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?"