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"

George W. Bush in a Nutshell?

I read about a third of Bush at War, and I may well return to it at some stage, but the mood that compelled me to begin it passed quickly, and in any case it wasn't quite what I wanted: Woodward's tone is way too matey and sympathetic for me. I did, however, learn that George W. Bush was woken up by the Secret Service at 11:08 p.m. on 9/11. Woken up! He didn't work late that night? And he wasn't too buzzy to get off to sleep? See, if that had been me, I would have been up until about six, drinking and smoking and watching TV, and I would have been useless the next day. It can't be right, can it, that world leaders emerge not through their ability to solve global problems, but to nod off at the drop of a hat? Most decent people can't sleep easily at night, and that, apparently, is precisely why the world is in such a mess.

Nick Hornby, The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, Ch. "November 2003"; p. 33

Empire of Darkness

I think it helps to try to recreate the intellectual atmosphere of the 1950's, the milieu that produced Alfred Hitchcock and J.D. Salinger. In five-factor personality jargon, the Fifties stand out for strong Neuroticism. [...]

To an intellectual of the 1950's, the human psyche is dark. Freud's shadow looms large over all discussion pertaining to human nature. You take it as given that terrible demons lurk in both the individual and collective unconscious. All About Eve could be the story of any one of us. The phenomenon of Adolf Hitler is most easily understood as having sprung out of the collective unconscious of the German people. Suspicious that a similar phenomenon could occur anywhere, you scan the American scene for signs of impending fascist tendencies.

Arnold Kling, "A Must Read"

Merry Christmas II

All religions are the same: religion is basically guilt, with different holidays.

Cathy Ladman

Merry Christmas I

I can't bring myself to use the c-word, you know, the word we use to name this time of the year.

With its religious derivation the word is laughably out of whack with our binge of consumption and sentiment. So I'm going to rename the season. And on the principle that it keeps coming back and you can't escape it, I'm going to call it Herpes.

Joe Bennett, "Let's Rename the Season You Can't Escape" (via)

The Value of Education

As an economist and game theorist I have a unique understanding of the secrets of conflict resolution. And my marriage will be peaceful and harmonious once my wife accepts that.

Jeff Ely, interviewed by Paula Szuchman (via)

The Problem of Unobservable Quality

James Akerlof's seminal contribution to the economics of information, "The Market for 'Lemons': Quality, Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism," considered whether markets would exist if product quality were unobservable. Before the Quarterly Journal of Economics finally accepted Akerlof's paper four years after he first sought to publish it, three journals called it a lemon. "I first submitted it in June, 1967 to the American Economic Review. I got a reply from the editor which said that the article was interesting but the American Economic Review did not publish such trivial stuff."

Joshua S. Gans and George B. Shepherd, "How are the mighty fallen: Rejected Classic Articles by Leading Economists", Journal of Economic Perspectives 8: 165-179

The Term You're Looking for Is "Relatability"

In this extremely loose adaptation of Melville's classic novel, Ahab is revealed initially not as a bitter and vengeful madman, but as a bit of a lovable scamp. Ashore in New Bedford, he meets and falls for Faith Mapple, daughter of the local minister and beloved of Ahab's brother Derek. Faith herself quickly returns Ahab's love, as Derek is drab and ignoble. On his next voyage, however, Ahab loses a leg to the monstrous white whale Moby-Dick. When upon his return to New Bedford he mistakenly believes Faith wants nothing to do with him because of his disfigurement, Ahab returns to sea with only one goal in mind -- to find and kill the great white whale.

Jim Beaver, Plot Summary for Moby Dick (1930)

A Challenge for Neuroscientists

Happiness measured by asking "how happy are you? 1-10". Wonder what GDP would look like if we asked "how rich are you? 1-10"

Tim Harford, [untitled tweet]

The Problem with Digital

I think the government is learning what the music and movie industries were forced to learn years ago: it's easy to copy and distribute digital files. That's what's different between the 1970s and today. Amassing and releasing that many documents was hard in the paper and photocopier era; it's trivial in the Internet era. And just as the music and movie industries are going to have to change their business models for the Internet era, governments are going to have to change their secrecy models. I don't know what those new models will be, but they will be different.

Bruce Schneier, "Wikileaks" (via)

The Scientist's Incentives

Science (search for truth) and profession (making a living) are not a good fit. In a dozen ways, the demands of a scientist’s job get in the way of finding and reporting truth. You need to publish, get a grant, please your colleagues, and so on. Nobody pays you for finding the truth.

Seth Roberts, "The Decline Effect"

Why Do People Buy New Novels?

For a lot of products, my model of the purchase decision is fairly simple. If you hear about it two or three times from relatively "cool" or prestigious sources -- which can be ads, friends, institutions, and so on -- you will take it seriously and at least think about buying it. Even then it is often an "impulse" purchase and need not follow directly upon viewing any one of those ads or mentions; you may be in Barnes & Noble and wishing to cheer yourself up and what do you look for? Something you've heard about a few times. (This also leads to an equibrium where people are predominantly interested in new books, music, etc. and in turn those are the advertised products.)

Tyler Cowen, "A simple theory of product purchase and the low value of on-line ads"

Bonferroni Alert!

Reading about p-values makes me want to start a blog about them (how does such a blog not already exist?!). A good subtitle could be "where one in every twenty posts will be significant by chance alone."

Andy McKenzie, "P-Value Polemics"

Noam Chomsky against Affirmative Action

As to social importance, a correlation between race and mean I.Q. (were this shown to exist) entails no social consequences except in a racist society in which each individual is assigned to a racial category and dealt with not as an individual in his own right, but as a representative of this category … In a non-racist society, the category of race would be of no greater significance [than height]. The mean I.Q. of individuals of a certain racial background is irrelevant to the situation of a particular individual, who is what he is.

Noam Chomsky, "I.Q. Tests: Building Blocks for the New Class System." Rampart: 24–30 (excerpted here)

As Good a Time to Be Clear-Headed as Any

In America it's been suggested by some religious types that [Christopher Hitchens's cancer] could prompt a revision of his atheism. It's not a hypothesis to which he grants much respect.

"So now I know that there's another life in my body that can't outlive me but can kill me, it's the perfect moment to gratefully acknowledge that I'm a product of a cosmic design? Who thinks up these arguments? Actually it's an insulting question: 'I hear you're dying. Well wouldn't it be a good time to get rid of your beliefs?' Try it on them and see how they would like it. 'Christian, right? Cancer of the tits?' 'Well, yes, since you ask.' 'Well, can I suggest you now drop all that tripe?'"

Andrew Anthony, "Christopher Hitchens: 'You have to choose your future regrets'" (via)

The Public Choice Lesson: Let's Give up Altogether

If public choice says we need to change the incentives to change political outcomes, why would we expect those who profit by current arrangements not to fight against such changes?

Eric Crampton, "Folk Activism"

The Utopian Vision

[T]he liberal model is, like the economist on the desert island with a can of beans, “Assume we have a population of cooperative, intelligent, empathetic individuals” and when that turns out not to be the case, to move to a more expensive and exclusive neighborhood.

Steve Sailer, comment on "Two Types of People" by Robin Hanson

Ah, Those Little Things Again

A little sympathy is the difference between an effective satirist and a strident bore

Matthew Dessem, "#102: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie"

Spoiler

In the dawn days of science fiction, alien invaders would occasionally kidnap a girl in a torn dress and carry her off for intended ravishing, as lovingly depicted on many ancient magazine covers. Oddly enough, the aliens never go after men in torn shirts. Would a non-humanoid alien, with a different evolutionary history and evolutionary psychology, sexually desire a human female? It seems rather unlikely.

Elizer Yudkowsky, "Mind Projection Fallacy"

Awareness Campaign? Forget about It!

A woman often marries a man for his potential. If women married men for who they actually were, there would be far fewer marriages.

Jay Carter, interviewed by Michelle Burford (via)

One Reason People Drink Alcohol

She spread herself over and around him, trying to maximize their contact, feeling big enough to cover him entirely, pressing her face into his head.

"Patty."

"Mm."

"If you're sleeping, you need to wake up."

"No, I'm asleep . . . I'm sleeping. Don't wake me up."

His penis was struggling to escape his shorts. She rubbed her belly against it.

"I'm sorry," he said, squirming beneath her. "You have to wake up."

"No, don't wake me up. Just fuck me."

"Oh, Jesus." He tried to get away from her, but she followed him amoebically. He grabbed her wrists to keep her at bay. "People who aren't conscious: believe it or not, I draw the line there."

"Mm," she said, unbuttoning her pajamas. "We're both asleep. We're both having really great dreams."

Jonathan Franzen, Freedom, Chapter "Free Markets Foster Competition"; p. 167

The Human Condition

"You can't change the weather, Tom," June would say, meaning that some things simply were what they were, and we had no choice but to accept them. Tom understood the principle, but that had never stopped him from cursing the snowstorms and cold winds that blew against his small, shivering body.

Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies (p. 24)

Letzteres kann man von dieser Formulierung nicht behaupten

Eisenstein wird später berichten, dass er noch am Tag der Uraufführung vor den Teilnehmern des XIV. Parteikongresses bis zum letzten Moment am Schnitt gearbeitet habe. Der fünfte und letzte Akt sei nur mit Spucke geklebt zur Vorführung gekommen. Der Film reißt nicht, wie beführtet, in der Projektion, wohl aber das Publikum zu Begeisterungsstürmen hin.

Anna Bohn, "Zur Produktions- und Aufführungsgeschichte", in : Panzerkreuzer Potemkin: Das Jahr 1905 [DVD-Booklet]

Where Does the Discrimination Go?

A similar thing, somewhat attenuated, is going on with smokers. If people were allowed to meaningfully discriminate against people that they didn't like (e.g., pot-smoking pig, you need not apply here for work...smoker dogs can't rent here) without facing legal sanctions, they'd be a lot more willing to forgo making things illegal. Since anti-discrimination has taken that club out of the golf bag for most folks, they have to reach for the 'ban it or harrass them with laws' driver to express their animus. And make no mistake, they WILL express their animus, it's part of the human condition.

Jehu, comment on "Mead's Asymmetric Treatment of Illegal Drugs" by David Henderson

Plus ca change

Why do people think it intelligent to say, "I can see no difference!" It is nowadays quite a mark of culture to say that one can see no difference between a man and a woman, or a man and an angel, or a man and an animal. If a man cannot see the difference between a horse and a cow across a large field, we do not call him cultured; we call him short-sighted. Now, there are really interesting differences between angels and women; nay, even between men and beasts, and all such things. They are differences which most people know instinctively, as most people know a cow is not a horse without looking for its mane; or most people know a horse is not a cow without looking for horns. Whether the difference ought to count in this or that important question is a completely different matter, but it ought not really to be so difficult simply to see the difference.

G.K. Chesterton (via)

The Case for Markets

The case for markets never lay in their perfection but rather in the relative imperfection of alternatives. I'm teaching intermediate micro this semester. We go through the welfare theorems, and they're beautiful. We know that they don't apply generally. However, it's really hard to improve on the imperfection of markets. Both markets and policies are imperfect instruments. Markets fail relative to blackboards, but regulatory solutions often fail relative to the real world market alternative.

Eric Crampton, "The Case for Markets"

The Postmodernists' Promise

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1963) appeared at a time when people still wandered freely between the literary and genre sectors, sometimes even forgetting where they were; it felt more like occupied Vienna than Cold War Berlin. Both J. B. Priestley and Graham Greene praised the book in the strongest terms, hardly minding that they were agreeing with people who had enjoyed Ian Fleming's The Spy Who Loved Me a year earlier. It wasn't long before the postmodernists arrived on the scene, vowing to obscure the line between elite and popular culture altogether, and in the sense that a towering wall was erected in its place, they certainly kept their word.

B.R. Myers, "Tradecraft" (via)

Sounds Like Good Advice

[T]he "extreme programming" planning technique: you estimate work by chopping it up into tasks and figuring out how long they would take in "ideal days" (that is if everything goes perfectly) . Then you see how many "ideal days" worth of tasks you managed to deliver last month (for instance) and multiply your estimate by the ratio actual days/ideal days.

chris cottee, comment on "Planning Fallacy" by Elizer Yudkowsky

The Plasticity Tradeoff

[I]f a system has the ability to change easily (i.e. it has high plasticity), then it will tend to expend resources on a wide range of trait values, and will have fewer resources to focus on the most important and relevant traits.

Andy McKenzie: "Trade Off #10: Plasticity vs Specialization"

Marriage Surprises

Take the cliché of the golf-playing husband and the shoe-shopping wife. Not even an evolutionary psychologist would claim to find monkey equivalents to this. Yet the obsession with the trajectory of ballistic objects is as baffling to most women as the obsession with searching and re-searching every store for the perfect shoe bargain is to men. (I know there are exceptions, but admit it: Marriage surprises most people by revealing the truth of such clichés.)

Matt Ridley, "Can Genes Explain the Sex Divide?"

The Egoistic Case against Deep Thinking

Deep thinking is not really in our own interest. Shallow thinking - working out what tactical manoeuvre to try next, who you can trust and who to copy from, and simply impulsively satisfying yourself with whatever nuggets are available - will bring you a much easier and more fun life, and more quickly.

Deep thinking, on the contrary, is hard work, takes ages, might fail, and mainly benefits other people. If I discover the new theory of everything which reveals the purpose of the cosmos, what do I get? Sure, I'll probably make some money - at least Malcolm Gladwell's publishers will offer me a contract - but the rest of the world benefits much more than me.

Leigh Caldwell, "Thinking and Attention"

Searching for the Young Soul Rebels

Instead, human beings generally try to associate themselves with what is being praised by society and disassociate themselves from what is being criticized. Being callow, young people are particularly impressionable. Despite all the romantic piffle about young rebels, the fact is that young people [...] tend to be conformists.

Steve Sailer, "Whatever Happened to the Democrats’ Youth/Minority Voter Juggernaut?"

A Theory of Perfectionism and Procrastination

The link between procrastination and perfectionism has to do with construal level theory. When you picture getting started straight away the close temporal distance puts you in near mode, where you see all the detailed impediments to doing a perfect job. When you think of doing the task in the future some time, trade-offs and barriers vanish and the glorious final goal becomes more vivid. So it always seems like you will do a great job in the future, whereas right now progress is depressingly slow and complicated. This makes doing it in the future seem all the more of a good option if you are obsessed with perfection.

Katja Grace, "Perfect Procrastination"

Leaving the Goalposts Where They Are While Declaring the Aim Is Now to Not Hit the Goal

Somewhere along the way, during the last 50 years, the critique of capitalism changed from condemning its failure to spread the wealth to condemning the very opposite. Suddenly the great sin of capitalism was that it was producing too much, making us all too materialistic, fueling economic growth at the expense of other values, spreading middle-class decadence, and generally causing society to be too caught up in productivity and too focused on the standard of living.

Jeffrey A. Tucker, "The Decivilizing Effects of Government"

Even So

A person I was seeing in psychoanalysis once said to me, "Don't you think Fraud is rather overrated", he had of course meant to say "Freud", and he blushed.

Adam Phillips, On Balance (quoted here)

If All Models Are Wrong. . .

If the goal of a model is to be useful, surely we need to explore [what] "useful" means. At the very least, usefulness will depend on use.

Richard Berk, quoted in: Andrew Gelman, "Useful models, model checking, and external validation: a mini-discussion"

It's Easy to Lie with Statistics, It's Easier to Lie without Statistics

"There's an interesting fight going on in baseball about whether clutch hitting exists: whether a player can hit better in the ninth inning when there are two runs on, whether he can be a better player when the game is on the line. And once again, there have been countless studies done on it, and not one of them can find any statistical evidence that any person is capable of lifting his game in such moments.

Yet people continue to believe, and they continue to get angry that anyone would suggest that such a thing doesn't exist. It's like, 'I know it exists because I've seen it.'"

Joe Posnanski, interviewed by Kathryn Schulz (via)

You Really Wish That They Wouldn't

As an atheist I, too, have been told by others that they are praying for me, but if they were not to tell me, their prayers would be just as heartfelt and just as effective. Thus, I know that they are telling me for some other reason. Indeed, telling me about the prayers is little more than a subtle condemnation of my beliefs- a way to tell me I'm wrong, while cloaking oneself in the illusion of generosity. I do not mean to imply that all such people who announce their intentions to pray are acting out of such condescension, but rather that those who do are not as hidden from sight as they seem to believe. [...]

[...] I suspect, though I can't say for sure, that upon being told someone is praying for me, I feel much the same way a Christian would feel if told that someone was going to sacrifice a chicken for him or her. Perhaps you appreciate the sentiment, but you really wish that they wouldn't.

Drek, "A Day for a Man Who Does Not Want One"

Take (at Least) One

You can’t get much more different than Hong Kong and Denmark, at least by the criteria used by most people on the left and right. But they all do at least one thing extremely well. They all are exceptionally good at one of the three attributes of a highly successful neoliberal society. Either they are highly civic-minded (Denmark, Sweden), or highly aware of the sorts of policies that produce economic efficiency (Singapore, Hong Kong) or highly democratic.

Scott Sumner, "A post-ideological index of good governance"

Sex Ed: The Basics

I didn't realize until my early twenties that if a man would have sex with me, all it meant was that he wanted to have sex with me, not that he liked me as a person or found me attractive. This is the one thing that was left out of the sex talk that my mom had with me that really would have been helpful to include.

Anonymous answer to the question "What in life did it take you a surprisingly long time to realize you've been doing wrong all along?" (via)

Soziolinguistik

Wegen seiner unglaublichen Arbeit wollten wir Walter gern im Abspann nennen - nicht nur bei Liebe niemals einen Fremden, sondern bei allen Filmen, an denen er mitarbeitete. Er war aber nicht in der Gewerkschaft und durfte deswegen nicht als Toncutter genennt werden. Dann meinte Walter: "Wenn sie das nicht wollen, kann ich mich dann Sound Designer nennen?" Wir meinten: "Das können wir pobieren, dann bist du eben Sound Designer . . ." Ich fand es immer schon komisch, daß Sound Designer diese tolle Berufsbezeichnung wurde, aber sie ist nur deswegen entstanden.

Francis Ford Coppola, zitiert in: Michael Ondaatje, Die Kunst des Filmschnitts: Gespräche mit Walter Murch (S. 57)

Mischel Meets Hardin

A co-worker brings in cupcakes early in the morning to share with everyone. I want to wait to have one so I can reward myself for working hard that day. But I'm worried that if I do so there will be none left. Gratification delay and the commons: antagonistic.

Andy McKenzie: "Three End of Summer Thoughts"

Who Will Think of the Deans?

The suffering of a university dean is no less real than the suffering of a starving child thousands of miles from here. The latter may suffer more, but his suffering is not more legitimate as a human experience. The pleasure of a cold beer on a summer afternoon is not more legitimate than the pleasure of solving a tricky equation. A good writer can communicate all kinds of human experience to all kinds of people--should be able to show an intelligent but uneducated reader what it feels like to solve that equation, to be that dean.

J. Robert Lennon, "Who Are We Writing for?"

Sample Selection Bias for Laypeople

Now, economists hear this sort of argument all the time. "That's ridiculous! I would never start working fewer hours because my taxes went up!" This ignores the fact that you may not be the marginal case. The marginal case may be some consultant who just can't justify sacrificing valuable leisure for a new project when he's only making 60 cents on the dollar. The result will nonetheless be the same: less economic activity.

Jane Galt (Megan McArdle), "A really, really, really long post about gay marriage that does not, in the end, support one side or the other"

Would Be Better Advice If It Contained a Theory about Which Applies When

Sometimes it is foolish to articulate an ambition too early - exposing it prematurely to the laughter and the scepticism of the world can destroy it before it is even properly born. But sometimes the opposite occurs, and the very act of mentioning a thing makes it suddenly seem possilbe, even plausible.

Robert Harris, Imperium, (Chapter V; p. 90)

Was Mussolini a Vegetarian?

To anyone that has attended a political demonstration, trawled a blog, or attended a Western university in the past half century, the scattershot use of “fascist” will ring familiar. And almost as clichéd as accusing an ideological opponent of fascist sympathies is the accurate observation that such charges often demonstrate an utter lack of understanding of just what qualifies as fascist, other than “someone I vehemently disagree with.” As an indicator of a particular set of political beliefs, “fascism” has become a perfectly meaningless pejorative, a political cudgel that is obtuse and imprecise by design.

What, if anything, unites such disparate fascist dictators as Benito Mussolini of Italy, Adolf Hitler of Germany, António de Oliveira Salazar of Portugal, and Francisco Franco of Spain? Fascism, the historian Stanley Payne writes in Fascism: Comparison and Definition, “is the vaguest of contemporary political terms.” Few ideologies have produced so many academic volumes dedicated to establishing a singular set of definitional criteria. All of the political movements commonly associated with fascism overlap in key areas (opposition to both classical liberalism and communism, for instance) and diverge in others (the Germans rejected Italian-style corporatism in favor of what one historian called a “racist-totalitarian welfare state”).

Michael C. Moynihan, "Crying Wolf: Are We All Fascists Now?"

Also: Scratching One's Balls in Public

Seeing this film is like being catapulted into an IMAX version of a Peter Stuyvesant commercial, back to the days when men smoked and didn't wear underarm deodorant, cars had engine notes, clutches required leg muscles and women enjoyed being flirted with at the office (...and, yes, they actually did!). Rendezvous is a high-adrenaline, condensed style statement with an ending that could have only come from the maker of 'A Man and A Woman'. Underscoring it all is the sexiest soundtrack of all time (John Barry and Shirley Bassey notwithstanding), 12 cylinders and 4 litres of the Ferrari 365 Boxer driven by Lalouch's friend, racing driver Jacky Ickx. I love this film and the era it represents, particularly as I live in one of the most over-regulated, purse-lipped and 'responsible' societies in the world. For anyone that has ever owned, driven or just loved classic Italian sportscars, (and enjoyed raising a little bit of hell), Rendezvous is a must see. I can just imagine our hydrogen-car driving grandchildren shaking their heads in befuddlement as they tuck into their tofu and spring water. I'll be there to explain to them that if you don't smoke, drink, fornicate and drive sexy cars that they actually mightn't live longer...but it sure as hell will feel longer.

jeffbertucen@hotmail.com, "Hairy-chested, un-PC and pure bollocking fun" [Review of C'était un rendez-vous]

Bit Obvious, But Very Nice

- Infinite Loop; see Loop, Infinite

- Loop, Infinite; see Infinite Loop

Steve Sailer, "Infinite Loop" (quoting a computer manual by himself)

Organizational Sociology: The Soap Heuristic

When I worked for large organizations, I never observed a personnel change that was truly driven by policy direction. Personality conflicts were always the main factor. I used to say, "Never ascribe to strategic calculation that which can be attributed to corporate soap opera."

Arnold Kling, "Brink Lindsey, Will Wilkinson"

Levels, Not Changes

Let's say you have two countries, A and B. In country A government spends 50 percent of gdp, mostly on a well-designed welfare state. When the downturn comes, there is only enough extra borrowing to make up for the lost revenue, and there is no designed "stimulus" per se. In country B, government spends 25 percent of gdp, mostly not on a well-designed welfare state. When the downturn comes, country B does an extra three, four, or even five percent of gdp "ramp-up" borrowing and spending.

Which country has a better, more active, and more AD-stabilizing fiscal policy? Well, it depends on the details and the numbers but I would encourage you to consider country A for this honor.

Tyler Cowen, "Measuring fiscal policy and evaluating its results"

How to Make Libertarians Mad

You can write donations off in your taxes to a large degree in the USA. So the rich make a choice: Would I rather donate or pay taxes? The donors are taking the place of the state. [...] So it's not the state that determines what is good for the people, but rather the rich want to decide. That's a development that I find really bad. What legitimacy do these people have to decide where massive sums of money will flow?

Peter Krämer (interviewed by Spiegel Online) (via)

Yeah, Me Too

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

John Kenneth Gailbraith

Ever Heard of Stanley Milgram?

In science we're always testing hypotheses. We never conduct a study to 'see what happens', because there's always at least one way to make any useless set of data look important. We take a risk; we put our idea on the line and expose it to potential refutation. Therefore, all statistical tests in psychology test the possibility that the hypothesis is correct, versus the possibility that it isn't.

Warren Davies, "Statistical Significance Explained in Plain English"

Wider den Exotizismus

Offenbarten die Bororó-Indianer, die dem verdutzten Ethnographen mitteilten, sie seien Papageien, eine andere, 'anarchischere' Mentalität als die Spieler von '1860 München', die von sich sagen, sie seien die Löwen?

Hans-Peter Duerr, Der erotische Leib (Einleitung, S. 26)

Suggests Women Are Capable of Presenting Good Arguments

Appeals to consider myself capable of e.g. engineering despite being female [are] suggesting that the viewer herself is likely in doubt. Such a statement can only be useful to women so ignorant of their own characteristics that they need to rely on their gender as deciding evidence in what career to devote their lives to

Katja Grace, "Why Is Gender Equality So Rude?"

Well, That's Because the TV Spots Were Crap

[I]f a work seems baffling yet remains intriguing, there may be a simple key to its mysteries. I doubt that James Joyce's Ulysses had a big opening weekend.

Roger Ebert, "O, Synecdoche, My Synecdoche"

Sums up Much of (Human) History

Researchers have observed small monkeys called Japanese macaques going bananas at the sight of a flying squirrel.

This riled-up response is probably just a false alarm, with the monkeys mistaking the squirrel for a predatory bird. On the other hand, male macaques – some of whom give chase and even attack a harmless rodent – might be trying to impress females in their troop.

Adam Hadhazy, "Monkeys hate flying squirrels, report monkey-annoyance experts", Christian Science Monitor (via)

School's Poison

'Like what?' Heather asked. 'What educational ideas are no good?'

'I think I have believed that if I waited, if I sat quietly at the table, without making a noise or movement - being good - the dish of life would be presented to me.'

Hanif Kureishi, "Goodbye, Mother"

In Praise of Induction

A few years after I became an assistant professor, I realized the key thing a scientist needs is an excuse. Not a prediction. Not a theory. Not a concept. Not a hunch. Not a method. Just an excuse — an excuse to do something, which in my case meant an excuse to do a rat experiment. If you do something, you are likely to learn something, even if your reason for action was silly.

Seth Roberts, "Learning from 'Pseudoscience'"

Living in the Fast Lane

[R]elative to fiction, real grand adventures tend to have fewer guides, and more randomness in success. Real adventurers must accept huge throws of the dice; even if you do most everything right, most likely some other lucky punk will get most of the praise.

If you want life paths that quickly and reliably reveal your skills, like leveling up in video games, you want artificial worlds like schools, sporting leagues, and corporate fast tracks.

Robin Hanson, "Real Adventure"

Consider Yourself a Test Case

Asked by Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs if making a woman laugh was half the battle in seduction [David] Mitchell retorted “If that’s the case, the other half must be the difficult bit.”

"Nick Southgate on Being Witty"

In Other Words, Your Sample Is Biased

One thing Bill James pointed out many years ago, is that the people who privilege intuition over statistics often end up using statistics to make their points. They just don’t use statistics systematically. Instead of looking carefully at offensive contributions, they’ll say that someone hit .300 once and somebody else notched 100 RBI.

Andrew Gelman, "Note to the 'quals': Instead of competing with the 'quants,' take advantage of quantitive understanding to do better qualitative reporting and analysis"

The Perils of Football

For me, 79/80 was a season when football - always hitherto the backbone of life - provided the entire skeleton. For the whole season I did nothing else apart from go to the pub, work (in a garage outside Cambridge, because I could think of nothing better to do), hang out with my girlfriend, whose course lasted a year longer than mine, and wait for Saturdays and Wednesdays. The extraordinary thing was that Arsenal in particular seemed to respond to my need for as much football as possible: they playes seventy games that season, twenty-eight of them cup-ties of one kind or another. Every time I gave an indication of becoming more listless than was good for me, Arsenal obliged by providing another match.

By April 1980 I was sick to death of my job, and my indecision, and myself.

Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch (Chapter "Filling a Hole", p. 117)

It's Not Deception

She will say whatever she needs to say, he thought, even if the dialogue verges on soap opera, to keep it going because she's still aching, all these months later, from the Priscilla shock and the Louise ultimatums. It's not deception her taking this line - it's the way we are instinctively strategic. But eventually a day will come, Axler thought, when circumstances render her in a much stronger position for it to end, whereas I will have wound up in a weaker position merely from having been too indecisive to cut it off now. And when she is strong and I am weak, the blow that's dealt will be unbearable.

Philip Roth, The Humbling (ch. 2: "The Transformation", p. 63-64)

Idea, Meet Real World

[E]ffective political ideas are those that can still do good in half-baked form.

Tyler Cowen, "A Pendulum Swing Toward Austerity"

Sensorische Deprivation

Er erinnerte sich an das, was ihm ein ehemaliger Mitarbeiter des Hamburger Instituts für Sozialforschung von seiner Zeit in einem türkischen Gefängnis erzählt hatte: "Dann fand ich per Zufall eine Zeitung. Anschließend habe ich den Rekord im Langsamlesen gebrochen."

Jan Philipp Reemtsma: Im Keller (S. 80)