Why Be an Early Adopter?

Old technology is typically pretty stable; new technology is improving. It can make sense to switch early (before the new technology actually performs better than the old) to get the benefits of being familiar with the new technology once it does take off.

Andrew Gelman, "Argument in favor of Ddulites"

Opportunity Costs

Poor people are people who make decisions. They are not a combination of circumstances that can be tweaked to make them stop acting like poor people. They like babies and sleeping in for the same reasons you do. And they are generally asked to give up those things in return for much less reward than the middle class people who cluck at them for their bad decisions.

Megan McArdle, "What Do Low-Income Communities Need?"

Der Markt für Politiker

Leider kann man keine Autorität ausüben, indem man die eigene Fehlbarkeit akzeptiert. Wir Menschen müssen einfach durch Wissen geblendet werden - wir sind dazu gemacht, Führern zu folgen, die Leute versammeln können, weil die Vorteile der Zugehörigkeit zu Gruppen die Nachteile des Alleinseins ausstechen. Es ist für uns profitabler gewesen, uns in der falschen Richtung zusammenzutun, als allein in die richtige Richtung zu trotten. Diejenigen, die nicht dem introspektiven Klugen gefolgt sind, sondern dem selbstsicheren Idioten, haben einige ihrer Gene an uns weitergegeben.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Der schwarze Schwan: Die Macht höchst unwahrscheinlicher Ereignisse, S. 238 (Kap. 12)

Antinostalgia, Holiday Card Edition

The thing is, a holiday card is something you're only supposed to look at for about a minute. Then you throw it away. This is practically the definition of internet content. It isn't that a fine old tradition is dead: it's that the perfect technology for holiday greetings has finally arrived.

J. Robert Lennon, "End of an Era?"

Entscheidungsfreiheit

Jetzt warteten sie auf das Ende, und vielleicht zeigt sich die Natur hier von ihrer barmherzigen Seite, denn wenn die Erschöpfung so groß ist, daß man stehenbleiben und sich nach seinen Verfolgern umdrehen muß, kann man das mit einer Ruhe tun, die dem Wissen entspringt, daß es keine andere Möglichkeit gibt.

Peter Høeg, "Hommage à Bournonville", in: ders., Von der Liebe und ihren Bedingungen in der Nacht des 19. März 1929, S. 51

Is "Vision of Liberty" the First Factor of Political Preferences?

Conservatives value above all else what Berlin called the negative vision of liberty, namely, freedom from coercion. Liberals are more willing to balance that against the positive vision of liberty — that is, having a reasonable opportunity to realize one’s potential. The negative vision focuses conservatives on restricting the government’s ability to interfere in people’s lives. The positive vision leads liberals to believe that government has a role in guaranteeing baseline minimums in education, medical care, and healthy communities. Most of us probably accept both visions to some extent, but how we balance the two may be built into our DNA. It is not to be expected, therefore, that a liberal will be converted by reading the great works of conservatism, or vice versa.

Carl T. Bogus, "A Liberal Reads the Great Conservative Works"

Conoisseurs Are Easy to Please

People think of connoisseurs as having higher standards. [...] Connoisseurs make unusual demands, yes, but in some ways they are easier to please than non-connoisseurs. Indie films are less pleasant than mainstream films. Yet film connoisseurs like them more. To most people, indie films are also much cheaper and more experimental than mainstream films. By supporting them — by preferring them — film connoisseurs are supporting innovation. The connoisseurs have lowered their standards for film in the sense that they can enjoy cheaper films. A friend of mine attends the San Francisco International Film Festival each year. He enjoys it. I wouldn’t. The SF film festival films don’t cost much, yet they have a certain innovative quality. (I”m not a film connoisseur, I barely understand it.) The source of pleasure has shifted from conventional sources (plot, music, dialogue, gorgeous actors, sets, and landscapes) to something else, perhaps novelty and complexity.

Seth Roberts, "The Willat Effect: More Consequences"

The Organisational Sociology of Deception

Here’s an easily falsifiable statement, but there’s something in it that interests me and I want you to pick it apart. I would start with the moment when George W. Bush met Vladimir Putin and said, “I looked into his eyes and saw this was a man I could really trust.” So, my thesis is this: If you’re Vladimir Putin, and you rise to the top of this chaotic and brutal society after going through the KGB, you must be some kind of strategic genius with amazing survival skills, because the penalty for failure may be torture or death. This kind of Darwinian set-up exists in many countries around the world. What does it mean to be head of the security services in Egypt? It means that you had to betray your friends but only at the right time, and you had to survive many vicious predators who would have loved to kill you or torture you, or otherwise derail your career. By the time you become Vladimir Putin or Omar Suleiman, your ability to think ahead and analyze threats has been adequately tested.

By contrast, what does it take to become a U.S. Senator? You have to eat rubber chicken dinners, you have to impress some rich people who are generally pretty stupid about politics, and smile in TV commercials. The penalties for failure are hardly so dire. And so, American leadership generally sucks, and America is perennially in the position of being the sucker in the global poker game. That’s the thesis. So, tell me why it’s wrong.

Even if your analysis is totally correct, your conclusion is wrong. Think about what it means to work for a Putin, whose natural approach to any problem is deception. For example, he had an affair with this athlete, a gymnast, and he went through two phases. Phase one: He concealed it from his wife. Phase two: He launched a public campaign showing himself to be a macho man. He had photographs of him shooting a rifle, and as a Judo champion, and therefore had the news leaked that he was having an affair. Not only an affair with a young woman, but a gymnast, an athlete. Obviously such a person is much more wily and cunning and able to handle conflict than his American counterpart. But when such a person is the head of a department, the whole department is actually paralyzed and they are all reduced to serfs and valets. Therefore, what gets applied to a problem is only the wisdom of the aforementioned wily head of the department. All the other talent is wasted, all the other knowledge is wasted.

Now you have a choice: You can have a non-wily head of a department and the collective knowledge and wisdom of the whole department, or else you can have a wily head and zero functioning. And that is how the Russian government is currently working. Putin and Medvedev have very little control of the Russian bureaucracy. When you want to deal with them, and I dealt with them this morning, they act in very uncooperative, cagey, and deceptive ways because they are first of all trying to protect their security and stability and benefits from their boss. They have to deceive you because they are deceiving their boss before he even shows up to work. And they are all running little games. So, that’s the alternative. You can have a wily Putin and a stupid government. Or an intelligent government and an innocent head. There’s always is a trade-off. A Putin cannot be an inspiring leader.

Edward Luttwak interviewed by David Samuels (via)

The World Series Fallacy

I would often have to fight the “World Series Fallacy,” which is that a strategy fails if it doesn’t help you win the top honor. A new coaching strategy is useless unless you win a Gold medal at the Olympics or the Super Bowl. We can think of other fallacies. You are a failure unless you are as big as Google, or you get elected President, or publish in the #1 journal, or so forth. The point is that good management is often about shifting the average performance, not getting all the variance. Not winning the World Series is besides the point.

Fabio Rojas: "Moneyball: An Orgtheory Review"

Tradeoff des Todes

Erst sah es wie eine Ohnmacht aus, wir fuhren sogar noch eine Weile. Aber dann war kein Zweifel, dass wir stehenbleiben mußten. Und hinter uns standen die Wagen und stauten sich, als ginge es in dieser Richtung nie mehr weiter. Das blasse, dicke Mädchen hätte so, angelehnt an ihre Nachbarin, ruhig sterben können. Aber ihre Mutter gab das nicht zu. Sie bereitete ihr alle möglichen Schwierigkeiten. Sie brachte ihre Kleider in Unordnung und goß ihr etwas in den Mund, der nichts mehr behielt. Sie verrieb auf ihrer Stirn eine Flüssigkeit, die jemand gebracht hatte, und wenn die Augen dann ein wenig verrollten, so begann sie an ihr zu rütteln, damit der Blick wieder nach vorne käme. Sie schrie in diese Augen hinein, die nicht hörten, sie zerrte und zog das Ganze wie eine Puppe hin und her, und schließlich holte sie aus und schlug mit aller Kraft in das dicke Gesicht, damit es nicht stürbe.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, S. 117-18

Introversion: A Hypothesis

My theory--that "social unease" is the euphemism for scant curiosity about someone else not kin, spouse, peer, or authority figure (often w/ semi-conscious contempt)--is a nice mood-killer at parties.

All Nations Welcome But Carrie, comment on "Oktoberfest" by Steve Sailer

Wer A sagt

Solange wir das Prinzip anerkennen, dass religiöser Glaube respektiert werden muss, einfach weil es religiöser Glaube ist, kann man auch den Respekt gegenüber dem Glauben eines Osama bin Laden oder der Selbstmordattentäter kaum ablegen. Die Alternative springt so ins Auge, dass man sie nicht sonderlich betonen muss: Man kann das Prinzip des automatischen Respekts für religiösen Glauben aufgeben.

Richard Dawkins, Der Gotteswahn, S. 427 (Kap. 8)

Macht, Charakter und Verhalten, supraindividuelle Version

Viele Religionen kommen heute schmeichlerisch lächelnd mit ausgebreiteten Armen auf uns zu wie schmierige Händler auf einem Basar. Im Wettbewerb mit anderen Marktschreiern versprechen sie uns Trost, Solidarität und Läuterung. Aber wir dürfen daran erinnern, wie barbarisch sie sich aufgeführt haben, als sie noch stark waren und den Menschen ein Angebot achten, das sie nicht ablehnen konnten. Wer vergessen hat, wie das gewesen sein muss, kann sich einfach die Staaten und Gesellschaften ansehen, in denen die Geistlichkeit noch über die Macht verfügt, ihre Bedingungen zu diktieren.

Christopher Hitchens, Der Herr ist kein Hirte: Wie Religion die Welt vergiftet (Kap. 5, S. 88)

Don't Express Yourself

Pity is such an awful, useless emotion - you have to bottle it up and keep it to yourself. The moment you try to express it, it only makes things worse.

Paul Auster, Invisible, p. 123 (pt. II)

Plausibilität und Wahrscheinlichkeit

Das folgende Experiment zeigt, dass Erzählungen zu einem Fehler bei der Abschätzung der Chancen führen können. Geben Sie jemandem einen gut geschriebenen Kriminalroman, beispielsweise ein Buch von Agatha Christie mit einer Handvoll Figuren, die man alle plausiblerweise für den Täter halten kann. Fragen Sie den Betreffenden dann nach der Wahrscheinlichkeit, mit der die einzelnen Figuren der Mörder sind. Wenn er die Prozentsätze nicht aufschreibt, um sie exakt verfolgen zu können, dürfte ihre Summe deutlich über 100 Prozent liegen (bei einem guten Roman sogar weit über 200 Prozent). Je besser der Krimischriftsteller ist, desto höher liegt die Zahl.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Der schwarze Schwan, S. 96 (Kap. 6)

Damn Right

My identity is not the accidents that have happened to me. It is what I choose.

Eric S. Raymond, "Why I Hate Identity Politics"

The Progress Equation

progress = resources*knowledge*time*freedom*motivation

Seth Roberts, "Alexandra Carmichael Almost Eliminates Headaches"

Belief

Modern liberalism takes the idea that people and subsets of people must be virtually identical. This is taken as essentially a religious given, no different from “the bible says so.”

tenthring, comment on "Twin Studies and Beyond" by Alex Tabarrok

Not Racist (But What's "a Pick in the Back"?)

Pull up your pants and buy a belt 'cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt. If you walk into somebody's office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back, and your shoes untied, and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won't hire you? They don't hire you 'cause you look like you're crazy.

Michael A. Nutter (quoted here)

Some Proxies Are Useless

[T]he idea that there is one thing called "government"—and that you can measure it by looking at total spending—makes no sense.

First of all, the number of dollars collected and spent by the government doesn't tell you how big the government is in any meaningful sense. Most government policies can be accomplished at least three different ways: spending, tax credits, and regulation. For example, let's say we want to help low-income people afford rental housing. We can pay for housing vouchers; we can provide tax credits to developers to build affordable housing; or we can have a regulation saying that some percentage of new units must be affordably priced. The first increases the amount of cash flowing in and out of the government; the second decreases it; and the third leaves it the same. Yet all increase government's impact on society.

James Kwak, "What Do You Mean, 'Government Is Too Big'?" (via)

Was aufs Papier gelangt

Ich hasse das Klappern der Schreibmaschine, weil es den Strom der Imagination zerhackt. Handschrift, Sprechzwang beim Tonband, das gleiche. Von dem, was bis in die Vorstellung vordringt - wenig genug - gelangt doch nur sehr wenig aufs Papier.

Bernward Vesper, Die Reise, S. 34

Resources Are Limited

Across a variety of disciplines, many researchers aim to show that subtle biases continue to exist. My reaction tends to be, yes, and the world is still round. It’s not merely a glass half-full versus half-empty difference. It’s a glass nearly to the brim, but upon very, very close inspection, we’ve determined that it’s fractionally below the rim, too close to see with the naked eye or even with typical magnification; but with a really high-powered lens we’ve discovered a measurable distance between the rim and the water level. As economists, we frequently assert and explain how zero is rarely the optimal amount of anything, even undesirable things like pollution. If the standard against which bias is to measured is zero, then I suppose we haven’t reached it

Brian Goff, "MLB Umps Not so Color Blind?"

Exchange and Power

Should police officers be paid per arrest? Most people think this is a bad idea, I imagine, but the larger point (what can we learn from this?) isn’t clear. In Systems of Survival, Jacobs tried to spell out the larger point. She wrote about two sets of moral rules. One set (“guardian syndrome”) applied to warriors, government officials, and religious leaders. It prizes loyalty and obedience, for example. The other set (“commercial syndrome”) applied to merchants. It prizes honesty, avoidance of force, and industriousness, for example. The two syndromes correspond to two ways of making a living: taking and trading. [...]

A powerful newspaper isn’t inherently bad; we want a powerful newspaper to keep other powerful institutions (government, large businesses) in check. Murdoch’s News International, of course, has became very powerful. Yet Murdoch newsrooms retained commercial norms, especially an emphasis on selling many copies. Reporters in Murdoch newsrooms were under intense pressure to produce — like policemen paid per arrest.

Seth Roberts, "Phone Hacking and Jane Jacobs"

People Respond to Incentives, Mental Health Edition

As low-income families experience growing economic hardship, many are finding that applying for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments on the basis of mental disability is the only way to survive. It is more generous than welfare, and it virtually ensures that the family will also qualify for Medicaid. According to MIT economics professor David Autor, “This has become the new welfare.” Hospitals and state welfare agencies also have incentives to encourage uninsured families to apply for SSI payments, since hospitals will get paid and states will save money by shifting welfare costs to the federal government.

Growing numbers of for-profit firms specialize in helping poor families apply for SSI benefits. But to qualify nearly always requires that applicants, including children, be taking psychoactive drugs.

Marica Angell, "The Illusions of Psychiatry"

What Is Kindness?

In common use, whether you are kind or cruel is not about what happens to the person you are supposedly being kind or cruel to. It is about what your actions say about your psychology.

You can be perfectly kind while knowing strangers die far away for want of help. If strangers die in front of you without you responding, that’s much more of a problem because it says you have no strong emotional response to this. That’s a worrying characteristic in an ally, for whatever reason. You can be kind while you vote for policies that everyone knows will indirectly harm people, as long as you’re apparently motivated by the right feelings about the immediate, visible effects. Do the opposite, and you are a cold and heartless calculator. Not kind at all, even if your actions benefit abstract people somewhere.

Kind people respond to immediate, vivid things, but are less required to respond to more abstract ones, and should never do so at the expense of the vivid things.

Katja Grace, "How to Inflict Huge Costs Kindly"

Why Isn't Sociology Better?

After three days of observing academics, it is clear to me that the social sciences attract precisely the wrong kind of people. They are I-want-to-help-and-thus-look-good people. In terms of personality, they are like sheep. Social science needs curmudgeons, but it gets womanly men and ideological women.

Ron Guhname, "Social Science Academics"

Framing Inequalities

This is something Alan Taylor’s American Colonies is really good on. His point is that if you look at the European aristocrats who ran the governments that colonized America, none of them were big into racism. In their eyes an African slave, a (Native) American savage, and a European peasant are all about on a par — they’re the scum of the earth, to be exploited economically, and perhaps feared as a potential source of violence and disorder. European governments of the 16th and 17th centuries typically presided over multiple linguistic groups, and important aristocrats could have very diverse landholdings. This was a very class-bound society, and the division between the elite and commoners was much more important than any proto-national considerations.

Matthew Yglesias, "Dimensions of Inequality"

Success and Selection on the Dependent Variable, Again

There’s an obvious selection-effect problem here. Most book-writing advice is going to comes from people who are able to successfully apply standard book-writing advice. But I don’t need book-writing advice from those people. I need to know what works for people with a mind like mine. Maybe nothing works. Maybe the best advice for people like me is: don’t try to write a book, you flake.

Will Wilkinson, "Neurodiversity and Writing Advice"

The Songwriter's Disease

The truth about autobiographical songs, he realized, was that you had to make the present become the past, somehow: you had to take a feeling or a friend or a woman and turn whatever it was into something that was over, so that you could be definitive about it. You had to put it in a glass case and look at it and think about it until it gave up its meaning, and he'd managed to do that with just about everybody he'd ever met or married or fathered. The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.

Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked, p. 244 (ch. 15)

Why Track?

In junior high and high school, tracking was the only thing that made my life bearable. In my memory, normal classes were a combination of Waiting for Godot and Lord of the Flies.

Bryan Caplan, "Reflections on Gifted Programs"

Die Betroffenheitsregel

So ergibt es sich, dass an der Spitze einer Gleichstellungsstelle regelmäßig eine Frau steht, nur ein Behinderter andere Behinderte vertreten kann und das Schwulenreferat selbstverständlich von einem bekennenden Homosexuellen geleitet werden muss.

[...]

Auch positive Diskriminierung bleibt Diskriminierung. Niemand käme auf die Idee, von einem Gesundheitspolitiker den Nachweis einer schweren Erkrankung zu erwarten oder von dem Vorsitzenden eines Rechts- und Innenausschusses die Abstammung aus einer Polizistenfamilie.

Jan Fleischhauer, "Qualifikation? Sie ist doch Deutschtürkin!"

The Poverty of Nonconsequentialism

Now, some people take the intuitive insanity of refusing to torture even to prevent the total annihilation of the universe as a devastating counterexample to non-consequentialist moral theories. I think this is a mistake based on a misunderstanding of the nature of morality and moral theory. Even the very best moral theory ever—one that organises and codifies our considered moral judgments better than any other—will sometimes generate the wrong advice. The usually unarticulated requirement that the very best moral theory ever have no notable counterexamples is arbitrarily over-demanding. A moral theory isn't a machine that takes in the specification of scenarios and spits out inerrant prescriptions. It is an intellectual refinement of our lived, evolving, socially-embodied morality, which is a body of largely tacit, often conflicting conventional rules and norms. The application of a moral theory requires the exercise of judgment at every step. Recognising the morally-relevant features of a scenario requires judgment. Identifying the rules and norms relevant to the circumstances requires judgment. Applying the relevant rules and norms appropriately requires judgment.

You may ask, "How do you know when a moral rule, such as 'don't torture', renders the wrong advice if the best moral theory always tells you that it is the right advice?" The answer is that you don't know. Sometimes exercising judgment amounts to little more than guessing and sometimes you'll guess wrong. Torture is categorically wrong, but it's not inconceivable that there are circumstances in which you should do it. However, there can be no general account of when you should do it, because generally you categorically shouldn't.

Will Wilkinson, "Torture Is Wrong"

Adult-onset Adolsescence

If Objectivism seems familiar, it is because most people know it under another name: adolescence. Many of us experienced a few unfortunate years of invincible self-involvement, testing moral boundaries and prone to stormy egotism and hero worship.

Michael Gerson, "Ayn Rand's Adult-onset Adolsescence"

Actually by Mark Twain (I Think)

I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.

Mark Twain

In through the Back Door

Given the power of our prior beliefs to skew how we respond to new information, one thing is becoming clear: If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn't trigger a defensive, emotional reaction.

[...]

In other words, paradoxically, you don't lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the values—so as to give the facts a fighting chance.

Chris Mooney, "The Science of Why We Don't Believe in Science"

Standard Reasoning Procedures

• Ask random colleges student random policy questions and they will feel compelled to come up with opinions.
• Ask them for reasons for those opinions and they’ll feel compelled to come up with such reasons.
• Such opinions strongly tend to support the status quo – mostly whatever is, is assumed good.
• There is only a weak added tendency for students to offer similar opinions and reasons on similar policy questions. Opinions and reasons are not being generated by processes that tend to produce much added similarity.
• Students are mostly satisfied to grasp at any plausibly policy-relevant difference to justify treating things differently, even when such differences don’t obviously “make a difference” to the issue at hand.

Robin Hanson, "Natural Hypocrisy"

Postmodernity Gone Mad: Football Imitates Football Imitation

Hoffenheim's Icelandic midfielder Gylfi Sigurdsson celebrated his opener with a bizarre "I've been shot and will go down holding my crotch"-routine. Asked about this disconcerting behaviour, the 21-year-old told reporters he had seen a digital version of himself doing just that in Fifa 2010 on the PlayStation. "I have no idea how they come up with it but decided to go with it now", he explained later.

Rafael Honigstein, "Kaiserslautern win 'semi-final' as Schalke have one eye on theirs"

Was heißt eigentlich "revealed preferences" auf Deutsch?

Manchmal heißt es von einem Mann, der allein lebt, er verabscheue die Geselligkeit. Das ist, als würde man von einem Mann, der nachts den Wald von Bondy meidet, behaupten, er gehe nicht gern spazieren.

Nicolas Chamfort

Beyond Parody

Q: What are the big, cutting-edge discrimination issues facing the EEOC?

A: [...]

Another case we filed is a nationwide challenge to criminal arrest and conviction screens. We challenged that as having a disparate impact against African-Americans and Latinos. That is still pending in Baltimore.

Another one was filed in Ohio and we're looking at the use of credit reports to screen out applicants. We allege it has a disparate impact against African-Americans.
Credit checks and criminal screens (were big) in the '70s and '80s and sort of disappeared but with the new economy, employers are adopting these types of employment screens. That is something that has generated a lot of interest at the EEOC.

Q: Why are more employers using credit scores and criminal convictions to weed out job applicants?

A: My speculation is that employers are in a position to generate much more interest in jobs and they're looking for shorthand ways to screen applicants. If we're able to establish disparate impact, then it's the employer's burden to demonstrate the hiring qualification is job-related.

(Employers) say it relates to honesty and performance. But that's where most of the litigation and discussion has centered - whether these screens can really be job-related and a business necessity.

P. David Lopez, general counsel for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, interviewed by L.M. Sixel (via)

How to Think about Book Purchases (Adjust for Individual Budgets)

I find books to be one of the most puzzling categories in terms of how much attention people pay to their price. Think about it this way — if you were going to spend 10 hours with a book, do you really care if it costs $3 more? Shouldn’t you happily pay $0.30 more per hour of reading if the quality of the book was slightly higher or the experience was slightly better? Personally my more pressing problem is time, and if someone could assure me a better, even slightly better experience, I would pay a substantial amount more.

Dan Ariely, "The Rationality of One-Star Reviews"

Writing Is a Lot of Work

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Gustave Flaubert (quoted here)

Voice Is Exclusive

In markets and other exit based procedures such as competitive federalism, rich and poor, articulate and inarticulate, can act on the basis of relatively easy comparisons between prices, qualities of goods and lifestyles across competing products and jurisdictions. Voice-based institutions, by contrast, give special privilege to those skilled in the use of articulate persuasion alone.

Mark Pennington, "Hayek versus Habermas" (via)

Best Practice Analysis

I'm always skeptical when receiving life advice from successful people, because their advice is biased towards taking too much risk, because successful people are selected for having been lucky.

Phil Goetz, "Happiness Engineering"

Isn't That True of Every Discipline (Other Things Equal)?

Economics is most like a science when people do not care about the outcome of the argument.

Tyler Cowen, "Is Economics a Science? (Liquidity Trap Edition)"

Opportunity Costs

The rich also leave jobs more quickly than others, for the simple reason that they can afford to do so. Karen Weisgerber, a senior adviser at the center who also works with Kenny at North Bridge, describes an heir she counseled who had earned an M.B.A. from a top-tier school and was an obviously intelligent man. He nonetheless moved from one high-tech job to another. “At some point, something would happen at each job that those who have to work for an income would learn to tolerate,” Weisgerber says. “And he’d just say, ‘I don’t want to deal with this.’ Eventually he had to say, ‘I don’t have a career.’”

Graeme Wood, "Secret Fears of the Super-Rich"

Warm & Fuzzy Feelgood Quote of the Day

I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at.

xkcd, "Time Management" (hover text)

One-Trick Pony

A friend of mine from Poland was surprised we had jokes in America. He thought the sole purpose of humor was to criticize the government. And our government was pretty good.

Seth Roberts, "Humor as Catalyst"

Why Do People Commit the Nirvana Fallacy?

I’m reminded of an exchange in first-year property class during law school concerning rent control. The issue on the floor was whether rent control would improve or diminish conditions given the fact that typically at the time rent control is instituted in a municipality, there isn’t enough adequate housing at reasonable prices for people to live with dignity and within their economic means. A student (not me) complained that it shouldn’t be the case that there wasn’t enough adequate housing at reasonable prices for people to live with dignity and within their economic means. This guy simply didn’t understand that there simply wasn’t enough adequate housing at reasonable prices for people to live with dignity and within their economic means and his solution to that dilemma was that there really, really ought to be enough adequate housing at reasonable prices for people to live with dignity and within their economic means.

Transplanted Lawyer, Comment on "The Terran Federation Needs YOU! (To Work As A Farmhand In A Chinese Rice Paddy)" by Patrick

Filter

Mich interessieren Worte nicht. Worte sind, wenn sie nach außen gelangen, durch so viele Instanzen gegangen, dass sie nur noch sind wie eine alte Tageszeitung.

Sibylle Berg, "Experiment"

Is Storytelling a Left-Wing Technique?

I would say that the story per se is usually left-wing, in both good and bad ways. It elevates the seen over the unseen, can easily portray a struggle for justice, focuses on the anecdote, and encourages us to judge social institutions by the intentions of the people who work in them, rather than looking at their deeper and longer-term outcomes. Precisely because the story is itself so left-wing, there won't be a definitive example of the left-wing novel.

Tyler Cowen, "What Is the Ultimate Left-Wing Novel?"

Don't Overdo This!

One thing men love is to instruct women. If a woman wants to enchant a man, she is wise to play his pupil. Men fall for this.

Roger Ebert, "500 Days of Summer" (via)

Literature Explained

I don't think the content of the life experience should determine whether a person writes a memoir at all. At all! People's lives don't vary much in terms of interestingness; what varies is how perceptive the writer is.

Rhian Mellis, "Who Should Write a Memoir?"

Discrimination

Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation. But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.

Jonathan Haidt (quoted here)

So, What about Perfect Uncertainty?

[L]ogarithmically right is a good way of describing how one’s beliefs should be transformed to be a fair approximation of the truth. When you think you are right, you probably are — but logarithmically. Much less than you think.

Seth Roberts, "Logarithmically Right"

Why Is Truth Stranger Than Fiction?

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

Mark Twain

Central Heating

Many have suffered from being in a building where there was a centralized thermostat for the whole building (or the whole floor), with the predictable result that some rooms are way too hot or way too cold. (Sounds like a metaphor, watch for it…)

Things were even more extreme in the former Soviet Union, where there were centralized heating plants for a whole city, and the hot air would then be pumped out to individual homes and offices. So basically the whole city had one centralized thermostat.

What a nice and simple solution there is: give each room its own thermostat. First, there is automatic adjustment from the thermostat to keep it from being too hot or too cold. Second, the people in the room at any one moment can choose to adjust the thermostat according to their preferences.

William Easterly, "Skeptics and Thermostats" (via)

I Can't Believe Nixon Won

Smart, curious people consistently overestimate the economic impact of information technology, in part because it improves their own lives so much.

Tyler Cowen, "Paul Krugman's Predictions from 1998"

I Smell Policy Relevance

Beware too easily assuming that others would be better off if they were more like you.

Robin Hanson, "Less Mature with Age"

Film Explained

2001 is a nonverbal experience; out of two hours and nineteen minutes of film, there are only a little less than forty minutes of dialog. I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content. To convolute McLuhan, in 2001 the message is the medium. I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does; to "explain" a Beethoven symphony would be to emasculate it by erecting an artificial barrier between conception and appreciation.

Stanley Kubrick, interviewed by Eric Nordern for Playboy, reprinted as pp. 47-74 in Stanley Kubrick: Interviews, ed. Gene D. Phillips, pp. 47-48

"That is why developing small but healthy habits that over time will become automatic is so money."

It is a profoundly erroenous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle--they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

Alfred Whitehead (quoted here)

Is It True? If So, Is It a Common Ground Problem?

We often think of people with extreme views as more passionate about them than people with moderate views. But we make a mistake when we assume that this passion translates into an eagerness to discuss. People who study radicalization of, say, terrorists note that as the subject becomes more radical in ideology, his evangelical zeal diminishes. Radicals turn inward.

Eli Dourado, "The Lonely Radicals" (via)

Good Fucking Point

The teacher took a breath. "He took the road that less people take. What does that mean to you?"

At least three girls around the room were waggling their hands in the air while clutching their opposite shoulders. "Ooo Ooo Ooo . . ."

"What would be the advantgage of taking a road less traveled by?"

"No traffic?"

Laughing.

Richard Price, Lush Life, p. 299

Ends and Means

In my view, the most dangerous phenomenon is not hatred. It is power. Hitler's hatred would have amounted to nothing had he remained a Bohemian painter. Many political leaders have caused great harm in spite of the best of motives. I am no fan of hatred, but I think what is really important is not to condemn hatred but to check power.

Arnold Kling, "Crime without Hate, Hate without Crime"

The Partisanship Package

Partisanship feels good – you get intellectual clarity, a sense of morality, and the warmth of fellowship all in one.

John McWhorter, "Nice Speech, But We Won't Be Coming Together"

Ratios of Small Numbers

Then someone at the table – and I couldn’t believe this – said, ‘My uncle smoked a hookah pipe all his life, and he lived until he was 90 years old.’ And I had a sudden flash of insight, which was this. Suppose you have something that actually kills half the people. Even if you’re a heavy smoker, your chance of dying of lung cancer is not 50 per cent, so therefore, even with something as extreme as smoking and lung cancer, you still have lots of cases where people don’t die of the disease. The evidence is certainly all around you pointing in the wrong direction – if you’re willing to accept anecdotal evidence – there’s always going to be an unlimited amount of evidence which won’t tell you anything.

Andrew Gelman on Statistics

Sounds Like a Win-Win to Me

Grading diamonds is a subjective business, and the better a diamond looks to you when you're grading it, the more money it's worth -- as long as you can convince your customer that it's the grade you're selling it as. Here's an easy, effective way to do that: First lie to yourself about what grade the diamond is; then you can sincerely tell your customer "the truth" about what it's worth.

As I would tell my salespeople: If you want to be an expert deceiver, master the art of self-deception. People will believe you when they see that you yourself are deeply convinced. It sounds difficult to do, but in fact it's easy -- we are already experts at lying to ourselves. We believe just what we want to believe. And the customer will help in this process, because she or he wants the diamond -- where else can I get such a good deal on such a high-quality stone? -- to be of a certain size and quality. At the same time, he or she does not want to pay the price that the actual diamond, were it what you claimed it to be, would cost.

Clancy Martin, "The Lie Guy" (via)

Redistribution vs. Public Provision

I think we (who are Austrian/libertarian-leaning) have to be very careful about separating arguments against public provision from arguments against redistribution.

There are serious issues with many kinds of subsidies and public ownership that do not exist with simple income redistribution or vouchers. The arguments against redistribution per se I think are a lot weaker, and many can be overcome by redistributing (a basic income or vouchers) to ALL citizens, funded by a flat tax.

liberty, comment on "An Assignment for Progressives" by Arnold Kling

In Defense/Praise of Income Inequality

I [...] worry that eliminating status competition on the income margin pushes it to less productive margins. If we’re hard wired to be status seeking, isn’t it generally a good thing that that’s channeled towards producing economic value for others rather than towards military exploits, feats of warmaking valor, potlach, or other more destructive forms?

Eric Crampton (quoted here)

Also: Neuroscience

Economics has a bad habit of routinely rediscovering (and taking credit for) ideas that are well-established elsewhere. Sometimes, whole fields are victimized in this way—social networks, institutional analysis, and culture—as smart economists assume an idea that is new to them, is new to everyone, and go off and reinvent some wheels.

Kieran Healy, "A Wealth of Notions", Sociological Forum 22: 119–25 (p. 124)

Taking Popper Seriously

The world is extremely complicated and doesn’t make sense – at least not in the way we want it to. We don’t want to understand the world simply by following some complex routine of intellectual gymnastics. We want it to makes sense intuitively. We want it to bound up in a single completely digestible ball. The world, sadly, does not always comply.

So we build miniature models of the world in our minds – fictions that do make sense. When we run into a part of the world that doesn’t co-operate we either shoehorn our observations into that miniature model or tear through, blogs, articles and books until we find someone who can.

The statement “it makes sense” is, however, a statement about how pleased we are with our efforts to shoehorn observations into our miniature model. It is not a statement about our understanding of the world.

To check our understanding of the world we have to ask not “does it make sense”, but “how would I know if I was wrong?”

Karl Smith, "The Curious Incident of Financial Theft in the Broad Daylight"

Psychology of Learning: The Road Not Taken

Learning is the central theme of experimental psychology and perhaps all academic psychology. Psychology professors have done more experiments about learning than anything else. Practically all of those experiments have been about efficiency of learning: The amount of learning (e.g., percent correct) in Condition A is compared with the amount of learning in Condition B, where A and B “cost” about the same. As a result, we know a great deal about what controls efficiency of learning, at least in laboratory tasks. I think many psychologists are surprised and disappointed that this research has had almost no effect outside academia. I have never heard a good answer to the question of why. If you’d asked me this a month ago I would have said it’s because they haven’t discovered large non-obvious effects. That’s true, but says nothing about how to discover them.

[...] Hedonics matter. Learning exactly the same material can be more or less pleasant. When Learning X is pleasant, it is learned easily; when Learning X is unpleasant, it is learned with difficulty or not at all. In the real world, hedonic differences matter more than efficiency differences. If they want to improve real-world learning, psychologists have been measuring the wrong thing.

Seth Roberts, "Three Observations about Walking and Learning"

The Social Production Function

Everything has become so strange. A year ago, the Communists ran the country. Today, you can't find a Communist anywhere.

"A Hungarian", qutoed in "True Lies" by Cass R. Sunstein

"False Consciousness" Explained

Occasionally the cynic in me wonders why so many relatively well-off intellectuals lead the egalitarian charge against the privileges of the wealthy. One group has the status currency of money and the other has the status currency of intellect, so might they be competing for overall social regard? The high status of the wealthy in America, or for that matter the high status of celebrities, seems to bother our intellectual class most.

Tyler Cowen, "The Inequality That Matters"

It's a Problem of Semantic Networks

[N]o punishment system with a wide enough range of punishment levels is more “cruel” than any other, at least from the convict’s point of view. It is the level of punishment that a convict finds cruel, not the method of implementing it. A prison system is just as cruel as a torture system; it is large punishments, e.g., long prison sentences or severe torture acts, that are cruel, not prison or torture itself.

Robin Hanson, "Prison Is Cruel"

(Knowledge Is Power) Squared

What’s unique about finance, I would argue, is a crucial kind of information asymmetry – not merely that outside observers cannot know as much as insiders do (this is also generally true, not merely true of finance), but that in finance the asymmetry pertains to precisely the information needed to game the system. Put simply, financial executives will always know more about how to game the financial system than anybody else, because manipulating the financial system is their job.

Noah Millman, "Some Measures of Inequality Are More Equal Than Others"

Economics 100

Money, after all, is just a way to avoid having to barter for stuff and avoid the coincidence of wants. If I want a chicken and potatoes for dinner, I don’t want to find someone who raises chickens and grows potatoes who is also interested in getting a degree in economics. If the person who is interested in a degree in economics is a furniture maker, I can give her an economics lecture in exchange for a chair and then try to find a chicken farmer who needs a chair. Very time-consuming, what economists call high transaction costs. Better to take some general measure of purchasing power, money, from the furniture maker and buy a chicken.

So money is a veil. It hides the underlying reality that what I can consume depends on what I can produce. And what I can produce depends on the people I can exchange with and cooperate with economically. The division of labor is limited by the extent of the market. If I have a lot of people to exchange with, then I can be more specialized and via technology, get a lot richer than if I trade with a small circle of locals. If I trade widely, I’ll have more money, but the amount of money I have is an effect not a cause. The existence of money is a cause–that creates wealth because it allows me to trade without [having] to find the chicken farmer who wants an economics lecture. But that’s it.

Russ Roberts, "What's Wrong with Keynes" (via)

Minimax Moralia

Of course, the overwhelming problem with most of the things I complain about isn’t that they’re going to inconvenience folks like me (although they often do). The problem is that they’re prone to abusive exploitation against people who aren’t comfortable well-educated middle-class white adults. The TSA, for example, has been picking on people with disabilities for far longer than they have libertarian-ish people with cell phones. But ask paternalists to put themselves in the mindset of a rape survivor, say, or a three-year-old kid, or a Muslim woman whose headscarf gets her “randomly” selected for extra screening every time she flies, and you run smack into a wall of cognitive dissonance and they call you a terr’ist.

Matt, "A Litany of Annoyances"