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Monkey Business and Freakonomics
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Fri Apr 20, 2007 02:16 AM
from the cashing-out-in-banana-chips dept.
from the cashing-out-in-banana-chips dept.
marct22 writes "Stephen J Dubner, co-writer of 'Freakonomics' said there will be a second Freakonomics book. One of the items that will be covered is capuchin monkeys' use of washers as money, buying sweets, budgeting for favored treats over lesser treats. He mentioned that one of the experiments had similar outcomes as a study of day traders. And lastly, he watched capuchin prostitution!"
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There's only been half a book so far.. (Score:4, Informative)
It's one of those books you buy at the airport before a long trip only to discover that it only takes half the trip to read it.
Re:There's only been half a book so far.. (Score:5, Informative)
It was short. But also one of the most interesting short books I've read.
So I hereby counter your unrecommendation ;)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Naked Economics [amazon.com] tries to do the same thing as Freakonomics, but achieves a much higher degree of success. Freakonomics was dumbed down to an almost insulting level, and many of the examples provided felt somewhat outlandish. Naked Economics does a much better job of distilling economic theory down to plain english, and picks much more relevant examples. I also found it to be a pretty entertainin
Re:There's only been half a book so far.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It never spends much space on economic theory, even "distilled to plain English", because that isn't the purpose of the book.
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Re:There's only been half a book so far.. (Score:5, Funny)
So, you're saying independent thinkers should take your word for it and do what you demand?
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Re:There's only been half a book so far.. (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: (Score:2)
Washers (Score:2, Funny)
3 week later, in prison... "I need to learn how to spell Cancun."
Monkey prostitutes (Score:3, Interesting)
Proof positive that it's the oldest profession?
I find it interesting how monkeys can be compared to day traders. I think to goes to show how similar us humans really are to other animals. In many ways we're more a fortunate combination of traits than having truly unique traits.
Re:Monkey prostitutes (Score:5, Funny)
I think it simply goes to show how similar day traders are to monkeys.
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Re:Monkey prostitutes (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Monkey prostitutes (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"He also devised two games that showed monkeys could end up feeling as if they'd won or lost, even though they'd actually broken even. Their seemingly irrational preference for the "winning" game had Chen questioning how useful the monkeys would be as a touchstone for studying human behavior. Then he found that a similar study of day traders conducted by another researcher resulted in the same psychological preference. Even when they ca
Or maybe (Score:4, Interesting)
Let me tell you a joke: "A researcher puts a flea on a piece of paper and yells, "JUMP!" The startled flea jumps. The researcher cuts off the flea's legs, puts it back on the piece of paper, and yells, "JUMP!" The flea doesn't jump. The researcher notes, "Fleas hear with their legs. A flea whose legs have been cut off can't hear any more.""
Or here, let me offer definitive proof that cats are nerds, or at least nerds act just like cats. Cats:
- are naturally attracted to books and keyboards. Mine always used to come curl up on the book I was reading.
- aren't very social, and don't deal well with extended periods of social interaction. (Keep petting one too long after it signalled "I've had enough," and it might just scratch.) They also actually need periods of being alone or left alone. Also, bringing a new cat home might just result in a fight over who's alpha, instead of, "hi, welcome to the team."
- except for a few modified/selected races, only "talk" when they actually have something to say and/or when all else failed. (See the widespread myth that meowing is somehow only for communicating with humans.) They're also not good at telling you what they want or why. How introverted is that?
- have a problem with authority and obeying orders. (See, "herding cats.")
- have unbalanced diets, by human standard, and would rather not eat their veggies
- have weird sleep schedules, by human standards.
- like it warm. I can just see a cat coming to the office in mountain boots and a sweater in July, if it were anthropomorphic.
- really dislike being stuffed in a suit and tie.
- really don't like showering, or being given a shower. Actually, "loathe" just about starts to describe it.
- play (with) all sorts of stuff that makes no sense for a normal human.
- never discovered complex courting rituals.
Etc. There you go. I've proven beyond all doubt that nerds act just like cats. Funny how similar we are to animals, eh?
In practice it just shows how easy it is to find _some_ animal that matches whatever you want to match, if you just look hard enough and ignore what is _really_ happening there. E.g., I've thoroughly ignored the fact that a nerd surviving on say, chocolate or pizza/chinese food only, is doing it because of taste preferences or being too lazy for anything else, while a cat is actually biologically made to be a meat-only eater. ("Obligate carnivore.") E.g., I've thoroughly ignored the fact that a cat's attraction to books isn't because it actually wants to read, and to your keyboard isn't because it wants to program. Etc.
To get back to the topic, yeah, you can compare anything from the real economy to a monkey play-economy, but it's just material to make Joe Sixpack feel better about his not understanding the real economy. Day trading especially is a complex phenomenon, including such aspects as being, basically, a form of gambling. I.e., when you see monkeys playing cards/dice/3-cups/whatever, then you'll have an essential ingredient in it. Sure, you can look at it superficially being just like monkeys and bottle caps changing hands, but that's the kind of superficial over-simplification that's outright useless except maybe as an emotional metaphor.
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I disagree (Score:2)
Humans are a fickle species. We demand to be entertained, humored, amused. Perhaps its our irrational emotions tak
Yes, but... (Score:2)
Yes, if we couldn't dream, fantasize, whatever, we'd probably be less successful than snails. But equally if we took all phantasies to seriously, we'd be even less successful. The trick is to _not_ jump off the house j
Re:Or maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
Allow me to start by mentioning my bias, I liked the book, took classes from Steve Levitt, and worked for him for a while during and after college. It may help to know that those gimmicky "comparisons" really were not a part of Levitt's academic papers [uchicago.edu] which the book is based on. Here's a bit of background on Freakonomics, basically Levitt writes a ton of clever papers that win him some recognition. Dubner took these papers and simplified them to try and make them accessible to the non-economic public. Sure, stylistically, there's issues that I have with it as well (and these are issues I have with virtually every pop-science book out there). But I feel as if you've belittled the book's content based on some style choices designed to draw the reader in.
Perhaps I've misunderstood your point, but gimmicky comparisons aside, there's a lot of well thought out content to that book that shouldn't be outright dismissed or characterized badly due to some tasteless introductory paragraphs.
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man, beast and machine (Score:2)
Kenan Malik would disagree.
That said, there are some things I disagree with Kenan Malik myself.
In any case, his book 'man, beast and zombie' is an interesting read, which make you wonder of the intrinsical (?) differences between humans and animals (and AI's).
May I be an early welcomer... (Score:4, Funny)
1) capture monkeys
2) provide a selection of washers
3) !!sex!!
4) profit!!
In Africa, monkeys shag you!
God, Slashdot is soooo predictable these days....
And why was my capcha 'incest'? Is someone trying to make a point?
From my personal experience (Score:4, Funny)
Only difference is that prostitutes usually dress up nicer and generally have a better taste in men.
Re: (Score:2)
Bonobo prostitution (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Bonobo prostitution - maybe not (Score:2)
Or it was his girlfriend (Score:3)
Re:Bonobo prostitution (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Bonobo prostitution (Score:5, Funny)
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Washers as money? (Score:5, Funny)
What makes monkeys so special? (Score:3, Funny)
They don't have any thumbs to speak of! (Score:2)
I've read the book... (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The article you quote says "The top 1 percent owns over 38 percent of the nation's wealth"
You got confused with "The top 1 percent's financial wealth is equal to that of the bottom 95 percent" which is not the same.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Right... so the top 1% should be paying 95% of the taxes. :p
Back in the real world, we nearly have a flat tax already [assetbuilder.com].
-l
Monkeys... (Score:5, Funny)
Monkey business news, only 2 years old (Score:4, Informative)
The NY Times article on that study, from 2005, can be found here [nytimes.com].
Yes, but TRAINED (Score:4, Interesting)
Basically it's bullshit to then compare a community of gorillas arificially _trained_ to do X to a community of humans who have a rationale behind doing X, as if there were no difference there. Whatever X may be.
In this case, "monkeys using washers/caps/whatever as money" conjures an image that is thoroughly misleading. It's not like those monkeys just saw a heap of washers and went, "I know, let's use those as money". They were _trained_ and coaxed to play a game they don't even understand.
Money was a hard concept to figure out even for humans. It took tens of thousands of years to figure that one out. Even if you look at the economy of, say, the Old Kingdom (an ancient Egypt period), it was based on barter. If you had some extra grain (e.g., you were a farmer) and wanted a pot, you'd go to the potter and ask, basically, "how much grain do you want for that pot?" Then the potter wanted a knife and went to the smith and asked, "can I trade you some pottery for a knife? What if I gave you some of this grain I earned too?" And so on.
Discovering money wasn't just an accidental seeing a round piece of metal and going, "oh, you know, we could use a bunch of those as money." It was a long and rocky road in itself, for example, discovering first the artificial value of jewellery and other rare luxuries. Then the fact that a golden chalice could be stored longer than a ton of grain, which would eventually rot. And only then the money wasn't just some rounded bits that could be traded, but a standardized quantity of such a valuable, non-decaying metal.
E.g., the value of the Roman Solidus, wasn't just being a round piece like a washer, but being a standardized quantity of gold. There wasn't some arbitrary assigned value to it, like when playing with washers or Monopoly money, the value was the exact value of the 4.5g of gold in it. Two pounds of Solidi weren't just an arbitrary value multiplied by the number of coins, it was the exact value of two pounds of gold.
Floating paper money with floating values are a _very_ recent invention, and it took lots of growing pains to wrap the human mind around _that_ notion. It took first assigning a value in gold, and getting people to believe that they can actually go and redeem a 100$ note for 100$ worth of gold. I.e., the value was _still_ tied to the idea of having an inherent value. It took a Great Depression to finally decouple money from an intrinsic value in precious metals, and some people _still_ can't really wrap their mind around it.
That was, in a nutshell, 40000 years after humans got out of Africa. Yep, 40k years. That's how long it took humans to arrive at the modern concept of money as just tokens.
So it's silly to believe that a bunch of monkeys would just see a bunch of worthless (for them) washers and immediately come up with the exact same concept. "Hey, we'll use these as tokens whose value is dictated by supply and demand." Nope, sorry, it's just not going to happen.
What you can have is monkeys _trained_ to play with washers in a mockery of an economy. We don't even know how much they understand there, and how much is mindless imitation and "pavlov's dog" kinda reflexes.
E.g., did someone actually figure out prostitution in all its human implications? Or more likely, a bunch of monkeys trained to give tokens to the researcher on all occasions, e.g., when they're fed, started also giving tokens as a reflex to anyone, including to the female they're mating with?
Did they really understand the concept of _buyin
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Re:Yes, but TRAINED (Score:5, Insightful)
People don't see that development, the money-for-gold of the old days. They see the essentially worthless token that becomes valuable because everyone around them deems it just as valuable. They don't care about how international trade influences inflation and how the Dollar stands towards the Euro or Yen, they know that prices go up or wages go down, but the why and how completely escapes them.
So generally, most people are just at the level of those monkeys. They know that if they perform some tricks (i.e. work), they will get some tokens (a paycheck) and they can redeem them for sweets (or a new computer). And that's it.
When you look at the bottom of it all, you'll see that many people are just that: Trained monkeys.
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Yes and no (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, you can say that many individual humans are not much better than trained monkeys. But that's a different topic.
No, IMHO, you can't compare:
A) a human behaviour that evolved over 40,000 years, and based on concepts refined and formalized over all that time, to
B) a monkey behaviour that exists only because someone trained them to do that.
Even if many of the individual humans involved at point A don't re
Re:Yes and no (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Yes, but TRAINED (Score:4, Insightful)
Washers and monopoly money aren't worth much because not enough people believe they are worth something.
What it takes is belief.
If the belief in the US Dollar's value weakened, it will fall in value. If it dropped enough you might have to give a million of them to perfect strangers just to buy loaves of bread, or a virtual sword in an MMOG.
Most people do not make buying decisions the way you claim they do. Only a few would do "this will save me X hours, but does it cost more than I make in X hours". Maybe even more people would go "Shiny! Let's buy it" than do what you say (looking at how advertising works
See "The Psychology of Spending": http://web.mit.edu/giving/spectrum/winter99/spend
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Humans are not trained? (Score:3, Insightful)
So you are saying you emerged from the womb with complete understanding of language, mathematics, and cause-effect association? When you were a child, did you have a clear rationale explaining why you were being taught how to divide or expand your vocabulary? I think you were sent to school where you received exposure to these and other concepts repeatedly until you began accurately repeating them to your instructors. Eventually you learned how to independently form sophisticated compositions of those si
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Sorry to break it to you, but if all that school left you with is a bunch of pavlovian reflexes, like a school for dogs would, then you probably shouldn't be
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You are. You assume you know that animals can't reason or think about things and apply them differently. Do you really for a moment think the researchers trained the monkeys to be prostitutes for the washers/money? No thats an instance of the monkey's reasoning and thinking about new and other ways to garner their sweets. Is the ability of the monkey's to reason and think about the training as sophisticated as our ability? probably not, but it seems like it should be judged o
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Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
For a nice expose on the myths of animal "training", take a look at "Do Animals Think?" by Clive Wynne (Easy search on Amazon). In a nutshell, there is no conclusive evidence that animals can "learn" beyond what is required for their natural environment. There is a big difference between Snake! Everyone watch out! and Hmm, I see a danger
Re:they are like us (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Considering how many internal memos, legal documents and news reports that I have read follow the same structure; I fail to see how their understanding is any different from a persons.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
it does? In my "Revised and Expanded Edition" there's nothing of the sort.
Also, their blog [freakonomics.com] (which was linked in TFA, but who reads TFA) is well worth a read if you enjoyed the book (or even if you haven't read it).
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Also, bear the probable audience in mind...