Seth’s blog

The Sharper Image has gone bankrupt and will no longer honor gift cards. In the comments section of the Consumerist post about this, several people apparently fail to understand why gift cards exist:

Another reason why cash is a better gift than gift cards.

This is just a good example why you should never buy a gift card.

Did anyone ever NOT know that gift cards are stupid?

The real lesson here, as Consumerists know, is don’t buy gift cards. They are a bad deal even if the issuer doesn’t go bankrupt.

This is the low-rent version of the deadweight cost of Christmas idea, which I discussed earlier. At the risk of stating the obvious, the perfect gift shows you know a lot about the recipient; cash shows you know nothing. A gift card shows you know a little — where the person likes to shop. They are less wasteful but less gift-like than ordinary gifts, more wasteful and more gift-like than cash. Gifts are supposed to be wasteful. This is why they are nicely wrapped. (Curiously no commenter called gifts stupid, a scam, etc.) In evolutionary terms, gift-giving traditions evolved because they increased demand for seemingly “useless” stuff. Gifts that went unused and expensive wrappings weren’t actually useless; they helped artists and artisans make a living. They were research grants for material science.

From Eyes on the Prize, about an Easter boycott of Nashville stores:

Easter was a most important time to buy. All blacks had to have a full, brand new outfit at Easter, no matter how poor you were, right? You may start three months ahead of time paying for that Easter outfit, and you may be paying for it for three months later.

There is a similar tradition in China: At the start of the new year you buy new clothes. I’ve blogged before about how rituals, ceremonies, and holidays promoted technological development: They increased the demand for high-end items. This helped skilled craftspeople make a living.

Bibloquet appears impossibly difficult, I posted recently. Yet people become very good at it, no doubt through huge amounts of practice. Why?

Now and then I hear about somebody getting very good at a physical skill: A basketball player is very good at free-throw shooting, for example. No doubt the reason is lots of practice. I’m not surprised because explanation is easy: He played a lot of basketball (social, fun to move around), he wanted to be a pro (aspiration). Professional musicians have practiced a lot — sure, music sounds good, it’s their job. Most cases of extreme practice that I know of have plausible common-sense explanations.

Bibloquet skill does not. It leads nowhere, is completely useless (I suspect), isn’t social, and isn’t promoted by the environment (there are no bilboquet rooms, for example). Some people spend a huge amount of time playing video games (also useless, etc.), but video games are complicated. Bibloquet is simple. You can see this in the price. A video game might cost $40, not counting the price of the computer it runs on. My bibloquet probably cost about $1. No computer needed. For that $1 I am going to get a huge amount of enjoyment. Hard to think of something else for $1 that would provide so much pleasure.

As Michel Cabanac has argued many times, our brains use pleasure to guide our actions: What we should do is more pleasant than what we shouldn’t do. Sometimes this system misfires because something man-made resembles what we should be seeking. If your iron level is very low you may suffer from pagophagia — too much ice chewing. Ice chewing brings persons with pagophagia great pleasure. I’m sure that the evolutionary reason is that ice chewing is producing the same sensations as bone crunching. Bone crunching would be a good source of iron because bone marrow is iron-rich. The mechanism that causes pagophagia evolved because it promoted bone crunching. Chewing ice resembles bone crunching. What biologically-useful activity does playing bibloquet resemble?

My guess is that bilboquet is addictive because:

1. Success is sharply defined. You catch the ball (success) or not (failure). Other addictive games have this feature. Tetris: you fit the falling shape into the pile at the bottom. Sudoku: You fill in all the squares correctly.

2. Success is not easy. We like a challenge. Most video games, such as Tetris, get harder and harder.

3. Hand-eye coordination is involved.

At the core of human evolution is occupational specialization and diversification. It started with hobbies. To get diversity of hobbies you need diversity of reward; a wide range of skilled activities must be rewarding. Rather than evolve a separate mechanism for each hobby, this was accomplished with a mechanism that is quite flexible and can operate with lots of different activities. Thus the reward system can be transferred to something completely useless, such as bibloquet. The not-too-easy feature caused hobbyists to become more and more skilled because only by continually challenging themselves could they keep enjoying it. Hand-eye coordination was required because the goal was to get people to make things. Why success had to be sharply defined I’m not so sure. (In art, a similar human activity, success is not sharply defined.) Maybe it serves to focus effort.

The lesson for me is that if I want to produce a task that will measure how well my brain is working and be so much fun it’s addictive, it should involve hand-eye coordination. (It will be easier to make the many measurements my omega-3 research requires if I have such a task.) This is consistent with what I’ve observed so far: None of the tasks I’ve used have been addictively fun. The balance task had a fairly sharp and difficult measure of success (staying balanced for more than a few seconds) and was physical but didn’t involve hand-eye coordination. The digit-span task had a sharp measure of success (perfect recall) and could be made more and more difficult but didn’t involve hand-eye coordination. Three other tasks I’ve used had less sharply-defined success and didn’t involve hand-eye coordination.

Addendum. A Japanese website. In Japan bilboquet is kendama. Thanks to Pearl Alexander.

A bilboquet is a toy: a ball and stick. The ball has a hole and is attached by a cord to the stick. You toss the ball and impale it with the stick. A friend gave me a Japanese version:

It seemed impossible to reliably catch the ball on the stick but here is someone who can do it:

Even better:

How do people get so good at this? I have part of the answer: it is a lot of fun to practice. I have been tracking my progress and I have to restrain myself from doing it more often. Why is it so much fun to practice?

To be continued.

Therefore it must be wrong. This was the reaction of several prominent anthropologists when Chuck Millikan, a California policeman, wrote to them to ask what they thought of the aquatic ape hypothesis, according to Elaine Morgan. Millikan was “a compulsive letter-writer,” said Morgan. He had been impressed by her ideas and wrote her to ask when her next book was coming out. There won’t be a next one, Morgan had replied, I’ve said all I have to say. Millikan’s response to this was to write prominent anthropologists asking them what they thought of her theory. When he sent Morgan their replies, she saw they had no good reasons for ignoring her. Emboldening and irritated, she wrote another book.

Let me invent a verb: to elaine morgan something is to have a big effect on something you shouldn’t have been able to influence. Elaine Morgan elaine morganed the study of evolution. She was far outside anthropology; she shouldn’t have been able to successfully promote a radical new view of evolution, but she did. Chuck Millikan elaine morganed Elaine Morgan; he shouldn’t have been able to persuade her to start writing again, but he did.

A excellent BBC documentary about the aquatic ape theory (part 1 of 6).