Psychology of Creativity: Art, Science and Technology

Until the middle of the 20th century, creativity was generally considered as a psychological attribute of an artist and, sometimes, of a scientist. Then in the late 1950s, J.P. Gulliford applied the idea of creative thinking to technological inventions.

Nowadays, engineers and scientists are expected to be creative. A recent paper shows how creativity in science/tech and art relate to personality traits, the so-called Big Five:

The Big Five personality dimension Openness/Intellect is the trait most closely associated with creativity and creative achievement.

We confirmed the hypothesis that whereas Openness predicts creative achievement in the arts, Intellect predicts creative achievement in the sciences. Inclusion of performance measures of general cognitive ability and divergent thinking indicated that the relation of Intellect to scientific creativity may be due at least in part to these abilities. Lastly, we found that Extraversion additionally predicted creative achievement in the arts, independently of Openness. Results are discussed in the context of dual-process theory.

A related paper outlined the overall relationship between the Big Five, by grouping them into two complementary categories - Stability and Plasticity.

Remarkably, the brain uses a broad range of cognitive strategies to pursue goals within a social context. Given a chance, we can exercise our creative options through technological innovation.

As a side remark, from an innovation theory perspective, the brain and society solve the stability-plasticity dilemma by using both traits, e.g. through the separation in space and time.

Creative Solution of the Day: the Publication Dilemma

Typically, inventors face a disclosure dilemma: on the one hand, you want to explain your idea to a potential investor or a customer; on the other hand, you don't want to explain it because the idea can be easily stolen. Researchers face a similar dilemma when they consider publishing their results that  might have valuable commercial implications.

In the 1840s, Samuel Colt used the US patent system to overcome the dilemma:

When Samuel Colt, of revolver fame, was trying to sell the U.S. government a system of naval mines, he had to establish that his device was original without giving away its secret. His imaginative solution was to submit the plan to the Patent Office, obtain a confirmation of its originality, and then withdraw the application before the patent was granted, thereby avoiding the publication of the patent specifications.*

The Colt's approach exemplifies a powerful problem-solving technique often called "Separation in Time." According to the principle:
- you perform the useful action first — in the Colt's case: explaining the invention via a patent application — at the time when your potential customer needs to be convinced;
- then you perform a reverse action — withdraw the patent application — at a different time, so that the competition doesn't learn about the idea.

Snapchat provides the most recent example of a successful application of the "Separation in Time" principle along the lines of Samuel Colt's solution. That is, a Snapchat picture or a post is published for a short period of time to a limited group of subscribers; then, the post disappears, so that the information doesn't leak out to the general public. Clearly, the technique can be used for a broad variety of "limited offers."

* Source: Alex Roland, "Secrecy, Technology, and War: Greek Fire and the Defense of Byzantium, 678-1204." 1992.

tags: dilemma, problem, solution, social, separation

Stanford CSP 74 Principles of Invention and Innovation (BUS 74). Session 2 Quiz 1

In a recent MIT Technology Review article, Antonio Regaldo describes a new genetic engineering approach that promises to eliminate malaria:

Malaria kills half a million people each year, mostly children in tropical Africa. The price tag for eradicating the disease is estimated at more than $100 billion over 15 years. To do it, you’d need bed nets for everyone, tens of thousands of crates of antimalaria drugs, and millions of gallons of insecticides.
...
A gene drive is an artificial “selfish” gene capable of forcing itself into 99 percent of an organism’s offspring instead of the usual half. And because this particular gene causes female mosquitoes to become sterile, within about 11 generations—or in about one year—its spread would doom any population of mosquitoes. If released into the field, the technology could bring about the extinction of malaria mosquitoes and, possibly, cease transmission of the disease.

Question 1: Using the "Divergeng-Exploratory-Convergent" thinking technique,
a) list lots of benefits and problems that the new approach creates;
b) create an explicit criteria for selecting top benefits and problems;
b) according to your criteria, what are the most important short- and long-term benefits/problems (at least one each)?

Question 2 (optional): What dilemma did the researchers solve, while trying to create their genetically modified mosquito?

Question 3 (optional): What's the difference between system levels that the existing and the new malaria solutions target?

Trade-off of the Day: Warmth vs Competence

In Scalable Innovation, we show how breaking, instead of making trade-offs, allows innovators create breakthrough technology and business solutions. It turns out, successful solutions to trade-offs in human psychology can also be beneficial in one's personal or professional life.

For example, here's how people typically perceive others in two psychologically important dimensions - Warmth and Competence*:

Figure 1 Each quadrant represents a unique combination of warmth and competence. The Partner, combining warmth and competence, inspires admiration. Its opposite, the Parasite, inspires contempt or disgust. The Predator and Pet inspire ambivalent feelings: the cold and competent Predator breeds resentment, while the warm and incompetent Pet inspires pity.

As you can see from the diagram, an ideal situations puts one into the upper right corner labeled "Partner", which combines high Warmth with high Competence. But research shows that in real life, people typically judge others in just one dimension and infer the other one through an implicit trade-off:

Theoretically, warmth and competence judgments vary independently, but in practice they are often negatively correlated, so that groups are stereotyped ambivalently as warm but incompetent, or competent but cold — an effect termed social compensation. For example, older people are perceived as warm but incompetent, and regarded with pity, whereas rich people are perceived as competent but cold, and regarded with envy. 

These ambivalent stereotypes are so ingrained that accentuating only one positive dimension about a person actually implies negativity on the omitted dimension — a secret language of stereotypes perpetuated by communicators and listeners. Indeed, the tendency to focus on the positive dimension of an ambivalent stereotype while implying the negative dimension has increased as social norms against expressing prejudice have developed.**

As we can see, even being perceived in a positive light can lead to negative personal and professional consequences. Therefore instead of succumbing to the trade-off, a psychologically-aware problem-solver would have to use one of the separation techniques to break the trade-off and demonstrate both warmth and competence.

I think I'll turn this real-life problem into a quiz for one of Stanford CSP invention/innovation courses.

* source: The Middleman Economy, by Marina Krakovsky
** source: doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2016.01.004. Promote up, ingratiate down: Status comparisons drive warmth-competence tradeoffs in impression management. Swencionis & Fiske, 2016.

Trade-off of the Day: Smartness vs Ease of Use

Steve Jobs shows how Apple broke the trade-off with the iPhone.



tags: trade-off, dilemma, interface, mobile, software, apple

Principles of Invention and Innovation (BUS 74), Session 2, Quiz 1

A 2008 Harvard Business Review article by Noam Wasserman describes a difficult choice that a start-up founder faces when his company begins to grow rapidly:

As start-ups grow, entrepreneurs face a dilemma — one that many aren’t aware of, initially. On the one hand, they have to raise resources in order to capitalize on the opportunities before them. If they choose the right investors, their financial gains will soar. My research shows that a founder who gives up more equity to attract cofounders, non-founding hires, and investors builds a more valuable company than one who parts with less equity. The founder ends up with a more valuable slice, too. On the other hand, in order to attract investors and executives, entrepreneurs have to give up control over most decision making.

This fundamental tension yields “rich” versus “king” trade-offs. The “rich” options enable the company to become more valuable but sideline the founder by taking away the CEO position and control over major decisions. The “king” choices allow the founder to retain control of decision making by staying CEO and maintaining control over the board—but often only by building a less valuable company.

-------------------------
Since the publication of the artcile, a number of successful technology companies, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Uber, managed to break, rather than make the trade-off. That is, the founders have retained a large degree of control while building highly valuable companies.

Question 1: What's common between these companies with regard to the relationship between control and funding? Describe the existing or propose a new breakthrough solution to the founder's trade-off.

Question 2: Provide at least one example where the investors' decision to fire the founder(s)
a) destroyed value of the company;
b) greatly increased value of the company.

tags: innovation, entrepreneurship, vc, trade-off, dilemma, bus74

Finally, I have my magic formula for analyzing problems and inventing new stuff!

Actor(s) {A}
in Context(s) {E},
using Stuff {S} and incurring Cost(s) {C},
perform Action(s) {P}
produce Result(s) {R},
which counts as Outcome(s) {O}

Several immediate thoughts:
- Dilemma resolution techniques apply to Actor(s) and/or Context(s).
- 10X analysis applies to Cost(s) and/or Result(s).
- The Three Magicians, esp. the second one, move us between Results and Outcomes and provide different levels of Contexts.
- Elements quantize!

There's a lot more but I have to think about how to describe this 6-dimensional innovation space in detail.

Also, we live in a world abundant with high-tech startups, while Christinsen's "Innovator's Dilemma" was formulated for a world with sparse startups. Today's successful high-tech companies — Google, FB, Apple, etc — feast on this abundance.

tags: invention, innovation, system, model, dilemma, 10x

Invention of the Day: Teleprompter

The teleprompter made live TV programs possible because it allowed news anchors and performers to deliver long speeches without spending days and weeks memorizing them.

According to a Smithsonian article:

“For those that had been either in theater or the movies, the transition to television was difficult, because there was a much greater need for memorizing lines,” says Christopher Sterling, a media historian at George Washington University. “At the time, there was a lot more live television, which many people today tend to forget.” Instead of memorizing the same batch of lines over the course of months, Barton was now expected to memorize new lines on a weekly or even daily basis. Cue cards were sometimes used, but relying on unsteady stagehands to flip between them could sometimes cause catastrophic delays.

Here, we can see how a new media technology — "the TV world" — lead to a 10X increase in demand for live content. During radio broadcasts, announcers could read long texts from a written or typed page. By contrast, live television required direct eye contact with the audience. In short, a successful TV program required the best of both worlds: lots of fresh content to compete with the radio, and direct contact with the audience like in the traditional theater. The invention of the teleprompter solved this problem.

As usually the case with major innovation, teleprompter was rejected by the convention professional thinking:

Although Schlafly, Barton and Kahn pitched the device to 20th Century Fox, the company was not interested. They promptly quit the company and started their own, founding the TelePrompTer Corporation.

A major refinement of the original invention came from Jess Oppenheimer, who invented an in-camera teleprompter.

Since then, the teleprompter's been a fixture in television, movies and political speeches. It'll be with us until, probably, somebody invents a brain-machine interface suitable for imitating direct human speech.

tags: invention, innovation, 10X, trade-off, dilemma, problem, solution

Solving the Life vs Glory dilemma - 2

Recap: In my earlier posts I described and analyzed in detail a typical dilemma situation: a person faces mutually exclusive choices. For example, the ancient Greek hero Achilles has to choose between dying young with eternal glory or living a long, uneventful life. The modern hero Neo from the Matrix has to chose between the Red pill and the Blue pill.

In art, heroes choose dilemmas. In real life, we try to get away from them by picking a reasonable trade-off - "the middle way." A fundamental characteristic of a dilemma or trade-off situation is the existence of "The Box." The Box represents a set of constraints, either visible or invisible. The first step to think outside the box is to discover what the box is.

In the Achilles example, we've established that he is locked in the box of personal mortal combat with an opposing fighter - Patroclus. Even if Achilles wins today, sooner or later a new fighter will be born to kill him. That is, once you've entered the dilemma box, the choices are unavoidable: Achilles wins some great battles, but he is eventually killed by Paris, who, in turn, dies in combat later.

At the first glance, the Achilles' Life vs Glory dilemma seems to have no happy outcome. On the other hand, we've established that another Greek Hero - Odysseus - had found a breakthrough solution: he reached eternal glory AND lived a long, fulfilling life. How did he do that?

First, let me say that the Achilles' box is version of a theoretical construct created by economist Francis Ysidro Edgeworth in the 19th century. It serves as a foundational principle for the modern economics of free markets, where people make rational choices about allocation of limited resources. That is why the first principle of economics is often stated as "Everything is a trade-off."

In Sclalable Innovation (Prologue), we show that great innovations often happen when people break trade-offs and dilemmas, instead of strengthening them. Odysseus is no exception. As a creative individual, he sees outside the Achilles' box. In his thinking, a 3-rd dimension exists - gods and other people (fig below).

When Odysseus encounters a tough challenge he leverages this dimension to generate a broad variety of coordinated actions. During the siege of Troy, he finally defeats the enemy city by getting one group of Greeks build the Trojan Horse, another group to hide inside it, yet another to rush the city when the Horse is inside, etc. This pattern of problem solving repeats when Odysseus runs into trouble on his way back home to Ithaca. For example, he uses the help of his team to defeat the Cyclops and escape from the cave. (Even the Cyclops' sheep act as "members" his team.) Odysseus accomplishes the impossible feat of listening to the song of the Sirens and surviving it too. (I posted about his solution in detail in 2011). Odysseus returns home to Ithaca and restores himself as the rightful king, by craftily creating a coalition of players and arranging the circumstances to benefit his cause. As the result of his adventures, Odysseus achieves eternal glory AND ensures that he has a long life.

In short, Odysseus is a 3D strategist, while Achilles is a 2D tactician. Achilles thinks inside the box, while Odysseus thinks outside it, by discovering dimensions of the situation that Achilles cannot see. In these dimensions, he finds opportunities for novel actions and their novel combinations. To motivate his allies, he uses certain psychological effects, which I'm going to cover later.

tags: creativity, problem, solution, dilemma, trade-off, separation, breakthrough, luck, control

Dilemma of the Day: Making Money vs Influencing Debate

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Laureate in Economics, says:

The reason that we [academics] write these things [books] is not to make money but to influence ideas [that] influence the shaping of the intellectual debate.

Source: Joseph Stiglitz. The Sixth Annual Frey Lecture in Intellectual Property.February 16, 2007 at Duke Law School. (12m.45s).

In contrast, major Silicon Valley innovators, both companies and VCs, break this dilemma by making money AND influencing the world. The Stiglitz' view highlights the difference between invention (i.e. production of concepts) and innovation (implementing concepts on a large scale). In innovation, the goal is to shape the debate for the sake of changing the world and making lots money in the process.


tags: dilemma, quote, business, invention, innovation

Solving the Life vs Glory dilemma - 1

In my earlier post, I quoted Achilles' dilemma from the Iliad. He has a difficult choice between 1) a short, but glorious life of a mortal combat hero; and 2) long, but uneventful life of a provincial king. I also noted a similar choice that Neo, the main character of the Matrix, faces in the virtual world of the all-powerful Mr. Smith(s). Morpheus, another rebel hero, offers him the choice between the Blue and Red pills. Neo chooses the Red pill, which leads him to a dangerous fight with the intelligent machines that rule his world.

Here's how we can diagram the dilemma. The horizontal axis is length of Life; the vertical - Glory. The curvy line is a typical trade-off trajectory, which can take extreme positions: Red = Eternal Glory and Early Death; Blue = Long Life and No Glory.

After posting the dilemma, I went on our regular evening dog walk with Dolce, the Giant Schnauzer. As we were walking, I started to think about Achilles' choices. Neither one of them felt really attractive. Nevertheless, I was sure that the dilemma must have a solution. That is, solving trade-offs and dilemmas is the bread and butter of the TRIZ methodology, which I studied back in college and still practice in my invention work.

The key principle we need to apply here is "Think Slowly!" That is, instead of making a quick choice based on intuition, we have to carefully consider the problem situation. Luckily, a dog walk is perfect for unhurried thinking.

The first step is to get rid of simple, meaningless labels.  For example, the phrase "Blue pill or Red pill" makes the choices easy to perceive in movies, but it tells us nothing about the nature of the situation. The contrasting colors can describe a conflict between all kinds of situations: from chess, to sports teams, to countries, etc. Since we don't know the relevance of colors, when offered the Blue or Red pill, we should say "Neither" and think hard.

How to think about dilemmas? Usually, a trade-off or dilemma is a sign of a constraint that we take for granted. It acts as a box that limits our choices. To solve the dilemma, we have to think outside the box. But how? First, let's try to identify the Achilles' box.

To find the box, we need to see the situation from a different perspective. We know that Achilles is the ultimate mortal combat fighter. He achieves his eternal glory by fighting other heroes to death. In the Iliad, he challenges a famous Trojan warrior - Patroclus. Therefore, we need to add a Patroclus' perspective to the picture (above). Now, we can see the box! Achilles and Patroclus are locked in mortal combat. If one lives, another dies.

In the Iliad, Achilles kills his adversary (the red circle in the figure above). Patroclus dies, but he achieves the eternal glory because he fights valiantly. In the mortal combat dilemma, he gets the Red pill. Although the Patroclus situation is clear, Achilles appears to escape his predicament. He gets the best of both worlds: 1) eternal glory for killing the best Trojan hero; 2) long life after the combat. Achilles lives with glory!

Unfortunately, the career of a mortal combat fighter doesn't end at the last fight he wins. On the contrary, it ends when he eventually looses to the next great hero. In the Iliad, Paris (the guy who stole Helen from the Greeks) shoots and kills Achilles with an arrow. Remarkably, the arrow hits Achilles in the heel, the only unprotected part of his body (thus, the expression the Achilles' Heel).

As the result, the original prophesy is fulfilled: Achilles dies and earns eternal glory (the red circle in the figure above). Given the mortal combat box, it's easy to predict the fate of Paris too.
The Achilles dilemma strikes again: Paris dies in combat, earning for himself eternal glory and, in the process, causing the eventual destruction of Troy.

By the time Dolce and I are halfway through our walk, the original dilemma looks totally unsolvable. Nevertheless, as we continue our problem analysis, we recognize that our favorite hero Odysseus, "the man of twists and turns," manages to escape the fate of Achilles and other mortal combat heroes. That is, he earns eternal glory and lives a long, fulfilled life. Moreover, his method of problem-solving is consistent throughout the Iliad and Odyssey. In each dilemma, he finds a way to think outside the box. How? I'll try to cover his method of problem solving tomorrow. Now, it's time for a dog walk.

Dilemma of the Day: Life or Glory

In the Iliad we find an excellent example of a two-dimensional dilemma. During the Trojan war Achilles has to choose between life and glory,

If I stay here and fight it out round Ilium [Troy], there is no home-coming for me, but there will be eternal glory instead. If I go back to the land of my fathers, my heroic glory will be forfeit, but my life will be long and I shall be spared an early death.

The dilemma is somewhat similar to the choice Neo faces in the Matrix: blue pill or red pill. Note, that in the Matrix the writer makes it easy for us to remember the difficult choice by labeling opposing options with different colors. We don't remember what they mean, but we do remember the colors.

tags: dilemma, story

Invention of the Day: Anaesthesia.

October 16, 1846 is the official birthday of anaesthesia, the art of preventing a surgery patient from feeling pain. On that day, surgeon Dr. Warren publicly demonstrated a painless tumor removal at the operating theater of the Massachusetts General Hospital. To anaesthetise the patient, Dr. Warren used the method invented by dentist William T.G. Morton. Under the invention, the patient was rendered unconscious by inhaling ether, an organic compound known to people since the 8th century, but never used in medicine before. The invention of practical anaesthesia (along with methods to prevent wound infection) created the world of modern surgery. The 1846 invention was a breakthrough that allowed people to control one of the basic biological experiences - pain.

Morton's US Patent 4,848 on the medical use of ether was never enforced due to public outcry.

Lab Notebook: A revolution in Human Resources.

Since the early days of Silicon Valley, venture capitalists (VCs) consider team quality to be a major factor predicting success of a startup. In the US, successful entrepreneurial teams typically emerge from universities and high-tech companies. In Israel, startup team formation often happens in the army, including, its high-tech units. Innovative, risk-tolerant, hard-working, highly-skilled people who can work together effectively are usually called "the A team." Startups succeed when the team discovers and takes advantage of a new, profitable business model, e.g. based on the latest and greatest technology. (Examples: Fairchild Semiconductors, Atari, Apple, Sun Microsystems, Netscape, PayPal, Yahoo, Google, Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, Wase, etc.)

Now, mature companies are trying to use the startup model to get employees to work as teams on specific projects, rather than functional departments in charge of internal processes. Netflix pioneered this approach and its former head of talent acquisition, Patty McCord, actively promotes it today. (See the HBR article for more detail). LinkedIn and Facebook use internal hackatons to identify new potential products and teams that can deliver them.

Another model is acqui-hiring, when an established company acquires a successful startup, so that they can work as an internal entrepreneurial team. Google and Facebook practice this model extensively. For example, many consider the recent acquisition of Nest GSV as an acqui-hire play by Google to get on board a team that can create a successful consumer device.

These approaches take into account that the startup-based innovation model created in Silicon Valley differs dramatically from the successful industrial innovation model pioneered by Henry Ford. He invented not only the mass-production logistics and manufacturing system, but also revolutionized labor hiring. Instead of an ethnically-based team of low-skilled workers hired to build a railroad or unload a ship, Ford wanted to see an English-speaking specialist who could fit into his production process. Similar to the quality control process in parts manufacturing, Ford tasked his newly-invented human resources (HR) department with selecting persons that fit a specific job criteria: work skills, education level, family history, ethnicity, etc. Elements of his approach were based on the popular at the time theory of eugenics, which advocated selecting people based on certain inherent traits. (Today, eugenics is broadly associated with racism and bigotry). Ford's HR system proved to be highly successful for the American industry because it allowed companies to plug individuals into well-defined work and social roles. (For example, when hiring engineers GE routinely interviewed wives of the candidates to make sure they possessed proper moral values.) 

After the World War II when educational and social roles started to shift, the new idea of the Human Capital eventually took hold. Large companies started treating their employees (often with an implied life-time job guarantee, e.g. a trade-union contract) as capital. As workplace requirements changed, the employees were provided with on-the-job educational and training opportunities to maintain or improve their skills. To manage the workforce and comply with labor laws, HR departments set up performance evaluation processes, with regular manager feedback, promotions, and incentives structures. Nevertheless, at the core of it was the old Henry Ford's idea that an individual had to fit into a pre-defined corporate production process. 

Of course, this model doesn't work in an environment where breakthrough innovations are required for company growth. Fist, startups simply can't afford the overhead. Second, large corporations, despite their incredible R&D capabilities, proved to be unable to accommodate innovations from within. Clayton Christensen described this problem in his seminal book "The Innovator's Dilemma." Unfortunately, the solutions that he offered don't seem to work despite people trying hard to implement them. Research in Motion, the maker of Blackberry phone, would be a great failure example (see the ft article). The company did everything by the book, but eventually could not compete with Apple's iPhone.

The current revolution in HR promises to solve the Innovator's Dilemma by giving internal entrepreneurs enough freedom inside the company to create innovations. It also lets companies get rid of employees that don't fit into their culture or have outdated skills. As a result, they get a mobile, active, motivated workforce that can move quickly and carry innovation risks/rewards, rather than offloading it to the parent company. Of course, traditional companies and their HR departments will lag behind in implementing the new model. Most likely, it will continue to spread through new successful startups capable of scaling their initial business into new technology markets.

tags: invention, innovation, control

Flue vaccine: a world-scale guessing game

According to the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),

It takes at least six months to produce large quantities of influenza vaccine. For vaccine to be delivered in time for vaccination to begin in October and November, manufacturers may begin to grow one or more of the virus strains in January based on their best guess as to what strains are most likely to be included in the vaccine.

 To improve the odds of guessing the right virus 6 months ahead of time, each flue shot contains a cocktail  of three weakened viruses. The hope is that at least one of them will trigger our immune system into anticipating the right flue. In essence, we force the immune system into overdrive (red alert state!) because we can't know the exact nature of the flu threat. When the guess turns out to be wrong, as that was the case with the 2009 H1N1 virus, we end up with a pandemic situation because our collective immune system is barking up the wrong tree.

Would it be possible to make a 10X improvement in the vaccine development process, so that the cycle takes 1-2 weeks instead of 18-20 weeks?

The current system is geared toward large-scale production and distribution, which requires government approvals, massive investment into manufacturing, etc. To deliver an order-of-magnitude improvement, we need a different system that produces the vaccine on the spot, bypassing the existing methods. Using 3D printing as an analogy, if we had a vaccine production kit that could be adjusted locally instead of globally, we would be able to kill two birds with one stone: make the right vaccine at the right time AND reduce vaccination costs.

Thoughts?

tags: healthcare, tradeoff, dilemma, problem, solution

Growing new body parts.

The March 22 issue of the WSJ reports that biologists have found a working solution to the problem of creating "spare" body parts for transplantation. Before diving into the solution, let's consider the core problem first.

Traditionally, doctors took organs from healthy donors (live or recently dead) and used them to replace failed organs in their patients. The method had (and still has) two major problems: 1) high-quality body organs are rare and expensive; 2) other people's organs can be rejected by the patient's immune system.
Although creating biological organs from scratch from the patient's own cells can address both aspects of the problem, such method would be extremely difficult and take a long time. Besides, the vast majority of people don't require transplants during their lives. Therefore, growing organs that nobody needs would be a tremendous waste.

The new solution allows to create one's "own" organs on demand. It uses sanitized cadaver organs as a scaffold that supports the patient's own stem cells that grow around it. (The figure above shows steps involved in building a heart.) As the result, we have an abundant supply of cheap "prototype" organs that in combination with the patient's stem cells have a great chance to be compatible with the host body. The method would probably work for most functional body parts, except the brain.

tags: trade-off, dilemma, problem, solution, biology

Trade-off of the Day: Taste vs Convenience

A major problem with canned food is its lack of flavor (Popular Science, 5/10/1012):

What gets sacrificed to the public’s demand for convenience are flavor, texture and nutrients. For food to survive on a shelf for a year, it has to be free of nearly all microbes, and the most common FDA-approved method of ensuring that is fairly primitive. In fact, it is the same sterilization technique that Napoleon’s army used in 1810: Kill all the pathogens by heating food to 250°F in a pressurized vessel called a retort. Hormel Compleats Beef Tips, as a result, taste a bit like canned dog food smells.

The trade-off is based on the dominant process that kills both microbes and flavor by over-heating. Food companies solve the problem by adding artificial flavors. Although a breakthrough solution for the problem exists, the industry is in no hurry to apply it:

In France, the food manufacturer Knorr just introduced the first line of boxed soups that are sterilized with electric current—a more efficient approach that leaves the vegetables in the potage more firm and flavorful than a retort can. But new approaches like these, despite their advantages, take decades to make their way into the entrenched and conservative food industry.

In the example we can see the power of the dominant design/process. It's virtually impossible to displace it unless one is willing to create a different market.

tags: trade-off, problem, solution, dilemma

Lunch Talk: (@TED) The math and magic of origami.

Robert Lang is a pioneer of the newest kind of origami -- using math and engineering principles to fold mind-blowingly intricate designs that are beautiful and, sometimes, very useful.

At 13:53 Robert Lang spells out the dilemma origami helps to solve: something has to be small when folded, and it has to be large (and shaped in a certain way) when unfolded. Examples: space lenses, a heart stent, an airbag, etc. tags: lunchtalk, science, art, dilemma

In praise of procrastination

Nassim N. Taleb writes:

[T]he Romans revered someone who, at the least, resisted and delayed intervention. One general, Fabius Maximus was nicknamed Cunctator, “the Procrastinator.” He drove Hannibal, who had an obvious military superiority, crazy by avoiding and delaying engagement.

There is a Latin expression festina lente, “make haste slowly.” The Romans were not the only ancients to respect the act of voluntary omission. The Chinese thinker Lao Tzu coined the doctrine of wu-wei,“passive achievement.”

Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad. - Antifragility, 2012.

I've been thinking about discussing or — better! — solving the procrastination dilemma with the students during the Summer '13 Principles of Invention course at Stanford. On the one hand, procrastination is bad because it makes us miss important deadlines or waste time on unimportant rather than important tasks. On the other hand, as Taleb notices, procrastination helps us save the effort of reacting to events that might blow by harmlessly without any intervention.

My earlier posts on procrastination: 1, 2, 3

tags: dilemma, problem, solution, course

Lunch Talk: The Social Security dilemma (Yale Univ.)

This lecture continues the analysis of Social Security started at the end of the last class. We describe the creation of the system in 1938 by Franklin Roosevelt and Frances Perkins and its current financial troubles. For many democrats Social Security is the most successful government program ever devised and for many Republicans Social Security is a bankrupt program that needs to be privatized. Is there any way to reconcile the views of Democrats and Republicans? How did the system get into so much financial trouble? We will see that the mess becomes quite clear when examined with the proper present value approach. Present value analysis reveals the flaws in the three most popular analyses of Social Security, that the financial breakdown is the fault of the baby boomers, that privatization would bring young investors a better return than they anticipate getting from their social security contributions, and that privatization is impossible without compromising today's retired workers.

Link

tags: lunchtalk, economics, dilemma, problem