If you want to learn to take good photographs, you need to understand how cameras work. See my super-simple explanation here: Understanding Exposure.
If you want to actually take good photographs, you need to put that understanding into practice. I’ve long wanted to build a simulator to illustrate the concepts in my Understanding Exposure post, but have never been able to set aside the time. Well, someone has beat me to it, and done a very nice job.
This Camera Simulator lets you control the three basic camera functions, plus lets you play with some other cool variables.
“What made America great was her ability to transform her own dream into hope for all mankind . . . America did not tell the millions of men and women who came from every country in the world and who — with their hands, their intelligence and their heart — built the greatest nation in the world: ‘Come, and everything will be given to you.’ She said: ‘Come, and the only limits to what you’ll be able to achieve will be your own courage and your own talent.'”
Following yesterday’s post, I thought I’d share a bit more about irrational behavior. The following attributes won’t help as much at the tables in Vegas, but they can save, or make, you more money in a lot of other situations. Much of this information comes from reading Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior by Ori and Ram Brafman. An incredibly interesting read that I would highly recommend if you’re interested in this kind of stuff.
Value Attribution
Human beings have a lot of stimuli thrown at them. Sights, sounds, textures, tastes and smells bombard every second of every day people. We couldn’t possibly process all of the information as it arises, so instead we use shortcuts. These shortcuts can be good or bad. We label a strange dog that growls and bears his teeth at us as dangerous. That helps keep us alive. But, this system of judging unknowns based on our own history and preconceptions can also be harmful. If you saw a Chippendaledesk sitting on the curb next to trash cans, waiting to be picked up, you would assign it a totally different value than if you saw that same desk at a Sotheby’s auction.
Fortunately or unfortunately, value attribution applies equally to people. For example, in 2007 the Washington Post hired Joshua Bell, one of the best violinists alive, to play an impromptu concert at the L’Enfant Plaza subway station in Washington D.C. Instead of his usual tuxedo, Mr. Bell wore blue jeans and a baseball cap, though he did bring along the same $3.5 million Stradivarius he performs with in concerts. Surprisingly, even though passerby would have had to pay hundreds of dollars to see one of Mr. Bell’s performances at Carnegie Hall, no one stopped to listen, save one woman who recognized him.
At the other end of the spectrum, people often blindly follow those who are highly regarded, even if all evidence points to the fact that they are dead wrong. Charles Dawson’s “Piltdown Man†is a perfect example. Dawson, a well-respected British Fellow at the Geological Society of London, was able to convince much of the British scientific community that he had found the “missing link†right in Britain. Even though the chimpanzee jawbone he had filed down and the medieval skull he had painted brown were, to an objective eye, plainly not what Dawson represented them to be, it took nearly 40 years for the scientific community at large to admit they were hoaxed.
Once we place a certain value on something, any subsequent information we receive is interpreted in light of that initial valuation. Imagine you’re in a car accident and you hire a lawyer. If the highly regarded expert witness your lawyer hires first tells you your injury is worth $500k, any opinion by the insurance company’s expert is deemed less credible, flawed, spurious, or insulting. This can happen even where the initial valuation is completely arbitrary. What’s more, once a value is attributed, commitment can rear its ugly head again. For example, if you’re a lawyer and a client comes to you to negotiate a claim, and you tell him that claim is worth $500k, he can get committed to that number, even if you arbitrarily picked it. The more committed he gets to that number, the harder it will be to persuade him to accept a lower, even if more reasonable, number.
Additionally, as the Brafman brothers state in Sway, “we may turn down a pitch or idea that is presented by the ‘wrong’ person or blindly follow the advice of someone who is highly regarded.†In any dealing, it’s important to be weary of either of these possibilities. In any negotiation, you would be wise to ask yourself, “Do I dislike this offer because I can’t stand the other negotiator, or is the offer actually reasonable? Am I agreeing to an unreasonable offer because the other side is so charming? Is my highly regarded expert witness way off on this one?”
Diagnosis Bias
Human beings have an innate tendency to overestimate our ability to form an objective opinion. In every new experience, from a first date to a job interview to listening to a guest speaker, we use diagnostic labels to help us simplify all the new information we’re receiving. The simplicity comes from ignoring all the things we think don’t make a difference. The problem comes from the fact that once we apply that label, we don’t notice the things that don’t fit within that label. When we buy a new car with a stiff “Sport Suspension”, we don’t notice that the ride is really bumpy until an objective third party tells us.
While we can never fully overcome the diagnosis bias, we can take a cue from Odysseus, who had his men tie him to his ship’s mast so he would not follow the siren’s song to his demise, and set limits for ourselves. If we know we tend to overestimate our own abilities, if we know we’re overly optimistic about the future, and if we know we tend to ignore all evidence that contradicts what we want to believe, we can set up systems to try to prevent these things. Systematically list out contradictory evidence and the positions the other side is likely to take. Don’t dismiss arguments you think are frivolous; instead take the time to critically analyze them. Put yourself in the other party’s shoes and think about why they would put forth that argument and what’s behind it.
I like to gamble. Actually, that’s a lie. I love to gamble. Poker and craps, mostly, but if I’m bored enough, I will literally gamble on anything. I’m fortunate in that I’ve developed a bit of skill at the games I normally play, and in that I’m the luckiest person you will ever meet. One more thing makes me a good gambler: I understand human psychology. Here are two innate human characteristics you must understand if you want to avoid big losses, in gambling, or in life.
Loss Aversion
Pretend you bought a share of Apple. Now pretend you’re staring at the stock ticker. It would seem logical that the intensity of the happiness you would experience if the price goes up $1 would be the same as the intensity of the sadness you’d experience if your stock went down $1. Turns out, it’s not even close. Depending on the study, researches have found that people experience the intensity of a loss between 2.5 and 7 times greater than they experience the intensity of a gain of the same amount.
This universal human characteristic is known as loss aversion, and the fundamental irrationality that drives it not only affects how we feel about gains or losses that have already happened, but powerfully guide us to make decisions that appear to avoid future losses.  If you’ve ever bought a flat-rate plan or the full coverage rental insurance, you’ve experienced this first hand. At one time, cell phone companies charged by the minute, but they soon began offering more expensive flat-rate, unlimited calling plans. People signed up in droves, most of whom would never have hit the number of minutes where the flat-rate’s price would have made sense, because of the fear of running over their plan’s allotted minutes and being charged penalty rates. Similarly, car rental companies have suckered people into buying insurance that’s redundant two or three times over (since your credit card and regular car insurance generally cover rental damage/loss) by offering to sell you a “loss damage waiver.â€Â That’s the power the word loss alone elicits in us.
Loss aversion in itself isn’t horrible. Humans exist today because of it. It’s far safer to be weary of every rustle in the grass, always prepared for the poisonous snake, than it is to assume its not a snake based on the overwhelming probabilities. But, when loss aversion combines with other irrational behavior, it can become very dangerous. For instance, the more meaningful a loss is, the more loss averse we become. When more is at stake, we risk making decisions that become progressively less rational. Investors and investment advisors are so familiar with this type of irrationality they have their own phrase for it: chasing a loss. The worst part about loss chasing is that often times you’re not chasing a loss at all. If you bought your stock at $50, watched it go to $100, thought about selling but didn’t, then watched the stock slide down to $90, you could still sell now for a $40 gain. But many people refuse to sell, reframing the $40 gain as a $10 loss. In these circumstances, merely recognizing that loss aversion exists can impart some rationality, saving you a lot of heartache when the stock drops to $0.
Commitment
Normally we think of commitment as a positive attribute, but in the world of rational behavior, it can combine with other irrational behaviors to produce devastating results. Once people become committed to behaviors, practices, or positions, it becomes increasingly difficult to break free from them, even when they clearly aren’t working anymore. The more people invest in something, be it time, money or energy, the more they feel like they need to continue that thing, lest all their prior effort be for naught.  When commitment is combined with loss aversion, we end up with results of the $1 auction.
The way this usually works, around the $.50 mark, the bidders realize what they are in for. Yet still, rather than just cutting their losses and conceding the $.50, they dig in and commit to decisions to attempt not to lose. Here, loss aversion combines with commitment to fuel behavior that, from the outside, seems outrageously irrational. Who would pay more than $1 for a $1 bill? Well, if you’re losing bid is $.50, you might as well bid up to $1.50, since you’d be losing the same $.50. And of course this thinking continues. There are different versions of this game, but the outcome is always the same. In a legendary version conducted at Harvard Business School where only the second highest bidder had to pay, the “winner” ended up paying $204 for a $20 bill. Ouch.
Two more epic examples where loss aversion and commitment combined to horrific effect were the Vietnam War and GWB’s Iraq/Afghan wars. In both instances, LBJ and GWB jumped into a situation that looked easy to win. Each looked like chance to buy a $20 bill for $2. But, as other unforeseen factors intervened, as stakes grew, both men became committed to not losing. As Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winning economist who first described loss aversion, said, “To withdraw now is to accept a sure loss, and that option is deeply unattractive. The option of hanging on will therefore be relatively attractive, even if the chances of success are small and the cost of delaying failure is high.â€
This is a profound insight into how human beings operate. We’d rather hang on, even though the longer we do so the worse the probabilities for success become, than to accept a small loss today. This realization can be crucial, not only to a gambler, but also to anyone in a negotiation, especially one where the stakes are high and the timeline is dragged out. As people invest more in their positions, they become more committed to them, even if they are ultimately detrimental. LBJ refused to withdraw from Vietnam early because it would have cost him valuable political capital he wanted to expend building his “Great Societyâ€. In the end he lost a war, thousands of American lives, and any opportunity to achieve his ultimate goal.
The Gambler was right: you need to know when fold ’em, and when to walk away. (On the other hand, don’t ever run away from a table though, that’s horrible advice: you’ll end up getting either shot or arrested.) It’s ok to lose. The key is to make sure those loses don’t spiral out of control.
Number one piece of advice if you’re ever questioned by the police about a crime: keep your mouth shut until your lawyer gets there.
Interrogation techniques are so psychologically effective, people confess all the time. Even when they didn’t do it.
Case in point: after 12 hours of interrogation, Frank Sterling confessed to a vicious murder he didn’t commit. Why? The answer used to be that police would literally beat confessions out of people. Once that “investigative practice” was outlawed, police sought non-violent ways to accomplish the same thing. John E. Reid developed a procedure in the early 1960’s that seemed to provide the solution. It turns out, the Reid technique is very, very effective:
The procedure basically involves three stages meant to break down a suspect’s defenses and rebuild him as a confessor.
First, the suspect is brought into custody and isolated from his familiar surroundings. This was the birth of the modern interrogation room.
Next the interrogator lets the suspect know he’s guilty—that he knows it, the cops know it, and the interrogator doesn’t want to hear any lies. The interrogator then floats a theory of the case, which the manual calls a “theme.†The theme can be supported by evidence or testimony the investigator doesn’t really have.
In the final stage, the interrogator cozies up to the subject and provides a way out. This is when the interrogator uses the technique known as “minimizationâ€: telling the suspect he understands why he must have done it; that anyone else would understand, too; and that he will feel better if only he would confess.
The interrogator is instructed to cut off all denials and instead float a menu of themes that explain why the suspect committed the crime—one bad, and one not so bad, but both incriminating, as in “Did you mean to do it, or was it an accident?â€
It’s shocking just how quickly a bit of isolation and a bit of stress can break a person down. Hundreds of “compliant confessions” have been overturned in the last 30 years based on physical evidence that proves the person that confessed didn’t actually commit the crime. The Reid technique is so devastatingly effective, the Supreme Court singled it out in its Miranda decision (requiring cops to explain to those they arrest that they have a right to remain silent).
If you’re ever picked up for anything, call a lawyer. Just having another person in the room prevents the Reid technique from working: without the isolation, the psychological games don’t work.
“Transparency” has been one of the hottest buzzwords in business for a few years now. Pundits and actual businessmen alike tout the advantages of full disclosure, and maybe more importantly, the ramifications of not being forthright. But, as Seth Godin wisely points out, there are some things that just don’t need to be seen. Do we really need to see where our dinner came from? Would we all be bigger fans of Apple if we got a press release detailing every sketch Jonathan Ive puts to paper? Would we be bigger David Copperfield fans if only we knew how every trick was done? Mr. Godin argues that, while in some cases transparency can be a tremendous asset, at other times it’s a detriment.
Say Queensbridge
Ron Artest could be the poster boy for Web 2.0’s love of transparency. He may be the most intimately known athlete on the planet. He’s insane: he flew into the stands in Detroit to punch fans after a soda was thrown at him. He’s a fame-whore: he chose to play in Los Angeles because “it would be the biggest story,” and he’s producing a reality show titled “They Call Me Crazy.” He has almost no musical talent, but has produced three rap albums. He’s also intensely loyal, one of the reasons he made Chuck Sager say “Queensbridge”, his old neighborhood, seconds after he won his first NBA Championship. Of course that was only after he made sure to thank his shrink. Minutes later, in the postgame press conference, instead of basking in his own glory after his key performance in clinching his first NBA title, he talked about how he felt like a coward for bailing on his Pacers team years before. We know exactly who Ron Artest is, craziness and all, and we love him for it. Transparency is Ron’s saving grace.
Ron Ron is unique: most other big name athletes go the opposite direction. Tiger Woods was intensely private, it turns out for good reason. He crafted and polished his image, zealously protecting it, and he was beloved, worldwide. But all it took was some Ambien and a pissed off Swede with a 9 iron to bring it all tumbling down. And there lies the danger: if you’re really sausage underneath, you can polish the surface until it looks like filet, but if anyone takes a bite, they’re going to know what’s what. If you only proclaim to be sausage, if you’re John Daly and drink Coors Lite and smoke Marlboro Reds on the course, freely admit to losing tens of millions of dollars gambling, and don’t claim to be anything but what you are, the public will embrace you.
The Consummate Showman
A lack of transparency can be extremely powerful. By hiding your hand you build mystique, which piques curiosity. Copperfield was a master at this. We all know those tigers didn’t appear out of thin air. We know it was a trick. But still, we enjoy the show. We enjoy having our emotions manipulated. We enjoy trying to figure out what’s really going on. The “show” is why Copperfield was able to (allegedly) put down $56.5 million (plus an additional settlement) for his own Bahamanian island. If we knew how those tigers really “appeared” out of thin air, we’d lose all interest. Those are the only backstage passes you’d actually pay less for.
But be careful. Copperfield never claimed he could actually conjure cats from nothingness or make the Statute of Liberty disappear. He never lied. He only claimed to be a performer. Tiger Woods relished his wholesome image, but his whole image was a lie.
Sometimes, to be successful, you need to be a Copperfield. Just don’t claim to be anything but what you really are.
Bill Simmons, who’s nicknamed The Sports Guy and writes a comical column for ESPN, shares a very insightful response to a reader’s email about why soccer will never become popular in the U.S.:
“Sometimes when people become die-hard fans of something that isn’t mainstream — a writer, a band, a player, a TV show, a sport or whatever — they want to keep that thing the way it is over seeing that thing take off. Why? Because it’s cooler to like something that isn’t mainstream popular. Because mainstream popularity begets bandwagon fans and people who aren’t as sophisticated about that product. Because it’s more fun to love something before it takes off than after it takes off.â€
This phenomena can be seen in nearly ever artistic community, and it’s especially rampant in the indie music scene, which is why this t-shirt is so funny. At the same time though, it reflects one of our most basic instincts. When we get to something first, it’s ours. If you find a twenty in the parking lot, it’s yours. You’d cry “theft†if someone took it from you. If you find a girlfriend, she’s yours. You’d cry “whore†if she was kissing someone else. These are the same feelings we apply to arts, or sports, or restaurants, or bands that we “discover†first. We feel more sophisticated about that product often only because we’ve been around it longer than newcomers. That attitude is silly at best, and self-defeating at worst.
If You Love Something, Set It Free
The Cult of the Status Quo has reared its ugly head many times since the dawn of affordable DSLRs. I remember many old school film guys deriding Photoshop and its users as something evil, something to be feared. Well, the guys that didn’t get with the program likely don’t have any work today. Similarly, in the landscape photography world, forum members have been bashing HDR photography since it’s inception. “It’s disgusting looking!†“It looks like fried hell!†There are millions of threads like these. Now, HDR did look pretty crappy initially, but that no longer has to be true. You can create some amazing images with the newer software. But, that doesn’t stop The Cult. Just yesterday I was browsing a Fred Miranda posting where somebody posted two versions of a photo, one hand-blended and one done with HDR software. Now, the HDR software was hands down better. It had a few minor flaws, but it murdered the hand-blended shot. The first twenty responses claimed they preferred the hand-blended shot, and that the HDR shot looked like crap.
So what? How is this harmful? Well, while you were writing yet another post bashing HDR or the poseurs using plug-ins, Scott Kelby embraced HDR and made millions off his how-to books. HDR PHOTGRAPHER made stunning images and sold tons of prints.
What could you accomplish if your default response was “Interesting…” instead of “No”?
You know how you can tell when you’ve made a good decision? If you feel like you waited too long to make it, then it’s a good decision. [If you say] we should have done this a long time ago.
People make a big fucking deal about art. They talk about provenance and historical relevance and cultural significance. Those things can certainly make a piece of art more interesting, but why does that make someone want to own something? There’s literally billions of dollars worth of famous art I wouldn’t even think about hanging on my wall. A piece of art might be important. It might have been the genesis of a new style. A famous artist may have made it. But if you don’t enjoy looking at, who gives a shit?
Well, museums do. Art historians do. The art-loving public does. Even I do, to an extent. I want to see important art. I want to see the works that launched new styles. I want to see the most famous and “important” works of art in the world. But that doesn’t mean I like them or think they’re good. That doesn’t mean I’d ever want to hang them on my wall and look at them all night.
That’s the interesting thing about art. There’s a market for just about everything, even art that looks like shit. It’s all about the story behind the art. With the right story, you can get people to buy anything. Or literally nothing:
Black on Black No. 8 by AD Reinhardt at the Leopold Museum in Vienna. I'm not fucking with you. It's just a piece of black canvas.
I recently ran across Deborah Butterfield’s sculpture. She goes out and finds wood scraps, fashions them into horses, and then casts them in bronze. I think they look super cool:
I recently wrote the following as a response to one of Sebastian Marshall’s posts about investing, in which he breaks down what he’s learning about the financial game, the reasons people shouldn’t try to pick their own stocks, and how he’s going about picking his own stocks. I thought I’d repost it here just for longevity’s sake. I have a fair amount of first hand experience in this area and a lot of second hand experience, so I offered Sebastian my own words of warning. I didn’t mention it in the comment, but I’m not exactly alone in my thinking: I’ve got bothhistory and Warren Buffett on my side. Bottom line: picking stocks is a game you cannot win.
Hi Sebastian,
Thoughtful post. My only qualm comes from the fact that your argument really boils down to “…but I’m smarter than them.” You probably are. From our conversations, you definitely seem like a really smart dude. And being smart enough to avoid investing in something like Ivanhoe is half the game.
But, I don’t think that’s even close to enough to truly be successful. I think there’s three main problems, and competition is the first. There’s literally hundreds of thousands of people who do nothing but comb through financials, or write code that combs through financials, looking for value based picks. You could be the smartest human being in the world, but it’s pretty tough to beat this massive amount of brute force.
The second problem is opportunity. Warren Buffet still reads financial statements for 8 hours a day. He says it’s his favorite thing to do. And yet, as of Dec 31, 2010, 54% of his portfolio was tied up in Coca Cola, American Express, and Wells Fargo. Just three freaking companies. Why? He has a deep understanding of a huge number of companies. His only real job is to find undervalued companies and buy them up. And yet his entire portfolio included just 25 positions. I’m going to guess the only reason his portfolio isn’t more diversified is because he can’t find better opportunities. If Buffet can’t find them, I’m certainly not going to find them in the couple of hours a week I could devote to it.
But the biggest problem, and the real reason I don’t do this kind of stock picking, is fraud. I’ve had the opportunities to meet with people from all areas in this field. Hedge fund guys, I-Bank guys, accounting guys, CFOs, and securities lawyers. They all recognize that the game is rigged. The degree to which they think it’s a sham varies, but they all agree. They all know everyone is lying, at least to some extent. I think unless you’re going to get all the way up a company’s ass like Buffet does, looking at financials alone is never going to cut it.
Anyways, I’ll admit that looking for those diamonds in the rough is fun. Good luck, and I hope you do find one.
Inspiration and work ethic, they ride right next to each other. When I was an upholsterer, sometimes you’re not inspired to reupholster and old chair. Sometimes it’s just work and you just do it because you’re supposed to. And maybe by the end when you finish you look and say “eh, that looks good… that’s pretty good,” and that’s it, and you just move on.
Not every day of your life are you going to wake up and the clouds are going to part and rays from heaven are going to come down and you’re going to write a song from it. Sometimes you just get in there and just force yourself to work, and maybe something good will come out of it.
That was our thing: whether we like it or not, write some songs and record them. Force yourself to work. Book only 4 or 5 days in a studio and force yourself to record an album in that time.
Deadlines make you creative. Opportunity, and telling yourself “you’ve got all the time in the world, all the money in the world, all the colors in the palette, anything you want,” that just kills creativity.
On stage, I’m using the same guitars on stage that I was using 10 years ago. I like to do things that make it really hard on myself. If I drop a pick, I have to go all the way to the back of the stage to get another one. I don’t have picks all taped to the mic stand. I put the organ just far away enough that I have to leap to get to it to play different parts of a song. It’s not handy to jump from one to the next. I always try to push it a little bit farther away so I have to work harder and get somewhere. All those little things, and there’s hundreds of those things like that: those guitars I use don’t stay in tune very well, and they’re not conducive, they’re not what regular bands go out and play. So I’m constantly fighting all these tiny little things because all of those little things build tension.
There’s no set list when we play: that’s the biggest one. Each show has its own life to it. It’s important to do that kind of stuff. When you go out and everything is all preplanned and everyone sets everything out for you and the table’s all set nice and perfect, nothing’s going to happen. You’re going to go out and do a boring arena set or something. All those things have always been a big component of the White Stripes: constriction, to force ourselves to create.
Only having red white and black colors on any of our artwork and our presentation, as the aesthetic of the band. Guitar, drums and vocals. Storytelling, melody and rhythm, revolving all these things around the number 3. All these components force us to create.
– Jack White, of the White Stripes, (transcribed from) Under the Great White Northern Lights
Not only do I think Seth Godin’s new manifesto, Poke The Box, is worth reading, I think there’s some ideas in it that are so important I’m putting them down here so I don’t forget them. The book is only 83 short pages that can easily be read in one sitting, but it’s incredibly motivating. It mostly deals with overcoming resistance and starting something, but a lot of related topics are covered. It’s definitely worth picking up.
On fear and focus:
Writing this manifesto might be overwhelming. I know it’s going to be read, at least by a few people. If I focus on that – focus on the fact that yes, it will be seen and criticized and worked with and misunderstood and embraced and spread – then I’m bound to hold back. The challenge is to focus on the work, not on the fear that comes from doing the work.
On failure:
Failure is an event, though, and with rare exceptions, is not fatal.
On doing:
Fitzgerald nailed it when he described Jay Gatsby’s attitude: “What would be the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?” It’s easy to fall so in love with the idea of starting that we never actually start.
I know a lot of people who not only fear change, but hate it. I had never really understood why. To me, change is always good. I’ve never gone through a change and said “I wish that never happened.” Even people who have gone through horrific things say “It made me who I am” or “I’m stronger for it” or some variant on that feeling. So why the anxiety about change?
People innately fear risk. It’s biological. So much so that we’ve actually coined a term for it: risk aversion. People don’t like taking risks because risks come with the possibility of loss, and people really don’t like losing. But change isn’t the same as risk. Think about all the changes you’ve feared over your life. Was there every really any risk that you’d lose? Even in the cases where some real risk did exist, I bet it looks much smaller in retrospect.
Seth Godin puts it nicely:
Over time, people have begun to confuse [change] with risk as well. We have concluding that if things are flowing, if there is movement, then of course there is risk.
Those who fear risk also begin to fear movement of any kind. People act as though [change], the movement of people or ideas or anything else that’s unpredictable, exposes us to risk, and risk exposes us to failure. The fearful try to avoid collisions, so they avoid movement.
These people have made two mistakes. First, they’ve assumed that risk is a bad thing, and second, they’ve confused risk and [change], and come to the conclusion that movement is a bad thing as well.
If your project doesn’t have movement, then compared to the rest of the world, you’re actually moving backward. Like a rock in flowing river, you might be standing still, but given the movement around you, collisions are inevitable.
The world moves fast now. If you’re not changing, not only are you bound to fail, you’re boring. Don’t believe me? Go check out what your favorite website looked like just a few years ago. What if facebook still looked like this 7 years later?
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