Michigan State University students had an unconventional math class this week after professor John McCarthy, 57, reportedly stripped naked in Calculus 1 class and began screaming that “there is no f—ing God” and “It’s all an act and none of it’s real.” In the age of laptop computers, the most surprising thing is that the students noticed and looked up from their computers. Presumably one student asked the standard question of “will this be on the test?”
Witnesses said that McCarthy was going through a routine derivative equation when he started to talk about his colleagues and how “they’re all actors.” He added that “It’s all an act and none of it’s real.”
McCarthy was arrested but not actually charged with a crime. He can certainly be charged with indecent exposure but I hope that he is not and that the police show a modicum of discretion. He obviously had a psychological meltdown. Brilliance sometimes comes with such mental issues as vividly shown in movies like “A Beautiful Mind.”
I would also hope that the faculty treats this matter as a mental illness and allows McCarthy to seek treatment rather than simply fire him. I realize it will be difficult for him to return to the classroom, but we need to treat mental illness like other forms of illness. Thus far the school has merely reassigned his classes. I expect that he is unlikely to return to teaching but in my view the school should treat this matter as an illness rather than misconduct. What do you think?
Source: NY Daily News
Otteray Scribe 1, October 14, 2012 at 6:40 pm
Malisha and Matt J.:
That is a description of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist. It is not the HPC itself.
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As an individual’s score may have important consequences for his or her future, and because the potential for harm if the test is used or administered incorrectly is considerable, Hare argues that the test should only be considered valid if administered by a suitably qualified and experienced clinician under scientifically controlled and licensed, standardized conditions.[2][3] Hare receives royalties on licensed use of the test.[4]
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I’m not interested in paying the royalties.
Malisha and Matt J.:
That is a description of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist. It is not the HPC itself. The information in the Wiki article can also be found in the Buros Mental Measurements Yearbook, which is a kind of “Consumer’s Reports” for psychological tests.
http://buros.org/mental-measurements-yearbook
FYI, most psychologists do not use the Hare. It is an instrument used almost exclusively by forensic psychologists and some forensic psychiatrists.
Malisha 1, October 12, 2012 at 7:15 pm
Matt J, where can one find a copy of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist? Have you seen it?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare_Psychopathy_Checklist
Just found it. I’ve never been to a shrink.
@Bron: You missed the point in your post that says, “I mean know their business. know what matters to their bottom line.”
The people you are selling to do not really know what matters to their “bottom line,” which in accounting is net profit. That was my point.
Because they don’t really know, pretending you DO know just reduces your credibility as a salesman. What they have is a budget they have negotiated and tasks they have been assigned, and their problem and pain is getting their tasks done within that budget.
For example, understanding Kraft’s or Boeing’s or Exxon’s business model and “bottom line” is pointless; the people you might work for within those companies do not care, they are salaried employees with a job to do and limited resources (and therefore they have pain). they do not care about “profit,” they care about an easier work life with less hassle.
tony c:
“You missed the entire point of my post! Virtually everybody in business buys solutions to problems, they do not buy “improvements to the bottom line.””
I did? how so? Since I said this:
Sales is only about solving your customers problems and anticipating what problems may arise in the future.
Malisha, I believe sales of the HPC are restricted. That means only a qualified professional can purchase it from the publisher. By qualified, that means the purchaser must be a licensed psychologist or psychological examiner who is subject to the ethical code of the licensing body. It is not for sale to the public. That is true of most psychological test. A test that becomes public knowledge is no longer a test that can be trusted.
Matt J, where can one find a copy of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist? Have you seen it?
“I do not socialize with clients. (Since I do not drink or follow any sports or celebrities or music and really know very little except science, they should probably be relieved that I do not try!)” (Tony C)
😎
@Bron: To each his own. I don’t do that, or make small talk, and it never hurt me, I always had more demand than I could meet.
As far as “knowing their business,” Slart would have to be interested in that, but I am interested in their problem and the constraints on the solution, not their whole business, and I think there is a big difference.
Plus, once again, their bottom line is “profit” and the people you sell to in large businesses could usually not care less about profit, they have a problem and money to solve it and that is the end of the analysis for them. They are salaried employees and it is not their job to worry about profit, that is above their pay grade; any decisions about “profit” are passed on to them in the form of problems they have to solve: cut labor by 5%, speed up the production line, make a version we can sell in Germany, expand the Mexico installation to double its output.
You missed the entire point of my post! Virtually everybody in business buys solutions to problems, they do not buy “improvements to the bottom line.”
Tony C:
I mean know their business. know what matters to their bottom line. but it doesnt hurt to ask if their husband or wife and children are doing well.
@Bron: Yep, I had to read a book. Actually about 40 books to find the book that solved my particular problem.
Like many people I know, I thought sales was about telling people about what I could do for them, and then they would decide whether they wanted that service and expertise or not. So the problem was that I thought, if they knew what I could do, they would automatically see the link to their problems, and they do not.
To put that in Slart’s arena, it is like saying “I can do sophisticated mathematical modeling!”, and assuming the customer knows what that means and what the implications are and will say, “By George, that is just what I need!”
But customers don’t really think that much, and that was (partially) my mistake. The connections between technical expertise and something they care about have to be drawn for them.
As for knowing my customers on more than a superficial level: Nah, I don’t think so. I have had several very happy clients I barely knew at all, but I saved their job or their project or (in one case) their entire company. That is also an advantage of this method; it is not a glad-handing, “I’m your buddy” approach. It is a professional approach with a professional distance, all I want to know about my customer is what is causing them pain that I can fix. Kind of like the doctor in the E.R.
I do not socialize with clients. (Since I do not drink or follow any sports or celebrities or music and really know very little except science, they should probably be relieved that I do not try!)
That has been very much okay with them, some of them still call me for help twenty years after my gig with them. Because when they need help bad, friendship doesn’t matter, all they want is to stop the new pain.
Tony C:
“My “sales calls” turned into learning experiences for me focused on understanding their problems from their point of view and solving them. Meaning, actually enjoyable.”
You had to read a book to learn that?
Sales is only about solving your customers problems and anticipating what problems may arise in the future. It is also about knowing your customers on more than a superficial basis. Always ask “what can I do for my customer to make his life easier.”
P.S. Although I say “keep it in mind,” [that you are selling an emotional necessity] I do not mean to make an appeal to emotion, that could backfire badly. I also do not mean you cannot get technical in the conversation. I mean remember the reason they are buying is usually not greed, but to alleviate pain.
In the SPIN method the “S” stands for “situational,” which is basically asking background questions to understand the person and position of the business in the market.
One of those background questions should be whether the prospect comes from a technical background; if they are mathematically oriented you do not want to insult their intelligence in describing your offering.
The reason focusing on the pain works is that virtually everybody in business is focused on their pains, not on the profits. All the way to the CEO, “profits” either do not affect their income, or have very little impact upon it. But there are hassles and irritations at every level of the company, from the janitor to the boardroom. So we focus on a problem to be solved, whatever that might be for a particular buyer in a particular company. The emotional importance and consequence of that will be inferred by the buyer, it isn’t something we need to know or to which we refer. But it is important for us to look for the clues that the problem we focus on really IS important to them; their desire to solve it is what will close the sale.
Profits are the residue of revenue left after all the expenses have been paid. Increased profit is a result of increased revenue (sales) or decreased expenses. Ways to do either of those things (sell more, spend less) are what can be sold as pain relief, because not selling enough is the pain of marketing and sales, and spending too much is the pain of buyers, production and operations.
Oddly, nobody (in a large business) is focused on profit directly, not even the CEO, because there are too many variables involved to comprehend it. Instead companies take the “greedy algorithm” approach and hope that optimizing all the parts in isolation will naturally optimize the whole. (Many do not even believe that can fail). So that brings us back to the individual pain in the individual departments; we do not promise greater profits, we promise to eliminate hassles, irritations, and other problems.
@Slart: I may harass you (and others) for the fun of mutual insult, but I do not think of that as reality. For the real world, it doesn’t cost me anything to share what I can and hopefully save you from stepping into traps I already sprung.
You can’t get somebody else to sell technical services. Do not hire a marketing firm (I tried that experiment and goodbye $10K), do not hire a salesperson (I tried that too.) The only person that can really describe or answer questions about your offering is you, so you are stuck with the sales job.
You have a lot to figure out, but your basic problem is that you are selling magic you cannot explain in any good way to your target audience. What I think was hard to overcome at first was the “selfish urge” to be understood, to be admired, and to get people to buy my services because I am a genius, let me prove it by explaining what I did…
Nobody cares. Customers buy metaphorical medicine in the hopes of relieving their metaphorical pain; what sells them is the promise of pain relief, and the more plausible it sounds (like backed up by a track record) and the less risky it sounds (by removing barriers to sales) the more likely they are to buy it. Nobody cares how the medicine works, agonist, antagonist, antibacterial, antiviral, chelator, who cares? They only care if it relieves their pain.
So (all in my view) you aren’t selling a “modeling” protocol. That means nothing to anybody but you, because you have been working on it. That is like telling me you are selling a COX-1 preferential cyclooxygenase inhibitor. If I have a headache, I will say sorry Kevin, I do not need that and I am rather busy. Then I will leave to go buy some aspirin (which is a COX-1 preferential cyclooxygenase inhibitor).
You need a way to sell aspirin. To start with, I would call it a “simulator” or “simulation,” people get that already. Nobody thinks of their video games as “modeling,” even though they are, but they do get that they are “simulations,” and they do get that accurate simulations let them play ‘what if’ games. You can pitch it like that, or like the “war games” simulations of the military, with the added bonus of automation that can discover new pathways they haven’t even considered (your “emergent behavior” claim, also something nobody but AI and science geeks know).
If you have developed something new, file a provisional patent application, it is free (or some trivial fee that seemed free to me), un-reviewed, and gives you two years of protection, and adds cachet to your offering. It’s Patent Pending, brother!
What you have developed, and what only you can offer, is new simulation technology that lets you rapidly simulate the flows of a given business, it is like an artificial intelligence that can find the obstacles and turbulence in those flows so they can be addressed and increase efficiency, and can see new ways of leveraging what is already there.
“Have you heard of data-mining? That is about finding relationships in your databases you did not even know existed, so you can turn those into new business opportunities. Kesseler can do the same thing for you with your business processes, our simulator can mine them for previously unknown relationships, and produce new business opportunities, whether it is correcting key issues or boosting efficiency and productivity.”
Or something like that, that is truthful if metaphorical. You have work to do from their point of view, how do they describe the pain your simulator can relieve? “Lack of profit” is not a pain, btw. “Unexpected costs” is a pain, “Waste” is a pain, “Competition” is a pain, “Angry customers” is a pain. Almost nobody buys a service because it is going to increase profits, because that is what everybody is promising them and they are jaded. The vast majority of sales are about trying to stop something they hate, that is irritating, that gets them in trouble with their boss, that makes customers return stuff, that makes them lose sales to the competition, that delay the production line. Things that make Daddy work late and miss Friday game night with the kids.
That is what you have to keep in mind at all times, you are not selling a mathematical modeling service; you are selling an emotional necessity.
Slartibartfast 1, October 11, 2012 at 6:09 pm
Matt,
FYI—I was never as naive or as much of a fool as you are.
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The fact that you relied to this means you’re studier than I am.
Matt,
FYI—I was never as naive or as much of a fool as you are.
Slartibartfast 1, October 11, 2012 at 4:52 pm
Tony,
One of the lessons I’ve learned in the past year is just what a naive fool I was a year an a half ago
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Will you still be a naive fool five years from now?
Tony,
One of the lessons I’ve learned in the past year is just what a naive fool I was a year an a half ago…—I’ll check out the book you suggest. As I said, I’m going to be making a push on developing my software into a usable tool over the next month or so, but, after that, I’ll be trying to sell it and what you said seems like it is right on target for what I’ll be doing.
Anyway, enough of this being nice to each other crap—if you want to further discuss my business (or want me to let you know what’s going on with it), then send me an email at (first name)@(last name).net (please note the spelling of “Kevin Kesseler”—you wouldn’t want to make the same mistake that was recently made on the corrections thread) and we can get back to more important things—like butting heads for Gene’s amusement and talking about math in front of raff for our own amusement… 😛
@Slart: After that, I’ll be trying to get customers to prove that the service is valuable (and can be profitable).
Like I said, SPIN selling. That book probably changed my life. I had already been attempting business for years with mixed success. I wasn’t going to quit, it wasn’t that dramatic, but in the afternoon it took me to read that book, everything I hated and feared about being a salesman evaporated; it was an epiphany for me.
It is too embarrassing to relate my previous pathetic approach, but suffice to say this book provided a compelling argument (for me) to just be the student geek I really have been all my life. In fact, my “student mode” (hyper-attentive and analytical, hyper-memory, lots of questions and clarifications) turned out, with sensible guidance and structure provided by this book, to be ideal.
My “sales calls” turned into learning experiences for me focused on understanding their problems from their point of view and solving them. Meaning, actually enjoyable.
Despite the (IMO) unfortunate acronym, this is the analytical and logical approach to the type of sales you will be attempting, with lots of empirical evidence that it works. The highest paying gigs I have ever had in my life were sold using this method, it is hard for me to imagine having landed them without it.
Tony,
I suppose you’re right—this dead horse is well and truly beaten.
“Good luck with the business. Are you going to leave teaching, or try contracting on a partial appointment?”
Thanks.
I’m not going to “leave” teaching—I was never really there to begin with. I did teach 2 courses at UNC and 1 at Duke the semester after I graduated after which I spent 5 years in a post-doc at UNC. Since then I’ve been unemployed and working on this project (almost 3 years now). I’ve never had much of an interest in teaching and would take a modeling job in industry long before I would take a teaching position (even a tenure-track academic position isn’t really what I’m interested in right now—not that I’d turn one down… 😉 ).
I’ve achieved proof of concept with my software and I’m currently working to get a stable “alpha” version and get my business set up—the goal is to have this done by the end of the month. After that, I’ll be trying to get customers to prove that the service is valuable (and can be profitable).
There are two points in your long comment that I still want to address—linear vs. non-linear and emergent properties of models, but they can wait for another day…