Influencing Young Minds

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is never goodI really like teaching Duke undergraduates. They are an ambitious and intelligent group. But sometimes their ambition and intelligence get in the way of creative thinking, especially in regards to careers. They all want to remain high achievers, so they know they must either become doctors, lawyers, investment bankers or business consultants. Not infrequently I find myself talking to undergraduates about careers, urging them to do something different for a couple years and learn more about the world, before settling on one of these well honed paths.
I was reminded of these conversations recently when I read “How About Never–Is Never Good for You?,” by Bob Mankov, cartoon editor at the New Yorker. He relayed his experience visiting high schools in grade schools, and talking about his career as a cartoonist:

“Some years ago, at my daughter’s high school, I gave a Career Day talk about my thirty-five-year “career” in cartooning. I do these talks in the hope that I can prevent one young person, especially if they are Jewish, from becoming a doctor, lawyer, dentist, or accountant.”

I highly recommend his book, if you’re up for a good laugh. It is loaded with cartoons too!

Is It Irrational For Carmelo Anthony To Take So Many Three Pointers?

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carmelo anthonyA jab to the right, then Carmelo steps back behind the three-point line and launches a shot. It clanks off the back of the rim. How likely is he to be the next person on his team to attempt a shot? And what are the odds that his follow-up shot will come from behind the arc?

NBA players are paid enormous sums of money to make good decisions on the basketball court. To thrive in the league, they learn to pick their spots. Some players know they should avoid three-pointers at all costs, some only take such shots when they are wide open and can set their feet, and others (Steph Curry being a great example) have a green light to toss up three-pointers just about whenever they desire.

But what happens when an NBA player misses a shot? How does such a failure influence the distance and timing of his next shot?

Psychologists have known for a while now that sports enthusiasts believe too strongly in the idea of the “hot hand” – that once a basketball player makes one or two fifteen-footers, he has proven himself to be hot and should, therefore, be fed the ball more often so he can continue his hot shooting. This hot hand theory has been shown to be fallacious, with research establishing that the likelihood of making an NBA shot has, at most, only a slight correlation to the success or failure that same player experienced with his previous shot. The majority of studies in the academic literature have shown that the outcome of the previous shot has no correlation with that of the subsequent shot, once you adjust for the average field goal percentage of the player from the distance in question. Some studies show a small correlation, but even these studies do not dispel the fallaciousness of the hot hand theory, because most of us perceive the correlation – the hot hand – to be much greater than it is… (Read more and comment on Forbes)

Emotional Adaptation and Desire

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26I’ve done a fair amount of research on how people emotionally adapt to life circumstances. My research is mainly in the context of illness and disability, where people bounce back from adversity more than expected. But people can also emotionally adapt to good things, a very important phenomenon for consumer behavior. We are ecstatic when we finally fork over at the money for a large-screen television, but pretty soon we get used to the experience. It looks like this psychological phenomenon has been known at least since the time of Epicurus, who once said:

“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”

Great advice, that hopefully should help us appreciate what we have.

Will Lowering The Price Of Genetic Testing Raise The Cost Of Medical Care?

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The first time scientists sequenced a person’s entire genome, it took more than a decade and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Currently, such sequencing takes less than twenty-four hours and costs less than $5,000:
cost per genome
To put that into perspective, Myriad Genetics charges $3,000 to test for mutations in just two genes associated with breast cancer. The days of affordable genomic sequencing are rapidly approaching. But will such testing bankrupt us? …(Read more and comment at Forbes)

Science Writing Prodigy

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shutterstock_51700795I’ve been teaching college for four years now, at a pretty darn good college. But I’m not sure I’ve seen student writing quite as good as this undergraduate writing sample:
There is a wide yawning black infinity. In every direction the extension is endless, the sensation of depth is overwhelming. And the darkness is immortal. Where light exists, it is pure, blazing, fierce; but light exists almost nowhere, and the blackness itself is also pure and blazing and fierce. But most of all, there is very nearly nothing in the dark; except for little bits here and there, often associated with the light, this infinite receptacle is empty.
This picture is strangely frightening. It should be familiar. It is our universe.
Even these stars, which seem so numerous, are, as sand, as dust, or less than dust, in the enormity of the space in which there is nothing. Nothing! We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s Pensées and read, “I am the great silent spaces between worlds.”
Those words, quoted from a recent Smithsonian article, were written by Carl Sagan as a Chicago undergrad in the 1950s. Pretty humbling, on many levels.

Price Transparency Thoughts from a Thought Leader (And Former Student)

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Paul MillerHere is a great piece on my former student, Jessica Harris, who now works in health care price transparency at Aetna. She visited my class this summer, and here are some of the things she taught them:
The evolution of transparency in the industry: “2013 and 2014 have been really important years for transparency and for discussion on this issue. There were many articles in the mainstream press that discussed all sides of this issue. You also saw where some states have mandated transparency and have actually created websites to show transparency. You also have some advocacy organizations — like the Catalyst for Payment Reform — that represent big companies and released a report card for state transparency laws for the first time in 2013.
And then you also saw some big events happening in federal policy. In March, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released an in-patient data set for the very first time, and then in June they released an out-patient data set for the very first time, showing payment data for individual procedures. That was a big deal. It created a lot of interest from organizations like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation encouraging start-ups to really innovate around this data and figure out how to show it to consumers.”
Barriers to transparency: “Negotiated prices are historically considered trade secrets. Many hospitals or health systems have something called gag clauses where it forbids the payer to disclose the prices they negotiated. Actually a study came out in 2013 showing that only 16 percent of hospitals that were asked the price of a traditional hip replacement were able to give a price. And of those prices, they varied significantly.”
Trends in employer sponsored plans: “There are two trends happening for employer sponsored insurance.
First of all, you’re seeing increased cost sharing. So 38 percent of employees face an annual deductible of over $1,000 per person, in plans that the industry calls “high deductible health plans”. So in 2012, only 13 percent of employers were considering offering only high deductible options. But in 2014, 44 percent were considering offering only high deductible plans. A high deductible model means you have to pay a certain amount before the health insurance even kicks in in terms of cost sharing. So you have to pay a certain amount before you even start paying a co-pay or a percentage of the service you are using.
‘Consumerism’ and out-of-pocket spending continues to increase: despite seeing health care spending go down overall and costs start to stabilize a little bit, we saw an increase in out-of-pocket spending; it was up by 4.8 percent in 2012 to $768 per person.”
The impact of exchanges: “You are seeing a shift from a more traditional, almost like a pension model, to something more similar to a 401k model. Again when we think about health care consumerism, you see more responsibility but also more choice falling on the employee, but it also means the company isn’t defining the health care as much. They are saying go out on exchanges, we’ll give you a voucher, purchase your health care, but it is on you to decide if you’re purchasing a good plan for you and your family.
We’ve heard about the public health insurance exchanges for the uninsured, but there are actually several private health insurance exchanges that have cropped up, creating marketplaces for all those benefits you might traditionally get from your employer and having employees go out and be able to shop on the exchange to be able to get the care that they need.
It’s a really big disruptive force that we’re going to see in the next couple of years. According to one study, by 2017, nearly one in five Americans may buy benefits from an exchange. To put that in perspective, the public exchanges serve nearly 30 million uninsured. The private exchanges are going to rapidly change insurance purchasing for about 150 million people with employer sponsored insurance.”

Side Effect Warnings Can Increase Pharmaceutical Sales

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warningI must not be the only person to wonder how pharmaceutical companies succeed with direct to consumer advertisements when, stuck in the middle of all their TV ads, are those long lists of side effects. You know what I mean. After watching a smiling and attractive person running through a field after receiving some wonder pill, the narrator tucks his voice down an octave and intones that the medication “could cause rashes, constipation, heartburn, bladder dysfunction and cardiogenic syncope.” How could anyone listening to this ad want to take this product?
Research by Yael Steinhart and colleagues suggests that such warnings may increase how much people like the product, but only after they have had the time to get over their immediate aversion to the side effects.
Steinhart presented people with product advertisements that either did or did not include product warnings. In the short run, such warnings scared consumers – they were less inclined to buy the products. No surprise here.
But for some people, the researchers didn’t ask for their immediate attitudes towards the product. Instead, they re-contacted them two weeks later… (Read more and view comments at Forbes)

A Picture of Scientific Publication Bias

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Because so much of human thinking is dichotomous, even though so much of the real world exists on a continuum, we have strange phenomena like the one illustrated in the picture below. The picture shows the significance values of research findings, and reveals that there are many more articles published where the statistical significance of the results is just less than 0.05 than ones where the results are slightly greater than that arbitrary cutoff. The picture excludes all those values which were published at exactly 0.05 because that, somehow being the magic number where a finding shifts from false to true, would probably reveal a bar that extended beyond the top of your computer screen:
scientific bias graph
Ps. Matthew Hankins originally tweeted this excellent picture. 
 

PeterUbel