honestly too young to question this, and to also question why they hadn’t achieved their perfect weights if it was so simple.

Now, to the question of values. From my perspective as a kid, the values I learned were the following:

1. I am terrible at following simple directions, because I can’t seem to control my eating,
2. I don’t look good to other people, and
3. it’s really important to look good to other people.

All in all, a pretty nasty set of values that I carried around with me like a sin for years, until something else happened, which I will get back to soon.

You might say that the article with Dara-Lynn and Bea is completely different, because first of all the mother wasn’t offhand in planning her daughter’s diet: she lived and breathed the control that she thought was required to get her daughter to lose weight. Also, it was a “success,” in that Bea lost the weight her mother set out for her. Even so, I see parallels for Bea’s received wisdom from her mother:

1. You have to submit entirely to someone else (me, your mother) because you can’t be trusted to follow your instincts,
2. You didn’t look good to other people, and
3. it’s really important to look good to other people.

But I do feel sorry for her on top of what I went through, because now her mom is not only in a national magazine bragging about her control over her kids, she’s also gotten a book deal to go into the details of this control freakiness. Because it’s all about how a mother can foster good eating habits in her kid. I guess.

If there was any justice in the world, it would be Bea getting the book deal, in advance, to describe what it’s like to live with such a control freak mother. I honestly wish her luck.

A few concluding remarks. First of all, if you were wondering when the nerdy stuff was coming, here it is: there’s enormous selection bias going on. For every mother you hear about who drags their kids kicking and screaming through a diet, there are hundreds of poor kids who ended up like me, with failed enforced diets and incredibly guilty consciences (but at least no pictures in Vogue of their shame). We don’t hear about them, of course, because nobody wants to.

Next, although Bea is a “success story” now, I’m pretty well versed in statistics on teenage dieting and I’m anticipating lots of terrible experiences for the daughters of the women who will buy this book. A generation of girls who are ashamed and self-conscious.

Finally, how I got over my shame. It was mostly a coping mechanism. I went into a hospital when I was in 10th grade, with deep feelings of depression, and missed a few weeks of school. It was a critical moment for me, and I knew it. I had to decide whether to be depressed and passive for the rest of my life or whether to try to live life on my own terms. I basically decided to take on the following “anti-values” in order to obviate the terrible self-image I harbored at that time. I came up with these three anti-values, which I still live by:

1. I forgive myself for not being good at controlling myself, because I love my body, even parts of it that confound me,
2. I look good to myself, and
3. it’s not that important to look good to other people.

Probably not stuff for a book deal, but at least it’s kept me from giving my kids eating disorders.