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Jake Halpern (15:16)

I'm Jake Halpern, host of Deep Cover, a show about people who lead double lives. We're presenting a special series from Australia. It's all about a family who is conned by a charming American.

Tim Harford (15:29)

When you marry someone, you feel like you really know them. I was just gobsmacked as to what's going on here. Does the name Leslie Mnookian mean anything to you? Oh, you bet.

Jake Halpern (15:40)

Never forget her. Listen to Deep Cover presents Snowball. Wherever you get your podcasts.

Tim Harford (15:52)

If we know anything, we know we're supposed to stick to a task. Psychologists have developed some attractive Ideas about how success depends on practice and determination. There's Angela Duckworth, who's popularized the idea of grit, Carol Dweck's research on the growth mindset, and the late Anders Ericsson, the source of the 10,000 hour rule made famous by Malcolm Gladwell. There are subtleties to each of these research programs, but the versions that have broken into popular culture are simple enough, like some motivational poster. Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not. Nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not. Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. The slogan press on, has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race isn't that great? It's often attributed to President Calvin Coolidge, but it's older than that. Claude Shannon, however, seems not to have gotten the message. He achieved so much, but if he'd stuck to a task, couldn't he have achieved so much more? Instead, he was playing with flame, throwing trumpets, juggling robots and silly poems. Oh, and the impossible task of beating the casino at roulette. For a junior academic, Ed Thorpe spent a surprising amount of time in casinos. Using some ferocious mathematics and the best computers he could access at mit, Thorpe had figured out that it was possible to beat the dealer at the casino staple, blackjack, by keeping track of the cards that had been played and placing bets when the deck was offering favourable odds. Card counting is a familiar idea these days. It all started with Ed Thorpe. Thorpe's ideas were sophisticated enough to be worth publishing as an academic paper, which he did. But he wasn't content with that. He wanted to beat the casino, too. To do that, Thorpe had to learn to spot crooked dealing, wear a disguise, count cards unobtrusively late into the night, and above all, make sure he didn't get killed. That was no idle worry. One day, Thorpe made a little too much money and the casino spiked his coffee with something mysterious that blurred his vision for hours. He came back the next day and the casino tried it again. But Thorpe wasn't scared. His idea to beat roulette was the boldest of all. He didn't have in mind a clever mathematical system. There are loads of them and he knew that none of them work. Instead, he planned to build a computer that could predict where the ball would land. That would be hard even today, but at a time when computers were the size of pianos, this computer needed to be one that you could conceal inside your clothes. The world's first wearable computer. Decades before the Fitbit, Google Glass or the Apple watch, Thorpe had done some experiments on the timing of a roulette wheel with his wife, Vivian, a woman who was both intelligent and indulgent, as you'd need to be if you were married to Ed Thorpe. But to crack the problem, he needed to team up with perhaps the best gadgeteer in the world, Claude Shannon. Thorpe spent 20 hours a week at Shannon's house. He was in heaven. The basement was a gadgeteer's paradise. Motors, transistors, switches, pulleys, gears, condensers, transformers. I was now happily working with the ultimate gadgeteer. Shannon and Thorpe were able to time the spinning of the ball around and up a loop and the contrary motion of the wheel itself. With practice, they were able to start a clock within 100th of a second and then stop the clock after 10 revolutions. That gave them both the speed and the position of the ball relative to the wheel. And Newtonian physics could do the rest. The result of months of experimentation taught them that using their computer to compute the path of the ball, they could predict that it would fall into one of five numbers, just over one eighth of the wheel, and expect to be right 20% of the time. It seems a modest advantage, but the potential profits were enormous. All they had to do was to figure out how to miniaturise that computer, making it small enough to slip into a pocket and carry into the casino undetected. It was an astonishingly audacious project and a huge effort. For the final three weeks, Thorpe was effectively living at Shannon's house. But by August 1961, the device was ready. With their accomplices Vivian Thorpe and Claude's wife, the mathematician Betty Shannon, the two gadgeteers then took it to the casinos. The Einstein of computer science was going to Las Vegas. Looking at Claude Shannon's career from age 33 onwards, it's hard to escape the conclusion that he might have achieved more, much more, if not for his habit of flitting between whimsical projects and typically setting them aside before they were finished. But some very smart people would disagree. Vannevar Bush arguably knew more than anyone about the way scientific progress occurred. He guided science policy for the United states during the Second World War, coordinating the efforts of 6,000 researchers. Bush said that great scientists should range widely and keep changing things up. In a speech to professors at mit, Bush advocated breadth rather than depth. It is unfortunate when a brilliant and creative mind insists upon living in a modern monastic cell. Bush's idea was later backed up by scientific investigation of scientists themselves. In 1958, a remarkable study was Launched by a young psychologist named Bernice Ajison, the study followed a group of promising researchers as their careers unfolded, periodically interviewing them and continuing even after Aidison herself died in 1985. Four of the scientists eventually won Nobel Prizes. The findings of the Aidison study support Shannon's habit of flipping from one project to another. The scientists who'd most flourished over the decades had switched back and forth dozens of times. Once you start looking for this pattern, you see it everywhere. Isaac Newton is most famous for formulating the law of gravity, but made huge advances in mathematics and optics. He was the Master of the Royal Mint and was fascinated by economics and devoted as much attention to alchemy as to anything else. Einstein published four astonishing scientific papers on four different topics, all in the same year, 1905. Charles Darwin worked simultaneously on the theory of evolution, the definitive two volume work on barnacles and a book about the human infant, begun while his son William was a baby and published just in time for William Darwin's 38th birthday. Multiple projects aren't unusual. At the highest level of science, they're the norm. Not only that, high achieving scientists often have time consuming side interests, pursuing photography, fine art or music at or near a professional level. Nobel Prize winning scientists are substantially more likely to have serious hobbies than other leading scientists, who in turn are more likely to have them than the rest of us. The later part of Shannon's career fits right into this highly diverse pattern. But then, so does the early part. Back in 1939, shortly after his first thunderbolt, he wrote a note to an academic. Dear Dr. Bush. Yes, Vannevar Bush, the man who knew everyone who mattered in mid century American science. Of course, he was there to support the young Claude Shannon. Dear Dr. Bush, I've been working on three different ideas simultaneously and strangely enough, it seems a more productive method than sticking to one problem. When Shannon wrote to Vannevar Bush, he wasn't working on engineering or logic. He was working on genetics. He knew nothing about the subject, but swiftly produced a completely new kind of algebra to describe and analyse genetic inheritance. The work was intriguing and wholly original, but needed developing. Did Shannon develop it? He did not. In fact, he never even bothered publishing it. Neither did he ever return to genetics. Later scholars lament the loss. His new algebra might really have advanced the field, but sticking with genetics might also have meant he never had his second thunderbolt on information theory. Between those two thunderbolts, Shannon didn't just switch fields, he lived a rich and complicated life. He married and then divorced within a year. He moved to Manhattan to spice things up. He'd played chess in Washington Square Park. He'd played clarinet. He loved the jazz scene in New York. He swam, played tennis, stayed up too late and played his music too loud. All this was happening when Shannon was at the peak of his intellectual powers. Shannon didn't just hit 35 then abandon serious thinking in favour of playing around. Shannon was playing around all along. Maybe Shannon's love of frittering, I say frittering away his time on juggling or unicycling or music or chess. Maybe that's not the reason he produced only two truly brilliant ideas. Maybe it's the reason he produced two truly brilliant ideas in the first place. Cautionary Tales we'll be back in a moment.

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Jake Halpern (27:11)

Jake Halpern, host of Deep Cover, a show about people who lead double lives. We're presenting a special series from Australia. It's all about a family who was conned by a charming American.

Tim Harford (27:24)

When you marry someone, you feel like you really know them. I was just gobsmacked as to what's going on here. Does the name Leslie Mnookian mean anything to you? Oh, you bet.

Jake Halpern (27:35)

Never forget her. Listen to Deep Cover presents Snowball. Wherever you get your podcasts.

Tim Harford (27:46)

I try hard to answer all the people who write to me. I get anxious knowing that the task is unfinished. Claude Shannon didn't feel that same compulsion to clear his inbox. He often left correspondence unanswered, then eventually cleared the decks through the use of a trash can marked letters I've procrastinated on for too long. That might seem a trivial thing, but I think it points to something deeper. Psychologists have identified a tendency called completion bias. If you've ever assembled a list of things to do, then ticked off all the easy ones while ignoring the important stuff, you've demonstrated completion bias. That apparently admirable tendency. Persistence. The determination to finish what we start. Well, it can be twisted and perverted if we feel compelled to reach the finish line. We also feel tempted to choose a short racetrack. There's more at stake here than making ourselves feel better by cheating with our own to do lists. Psychologists recently studied completion bias in a high stakes setting, a hospital emergency department. They found that the busier the emergency room becomes, the more the doctors look for quick wins. The patients who aren't really very ill and can therefore be treated swiftly and ticked off the list. And this behaviour is counterproductive. The more seriously ill patients wait longer, of course, and the doctors start to slow down. After working through a lot of fairly trivial cases, I expect we all know the feeling. But in their subconscious desire to see some work through to completion, doctors were harming the patients who were in greatest need. Claude Shannon's willingness to set aside projects starts to look like a strength rather than a weakness. Shannon certainly could focus, whether building information theory from scratch or building a wearable computer to beat roulette. Yet Shannon also seemed to have an inner confidence that allowed him to declare victory at any point. That suited him. If a piece of work was not good enough to publish, fine. He was happy to leave it unpublished. That juggling paper is an example. But so too was his early work on genetic algebra. One of Claude Shannon's colleagues at Bell Labs praised him as a man of infinite courage. He was talking about Shannon's intellectual daring, a willingness to march into unknown territory to begin the search for solutions to problems that seemed as unbeatable as roulette. But perhaps courage is not quite the right word to describe Shannon's approach. I prefer insouciance. Claude Shannon just wasn't worried. He didn't feel completion bias the way you and I feel it. He would walk away from any project at any time without regret. And if he was willing to abandon a stalled project, where was the risk? And if there was little risk, why talk about courage? Shannon didn't need courage. He just needed the ability to move on. In August 1961, Claude and Betty Shannon met Ed and Vivian Thorpe in a hotel room in Las Vegas. Claude and Ed prepared the wearable computer system, which required both of them to operate. Shannon controlled the computer itself, the size of a cigarette packet with 12 transistors in it. He used his toes to trigger silent mercury switches hidden in his shoes. Thorpe, whose research into blackjack had given him plenty of experience hanging around in casinos, was the one who would place the bets. He had a radio receiver and an earpiece connected to a hair thin steel wire. The earpiece played an ascending musical scale. Shannon would use the toe switches to time a rotation of the wheel and then the counter rotation of the ball from the moment it passed a reference mark. Thorp would hear the musical scale stop on a continuous note at the moment that Shannon finished timing the rotation. And the pitch of that continuous note would indicate in which part of the wheel the ball was likely to drop. Thorpe still had a few seconds to place bets and collect the money. Thorpe knew from hard experience that they had to be careful. Their device wasn't illegal. It was far too inconceivable for that. But it wouldn't go down well if discovered. Beating the casino required more than just beating the game. That's why the Shannons and the Thorpes stroll up to the table separately, pretending not to know each other. It's why Claude Shannon's scribbling numbers down, distracting the floor manager from what he's really doing. All the while, he's gazing intently at the wheel from under his dark eyebrows and his toe silently pressing and releasing the hidden control of the computer. And while Thorpe is standing at the other end of the table, cheerfully placing his bets, the earpiece is receiving the signals from Shannon's little computer and giving Thorpe predictions in the form of musical tones. And Thorpe is winning. Not everything goes smoothly. The fine wires to Thorpe's earpiece break several times, requiring a trip to the bathroom to fix them. At one moment, a horrified observer sees the earpiece come loose and thinks some strange insect is crawling out of Thorpe's ear. But fundamentally, the computer works perfectly. The chips are stacking up fast. At the end of the visit to Vegas, the Shannons and the Thorpes pondered their options. Ed Thorpe was bullish. He'd beaten the casinos before and was happy to do it again. But Betty, Claude and Vivian weren't so sure. It had been an exhilarating day, but a nerve wracking one. And casinos simply banned players who seemed to win too much for any reason. So making the computer pay on a regular basis would require constantly concealing their identities. Thorpe was forced to admit they had a point. The computer clearly worked, and in theory, they could use it to make millions. But was it worth the effort? And the risk? Shannon and Thorpe had had their fun, and they'd proved their point to their own satisfaction. And Claude Shannon had other projects to play with. So after months of hard work, the world's first wearable computer was retired, undefeated after a single trip to Vegas. Decades later, Thorpe reflected, I have always thought it was a good decision. When I first thought about writing this cautionary tale, I thought it would be a warning not to Lose focus like Shannon did. I've changed my mind. Now I think Shannon and Thorpe are inspirational figures. The cautionary tale isn't a warning to keep your focus. Instead, it's a warning not to focus too much. Don't commit yourself so totally to a project that you lose heart, or lose sight of creative ideas, or lose your freedom to change course. There's one last lesson I think we can draw from Claude Shannon's ability to move on. In their Vegas hotel room, as Shannon equipped Thorpe with his earpiece and the fine connecting wires, Shannon had cocked his head to one side and smiled impishly. What makes you tick? It was a joke about the fact that Thorpe was plugged into a machine. But young Thorpe took it as a deep question from an older and wiser man. What did make him tick? Professional gambling? Academic mathematics? Or something else? But then, why choose? Shannon seemed to do it all, from academia to juggling. And so, in the end, would Ed Thorpe. You can find interviews with him well into his 80s, still as sharp as anything reminiscing about blackjack and academic mathematics and the hundreds of millions of dollars he eventually made after analysing the patterns in financial markets as one of the first quants. One of the intriguing ideas in Claude Shannon's mathematical theory of communication is that a message can be compressed to the precise extent that it is predictable. A movie can be compressed because each frame tends to resemble the previous one. A compression algorithm doesn't store the new frame. Instead, it stores a series of diffs, changes from the previous frame. Movies with lots of cuts or fast, dramatic movements are harder to compress. The same is true, more or less, with the way we remember our lives. Although the brain is not a video recorder and doesn't store diffs, it does compress memories by recalling the gist of an experience. If I get up in the morning at the usual time, eat my regular breakfast, walk the usual route to the station, and catch the same train as always to the office, my brain doesn't trouble itself to remember much. The diffs aren't worth bothering with. A life that's too predictable creates few memories. That's what prisoners sometimes say about their years behind bars. They don't remember much because it was all the same. Or the pandemic. Lockdown, for me, and perhaps for you, involved sitting in the same seat, doing the same thing every day. Life in lockdown was thin and forgettable. The opposite experience is a vivid vacation somewhere packed with new sights and smells. The people, the language, the architecture, the food. These complex, rich experiences defy compression. The diffs are too big, so the memories are rich. Has it really only been 10 hours since I arrived, you ask yourself? It feels like a week. So if you want a full life rich with memories, keep searching for new experiences. And like Shannon, don't be afraid to declare victory and start afresh. Shannon did everything the jazz and the juggling and the chess, the intellectual journey from genetics to the Rubik's Cube, the jokey robots and the flame throwing trumpet. And he really did turn upside down the way the world thought about digital information not once, but twice. Isn't twice enough? The key sources for this episode were Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman's biography of Claude Shannon, A Mind at Play, and Edward Thorpe's autobiography, A Man for all Markets. For a full list of references, see TimHarford.com Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts. Starring in this series of Cautionary Tales are Helena Bonham Carter and Jeffrey Wright, alongside Nazar Eldarazi, Ed Gochan, Melanie Gutteridge, Rachel Hanshaw, Cobner, Holbrook Smith, Greg Lockett, Misea Munro and Rufus Wright. The show would not have been possible without the work of Mia Labelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnarz, Carly Migliore, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostock, Maggie Taylor, Daniela Lacan and Maya Koenig. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share. Rate and Review.

Jake Halpern (40:48)

I'm Jake Halpern, host of Deep Cover, a show about people who lead double lives. We're presenting a special series from Australia. It's all about a family who was conned by a charming American.

Tim Harford (41:01)

When you marry someone, you feel like you really know them. I was just gobsmacked as to what's going on here. Does the name Leslie Mnookian mean anything to you? Oh, you bet.

Jake Halpern (41:11)

Never forget her. Listen to Deep Cover Presents Snowball Wherever you get your podcasts, this is an iHeart podcast.

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