- Talking about inlaws with your spouse is a minefield of higher-order beliefs that its really just veiled criticism of those traits of your spouse that have yet to assimilate into the relationship.
- Kids love to play games with grownups in large part because they infer that if the grownup is playing then the game must be super fun. The problem is that games for kids are usually boring for grownups. So someone should invent a game where there are effectively two sets of rules. The simple kids rules and the more subtle rules for grownups. Think of Pixar movies with inside jokes aimed over the heads of kids and at the adults.
- We have recently discovered a great exception to the boring-for-grownups rule for games. Its called Escape: The Curse of the Temple. Highly recommended.
- On Economics Job Market Rumors the only threads worth reading are the ones that have many Likes and also many Dislikes. Its gotta have both.
- When you send out emails pitching your students to departments that are hiring, you recycle the text but cut and paste the name of the recipient and the department to customize the email. When you send it to, say LRMU, address it to Harvard pretending it was a cut-and-paste omission.
- Someone should collect data on coughing in concert halls over time. I hypothesize that they are clustered rather than uniformly distributed. (There’s a simple theory behind it.)
Cheap Talk 
4 comments
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March 11, 2013 at 1:18 am
Gavin
Re#1: Where does that leave the “you’re just like your Mother” defense?
Re #6: Is it the same theory as yawning?
March 11, 2013 at 8:07 am
M. H.
#6: Not only they are clustered, there is a literature on this: EL
March 11, 2013 at 5:25 pm
Dimitriy V. Masterov
From Wikipedia:
[Keith] Jarrett is notoriously intolerant of audience noise, including coughing and other involuntary sounds, especially during solo improvised performances. He feels that extraneous noise affects his musical inspiration, and distracts from the purity of the sound. As a result, cough drops are routinely supplied to Jarrett’s audiences in cold weather, and he has even been known to stop playing and lead the crowd in a group cough.
May 16, 2013 at 12:19 pm
Mame
re #2 — Let’s define 3 classes of games:
“Luck-driven”, the category most kids’ games fall into, which involve only blind luck and no choices: e.g., candyland, chutes and ladders, War the card game.
“Skill-driven”: involving no planning-ahead component: e.g., pictionary, trivial pursuit, Set)
“Strategy-driven”: pretty much every other game: e.g., chess, Monopoly, every other card game besides War
The skill-driven games are only fun if both players have the same skill level. So, Trivial Pursuit is not going to be fun to play with a kid, but Pictionary might, depending on the kid’s abilities. Set is marketed as being equally challenging for kids and adults, although I have never met a kid who was any good at it. But this does not really speak to your idea about a 2-tier game.
We want to think of a game that’s strategy-driven for the adult player, but luck-driven for the kid player. You can’t just take an existing two-player strategy-driven game and give the kid a random decision mechanism (e.g. roll dice to determine which chess piece gets moved). This would ruin the strategic-thinking component for the adult since they know the kid is responding randomly anyway.
One idea is to adapt an existing ONE-player strategy-driven game that involves a randomized component. The trick here would be to forcibly shorten the time the adult player has to make her move, so that the kid doesn’t notice the adult’s half of the game is more involved (and more fun by implication). Zombicide is an excellent board-game where zombies move and spawn randomly depending on cards/dice. You could have kids move for the zombies and adults move for the humans. You could easily devise a gentler-themed variant suitable for non-violence-desensitized children.
One hazard in this 2-tier game is that the kid will demand to play the role meant for the adult, trapping the adult in a nightmarish world of watching the child make stupid strategic decisions while the adult herself is relegated to moving randomly. But you can always trick the kid into picking a certain role by distracting them with princess-shaped game pieces or whatever.