Did you ever wake up with the bullfrogs on your mind?
Today was my last full day in Berlin. I got up early and took a train from the Zoo station out to Golm in Potsdam and met with Reinhold Kliegl and his students, and gave a talk about Chinese reading. The campus is in the former East Germany, and the core of it was an old Stasi school. They have build a very impressive lab and are doing some really interesting work. There may be some possibilities for three-way collaborations looking at German, Chinese, and English reading, which could be interesting.
Did you ever wake up with the bullfrogs on your mind?
Then I took the train and subway back to Max Planck and met with Gerd Gigerenzer and his ABC group. A really fascinating group of people, who are doing very thoughtful work on decision-making and economic reasoning. Economists have grudgingly accepted psychologists into their domain of interest, although often by saying that when people make rational decisions it’s the domain of economics, and when they make irrational decisions, it’s the domain of psychologists. Gigerenzer’s work fundamentally challenges this, showing that often the simple heuristics non-experts use can be better than the “optimal” strategies of experts. For example, German college students do better than American college students at estimating the relative population of American cities, such as deciding whether San Antonio is bigger than San Diego. Their strategy is simple—they’ve heard of San Diego and not San Antonio, so it much be bigger. Similarly, novices pick stocks this way (buy the one you’ve heard of), and it turns out to be a pretty good strategy (unless you know too many companies).
Did you ever wake up with the bullfrogs on your mind?
After all this, I dropped my stuff off at the hotel and took the subway over to Potsdamer Platz. I walked through the new Holocaust memorial, which is exceedinly odd. The picture is taken from within the memorial, which consists of granite blocks (coffins?) of varying size in a grid in a rolling site. The picture shows the new American Embassy (the orange bits), which is going up right by the Brandenburg gate. Nice location.
That’s a sure sign baby, you’ve got bullfrogs on your mind.
I walked down to a restaurant, Linden Life, recommended by my colleague Jeff Mirel. I had a very nice dinner there, which included some amazingly good saurkraut (the only time I’ve had sauerkraut that isn’t too pickled and sour). While I ate, I read some of Victor Klemperer’s diary of the Nazi years—I will remember. After a while a blues band started playing, including a song I’d always song to my daughter when she was young and I needed to wake her up (The Bullfrog Blues).
Then back home, and tomorrow I fly back home for real. A really fascinating trip, but so full of interesting experiences that there wasn’t much time to reflect on them here.