Chess in a dress update

Regular readers may recall that I once conjectured that I could improve my chess by wearing a dress. Well, you’ll be pleased to hear that I’m finally getting round to testing this. Day 1 was allocated to the control group, and I scored 1.5 out of 4. Day 2 was allocated to the intervention group, and I scored 2.5 out of 4. Pretty promising! After day 40 I’ll see whether the intervention days are significantly more successful than the control days. I’m also gathering some other data to see if there are any more patterns I can test in future work. I’ll let you know how it goes, but don’t put it your diaries as I’m quite busy at the moment and the trial days may not be consecutive. Are you excited to find out? I know I am!

Scrabble: the gathering

I played Magic: The Gathering a few times a while ago, but I never really got into it. I like games and I quite like most of the idea of this one, but there’s one feature that puts me off. It’s not the wizards and magic element; I don’t care about that one way or the other. It’s the building your own deck element. For those of you who don’t know, Magic is a card-based game, where each player uses their own personal deck of cards. You don’t use a standard deck; you put together a deck with good cards in it, to give yourself an advantage. A deck can be good by containing cards which are good in themselves, and by having cards that work well together. This leads to the Magic experience having two parts: playing the game, and buying and trading cards to produce a kick-ass deck. The second part can get quite expensive if you take it seriously, although I don’t see that this in itself should put you off when you compare it with other leisure activities like playing golf, going to the football or drinking in a pub.

Anyway, when I play a game I want it to be fair, either by being roughly symmetrical (like chess) or by having a well-organized handicapping system (like golf). And I suppose that for me the collecting part of the Magic hobby is not only unappealing in itself, but also spoils the playing part. I’d prefer it if the cards were dealt randomly from a communal deck. People could still collect fancy cards to add new elements to the game, although since fancy cards wouldn’t give their owner an advantage people wouldn’t want them so badly and the Wizards of the Coast wouldn’t make so much money. So it won’t happen. Oh well.

When I was thinking about why I don’t like Magic, I thought of how Scrabble could be modified in a similar way, and that I wouldn’t like that either. The corresponding modification to Scrabble would be for each player to have their own customized bag of tiles, instead of both drawing from a standard communal one. There would have to be some restrictions on what a bag could contain to stop people just having a bag full of blanks and laying down bingo after bingo, although thinking about it this would probably lose to a bag with mostly blanks and the odd high-scoring letter, so perhaps the unrestricted version would have some interest. But this would be feasible, and I understand there are restrictions on Magic decks too. Corresponding to the fancy new cards in Magic, you could have fancy new tiles, like a tile that could be any vowel (maybe scoring ½), or a tile which turned its square into a double word score, or increased the values of adjoining tiles. There are all kinds of possibilities.

Now, I’ve already said that I wouldn’t welcome this modification to Scrabble myself, but the kind of people who like Magic might, and I wouldn’t mind them sending some of their money my way. I could call it Words with Enemies. I doubt the makers of Words with Friends would have the front to sue me for making a minor modification to their idea and marketing it as my own. That would be ridiculous.

Weird expression

I’m a philosopher of language, and if you don’t know much about what philosophers of language do then you might think that means I know all about grammar and syntax and subordinate clauses and that sort of thing. Sadly it doesn’t: philosophers of language can get by without knowing much grammar at all. (You should see some of the things we say about the word ‘that’.) Nonetheless, today I’m writing about grammar. I do hope I’m not becoming one of those ill-informed windbags that Geoff Pullum so entertainingly excoriates on Language Log, but time will tell.

Anyway, the expression I’ve been wondering about is ‘try and’, as in ‘I’ll try and get home in time for tea’. I understand that some people don’t like this expression, and pretend to misunderstand it as (roughly) ‘both try and’. If it meant that then you couldn’t try and do something without succeeding, and this isn’t what people mean. They use it to mean what ‘try to’ uncontroversially means. Maybe people pretend to misunderstand it because they think it’s new and they don’t like new things. Or maybe they dislike it because it’s weird.

The OED gives six examples of ‘try and’ being used like this, between 1686 and 1883, and I saw another example on the BBC website yesterday, even though I wasn’t consciously looking for one. I’ve forgotten where it was though, so I deliberately found another example. It's in the text under this video. It’s even easier to find examples in reported speech, which I suppose suggests it’s a bit informal. The OED says it’s colloquial, so I guess they agree.

Anyway, the grammar they give for ‘try and’ is that it’s followed by a co-ordinate verb, whereas ‘try to’ is followed by an infinitive. I don’t know whether that’s right. Consider these two:
 

• ?I try and be the best.
• *I try and am the best.

To me, the second sounds totally ungrammatical if it’s meant to mean ‘I try to be the best’, and the first sounds a lot better. It seems to be the one people use, anyway. But if I’ve understood the OED’s rule correctly (I blush to confess that I’m a bit unfamiliar with the terminology and after looking it up I’m still not quite sure), they predict that the second is better. It isn’t.

Leaving ‘be’ out of it for the moment though, I think the only times ‘try and’ really sounds fine are when the second verb is the same in the infinitive form and in the form ‘try’ takes in the sentence. These all sound pretty bad to me, where ‘try and’ is meant to mean ‘try to’:

• *I am trying and find my keys.
• *I am trying and finding my keys.
• *He tries and find his keys.
• *He tries and finds his keys.
• *I tried and find my keys.
• *I tried and found my keys.

I don’t actually know whether I use ‘try and’ in my own speech, and a search of my blog seems to reveal that I don’t use it there, but I'm used to reading and hearing it so my grammaticality reactions shouldn't be too far off. I’m fairly sure that people who do use it only do so when ‘try’ is in the plain-looking form, so (except with ‘be’) it doesn’t matter whether the verb following ‘and’ is supposed to get modified or not. All the OED’s examples are like that. I guess when people are using a form with 'trying', 'tries' or 'tried', they go with ‘try to’.

This seems an odd state of affairs. Maybe what’s going on is that there are two rules, which in a lot of constructions can’t both be obeyed: use an infinitive verb and use a co-ordinate verb. If you can’t do both, it sounds wrong. Is that plausible? It doesn’t seem terribly plausible, especially when we’ve had at least 327 years to get used to it. Our language-processing machinery has had plenty of time to work out how it’s analysing the construction. But I can’t see what else might be happening.

Another problem is that this explanation doesn’t predict that ‘try and be’ sounds OK. On the other hand, while Google Ngrams has no results for either ‘he tries and be’ or ‘she tries and be’, the former gets plenty of genuine results from a standard Google search and the latter gets none. That’s pretty weird, and I’m not sure what kind of theory would predict it. But it’s how we talk. If you know of any proper linguists who know what the deal is with ‘try and’, do let me know, and if the OED really do have it wrong then maybe let them know too.

Risky business

I don’t know how many of the millions of people who’ve bought Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow have read it, but I have and I thought it was very interesting. One of things he talks about in chapters 25-26 is risk aversion. Lots of people won’t take a bet to either gain $200 or lose $100 on a coin-toss, and that seems to mean they’re risk averse. They stand to gain more than they stand to lose, and the chances are equal, but they won’t take that chance. Regular readers may remember risk aversion coming up once before when I was talking about Deal or No Deal.

Kahneman says that for a long time economists used to think that (or at least idealize that) people were risk averse when it came to money, but not when it came to utility. Your first million makes a bigger difference to you than your second, and maybe it even makes a bigger difference than your second and third put together. In view of that, maybe your last $100 makes more of a difference than your next $200. If that’s right, you’re not rejecting the bet by being risk averse; you’ve just got a proper appreciation of the diminishing marginal utility of money.

The problem with this line of thought is that while it can rationalize bets which seem sensible instances of monetary risk aversion, it can only do so by attributing people utility functions which also rationalize insane-seeming pieces of (monetary) risk aversion. Matthew Rabin showed this in a technical paper, and he and Richard Thaler wrote an entertaining paper about it which references Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch. The idea is that if diminishing marginal value of money is all that is going on, then someone can’t rationally reject one fairly unattractive bet without rejecting another very attractive bet. Their first example is that if someone will always turn down a 50-50 shot at gaining $11 or losing $10, then there’s no amount of money they could stand to win which would induce them to take a 50% risk of losing $100. They have several other examples, including ones which remove the ‘always’ caveat, only demanding that they would still turn down the first bet even if they were quite a bit richer than they are now. The basic idea is the utility of money has to tail off surprisingly quickly to rationalize rejecting the small bet, and if it tails off too quickly you'll have to make odd decisions when the stakes are high. They’ve thought of objections and the reasoning is hard (for me) to argue with.

Now, what Thaler and Rabin reckon is going on is loss aversion. The reason you won’t take the $100-$200 bet is that you recoil in horror at the thought of losing $100. There’s plenty of behavioural economics research (I’m told) showing that people can’t stand losing even if they’re pretty chilled about not gaining, and that’s why Thaler, Rabin and Kahneman think that’s what’s going on. Thaler and Rabin say it’s not just loss aversion either, it’s myopic loss aversion. The reason it’s myopic is that you’d take a bunch of $100-$200 bets if you were offered them at the same time, because overall you’d probably win big and almost certainly wouldn’t lose. But if that’s your strategy then you should take the bets when they arise, and in the long run you’ll probably end up on top.

I agree that people are myopic, and they don’t always see individual decisions as part of a longterm strategy where losses today get offset by the same strategy’s gains tomorrow. I think Thaler and Rabin have missed something when they invoke loss aversion, though. This is because you can set up the “if you reject this bet then you’ve got to reject this attractive bet” argument without doing anything with losses. Suppose I offer people a choice of either $10 or a 50-50 shot at $21. Sure, some people will gamble, but aren’t lots of people going to take the $10? If they haven’t already, some behavioural economists should do that experiment, because if people reject the bet then Rabin’s theorem will kick in just the same as before and lead to crazy consequences. The difference is that this time you can’t explain the difference as recoiling in horror at the prospect of losing $10, because the gamble doesn’t involve losing any money. It just involves not winning some money, and people are relatively OK with that. (Notice that choosing not to gamble also involves not winning some money.) If you object that the non-gamblers want to make sure they get something, then change the set-up (if your budget stretches that far) to either $20 guaranteed or a 50-50 gamble for $10 or $31. It still works, and I bet plenty of people will still take the $20.

Now, what I think is going on is myopic risk aversion. I don’t see that there’s much wrong with risk aversion in itself. If you could choose either a life containing a million hedons or a 50-50 shot at either a thousand or two million, I’d understand if you took the million. Only a real daredevil would gamble. And when John Rawls is putting whole-life choices before people in the Original Position, he won’t assume they’re anything less than maximally risk averse. Maybe Rawls has gone too far the other way, but I’d definitely want to see a pretty good argument before believing that the cavalier attitude of the expected-something maximizer is rationally obligatory.

Now, mostly when we make decisions they’re small enough and numerous enough that a fairly cavalier strategy has a very low risk of working out badly overall. Applying original-position thinking to the minor bets offered by the behavioural economists in the pub is confused. It feels like you’ve got a 50% chance of getting the bad outcome, but seen in the context of a more general gambling habit the chances of the bad outcomes are actually very small even with the cavalier strategy, and since its potential payoffs are much higher, you’d have to be very risk averse overall to turn down the gamble. You’re very unlikely to be that risk averse all things considered, although perhaps Rawls was right that it’s cheeky to make assumptions.

So that’s what I think’s going on. Loss aversion is real, but it can’t do the work Thaler and Rabin want, either in straightforward form or myopic form. I think the real culprit is myopic risk aversion. Overall risk aversion is rationally permissible, but myopia isn’t and can result in individual decisions looking more risky than they really are. Unless the stakes are really high, like on Deal or No Deal.

Now wash your hands

I don’t know if users of ladies’ toilets know this, but lots of men don’t wash their hands after using the loo. I know this, because when I’m in a public restroom I’ll often see men go straight from the urinal or stall to the door without visiting the washing facilities. Dyson must weep. Now, as a man who washes, I have nothing but contempt and disgust for these people, in spite of being a regular reader of SMBC comics.

What gets my goat even more, however, is when the soap stinks. And it very often does. And when it does, it almost always stinks in the same way! I can guess why the manufacturer makes it: people manifestly buy it and presumably it’s cheap. But I don’t know why people buy it, because it smells so terrible that if you knew beforehand what it was going to smell like, you wouldn’t use it. You’d clean your hands with the thermal energy from more hot water and the kinetic energy from rubbing your hands instead of the chemical energy from the soap. I assume that one kind of energy cleans about as well as another.

So there are a few things that annoy me about this situation. One is that it makes my hands smell bad. Bad enough to take to my blog about it, even though I don’t write much anymore. Another thing that annoys me is that I’m being punished for washing my hands, when those Neanderthals I mentioned at the start of the post are getting off scot free. And their uncleanliness is as likely to make someone else ill as it is to affect them, if my understanding of epidemiology is correct. I’m being punished for being a responsible citizen, and that’s not cool. And the third thing is that I’m not even getting a choice in the matter. They’re only able to skimp on soap by doing what effectively amounts to playing a mean trick on me: “Hey, why don’t you try this soap?” “Er, OK.” “Ha! Now your hands stink! Now buzz off, stinky hands!” That’s how I feel in the moments immediately after I’ve taken my chances with an unfamiliar soap dispenser and the familiar stink wafts up from my hands. I try to wash it off, but it’s too late. I guess I could start carrying some hand sanitizer around with me, but I don’t feel I should have to. Maybe that’s what the Neanderthals are doing.