The sweet taste of a new idea | MIT News

Sendhil Mullainathan did not forget the pleasure he felt the first time that the delicious cookie is tasted, but Levin Levin. The experience compares when he faces new ideas.

“The fun that dates back greatly is the same pleasure that I hear a new idea, discover a new way to look at the situation, think about something, stumble and then move,” says Mullainathan, “PEER De Florez, says that the pleasure is the same as the pleasure that I hear a new idea, or discover a new way to look at the situation, think about something, or stumble and then move.

It seems that the love of Mullainathan of new ideas, thus exceeding the usual interpretation of a situation or problem by looking at it from many different angles, has started early. As a child at school, he says, it appears that the answers of multiple options to all tests provide possibilities for being correct.

“They were saying, here are three things. Which of these options is the fourth?” Well, I was like, “I don’t know.” “There are good interpretations for all of them,” Molinathan says. “While there is a simple explanation that most people will choose, original, I saw things completely differently.”

Molinathan says the way his mind works, and she has always worked, “outside the stage” – that is, not coinciding with how most people are easily chosen to answer the test. It compares the way he thinks “one of these videos in which the army is walking and there is no one in a step, and everyone thinks, what is the mistake in this man?”

Fortunately, Molinathan says, “Be outside the stage is useful in research.”

It seems that. MULLAINATHAN got “Genius Grant” Macarthur, and he was appointed “a young global leader” by the World Economic Forum, “the best 100 thinkers” has been named Foreign policy The magazine, it was included in the “Smart List: 50 people who will change the world” by Wireless The magazine, and won the Infosys Award, the largest cash prize in India recognizes excellence in science and research.

Another major aspect of Mullainathan is a researcher – his focus on the financial scarcity – dates back to his childhood. When he was about ten years old, just a few years after his family moved to the Los Angeles region from India, his father lost his job as a space engineer due to changing security clearance laws related to migrants. When his mother told him that without work, the family will not have any money, he says he was incredible.

“At first I thought, this could not be true. It was not completely.” “This was the first time I thought, there is no ground. It could happen. This was the first time that I appreciate the economic accuracy.”

His family got the management of a video store and then other small companies, and Molinathan went to Cornell University, where he studied computer science, economics and mathematics. Although he was doing a lot of mathematics, he found himself attracted to the record economy, but for the behavioral economy of an early pioneer in this field, Richard Taller, who later won the Nobel Memorial Prize in his work economic sciences. The behavioral economy brings psychological, and illogical aspects often, from human behavior to the study of economic decisions.

“It is the amazing part in this wonderful field,” Molinathan says. “What makes it interesting is that mathematics in the economy does not work. Mathematics are elegant, and theories. But it does not work because people are strange, complex and interesting.”

The behavioral economy was very new, as Molinathan was to the point that he says that Thaner advised him to study the record economy in the graduate school and manufacture his name for himself before focusing on the behavioral economy, “because he was very marginalized. He was considered a superior risk because it did not fit the field.”

Unable to resist thinking about the dodges and complications of humanity, however, Molinathan focused on the behavioral economy, and obtained a doctorate at Harvard University, and says he spent about 10 years studying people.

“I wanted to get the intuition that a good academic psychiatrist had about people. I was committed to understanding people,” he says.

Since Mullainathan was putting theories about why people made certain economic choices, he wanted to test these theories experimentally.

In 2013, he published a paper in sciences Entitled “Poverty impedes the cognitive function.” Research measured the performance of sugar cane farmers in intelligence tests in the days before their annual harvest, when they were out of money, and sometimes almost hunger. In the study subject, the same farmers conducted tests after they were harvested and they were paid for a successful crop – and they recorded much higher.

Molinathan says he is grateful because the research had a long -term effect, and that those who make politics often take into account.

He says: “Policies as a whole are difficult to change, but I think they have created allergies at every level of the design process, that people realize that, for example, if you make a program for people who live in economic accuracy that is difficult to register on, this will be a truly huge tax.”

For Mullainathan, it was the most important effect on searching on individuals, an effect he saw in the reader’s comments that appeared after the research was covered The guardian.

“Ninety percent of the people who wrote these comments said things like,” I was not economically secure at some point. This exactly reflects what I felt the poor. “

Such ideas about the road, external effects can affect personal life can be among the important developments achieved by algorithms, says Molinathan.

“I think in the past era of science, science has been done in large laboratories, and work has been done in big things. I think that the next era of science will be in the same way to allow individuals to rethink who are and what their lives are.”

Last year, Molinathan returned to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (after he previously studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1998 to 2004) to focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning.

“I wanted to be in a place where I could get one foot in computer science and one foot in the first -class behavioral economy,” he says. In fact, if I say objectively, “what are the places that exceed both,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the top of that list. “

While AI can automate tasks and systems, automation of the capabilities that humans already possess “is difficult to be enthusiastic about them,” he says. Computer science can be used to expand human abilities, which is only a limited idea of ​​creating questions.

He says: “We must ask, what capacity you want to expand? How can we build an algorithm to help you expand this capacity? Computer science was always wonderful in facing difficult problems and building solutions.” “If you have a capacity you want to expand, this seems a big challenge to computing. Let’s get to know how to take it.”

Molinathan says that the sciences “far from hitting the boundaries set by physics,” such as psychology and economics are about to huge developments. “I mainly think that the next generation of breakthroughs will come from the intersection of people’s understanding and understanding of algorithms.”

A possible use of the regular organization in which the decision maker can take place, for example, the judge or the doctor, on the associated their average decision with a certain set of circumstances. This average is likely to be more free for daily effects-such as the bad mood, indigestion, or slow traffic on my way to work, or a battle with the husband.

Mullainathan summarizes the idea as “your average is better than you. Imagine an algorithm that made it easy to see what you usually do. This is not what you are doing at the moment. You may have a good reason to do something different, but asking this question is wonderfully useful.”

To go forward, Mullainathan will at all to work for such new ideas – as it offers this delicious reward.