Definitely not wishful thinking

I don't believe in hell, but oftentimes I really wish there was one. Just so that people like Kadafi could go there.

If you outlaw honesty, only outlaws will be honest

The Social Network is not a good film; unless you have time that you can afford to just waste, don't watch it. There is a scene in it, however, which in retrospect seems quite profound to me (luckily, it is also the very first scene of the movie, so you can save yourself some time). In it, the movie version of Mark Zuckerberg is having a fight with his girlfriend (from now on I'll call the main character "Movie Zuckerberg" to differentiate that character from the real Mark Zuckerberg, of whom I know next to nothing).

So anyway, the two are having an argument, in which Movie Zuckerberg is portrayed as someone profoundly autistic, tone deaf to other people's feelings. He's obsessed with Harvard's exclusive "clubs" to the point that getting in one of them is all he can talk about. The cynical honesty with which he's talking about all this is terrifying his girlfriend. He seems beyond obsessed with status for its own sake. He knows that the clubs don't offer anything substantial; he sees them in all their superficiality for what they really are: dispensers of status. He doesn't care that the whole idea of clubs is morally repugnant; he recognizes that it's very hard to get status without them, and since status leads to a better life, he simply figures he needs to find out how to get in. All the while he's being cynical and insulting beyond socially acceptable standards (his girlfriend keeps trying to end the conversation and leave saying that she has to study, to which Movie Zuckerberg replies: "C'mon, we both know that's just an excuse. You don't have to study. You go to BU, for chrissake"). At some point his girlfriend becomes fed up with all this and breaks up with him saying: "You'll probably go through life thinking girls hate you because you're a nerd. You need to realize that's not true: they hate you because you're an asshole."

Here's what makes this scene interesting: Movie Zuckerberg actually is an asshole. He's being honest about things most people are never honest about, and it's precisely because he is one.

The truth that Movie Zuckerberg verbalizes is this: what we want is status for the sake of status. We don't care what status is made of; all we care about is a universally acceptable metric for differentiating low-status people from high-status people, and having as much of whatever it is that gives high status for ourselves as possible. Problem is that while this may be the truth we live by, it is not the truth we believe we live by. We are socialized to believe that we don't care about status for its own sake; in fact, we're taught to despise people like Movie Zuckerberg. Our status desire is the truth that dare not speak its name. One of our social norms is to punish honesty about those things.

But, as supporters of the right to own guns are fond of saying, if you outlaw guns only outlaws will have them. If standards of decency and politeness punish honesty, only the impolite and the indecent will ever be honest.

Robin Hanson had a post not so long ago (I can't find it though) in which he pointed out that people who oppose certain policies which are efficient from an economic point of view (like free trade or congestion pricing) do so not because they don't understand the logic of what makes them efficient; rather, they oppose them because they have an emotional approach to the subject which tells them those policies are just wrong. What the scene in the Facebook movie made me realize is that the converse of what Hanson says is also true: those who approve those kinds of policies do so not because they are smarter than other people and can therefore better understand why they're efficient; they do so because they lack certain emotions. In short, because they're assholes. (By the way, this doesn't change the fact that they're right, both in their conclusions and in their arguments. They may be motivated by malice or callous indifference, but they are still the ones who are correct.)

To sum it all up in slightly different words: the people that we call "brutally honest" aren't brutal because they're honest. They're honest because they're brutal.

The depressing implication of this is that truth has no chance. The Big Lie has evolved an incredibly insidious defense mechanism: by outlawing honesty it has ensured that only criminals can ever become apostles of truth. And thus we watch Movie Zuckerberg fight with his girlfriend and conclude that the things he says simply cannot be true since he is transparently such a very bad person.

A friend of mine I went to grad school with used to say that he really wished we could all know the full contents of each other's thoughts. I disagreed with him at the time and we'd have heated arguments over this. I now think he couldn't be more right. In fact, sometimes I feel like this would be the only way to make the world even remotely bearable.

Life is full of mysteries

How does a thermos know which things to keep cold and which to keep hot? Why does the tide go in and out? How does bread turn into toast? A dollar bill into a soda can? Food into poop? How can boats float if they're so heavy? If species evolve, why are there still monkeys?

What's the common theme here? All these are things Bill O'Reilly thinks we can't explain.

Enjoy.

Formula trees

Ever had to translate a long and complicated propositional logic formula from Polish notation into standard bracket notation or the other way around? Yeah, didn't think so. Well, I'm going to offer you some advice anyway. For whatever reason it just occurred to me that the task becomes much easier if instead of trying to translate directly you first translate your formula from whichever notation you have it in into Smullyan's tree notation, and then from that into the desired final notation. So if you have a formula in Polish notation, you do the following: Put the leftmost operator at the top of the tree (that's your highest-level node); put the second-leftmost operator (if it's there) at the level-two node starting the leftmost branch of your tree; continue that branch until you hit an atomic sentence(s); put the next operator at the level-two node starting the second-to-the-left branch of the tree; continue going down then right like than until you're done.

For example, say you have ENKpqANpNq. Your leftmost operator is E (equivalence); so that's what you'll be putting at the very top of the tree:

1.

<->

Then you've got negation at a level-two node on the left:

2.

<->

~

Then conjunction one node below:

3.

<->

~

&

And then the left node hits bottom with atoms p:

4.

<->

~

&

p

...and q:

5.

<->

~

&

pq

So you move to the right and continue:

6.

<->

~ |

&

pq

7.

<->

~ |

& ~

pq

8.

<->

~ |

& ~

pq p

9.

<->

~ |

& ~~

pq p

10.

<->

~ |

& ~~

pq pq

And that's the tree, which gives ~(p & q) <-> (~p) | (~q) (one of De Morgan's laws), which is the desired translation. The reverse procedure is equally easy.

Belated Valentine to readers

1. Go to this site;

2. Type or paste text below and hit return.

plot (x^2+y^2-1)^3-x^2*y^3=0

E Pluribus We Trust

The House Resolution 13 "reaffirms 'In God We Trust' as the official motto of the United States." I'm confused, which is probably the result of my profound ignorance with respect to the rules governing official mottos. Can there be more than one official motto? Are there degrees to how official a motto can be? If so, is the top tier of officiality reserved for just one motto?

I thought E pluribus unum was the US motto. You know, e pluribus, out of many, as in out of those who trust in God and those who do not, one.

That motto is clearly just fantasy. So is "In God We Trust" though. Does it matter which fantasy is the official one? Depends on who takes it seriously.

Congressman Joe Wilson, how does your brain not explode?

Here's a quote from an op-ed for the Aiken Standard written by Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC):

Last month, the Department of the Navy announced its decision to locate F-35 Joint Strike Fighter squadrons out of the Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort installation. This will result in the creation of 1,532 military jobs with an additional 200 jobs being created in the private sector.

Then, few sentences later, he asserts:

The federal government should not be growing when so many Americans are out of work.

Huh? I mean, does he listen to himself, or what's his problem? Last time I checked, the Department of the Navy was the federal government. So when the Department of the Navy puts new F-35 Joint Fighter squadrons somewhere, what we see is the federal government growing, Mr. Congressman Wilson. But you've just said that this "will result in the creation of 1,532 military jobs," Mr. Congressman Wilson. So how can you also say that federal government should not be growing in times of unemployment? Do you even understand what you're saying? Like here, for example:

Gone are the days of failed Stimulus Plans that only led to higher unemployment rates, the loss of 1.8 million jobs in the private sector, and increases in the federal deficit to over $14 trillion.

What exactly is the economic difference between the government employing people to fix bridges versus to fly F-35 fighter jets? Wait, I think I know the answer to that one. The latter happened in your Congressional District. So why not be honest and just write:

When so many Americans from my Congressional District are out of work, the federal government should be growing only there and nowhere else, so that they keep voting me into the House.

For those seeking further amusement, here's what Rep. Joe Wilson said after House passed a bill repealing Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act:

We just repealed Obamacare!

It must be strange to live in Joe Wilson's world, where when the military sets up a new fighter plane base it doesn't mean that the federal government is growing, and where passing a meaningless bill which in the current political situation has absolutely no chance of becoming new law means that you've enacted new law.

The modelers' oath: 'First, Do No Harm' should mean 'Beware Type I Error'

I want to come back to the "model makers' Hippocratic Oath," mainly to talk about what I think it's missing. Take a look at this item: "I understand that my work may have enormous effects on society and the economy, many of them beyond my comprehension." What bothers me about it is that it highlights the fact that the whole oath is self-contradictory: a modeler who does actually understand that her work may have enormous effects on society and the economy would write a completely different one. Let me explain.

The oath I quote has been written by people who develop models with the purpose that they be used to inform actual real-world decisions, but it reads like rules of ethical conduct for academics. And there's a difference. In the world of academia, where there's no central authority deciding which models are to be used and which are to be discarded, and where the criteria for judging models are (at least in theory) purely epistemic, a model can (in expectation) do no harm. Not so in the applied world. The most important thing an applied modeler needs to worry about is the ration of the expected costs of a type I versus a Type II error. (With respect to models, a type I error would be using a model when it's wrong, and a Type II error would be not using a model when it's right.) This is because whenever real-life decisions are made based on models, a Type I error is for some reason much more likely than a Type II one. It's probably tied to the "do something" cognitive bias that we have: whenever a crisis situation arises, we feel like changing the status quo is always better than doing nothing, no matter what the change may be. "I know this performance measure may be imperfect, but do you have a better one?" But Type I error can have disastrous consequences. Up until the 20th century, someone who became seriously ill was more likely to die if he followed a doctor's advice than if he did not; yet doctors were not changing their practices. Why? "I know it may sound crazy to drain your blood with leeches when you have pneumonia, but do you have a better cure?" It would of course be optimal if humankind understood that sometimes a better cure is no cure at all, but since that's not happening anytime soon, it's better if cure-makers adjust their behavior to the constraints as they currently are. To sum up, then, the single most important rule for an applied model maker should be this:

I will only reveal my model to those with power to apply it if I think the costs of a Type II error are much, much greater than the costs of a Type I error.

If you do not think that's the case, keep your model off the streets. (This doesn't mean you have to burn it. You can just keep it in academic journals where it will do no harm.)

One philosopher to rule them all

Who was (is) the greatest philosopher of all time? (I know, the question is completely useless and quite possibly meaningless. Still, I think it's a bit entertaining.) Depending on who we classify as a philosopher, it's either impossibly hard or ridiculously easy. Was Bertrand Russell a philosopher or a mathematician (or logician, or whatever)? How about Gottlob Frege? Charles Sanders Peirce? Alfred Tarski? Ludwig Wittgenstein? If they were all philosophers, I can't decide. If none of them were, the answer is David Hume, hands down, not even a contest.

Trading one fantasy for another

I found this via Andrew Gelman's blog:

Emanuel Derman and Paul Wilmott wonder how to get their fellow modelers to give up their fantasy of perfection. In a Business Week article they proposed, not entirely in jest, a model makers' Hippocratic Oath:

• I will remember that I didn't make the world and that it doesn't satisfy my equations.
• Though I will use models boldly to estimate value, I will not be overly impressed by mathematics.
• I will never sacrifice reality for elegance without explaining why I have done so. Nor will I give the people who use my model false comfort about its accuracy. Instead, I will make explicit its assumptions and oversights.
• I understand that my work may have enormous effects on society and the economy, many of them beyond my comprehension.

Maybe it's just me, but the credo sounds a bit self-flattering. If the modelers are indeed trying to give up the fantasy of perfection, they are certainly willing to replace it with the fantasy of self-importance.

How governments differ from people: Defaulting on some of their obligations can actually increase their creditworthiness

Blogger Matt Yglesias, writing about Sen. Pat Toomey's (R-PA) proposal of legislation that would require the Treasury to make interest payments on our debt its first priority in the event that the debt ceiling is not raised, concludes:

Now of course this is nonetheless a kind of default. A person whose creditworthiness is above question meets all his financial obligations. Another kind of person might manage to stay current on his mortgage and make minimum credit card payments while leaving utility bills unpaid and welching on sundry promises to friends and business associates. That’s not grounds for foreclosure, but obviously it’s going to hurt your standing as a borrower.

As Paul Krugman likes to say, not only is this untrue, it's the exact opposite of truth. The very reason that we may one day have trouble rolling over our debt to foreign entities is because everyone and their mother knows that what Toomey is proposing can never, ever possibly happen. The day that most analysts conclude that the US government cannot possibly meet all of its financial obligations, our foreign creditors will immediately stop buying T-bills because in the event of a US government default, interest payments will be the first thing to go. And conversely: if the US somehow became a dictatorship, and its government became more dependent on foreign money than political support of domestic voters, its creditworthiness in the eyes of China would increase, because what Sen. Toomey is talking about would in that situation actually be possible.