Of mice and frogs

If you haven't yet read Paul Graham's brilliant essay "Keep Your Identity Small," you should do it sometime soon. Here's some excerpts:

As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on forums?

What's different about religion is that people don't feel they need to have any particular expertise to have opinions about it. All they need is strongly held beliefs, and anyone can have those. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people feel they have to be over some threshold of expertise to post comments about that. But on religion everyone's an expert.

(...) this is the problem with politics too. Politics, like religion, is a topic where there's no threshold of expertise for expressing an opinion. All you need is strong convictions.

Most people already agree with this and so will probably think it's trivial. Of course, a discussion amongst people with strong convictions and little knowledge will inevitably turn into a yelling match with zero substance. But if we let only the smart and knowledgeable people argue, it won't happen.

Graham's essay explains nicely why this isn't so. Lack of knowledge is only part of the problem; the real problem is people's natural tendency to personalize their opinions about things so that those opinions

(...) become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity. By definition they're partisan.

This means that smart people aren't exempt from the tendency of turning their arguments into religious wars because it's not absolute but relative intelligence or knowledge that matters. Sure, someone who's never written a line of Javascript code will not join a thread on Javascript programming in order to express strongly held convictions about it. But among people who have about the same level of expertise in something, holy wars do emerge. Quantitative social science, for example, is a battleground of "frog and mouse" wars between frequentists and Bayesians, classic and behavioral game theorists, or between R and SAS programmers. All this despite the fact that the average IQ of a participant is probably at least in the high 130s, and that some of those warriors use the techniques they identify with to study the epistemic irrationality of identity-based policy disputes. Again in Graham's words:

If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible. (...) The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.

This is the right solution, but it's also easier said than done. Identities can be based on negations, not just assertions, and the most important reason people construct conscious identities for themselves is that they provide a rationalization for their desire to feel superior to others. In other words, it's easy to fall into a trap of constructing your identity around being someone who realizes labels make people stupid and who therefore takes conscious effort to avoid constructing an identity for herself.

A perfect response

You've all probably heard the argument that voting in democratic elections is irrational if your only goal is to influence policy through participating in a choice of candidate(s): the ex ante probability that your vote will actually matter at the margin is so incredibly low that even if the opportunity cost of casting a vote isn't very high, it still by far outweighs expected benefit. (This isn't the same as saying that voting is irrational in any absolute sense, just that when people vote, they aren't motivated by policy only. In some ways, the very act of voting must be enjoyable to people.)

Now if you use this argument to show someone who is deeply convinced that their only reason for voting is influencing policy that this conviction must on some level be wrong, their standard counterargument is a variant of "What if everyone thought this way?" It's not a valid counterargument, to be sure, because it doesn't even address the point, but I have to admit I usually had trouble explaining exactly why it's not valid.

Well, thanks to the editor of Economic Enquiry R. Preston McAffee, we now have a perfect retort to this counterargument. Sure, McAffee's response was fashioned to argue a different point, but it's general enough to apply here and in many other like situations:

It is like saying that Taco Bell should not exist because it would be a bad thing if Taco Bell were the only restaurant in the world.

(HT: EconLog.)

Otherwise known as 'placebo'

From The New York Times:

It has long been the standard practice in medical testing: Give drug treatment to one group while another, the control group, goes without.

Now, New York City is applying the same methodology to assess one of its programs to prevent homelessness. Half of the test subjects — people who are behind on rent and in danger of being evicted — are being denied assistance from the program for two years, with researchers tracking them to see if they end up homeless.

The city’s Department of Homeless Services said the study was necessary to determine whether the $23 million program, called Homebase, helped the people for whom it was intended. Homebase, begun in 2004, offers job training, counseling services and emergency money to help people stay in their homes.

But some public officials and legal aid groups have denounced the study as unethical and cruel, and have called on the city to stop the study and to grant help to all the test subjects who had been denied assistance.“They should immediately stop this experiment,” said the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer. “The city shouldn’t be making guinea pigs out of its most vulnerable.”

It's fascinating to see how much perceptions of abstract situations depend on completely superfluous details. No one calls on cancer drug researchers to stop experimenting and immediately give new, untested treatments to everyone; no one vilifies them for making guinea pigs out of people. The NYT article is titled "To Test Housing Program, Some Are Denied Aid;" if the article was about a medial trial, what would the title be? Would it contain the phrase "denied aid?"

I have no idea if this experiment is actually methodologically valid or ethical. But if it isn't, it's certainly not because it treats people as lab rats or denies aid to the needy.

Observed in a public laundromat: Slightly odd behaviors of people who seemed perfectly sane

• Grooming one's dog;
• Painting one's toenails;
• Reading Hemingway out loud to one's boyfriend;

National schools of internet trolling

When people misbehave, they usually do it in ways they know they can get away with; so, looking at differences between misdemeanors that are prevalent in different societies can tell you a lot about what types of social norms those societies adopt. Being reasonably familiar with both English-language and Polish blogosphere (of the ecnomics/politics variety), I've noticed one striking difference in terms of the types of insults that English and Polish-speaking trolls use. Namely, there are three types of egregious comments routinely made on Polish blogs but almost never seen on English-language blogs. What this means is that one community developed strong norms against these types of comments while the other one did not; I leave it to the reader to ponder what this difference might be due to.

So here are the three most annoying types of comments or posts frequently seen on Polish blogosphere, listed in ascending order of annoyance (although, to be sure, all three types far exceed the threshold beyond which you feel like smashing your computer against the wall):

1) "Who's paying you to say this?" This type of blogger/commenter automatically assumes that anyone and everyone who expresses certain preferences or beliefs does it because he has a personal interest in it (as in, he is paid or blackmailed by corporations, secret services or whatnot, or does it out of pure opportunism, hoping to get noticed by someone influential, or I don't know what). Because we all know that the most common reason for people to express their opinions is that they expect personal gain from it, not that they actually, you know, have such opinions. Another interesting observation is that commenters who use these sorts of accusations always use them against people they disagree with. Somehow it seems obviously true to them that people who express opinions they agree with cannot possibly do so because they may have a personal interest in it.

2) "Can you prove I'm wrong? No? Then you've just admitted I'm right! I win! I win!" When you start reading Polish blogs, especially ones about politics, you'll immediately notice something so bizarre you'll have trouble believing your own eyes: There actually are people out there who either do not know or do not agree that the burden of proof of a proposition rests on the person asserting it. Seriously. And they're not a rare breed either. "These elections were fraudulent. You, Mr. sociology professor, with all your polling data and fancy statistics methods, somehow can't prove they weren't. So which one of us is right?" (This is an actual quote.) And on and on, in hundreds of mutations and hundreds of thousands of copies.

I think (though I may be wrong) that, as opposed to the #1 type, these comments can only be made by people who are genuinely quite stupid. It's no use defending them saying that they may not have heard of the "burden of proof" rule and so are simply ignorant, not stupid. I think most people don't need to be taught this rule; they come up with it on their own. This is not to say that Polish commenters are less intelligent than Australian or American ones; it's just that the norms of English-speaking internet community punish this type of stupidity much more severely, so stupid people keep quiet.

3) "Your preferences are all wrong. Change them immediately." This one is an absolute gem. Like the previous type, this sort is only made by the terminally stupid. It is, however, quite distinct in one sense: while the previous two types are merely much more common on Polish blogosphere than they are on the English-language one, this one appears to be unique to it. I have not seen this type of comment ever made on any English-language blog. Never. Not once.

Okay but what is it I'm actually talking about here? It's when a commenter goes on someone's blog only to tell the author that they've chosen the wrong topic to write about, and nothing else. "There are huge important things x, y and z happening in Polish politics right now, and all you can write about is your wife/daughter/weekly poker game/whether or not it was Charles Sanders Peirce who invented randomized controlled trials? What is wrong with you?!" Sometimes (quite often, actually), this goes together with a Type (1) comment for good measure: "Someone must be paying you to distract blog readers from what's really important."

Can you comprehend the depths of egotistic stupidity of people who believe that what's important to them must, by extension, be important to the entire world, strongly enough to actually become actively indignant whenever they see someone who appears to believe otherwise?

In hindsight, this is useless

A sports interviewer asked a basketball player: "Are you a playoff-quality team?" "Time will tell," said the player.

Well, not really. Time will tell whether they'll make the playoffs, not whether they're a playoff-quality team. If looking at the list of playoff teams is the only way to determine if a team is playoff-quality, then people should stop using the term "playoff-quality team" because it's nothing more than a tautology.

Stroke of genius

This is the coolest idea I've seen in a long while. Because TSA is a government monopoly with the authority to use the criminal justice system against you, it's hard to protest their actions even verbally without risking getting in significant trouble. Fortunately, technology helps, as usual.

Live by praise, die by praise

You've probably heard this by now: Steve Johnson, wide receiver for the Buffalo Bills, dropped a pass that would have won his team the game against the Steelers this past Sunday, and promptly blamed it on God in his Twitter post

I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!! AND THIS IS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! I'LL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!! THX THO

Kudos to Steve Johnson for not conforming to a silly double standard by which God always gets credit for good things but never the blame for bad ones. The "THX THO" comment is a bit cryptic, however. Is this something like "Talk later?"

Atheism billboards: what is and what's not a good idea

There's a new billboard along I-495 on the New Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel; here's what it looks like:

It's been put there by American Atheists. As much as I'd love to see a public campaign to de-stigmatize atheism, I'm not sure that we should be putting up billboards with slogans of this sort. Here's why. Imagine there's a country where an overwhelming majority of people are Christian but there is also a small Muslim minority. The Muslim minority is distrusted, discriminated against, and overall held in passionate contempt by most of the Christians, so some Muslim activists decide a billboard campaign could help their cause. After a brief debate, they decide on a slogan:

Look, Jesus is not God, just one of His prophets. And a minor one at that.

Would that be a good slogan, from the point of view of advancing the cause of ending anti-Muslim discrimination? I think it definitely would not be, and I also think the I-495 atheism slogan is basically just like that. The reason it's a bad slogan is not that it's offensive to religious people; I don't care about hurting their feelings. The reason it's a bad slogan is because it's trying to argue the veracity of religious claims. That's not a bad thing in itself; religions are, after all, false, and there's no harm in trying to argue that point--so long as it's done in forums that are explicitly dedicated to debating the truth-values of metaphysical claims. A public campaign against anti-atheist bigotry, however, just isn't about whether or not religions are true. It's about extending the existing norms governing day-to-day interactions in a society inhabited by people of different religious beliefs on atheists as well.

People of different religions, at least in the US, have succeeded in agreeing on such rudimentary norms. The gist of this agreement is: Inasmuch as it's possible, we live by the moral code provided by our religion, and if there's a conflict between different religious codes that needs to be resolved in order for society to function, we will try to work out a solution that does not make any assumptions as to which of the conflicted religions is fundamentally right. In a way, it's an agreement to disagree; but note that it's not an agreement to never talk about the disagreements. It's not a "don't ask don't tell" policy. If someone wants to proselytize, they can. But the agreement is that they can only do so on their own behalf, as private persons. In public sphere, trying to convert someone is seen as, at the very least, bad form, and this social norm is a great achievement. Us atheists should conform to it as well.

This doesn't mean I think billboards are a bad idea. For example, NYC Atheists (which is a New York City chapter of American Atheists) has just launched a bus ad campaign featuring the following slogan:

This is exactly what public debate needs. The problem that needs immediate fixing isn't that most people believe there's a God when in reality there isn't one; it's that most religious people seem to be convinced that atheists cannot be moral. From the point of view of efficient and fair functioning of basic social institutions, it doesn't matter if people do or do not believe in God. It does, however, matter if people believe that having certain metaphysical beliefs completely disqualifies someone as a moral person. As a matter of empirics, what God you do or do not believe in has little bearing on your moral character. If, however, you believe that atheists cannot be moral people, you very likely are a hateful person, and society should evolve a norm that would make expressing such beliefs extremely embarrassing for you, just as it has made it embarrassing to admit that you think Jews use human blood to bake Matzah. Such norms of social punishment are necessary not because they extinguish beliefs based on hatred; that is probably not possible in the short run; but because they, at the very least, make it extremely hard to act on those beliefs in an organized manner. Which, when allowed to happen, inevitably leads to lots of gratuitous human suffering.

Don't call me 'customer,' I ain't your customer

Apparently, the TSA has a "Customer Complaint" section on their "Customer Service" website.

My first complaint would be that that they call me a customer. I am not their customer. I've never voluntarily entered into a transaction with them. The only reason I've had any interactions with them is because anyone who wants to board a flight is forced to deal with them. There's a term that adequately denotes the weaker party of a relationship like that, and it's not 'customer.' It's 'hostage.'

So that would be my first complaint. As to my other complaints, I don't even know where to start.

Vote-share bonds and unintended consequences

Economist Hans Gersbach has had a creative idea how to induce more responsibility in government spending: by introducing a new financial instrument called "vote-share bonds," which are government bonds whose seniority is tied to the vote-share that the policy it is supposed to fund has received in parliament. More specifically, vote-share bonds work like this:

Each government bond is tied to the share of the votes that its underlying budget deficit adoption has received in parliament. A government bond that has a higher vote-share than another is senior. This creates a ladder of relative seniority for which the vote-share is the organising principle. At the top of the ladder are the bonds with the highest vote-share. Any government funds available for servicing and repaying government debt will always be turned first to the top of the ladder to satisfy the claims of the bond-holders with the highest seniority. The other bond-holders are served sequentially by moving down the ladder.

In other words, different bonds issued by the same government will have different yields depending on the popularity of deficit spending that they are supposed to finance. One of the desirable effects of this, Gersbach says, will be the fact that

(...) minorities opposing further public indebtedness can make it more costly for the ruling government majority to issue debt. A minority cannot prevent the issuance of new government debt, but by opposing it, it can give it junior status, thereby inducing high risk premiums. Enhanced fiscal discipline would tend to decrease the average cost of borrowing.

This is the right way to think about incentivizing deficit control, but the details are not worked out properly. In fact, due to the fact that parliament parties can vote strategically, adopting Gersbach's idea could lead to there being more debt with the same seniority than would be issued if the status quo were unchanged. How? Consider this scenario:

Suppose the Congress is split 51%-49% in favor of the Republicans. Suppose the Republicans want to invade Iran but there's no money to do it so the policy would have to be financed through issuing bonds. Suppose also that invading Iran is popular among Republican voters and no one else; that is, it would receive a 51% majority of votes in Congress but no more than that. Things being the way they are, the policy would be voted through by Republicans, and financed through bonds with the same seniority and risk premium as any other government bonds. Now suppose we're in Gersbach's vote-share bond world. Republicans know that if they pass their favorite policy just with their own votes, without any help from the Democrats, the debt issued to fund it would be very expensive. So they offer Democrats a deal: You all vote for invading Iran, and in exchange for that we will vote for one of your pet deficit-increasing projects that everyone else hates, say subsidizing auto industry.

In our world, we'd see debt being issued only to finance invading Iran. In vote-share bond world we'd see debt being issued both for invading Iran and subsidizing auto industry, and bonds used to finance both policies would have very high seniority (because, assuming both those policies are very important to their respective partisan supporters, they could both be passed with 100% majority or very close to that). In other words, the situation would be strictly worse than it is now.

Why can't we run deficits in op-ed writers and Tea Partiers

A recent poll by NBC and The Wall Street Journal shows that 61% of Tea Party sympathizers believe that free trade has hurt the United States. To me this is yet another piece of inductive evidence of the fact that there is absolutely nothing good that can be said about the Tea Party.

There is also not one good thing that can be said about recent NYT op-ed that defends this particular belief. I'll quote just two sentences in which the density of confusion seems to reach its peak:

Tea Partyers also have an instinctive aversion to deficits, and they are undoubtedly concerned that our enormous trade imbalances — which require us to sell hundreds of billions of dollars in assets each year — will leave our children dependent on foreign decision makers. Indeed, the value of foreign investments in the United States now exceeds the value of American investments abroad by $2.74 trillion (...)

Sure, it may be the case that Tea Parties oppose free trade because their "instinctive aversion to deficits" makes them worry about trade deficit; but if that's the case, all it means is that they're too ignorant to know the difference between budget deficits and current account deficits. The talk of "leaving our children" with all sorts of disasters suggests that the op-ed writer shares that ignorance. And it is nothing more than ignorance. Trade deficit is not debt. It's excess of monetary value of imports over exports. It can lead to debt, but it doesn't have to, depending on how it's financed. In most general terms there are three ways of doing it. First, you can finance it through foreign currency reserves. Of course you can't do it forever as one day you'll deplete those reserves, but while you're at it, no debt is being created. Second, you can borrow foreign currency. Third (and this is what the U.S. does), you can have an economy competitive enough to induce foreigners to invest the excess capital due to their trade surpluses with you in your assets. So, businesses from countries that run surpluses with us consider it a good deal to invest in U.S. assets such as stocks, T-bills, factories or real estate, and that inflowing capital allows us to finance our current account deficits (and other things). Theoretically, this could go on forever without any danger of turning into an ever-increasing debt burden that "our children" would have to deal with. We simply import capital; that's all there really is to it.

Now the op-ed writer is indeed correct (as well as highly original) in his or her observation that importing capital makes us dependent on foreign decision-makers. Here's my question though: what doesn't? Exports make us just as dependent on foreign decision-makers as imports do. If we start running huge trade surpluses with Japan and then out of the blue Japan goes into a depression, we're screwed. Also, in free trade there really is no dependency; there's only co-dependency (or in nerdspeak, a feedback loop). Importing capital makes us dependent on foreign investors and also makes foreign investors dependent on us. In other words, it makes us dependent on each other. It is almost as if trade had created a common interest or something.

For God's sake, can anyone who writes about free trade at least understand one simple fact that in every transaction all sides are dependent on one another? If you don't want to be dependent on foreign decision-makers, there is really only one thing you can do. Stop trading anything, with anyone. See where that gets you.

Now look at the second sentence in the quote: "Indeed, the value of foreign investments in the United States exceeds the value of American investments abroad by $2.74 trillion." This, according to the writer, is another fact showing that we're increasing our "dependency on foreign decision-makers." Note what an absurd metric this is though; if you're worried about all them foreigners buying your country out, you should be looking at foreign-owned assets in the U.S. as a fraction of total assets in the U.S., shouldn't you? (About 11%, in case you were wondering.)

To sum up: the writer would like the U.S. to run current account surpluses and also own more assets abroad than foreigners own in the U.S. In other words, the writer (and presumably the Tea Party as well) wants the U.S. to become net exporter of capital. I'd like to point out the fact, always overlooked by those who advocate for such changes, that exporting capital amounts to shipping jobs overseas.

After reading this post you'll think it's inadequately titled

If there's a website that has a link to every website that does not have a link to itself, does it have a link to itself?

And so on. Check out item 121; brilliant!

Someone explain to me why we're supposed to abhor this

I mean newscasters and political commentators donating money to political campaigns. MSNBC host Keith Olbermann has recently been suspended without pay by his employers for having donated $7,200 to three Democratic candidates (apparently NBC's corporate policies prohibit news reporters, but not "opinion program hosts," from donating money to politicians). I'm not going to argue that NBC's decision on Olbermann should be any different--he did break the rules. What I disagree with is the rule itself. I keep hearing, from pretty much everywhere, that donating money to politicians by journalists "raises conflict of interests questions," but so far no one has explained exactly what this conflict of interest is supposed to consist of.

Those who argue that large donations from corporations and individuals should be banned usually do so because they believe that it creates the possibility of "buying policies" by the rich and powerful. Suppose we agree with that argument; what we can do then is put a cap on the maximum amount a single donor is allowed to contribute, and all is well. Once that is done, what is the point of singling out journalists and banning them from donating altogether? I fail to see how Keith Olbermann could be buying anything from the Democratic Party by bribing them with seven thousand dollars, for Pete's sake. Sometimes I hear that if journalists are allowed to donate, it creates a threat to their journalistic independence. Again: how, exactly? I could see a threat to journalistic independence if the Democratic Party were found to have made donations to Keith Olbermann's retirement account; but where is the conflict of interest in a situation where it's Olbermann paying the Democrats? (Or Sean Hannity paying the Republicans, or whatever.) Is the concern here that if Olbermann is highly partisan then his newscasting will be biased and misleading to viewers? Suppose this is the case; then how is forbidding him to contribute money to the Democrats going to make things better? If a TV show is partisan and biased, making it impossible for its author to donate money to politicians isn't going to make it any less partisan and biased. In fact, I can see a compelling argument for how it could make it even more so. Suppose Olbermann has a burning desire to help the Democrats in whatever capacity he can. One way he expresses this desire is through donating money to them, the other one is through trying to "smuggle" pro-Democratic propaganda on his TV show. The latter, however, is difficult because of his employer's evaluation standards, so he's treading carefully in order not to get fired. Now suppose he finds out he can't donate money anymore. Isn't it possible that he will now try to channel a bit more of his desire to further the Democratic cause through his TV show than he did before?

On a related note, I think we're concentrating on campaign spending too much. Research shows this is not where corruption happens in American politics. Vote buying happens through barter deals being struck between legislators and various other entities (deals of the sort when, say, a corporation rep tells a Senator "So your vote is pivotal for bill A and you're trying to get perks for your district in exchange for doing what the party wants you to do. If you make your vote on bill A conditional on passing bill B, which we happen to like a whole lot, then we'll place our next investment in your state.).

It's important to argue about how to argue

I don't know specifically what Jon Stewart's "rally to restore sanity" was arguing in favor of, but still I think it was a great idea. The common complaint about it is that it wasn't really "about anything" because it wasn't arguing (at least not overtly) in favor of or against any specific ideological position or policy measure. I find it astonishing how easily people think that if an argument isn't about substance, it must be about nothing at all. There's also this thing called methodology. In order to have a rational discussion, all participants need to work out a set of methodological principles they all agree on. That is, they need to agree on universal principles of how to judge the truth/falsity/plausibility of statements (and, perhaps more importantly, how not to judge them). For example, unless every single participant of a debate agrees that modus ponens is a valid mode of inference and that affirming the consequent is not, all arguments made in the subsequent debate are useless and the debate itself is just a waste of time.

This is why Stewart's initiative is valuable: it may help some people recognize the fact that methodology exists and is important. I don't care what methodological principles he's arguing for; even if I thought they were completely ridiculous, I'd still applaud him, because no one else seems to think methodology matters at all (except for academics, of course, but who cares about them).

But then again, a plea for rationality in political debate is ultimately doomed. The purpose of discussing politics is not truth-seeking but signaling group loyalties. That's why so many people who are passionate about politics are so surprised to learn that something like methodology even exists. If what you're doing is signaling, methodology doesn't matter: you're not arguing because you think what you believe is true and you want other people to see it, but to show your fellow tribe members how committed you are to your tribe's values.

Strange beliefs involving numbers: When is a group overrepresented?

One of my hobbies is collecting bizarre and unusual examples of confused quantitative reasoning. Some innumeracies are very common (such as thinking that if an item's price has been discounted twice, first 50% and then 20%, it means that the overall discount is 70%), other ones not so much. Here's an example of the latter kind.

Poland has had presidential elections a few months ago. There were two candidates in the second (and final) round (Poland has a two-candidate runoff system). On election night, when polls were closed but votes were not fully counted, the media were of course talking about election-day polls. Those polls showed a stark contrast between the candidates' relative support among rural and urban voters. About 25% of one candidate's (Komorowski) electorate was rural, whereas the other candidate's electorate (Kaczynski) was reported to be 48% rural. The media concluded that Komorowski was overrepresented among urban voters while Kaczynski was overrepresented among rural voters. One blogger took issue with this interpretation, offering a quite creative argument against it:

The fact is that Kaczynski is represented equally by the whole country. Exactly equally. Because those 2 percent are just statistical error. Rural and urban electorates support Kaczynski equally strongly.

What's bizarre (and, to be honest, quite stupid) about this argument is the implicit assumption that a candidate's representation among different groups is equal if those group's shares in his electorate are equal. Which is absurd, of course; I mean, if some candidate's support was split 50%-50% between people under and over the age of 80, would you say that the candidate is equally supported by young and old voters? In a one-dimensional case, to claim that support is equal it has to be roughly proportional to the base rate. Since about 62% of Poles live in cities, Kaczynski is indeed overrepresented in rural areas.

Interestingly (or perhaps not), in the short passage I quote, the blogger makes two additional quantitative mistakes. First, he writes "2 percent" where he means "two percentage points." Second, he assumes that because the sampling error in the poll is at least 2 points it mean that the true rate is 50% rather than 48%. Sure, it could be 50%. But it's equally likely that it's 46%.

Three staggering mistakes in three sentences! (Yes, I do mean three. The second period mark is artificial.)

Non sequitur of the month: Stunning economics

This installment is inspired by a piece of breathtaking simple-mindedness exhibited by a writer for the Polish leftist site Krytyka Polityczna (it means "political critiques;" think of it as of Polish Huffington Post, with all applicable differences of scale of course). Some guy named Kapela has a review of the movie "The Social Network" in which he writes:

Where does Facebook's worth of 25 billion dollars come from? (...) it means that each account is worth about $50. How come I can't sell it then? I have over 1000 friends, which is more than average. So maybe my account is worth more than $50. No one wants to buy it though.

To clear things up first, the actually relevant reason you can't sell your account is that you don't legally own it; Facebook does. But let's imagine you would be legally able to sell your account. You still wouldn't actually be able to, and the reason is that your account isn't worth $50. It's worth next to nothing. Most of Facebook's revenue comes from selling ads. The possibility of reaching hundreds of millions of people is worth a lot to advertisers, so they are willing to pay a lot for it. The possibility of reaching "over a thousand" of individuals through one account, on the other hand, isn't worth a dime to advertisers, which means a single account would bring zero revenue, which means that it's worth about zero dollars. Now this isn't necessarily true of all accounts; I'm sure that if, say, Barack Obama were to sell his account on ebay, he could get a lot of money for it. But in those cases the account's worth is due in large part to things other than possible future revenue. Assuming that since 500 million accounts are worth $25 billion, 1 account is worth $50, is just dumb.

A quote to remember

I find it obscene that western nations tell developing countries to democratize while at the same time denying poor farmers proper access to export markets by subsidizing domestic agriculture.

--Economic Logic

No need to starve the beast

Some people are concerned that the EU is quickly becoming a superstate, an artificial, elitist structure that will basically rule over its member nations.

Look. The EU budget hovers around 1-1.5% of combined member GDPs. You call this a superstate?

Elections bring out the stupid in people

So, elections are upon us. Ever heard the phrase "If you don't vote, you have no right to complain?" Always uttered with much self-righteousness and absolutely no reflection, it's one of the most blatant non sequiturs in circulation at the moment. There's absolutely no logic to it. The probability that your particular vote will be pivotal in terms of the outcome of state or national elections is so small that it's essentially zero. Given the fact that multiple millions of other voters turn out at the polls, the influence that your individual vote has on the outcome is zero, which is about the same as the influence you have on the outcome if you don't even bother to vote in the first place. Ergo, either everyone has the right to complain or no one does.

At any rate, I have recently stumbled upon an original rephrasing of this peculiar argument due to a Marc Hedlund writing for O'Reilly.com. Hedlund starts with a simple paraphrase of the original:

Once, many years ago, I was waiting in line at the Post Office on election day. One postal worker asked another if she had voted, and the second responded, "Hell yes, I voted. If you don't vote, you can't bitch, and I am not giving up my right to bitch!"

So far so bad. Therefore, Hedlund decides to make it worse by inventing his own analogy of the problem:

I was thinking about that the other day when trying to decide whether to buy a new iPhone 4 or wait to see what happens with Verizon at some point in the future (...) If you're buying an iPhone 4 tomorrow, you already know AT&T is almost universally considered the weakest aspect of the phone's experience. You're signing up for that (...) So here's the deal: if you buy that phone right now, you're giving up your right to bitch about AT&T for the next two years. No, I mean it! Complaints will be returned to sender unread.

(...)

I'm undecided about what to do, myself. I'll probably cave. But if I do, I won't bitch, and you shouldn't either. The single strongest message you could send to Apple and AT&T would be to vote with your wallet against AT&T's crappy service. If you don't vote, then you're getting what you paid for.

OK, so this is actually a slight variation on the original, because what Hedlund seems to be saying is that you have the right to complain about Obama if and only if you voted for McCain. If you voted for Obama, you can't complain because you got what you've signed up for, and if you didn't vote at all, you can't complain because blah blah blah whatever (I'm not sure what the argument is there).

However, none of this changes the fact that Hedlund's is one of the worst analogies in the history of bad analogies. If I decide to buy an iPhone instead of a Verizon-based smartphone, i will have an iPhone. If I decide to buy a Verizon phone, I will have that. See where this is going? What happens to me phone-wise depends on my decision and my decision only. By contrast, if I decide to vote McCain, I may get McCain for president, but then again I may not. I may get Obama. What happens to me president-wise depends not just on what I do, but also on what about 215 million other people do. 215 million people on whom I have no influence whatsoever. In other words, while I decide what type of phone I will use (or if I will use any type of phone at all, for that matter), I do not decide what type of president I will use. That is decided for me. Sometimes I will like the outcome, and sometimes I will not, but either way the fact is that I did not choose the outcome. Tell me again, then, what exactly does the act of voting have to do with the right to complain?

Now because people have full control over what phone they use, they tend to choose between phones based on which one they think will be best for them. In other words, if they buy an iPhone and not a Verizon phone, they do it because they like iPhone's features so much that they are willing to get over its inferior signal reception; if they buy a Verizon phone, they do it because they value signal reception so much that they are not willing to sacrifice it for additional features. Hedlund suggests a novel reason for making a choice like that: if you don't like Apple's crappy phone service, buy Verizon in order to induce Apple to change their strategy. Actually, perhaps this is a good analogy of voting after all: thinking that your individual decision as to where to allocate $300 can change the behavior of a corporation whose annual revenue is some $43 billion is just as delusional as thinking that your individual vote matters for an outcome of an election with over 200 million participating voters. If you're forgoing iPhone 4 because you want to change Apple's strategy with respect to phone service, you have a serious problem with respect to your grip on reality.

"An intelligible picture of the world"

First, a quote from Thomas Nagel:

A creative individual externalizes the best part of himself, producing with incredible effort something better than he is, which can then float free of its creator and have a finer existence of its own.

...and then from Albert Einstein:

(...) one of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life into the world of objective perception and thought (...) Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it.

Simple escapism is a very important desire behind the creative impulse. One of the most powerful drives behind great works of science and art is distaste towards the world or one's very own self.

Interpreting simple statistics isn't always as simple as they are

Current unemployment rate is something like 9.2%. I've either read or heard somewhere that almost half of the currently unemployed have been out of a job for six months or longer. (Because whether or not that rate is accurate does not matter for this post, let's assume it's exactly 50%.) That sounds simple enough. But what does it actually mean? Does it mean that half of the unemployed are chronically unemployed? Well, in a way it does. But in another way it does not.

Suppose you've just been laid off and you want to know the crudest and easiest-to-obtain measure of the probability that you'll still be unemployed in six months. Is it 50%? No, it's less than that, and the reason is that a point-in-time measure overestimates the ratio of long-term unemployed to all unemployed, by definition: some of those who have been unemployed for a short period of time are no longer unemployed and so aren't counted. To have a better estimate of your probability of being unemployed for a long time you'd need to look at the ratio of long-term to all unemployed not on a given day, but over some period of time, say the past six months. This is called the "cohort method." You take a representative sample of all those who've lost their job, say, during the week of January 15th, 2010, and then follow them for the next six months, recording how many of them managed to get a new job during your period of study. From such data you can get an estimate that gets closer to the intuitive notion of "the ratio of chronically unemployed to all unemployed." Point-in-time statistics overestimate the number of long-termers, but also tend to underestimate the overall number of people who have experienced the measured phenomenon. For example, the rate of unemployed to labor force is now 9.2%, but if we were to measure the rate of all those who have experienced an unemployment spell last year to labor force, it would almost certainly be higher than that.

I recently quoted a piece arguing that one of the myths about homelessness is that most homeless people are chronically homeless. Perhaps one of the reasons why it's so pervasive is because whenever homeless shelters publish statistics about what percentage of their clients are long-term stayers, it's always point-in-time numbers. Cohort studies of shelter stay duration usually paint quite a different picture.

Read them their rights

The (somewhat) ethically interesting topic of in vitro fertilization is being discussed publicly a lot in Poland lately, due to the fact that the Parliament is about to vote on laws regulating the procedure (the status quo is that in vitro is legal and completely unregulated). The topic is interesting because, for some reason, it is ripe with bizarre ethical arguments (some of which I've blogged about before). Here's another one, again very common in Catholic ethics: in vitro fertilization is ethically wrong because it violates the right to be conceived through sexual intercourse, without any artificial enhancement. Why is this argument bizarre? Some (such as the legal scholar Wojciech Sadurski) criticize it on the grounds that it's incoherent to talk about rights of potential human beings, that is human beings who have not yet been conceived. I disagree with that critique; I think that, inasmuch as it's possible to talk about rights at all, it's possible to meaningfully talk about rights of potential human beings. But, I still think that the "right to be conceived naturally" argument is confused and completely wrong, for reasons I'll explain below.

First of all, talking about rights is difficult in any context because it's not clear to me what "rights" are. It's not that I think the concept is incoherent so much as it's simply redundant. What I understand about rights can be reduced to a much simpler and more fundamental concept of utility. In that view, rights are simply rules of conduct with respect to what individuals are entitled to that society has agreed to adhere by and enforce punishments for breaking. What the rules are supposed to do is delimit a certain standard of "minimum individual (expected) quality of life" that society agrees to never decrease in order to trade off against other values (such as social welfare or whatever).

Now contrary to what Sadurski claims, it's possible to meaningfully talk about the expected utility of someone who hasn't been born yet; in fact, people do it all the time. Consider, for example, a couple deciding whether to have children now or a few years later. Both partners are young and well-educated, but at this time they're quite poor. They have low-paying jobs and haven't worked for long so they don't have anything in terms of assets; moreover, they live in a neighborhood where it's not really good for kids to grow up, and are not able to move out of it at the moment. So, they decide to wait before having children for a time in their future when they're more affluent (which they expect will happen because they both have a lot of human capital, just not a lot of experience). This is a clear example of how expected utility of someone who does not yet exist (in this case, the couple's future children) can (and should) affect present choices of people who definitely do exist.

So what's wrong with the argument that in vitro violates a human right to be conceived naturally?

Well, first of all: who says there is such a right, and why should there be one? Rights are there to protect a modicum quality of individual life from being traded off against other things. For example, we protect individuals' right to life because we recognize that the quality of life in a society where people are allowed to kill others on a whim is extremely low, perhaps to the point of not being worth living. Therefore, in order to argue for protecting the right to being conceived naturally, we would have to have evidence of the fact that people who have been born through in vitro fertilization suffer because of this fact so much that they would rather not have been born at all. (Note that simply showing that knowledge that they've been conceived "unnaturally" causes some mental suffering is not enough. The burden of proof is showing mental anguish great enough to make a person want to kill themselves, because if it weren't for in vitro fertilization, those people would not have been born at all.) I think that if you surveyed all those who were born due to this method asking them if they would prefer to have had their right to be conceived through unaided sexual intercourse protected, you'd discover that enforcing this "right" would actually hurt people rather than help them.

Second, assume for the sake of the argument that potential human beings do indeed have a right to be conceived naturally. Why, then, are we talking as if that were the only right they have? If potential humans have this particular right, they must have other rights, too. What about their right to life, for example? Banning in vitro protects potential humans' right to natural conception, but it denies them a right to life. If you are a Catholic ethicist, then, you only have two logical choices. 1) You believe that potential human beings have a right to be conceived naturally but do not have a right to life. If this is the case, then your definition of a "right" seems to me to be completely arbitrary, and serving more as a rationalization of imposing your ethical preferences on those who disagree with you rather than as a way of minimizing human suffering. 2) You believe that potential human beings have both the right to life and the right to be conceived naturally but that it's more important for society to protect the latter rather than the former. If this is the case, then you're contradicting yourself because Catholic ethics claims elsewhere that the right to life is the most fundamental human right and that protecting it should always supersede all other concerns.

Being determines consciousness

Here's one of the most striking factoids in all of social science: there has never been a transition from democracy to dictatorship in a country with per capita output greater than or equal to slightly over $6,000 (1990 purchasing power parity) dollars. That's one of the findings of Adam Przeworski's research into democracy and development. Quoting from a paper in which Przeworski and Limongi observe 135 countries each year between 1950 and 1990:

The simple fact is that during the period under our scrutiny or ever before, no democracy ever fell, regardless of everything else, in a country with a per capita income higher than that of Argentina in 1975: $6,055. Thirty-two democracies spent 736 years with incomes above $6,055 and not one collapsed, while thirty-nine out of sixty-nine democracies did fall in countries that were poorer.

And by the way, it hasn't happened since 1990, either.

If you insist on cherry-picking, at least be more subtle about it

A Polish journalist Aleksandra Fandrejewska writes on her blog:

This week, a Fiat car manufacturing plant in Tychy [that's a city in Poland--p] halted production for a few days because its warehouses are filling up with cars that Germans and the French aren't buying because of the crisis. It seems that globalization isn't all that good for the economy.

Oh come on. If not for globalization, how big would that plant be? Would it even be there to begin with?

Singularity is China

From The Economist:

But the organisation is involved in even more controversial projects. It is about to embark on a search for the genetic underpinning of intelligence. Two thousand Chinese schoolchildren will have 2,000 of their protein-coding genes sampled, and the results correlated with their test scores at school. Though it will cover less than a tenth of the total number of protein-coding genes, it will be the largest-scale examination to date of the idea that differences between individuals’ intelligence scores are partly due to differences in their DNA.

Two points. First, why is searching for the genetic underpinning of intelligence "controversial?" We know intelligence is partly hereditary (more precisely, we know that some non-trivial fraction of interpersonal variance in IQ scores is due to interpersonal variance in genotypes). We don't know exactly what the genetic mechanism behind this is, but what's wrong with trying to find out? Second, I can't get rid of the feeling that the Chinese authorities are thinking about eugenics. I have no idea what they want or what is feasible, so I can't speculate about anything. On the other hand, I can't help not to. Imagine future China in which, say, 25% of population are people with IQs of 180 or higher.

If it's illegal, it doesn't exist

Eurostat plans on harmonizing the way in which all 27 EU member countries calculate their GDP estimates, by requiring all of them to include estimates of contributions from the so-called "shadow economy," i.e. the value of economic transactions that are off the books. This is to include not just transactions that are unregistered but legal (like off the books employment, barter of goods in order to avoid taxes etc.) but also the illegal ones (prostitution, illicit drugs and weapons trade, distribution of fake merchandise etc.)

That's a good idea, but hard to execute. It's a good idea because voluntary economic transactions generate wealth regardless of their legal status, so those activities contribute to GDP whether we like it or not; it doesn't make sense that they wouldn't contribute to our measure of GDP. It's hard to execute for obvious reasons.

I thought some of the reaction of the press and blogosphere to this decision were interesting in that they often revealed profound confusion about measurements and reality and/or about what GDP is supposed to measure. For example, you see headlines like "Prostitution, drugs give a 1.3 billion euro GNP boost" or similar. That's completely ridiculous; sizing up drugs and prostitution boosts the estimate of GDP, not GDP itself. It may seem like semantics but it's not. Whether we account for them or not, drugs and prostitution are part of our economies. If those activities were to suddenly disappear, most countries in the world would suddenly become poorer (some very noticeably so; think Thailand or Vietnam). What the headlines are saying is akin to claiming that your car will go faster if you put a speedometer in it. Then, a lot of bloggers complain that the decision was made so that European governments can "spout propaganda by trying to impress voters with artificially inflated GDP numbers." First, GDP figures won't be artificially inflated. Once again, semi-legal and illegal transactions are part of the economy and any GDP estimate that does not include them is an underestimate. Second, for voters it is reality that matters, not measurements. People care about their standard of living, not about official GDP numbers. If someone is unemployed and desperately poor, they aren't very likely to think "Well, but the government is doing a good job overall because annualized GDP growth was 4% last quarter." Government statistics usually have near zero propaganda effect. Another strange reaction was a complaint that illegal activities are violent and destructive, and therefore how can anyone think they increase wealth (as one blogger put it, "What about all those people killed in drug-related violence, how do they increase GDP?") Well, what about those people? GDP is the market value of all goods and services produced within a country. Nothing less, nothing more. Construction workers sometimes die in job-related accidents. Does this mean that construction industry isn't contributing to GDP?

Superficially very stupid

Here are excerpts from an article about a New Mexico University survey study concerning personalities and sexual habits of men:

A study has found that men with the "dark triad" of traits – narcissism, thrill- seeking and deceitfulness – are likely to have a larger number of sexual affairs.

(...)

The study subjected 200 college students to personality tests designed to rank them in terms of the dark triad. They were also asked about their sexual relationships, including their attitude towards brief affairs.

In other words, narcissistic, deceitful men report that they get laid more often.

Now I admit I haven't read the actual study so perhaps this glaring problem is addressed there somehow. If it is, then it's just the summary press article that's stupid. If it's not, both the study and the summary are.

From the "I wish I'd said this" file

From the blog of Zeno:

The October 2010 issue of Acts & Facts from the Institute for Creation Research is emblazoned on its cover with a colorful display of astronomical images, including the planet Saturn. Text is laid over the cover art, spelling out the question, “Why does the universe look so old?”

I think I know the answer to this one:

Because it's old.

Monstrous arguments

Here are some excerpts from a TV interview in which one of Polish Roman Catholic bishops Tadeusz Pieronek talks about the ethics of in vitro fertilization:

The development of in vitro fertilization methods may lead to (...) parents choosing their baby's sex, eye color, hair color, height, whether to endow it with genes of a genius or a serial killer. They will be just like the creator of the Frankenstein's monster. What is the Frankenstein's monster, a literary description of a creature brought into existence against nature, if not a premonition of in vitro? (...) Life created by in vitro fertilization is a result of artificial manipulation as opposed to forces of nature.

There's nothing about this particular quote that made me want to write about it; I've chosen it as a simple example of something larger. I'm quite convinced that future generations will be viewing such quotes with utter horror and disbelief, not so much at the ethical proposition that the speaker is defending, but at the pathetically low quality of arguments he's using in its defense. It's almost as if Pieronek thought that there's no place for reasoning in ethics and so there's no need for a logically coherent argument.

Let me count the ways in which Pieronek's arguments are too dumb to even be a start of a productive discussion. First, the part in which he compares in vitro fertilization to creating the Frankenstein's monster is not even an argument. It's a base appeal to emotions, namely to the primal emotion of disgust. That's no coincidence, because the fact is that a lot of what people consider universal moral intuitions is triggered by simple disgust that is then rationalized into a moral norm. For example, a lot of people feel disgusted at the thought of homosexual sex, and that disgust drives them to invent reasons why homosexuals are morally inferior to heterosexuals. Rationalization of disgust is a very well-know and well-studied phenomenon. There even are brain imaging experiments that vividly show the process taking place. The problem is that the disgust reflex is a very bad basis for moral judgments. For one thing, different people are disgusted by different things. For another, there exist aesthetically disgusting things that nevertheless are an unquestionable moral good, for example surgeries. Someone with a degree in ethics, such as Pieronek, should be responsible to know all this and be extra careful not to make ethical appeals to disgust.

Moving on to the parts of his interview that do contain some semblance of reasoning, by my count Pieronek manages to commit three logical fallacies in just a handful of lines of text. First, he commits the naturalistic fallacy by arguing that in vitro fertilization is morally wrong because it's unnatural. Take a minute to think about what it would mean to society if we were to apply this rule consistently. Our entire medicine, for example, is unnatural, so by Pieronek's logic we should never help anyone who's sick or injured because that would be against the will of nature. Second, there's fallacious use of the slippery slope argument when he says that the possibility of parents' choosing their baby's sex will lead to some parents wanting to endow their kids with the "genes of a serial killer" (whatever those may be). And third, there's classic cherry picking: he says that allowing parents to choose their kids' genes would lead to bad outcomes but says nothing of the fact that it could lead to good ones as well, because nature can be incredibly cruel in her own gene-picking; genetically inherited disorders cause an immense amount of suffering in the world.

People do what's expected of them. The fact that a respected public figure with an ethical authority in the eyes of many people feels completely comfortable saying things so blatantly stupid indicates that most consumers of public debate do not demand logic and reason from ethicists. That's a horrendous though, but it's obviously true, and there's much more evidence of it that than intellectually lazy rantings of a priest.

Homelessness is a housing issue

What causes homelessness? There are many well-known superficial answers to the question. For example: poverty causes homelessness. A moment's reflection will tell you this cannot be right, though: while almost all homeless people are poor, an overwhelming majority of poor people are not homeless, so poverty can be a necessary condition, but it can't be sufficient. Another answer: mental illness/drug problems/domestic violence cause homelessness. However, it turns out this answer is wrong, too; research has shown that (aggregate) changes in rates of substance abuse or mental health hospitalizations are not correlated with changes in homelessness. In other words: if substance abuse causes homelessness, then an increase in the number of alcoholics should cause an increase in the number of homeless people. But it does not. So what is the cause?

Research conclusions here are probably as clear as they ever get in social science: homelessness is caused by a conjunction of three factors, namely poverty, housing market conditions and housing policies. More precisely, people will face a high risk of becoming homeless if 1) They are very poor; 2) They live in a place where lowest available market rent is very high and 3) They live in a place where government subsidies towards rent are hard to come by. (For sources, see here, here and here.) Poverty can make you homeless only if the housing market and government policy conspire against you as well. Substance abuse, mental illness and domestic violence have mostly an indirect impact, in that they cause poverty.

All of the above is summed up nicely by a homelessness researcher, psychologist Dennis P. Culhane in a short press piece "Five Myths about America's Homeless." If you don't feel like reading it, the myths are 1) That homelessness is a chronic condition; 2) That most homeless people have mental health problems; 3) That most homeless people don't work; 4) That homeless shelters are a good policy response and 5) That government rent vouchers do not improve the situation by much.

Quote of the day

"Ideas are tested by experiment." That is the core of science. Everything else is bookkeeping.

Source: Zombie Feynman. Hat tip to RolfAndreassen.

Non-self-enforcing

Megan McArdle asks:

(...) why can't this vast media conspiracy I keep hearing about get it together on Phelps and his rotten little band of merry madmen? Their shameful protests at funerals are condemned by, to a first approximation, every single other person in the United States of America. So why do they keep doing it? Presumably because it gets them on the teevee.

So why won't the Liberal Media^TM take away their fun? Refuse to broadcast any footage that contains their message; refuse to write about them.

The reason is, this wouldn't be self-enforcing. Assuming that news about Fred Phelps and his demented posse sells, a conspiracy of silence would create a Prisoner's Dilemma. If you're a news outlet, and all your competitors are silent about the Westboro Baptist Church, you have an incentive to talk about them. Therefore, everybody talks about them.

Where'd my social status go?

In Western societies, social status of an individual is determined mainly by her job. Naturally, the perceived status of a job is correlated with income and education it requires, though not perfectly: college professors are better educated than corporate CEOs and New York City waste collectors make about the same as New York City firefighters, for example. What's interesting to me is that some jobs change their social status over time, sometimes dramatically. For example, over the past few decades, the jobs of a high school teacher, postal worker, flight attendant or airline pilot lost a great deal of their (initially very high) status. The job of a film actor, on the other hand, moved from extremely low to extremely high status over the first fifty years of its existence. I don't know what causes these shifts or if the causes are uniform. Just pointing out the obvious.

Mourning our dead

Question: Is the fact that religious people weep at funerals evidence of their covert atheism? If they truly and wholeheartedly believe that their loved ones simply moved on to a better life, why are they crying?

The standard answer is that they mourn a heartbreaking loss--their loved ones might still exist somewhere, but they'll never see them again, at least not in familiar circumstances.

For my own subjective feelings, there's a difference. I would feel a lot better than I actually do if I were deeply convinced that my grandmother and my uncle have simply gone on a trip somewhere, even if they were never coming back. And it does seem to me that believers mourn their dead the same way that unbelievers do: as if the dead were no longer present, here or anywhere else. But maybe it's just me.

The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics

Think about this: In each strategic interaction between humans there exists a set of actions such that, for each of the participants, the action he chooses is the best one possible for him, taking into account everyone else's actions. This fact is astonishing in of itself; but what's even more incredible is that a fact like this happens to be an immediate consequence of an obscure and highly technical theorem of topology. Physicist Eugene Paul Wigner wrote a famous essay titled "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences;" but it seems that mathematics is unreasonably effective not just in the natural sciences but in pretty much anything we can think of.

You cannot be a writer if you're unable to think like people you don't like

One of the things that happen to you when your beliefs function as a signal of group loyalty rather than as means of trying to estimate truth is that you're unable to think like your enemies. If your beliefs are signals of how much you care about those who agree with you, then whenever you're summarizing opposing views you are doing it not to discover or describe actual reasons that people who disagree with you have for their beliefs, but to show those who belong to your camp how much you hate and despise those who don't. To put it shortly, the reason you're summarizing opposing views is not to describe but vilify them.

One of my favorite (due to its extremity) case studies of this type of thinking is a Polish Catholic publicist and blogger, Tomasz Terlikowski. It's very instructive to read his polemical pieces. He's completely unable to try and figure out why it is that people may disagree with him on ethical matters, and thus unable to faithfully portray beliefs he's attacking. As a result, he's attacking not actually existing beliefs, but ridiculous strawman constructions designed to show how depraved he thinks his enemies are. It's inconceivable to him that any decent, intelligent person could possibly disagree with Catholic ethics, and thus, in his mind, those who do disagree with it must be stupid and/or intentionally destructive. And so in his essays he assumes that pro-choice advocates simply enjoy killing babies, that all that proponents of assisted suicide want is to relieve themselves of the burden of having to care for their old relatives, that people who advocate for gay rights see it mostly as a means of completely destroying society as we know it, etc.

As I said, Terlikowski's essays are instructive as a very extreme case of inability to "put yourself in someone else's shoes." The down side is that they're truly horrible to read: they are an ungodly mixture of bad writing, bad reasoning and breathtaking, hateful arrogance. (Think Phil Donahue but about 15 IQ points stupider and 10 Wild Turkey shots meaner. Or save yourself some trouble and just think of Bill O'Reilly straight away.) What is incredibly entertaining to read, however, is Terlikowski's fiction. He wrote a novel titled "Operation Shroud" ("Operacja Chusta"). The novel isn't entertaining because it's good; on the contrary, it is I think a strong contender for the title of the worst novel ever written in Polish. But as opposed to spectacularly bad essays, spectacularly bad fiction can be fun to read.

Operation Shroud is "theological-fiction." It's set in second half of the 21st Century Europe in which true Catholicism is persecuted by politically correct and ethically nihilist institutions, both state and religious. At any rate, what it's about isn't as interesting as what makes it so bad. One of the major reasons is that Terlikowski's characters are completely ludicrous. Nothing about them feels like real human beings; they are mostly just carriers of different opinions. And, unsurprisingly, Terlikowski's villains are even less of real people than his protagonists. They are nothing more than caricatures. Which makes sense: since Terlikowski cannot conceive of the possibility that a good-natured and intelligent person would have views different than his own, the villains in his book are either complete, drooling idiots or bona-fide, card-carrying psychopaths--hardly an interesting character study material either way. Terlikowski manages to make even those villains that convert to the side of good look uninteresting: there's nothing about their conversion that feels like an actual inner struggle; since the beliefs they've started out with are nothing but vile stupidity, all they need to do in order to discard them is to "open their eyes" and poof, their old evil self is gone, just like that. There's absolutely no reasoning process or emotional struggle behind the conversion; it's just something that happens, like larva turning into a butterfly.

The entire point of my rant is this: you can't be a good writer if you're unable to think like people who aren't you, including people you disagree with, people you don't like, people who don't share your values, people who are capable of doing things you could never do. You don't need to transform into those people; you can still disagree with them, dislike them, despise them or what have you, but you need to be able to understand them. You need to be able to see why they are the way they are and do the things they do. That's the only thing that will make your characters believable. Shakespeare clearly didn't like Edmund's character in King Lear but boy, did he understand him. And so do we. Since Terlikowski doesn't understand people who disagree with him, his fictional characters that he doesn't like are completely incomprehensible.

Graph of the day

The above is taken from a paper by Norton and Ariely. The authors conducted a survey in which they asked a representative sample of Americans a series of questions about income distribution in the United States. They asked people what they think that distribution actually looks like (this is the "Estimated" part of the graph) as well as what they think it should like (the "Ideal" part), and then pitted the results against the distribution as it actually is. The results are interesting. First, voters are deeply ignorant about the income distribution (they think it's much more egalitarian than it actually is). Second, they think that in a perfect world, the income distribution should be even more egalitarian than their erroneous perceptions of it. And third, there are no significant differences in those beliefs and desires between Democratic and Republican voters. This third finding is extremely surprising to me.

The law of small numbers

I've written once before about a quite common belief that small samples behave just like large samples do. Some time ago I was watching a tennis match which would have been extremely close if not for the fact that one of the players was getting the short end of the stick in terms of bad referee calls. The announcers noticed it but didn't think it was important because, they said, refs aren't biased but simply make random mistakes so "in the long run it all evens out" (i.e. you'll get about as many erroneous calls in your favor as you will against you).

The total number of points an average tennis pro will play during his entire career is a rather large sample, so the claim about things "evening out" is probably true. Still, it's meaningless, even if true. It doesn't matter what happens in the large sample of all the points a player will play during his career; what matters is what happens in a number of small subsamples of those points that we call "matches." The number of points played in a single match is small enough that random mistakes do not have to even out. Or, thinking about it in a slightly different way, even though the total number of points you'll play is large, some of those points will matter a lot more than others. Very close encounters can be decided by five or six key points going one way or the other. If you get unlucky and the refs make five bad calls that cost you a Wimbledon final, what does it matter that at some point in your career you will get five bad calls going in your favor, if those calls are unlikely to be as meaningful?

Just when you thought the Internet couldn't surprise you anymore

catsthatlooklikehitler.com

You can't choose not to signal

Thinking about signaling behavior is extremely depressing. It's bad enough to realize that so much of human behavior and beliefs have different purposes than the face value. What's worse is that it's very hard to find someone you can share your thoughts with. Taking our beliefs and behaviors at face value (especially those beliefs and behaviors that we consider "noble") is a very strong social norm, and there's a good reason for it. A lot of our behavioral norms serve to sort people into those that can be trusted to reciprocate if you do them a favor and those that cannot, and self-deception about those norms is part of how the sorting is done. This means that if you question, or even analyze those norms, most people that you choose to talk to about it will react with distrust or even outright hostility. They'll figure you for someone who's likely to shirk from their social responsibilities, and think that all your elaborate talk about signaling behavior is simply a way for you to rationalize your own selfishness.

1954

Leopold Tyrmand's Dziennik 1954 (or "Diary 1954") is hands down one of the best books I've ever read. It really is a shame it's never been translated into English. It's an incredibly insightful account of daily life in a totalitarian state, less dramatic than The Gulag Archipelago, but in its own way terrifying. It chronicles the first three months of 1954 in the life of an aspiring writer who lives in Warsaw.

The book offers an immensely interesting look into the daily routine of someone who is trying to survive in stalinist Poland while being in profound moral opposition to the cruel regime but completely unable to outwardly express that opposition for fear of career- or even life-ending retribution from the authorities. But on top of vivid description, Tyrmand's book offers some truly great analysis. It's full of incredibly insightful observations about how the system works. For example, it explains why communist propaganda was so crude and obnoxious, even though it was relatively easy for the authorities to make it just a little bit more friendly and attractive to the consumers without risking much. The crudeness wasn't due to incompetence; it was purposeful, because the goal of propaganda was not to persuade people but to demoralize and intimidate them.

But the most powerful insight of the book (or, at any rate, the most powerful one to me) was an observation that living in a totalitarian state robs everyone of their identity by making it impossible for anyone to define themselves by themselves. Everyone, whether collaborating with the regime or opposed to it, is forced to define their very own self relative to the system they live in. You can't live in communism and simply ignore it. There is so much injustice, cruelty and lies at every corner of your life that it is impossible for you to not think about it; almost every thought you have is a thus a reaction to something you've seen, heard about or read that you viscerally disagree with. Whether you like it or not, your entire inner life becomes a constant polemic with the communist monstrosity surrounding you; there are almost no thoughts left that are entirely your own. Communism robs you of your thoughts. That realization was extremely painful to Tyrmand; he repeatedly complains that even his diary, which is supposed to be the most intimate, personal form of writing, talks about the horrible reality of stalinism more than anything else. There is a great scene in the book that shows exactly how stalinism devours everyone's soul, even those who hate it. Tyrmand is riding a bus with his girlfriend Bogna (not her real name), a high school senior (I think she's 18 at the time but don't remember for sure). Bogna is talking high school gossip, being all loud and cheerful and youthful. As their bus drives by the infamous Rakowiecka Prison, a place where thousands of innocent people were being held, tortured and executed without charges, Bogna bursts into a particularly loud fit of laughter because of something she's talking about that she thinks is funny. Tyrmand gets infuriated by her lack of sensitivity, yells at her for laughing out loud and reminds her that behind the walls they've just passed innocent people are being tortured as they speak. Bogna looks at him incomprehensibly and then blurts out: 'You know what? You're nuts. You're just as insane as they are. All you ever talk about is what the communists are doing.'