Yikes, Europe

(I took these numbers from Megan McArdle, though she is not the original source. I forget who the source is.)

Because it lies

Some excerpts from an interesting essay:

On Nov. 21, Newt Gingrich, who is leading the race for the Republican presidential nomination in some polls, attacked the Congressional Budget Office. In a speech in New Hampshire, Mr. Gingrich said the C.B.O. “is a reactionary socialist institution which does not believe in economic growth, does not believe in innovation and does not believe in data that it has not internally generated.”  

[...] 

Mr. Gingrich has long had special ire for the C.B.O. because it has consistently thrown cold water on his pet health schemes, from which he enriched himself after being forced out as speaker of the House in 1998. In 2005, he wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Times berating the C.B.O., then under the direction of Mr. Holtz-Eakin, saying it had improperly scored some Gingrich-backed proposals. At a debate on Nov. 5, Mr. Gingrich said, “If you are serious about real health reform, you must abolish the Congressional Budget Office because it lies.” 

This is typical of Mr. Gingrich’s modus operandi. He has always considered himself to be the smartest guy in the room and long chaffed at being corrected by experts when he cooked up some new plan, over which he may have expended 30 seconds of thought, to completely upend and remake the health, tax or education systems.

Because Mr. Gingrich does know more than most politicians, the main obstacles to his grandiose schemes have always been Congress’s professional staff members, many among the leading authorities anywhere in their areas of expertise. To remove this obstacle, Mr. Gingrich did everything in his power to dismantle Congressional institutions that employed people with the knowledge, training and experience to know a harebrained idea when they saw it. When he became speaker in 1995, Mr. Gingrich moved quickly to slash the budgets and staff of the House committees, which employed thousands of professionals with long and deep institutional memories.

Note that all this love is coming from Bruce Bartlett, who served as a policy analyst in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations.

Bad logic, but good game theoory

John D. Cook writes:

Ad hominem arguments are bad logic, but good (Bayesian) statistics. A statement isn’t necessarily false because it comes from an unreliable source, though it is more likely to be false. (...) Some people are much more likely to know what they’re talking about than others, depending on context. You’re more likely to get good medical advice from a doctor than from an accountant, though the former may be wrong and the latter may be right.

This is true, but I don't think it's the most important reason why ad hominem arguments persist. After all, they are used also (and perhaps mostly) against reliable sources of information. The reason is game theory. Most interactions we face are signaling games of partial conflict. We talk not just to transmit information, but also to influence other people's beliefs and actions in ways that are beneficial to us. We talk to persuade more than to inform. (Of course, communicating information is a necessary condition of persuasion. You cannot persuade anyone by talking to them if they do not understand what you're saying. Language could not evolve if all human interactions were zero-sum--there wouldn't be enough coordination to establish a common understanding of messages.) Persuasion consists of sending messages of the form "given your preferences, you should do X because Y." The logical validity of such message is of course completely independent of the sender's identity; however, the truth value of the conclusion (that doing X is good for you) is not. If someone gives you a logical argument for why it's good for you to do X, it's perfectly rational for you to wonder why they want you to believe that. Perhaps it's good for them, not so much for you. In other words, it matters who it is that's telling you this, for strategic reasons. Their preferences are relevant information in terms of assessing the likelihood of the conclusion being true.

What separates ad hominem as good game theory from ad hominem as fallacy is whether you're using information about sender's identity to update your beliefs about truth value of the conclusion or about validity of the argument. Here's an example. Suppose you are a (benevolent and completely ignorant) dictator of a medium-sized country. You wonder if establishing minimum wage requirements would help low-skilled workers and, in the process of your wondering, you ask the opinion of an expert economist. The expert comes back to you with the standard microeconomic theory argument that enforcing a minimum wage higher than the market rate increases unemployment among low-skilled workers. You then find out that your expert owns a whole bunch of enterprises that depend on low-skilled labor. It's logically valid and perfectly rational for you to use that information to postpone your decision with respect to the minimum wage (for example, until you get more opinions from experts who have no stakes in the conclusion). But, it's a fallacy if that information causes you to conclude that microeconomic theory is wrong.

Copy/improve/paste part 2

This is part two of the series about great songs with even better covers. It's another instance of a cover that does everything more or less the same as the original. The original being:

I know to some readers it will seem like heresy to think any cover of this song is better than the original, but in this case I am a heretic. No, I don't mean Fiona Apple's version, but hold that sigh of relief: I like Rufus Wainwright's one.

Department of civil engineering

An annoying feature of policy debates: Arguing over issues which are, for all practical purposes, inherently quantitative, as though they were qualitative. For example, we can't have laws that set this or that limiting condition because laws can't "draw completely arbitrary lines in the sand". Sure they can. They have to. How does one deal with issues now dealt with legal concepts of, for example, age of consent or maximum speed limit, without being arbitrary? Here's another one I love: We can't do this because that's "civil engineering". Well, so are stop signs. The entire civil code is an exercise in civil engineering. So is criminal code.

The questions of whether or not we want laws that use arbitrary limits, or whether or not we accept social engineering, are just a waste of time. There's no real choice there. The meaningful questions are where we want to draw this or that arbitrary line, or how we want our civil engineering done in this or that case.

On dreaming

In 2000, the great musician John Fahey (1939-2001) released a collection of autobiographical stories called How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life. I love that title, mostly because of what it's not: it's not How The Lifestyle of a Bluegrass Musician Destroyed My Life or How Drinking Destroyed My Bluegrass Career or whatever. No; it says what it says--that it was the very act of pursuing his dream, not the costs associated with it, that destroyed his life.

It bears remembering that it's John Fahey saying this, so it can't be dismissed as just another case of someone who's delusional and wastes his life trying to become great at something he has no talent towards. Fahey was an incredibly talented musician, and a reasonably successful one as well. Given how great he was at his music, it's hard to believe that there was anything else he could be even better at. Music was his true calling. Following his true calling ruined his life. Despite what your guidance counselor told you, this can happen.

Copy/improve/paste

I want to write a few posts in which I'll show some music clips of original songs together with their covers. The idea is I'll post songs I really like a whole lot which nonetheless have covers that I like even more.

To start it off, here's an old (1970) song called Planet Caravan by Black Sabbath.

A very good song and I've always loved it. So when I heard its 1994 cover by (an otherwise dreadful) band Pantera, I was surprised by how much better it became.

This is an example of a cover that's better even though it's very close to the original; but it's not always the case. I'll post some superior covers that sound almost like the original (only better), as well as some that sound nothing like the source.

Inflation in the ancient world

In The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts there's a room with an impressive collection of artifacts from ancient Greece and Rome. One of the more interesting of those is a collection of coins minted by rulers of various ancient city-states as well as Roman and Byzantine emperors. There are about thirty coins ordered chronologically in a single row, and as soon as you see it you think, how's that for inflation. As you move forward in time, the coins get progressively smaller and show more visible signs of corrosion. In the younger coins, the corrosion also gets greener, suggesting that the proportion of copper used to make the coins was getting larger. Here's what the oldest coins looked like:

And here are the youngest ones:

Of course, all this could just be coincidence, or bias, either in the sample or in my perception (since they once taught me in school there was massive inflation in the latest years of the Roman empire). Who cares; it's much more fun to think it is what I think it is.

Here's my plan people

This is Newt Gingrich's answer to the question of what type of measures he would adopt after repealing President Obama's healthcare plan:

One, you go back to a doctor-patient relationship and you involve the family in those periods where the patient by themselves can't make key decisions. But you relocalize it. Two, as several people said, including Gov. (Rick) Perry, you put Medicaid back at the state level. Three, you focus very intensely on a brand-new program on brain science, because the fact is the largest single out-year set of costs we are faced with are Alzheimer's, autism, Parkinson's, mental health and things which come directly from the brain. And I am for fixing our health rather than fixing our health bureaucracy, because the iron lung is the perfect model of saving people so you don't need to pay for a federal program of iron lung centers because the polio vaccine eliminated the problem.

There you have it, folks. A concise, coherent and well thought-out plan. If you live on Planet Gibberish, that is. I know you'll wonder where I've been for the past two decades but... is this guy for real?

Just because there's a "=" in it doesn't mean it's an equation

Note: One of the reasons for writing this post was to test CodeCogs Online LaTeX Equation Editor as a way of posting LaTeX on Blogger. As you'll see, it actually works (it's not the first thing I've tried, believe me).

A popular science magazine Wired recently featured an interesting blog post briefly introducing 9 Equations True Geeks Should (at Least Pretend to) Know. Of course, the list starts off with Euler's identity

which is often described as "the most beautiful formula ever". Then there's also Boltzmann's entropy formula (engraved on his tombstone):

where k is supposed to be Boltzmann's constant and W is "the number of microstates corresponding to a given macrostate," whatever that means.

Which brings me to my to my next point: After reading the post, you won't really be able to pretend to know those nine equations. The more complicated ones don't even come with explanations of what their terms are (not like it's even plausible to give those explanations in a blog post). For example, if you're not a physicist, stare for a bit at Schroedinger's wave equation and then tell me how you'd go about "pretending to know it":

Piece of cake, right? There's, like, a partial derivative in there, and a second-order one as well. And apparently it has something to do with waves. What, did you ask me what that m term stands for? Well, it's physics, right, so it's probably mass... Or something. Anyway, like I said it's about waves.

Number eight on the list of nine is particularly puzzling. All it says is

where R-nought denotes the average number of people an individual infected with a pathogen will go on to infect. If that R-nought thing is less then one, the disease will die out; if it's greater than one, it will spread.

My problem with equation number eight is that it's not an equation. (If what you're thinking at this moment is something along the lines of "Well duh, of course it's not an equation, it's an inequality," please stop reading this now and just go away. I don't care that it's not literally an equation. If they threw in Bell's inequality there, I wouldn't have a problem with it.) The thing is that the remaining eight equations are something qualitatively different than this one. It's more or less the difference between equality and assignment in computer programming. The other equations (or inequalities) are logical statements; the "=" sign in them is a predicate which can be either true or false. "R-nought is greater than one" is not a logical statement; it's an assignment of a range of values to a parameter. What's funny is that the whole statement "If R-nought is greater than one then the disease will spread" actually is (kind of) an equation.

Respect my analysis!

Here's something quite amusing: a blog post (in Polish) written by an active politician and political science PhD, with some quantitative analysis of the situation in Sejm (a Polish equivalent of the House of Representatives) after recent elections. Or something the author thinks is analysis anyway.

Because he's all analytic and quantitative, the author kicks things off with a graph:

which he explains as follows: "The above graph depicts the distribution of power in Sejm. The percentages shown on the graph are percentages of seats belonging to each party."

So far, so good. Nothing inherently wrong with the graph itself (except maybe for labels; do we really need precision of two decimal places when talking about percentages of parliament seats?) It's the conclusions he draws from this graph that decidedly move his post from merely trivial to utterly ridiculous. He writes:

What are the implications of the above graph? 

First, the overwhelming advantage of PO. Even when compared to the largest opposition party (PiS), PO seems extremely powerful.

All this may very well be true, but it definitely is not a consequence of "the above graph". To make these kinds of conclusions we'd need to know many things that the graph doesn't tell us, like what kind of majority is needed to do what (do you just need plurality? Simple majority? Qualified majority? Maybe it depends on what you're voting on?), or what the likelihood of many possible coalitions is. For example, what if you need more than 50% of seats to do anything at all, and all the other parties hate PO and will never vote with them? Where's the overwhelming advantage?

But that's not all.

Second, the central position of PO. This party not only has the most seats, but is also situated in the most comfortable spot--the very center.

Oh god, where do I start. What is he talking about here, what does "central position" mean? In the center of what? The way he explained the graph, it is a visualization of one variable only: percent of parliament seats. Now he's talking as though the X axis measured another variable, the values of which are used to establish a linear order among parties. What is that variable? Why is is it not explained and why is the axis not labeled? Because according to the explanation, there is no such variable, so if I decide to order parties alphabetically by name, I'll be equally justified in claiming that PO has very little room for maneuver because it's second from the left.

They wouldn't do that, would they?

Let's start off the blog's new incarnation with a fresh installment of the Non Sequitur of the Month.

The largest oppisition party in Poland, called Law and Justice, has recently put forward a vague proposal of a new tax which they call "banking tax". No details are available, but judging from media rumors, it's essentially supposed to be some sort of tax on financial transactions. Predictably, the proposal has been criticized on the grounds that, contrary to Law and Justice's rhetoric, this new tax will be a burden not only on rich financial executives, but also on ordinary customers of banking institutions, since those institutions will most likely respond by raising prices of their services.

Now for the non sequitur part. In a TV interview, Law and Justice's press spokesman responded to this criticism by saying that the whole argument is a "myth," and that the critics must not really trust free markets as much as they say they do because if we have free markets in the banking sector, then banks have to compete for customers and will therefore not try to shift the burden of the new tax on them.

This is exactly like saying that the belief that an increase in world prices of crude oil will drive up prices of gas at the pump is a "myth". After all, car fuel is sold on a free market by multiple distributors who have to compete for customers.

The beauty of this argument is that it's such a pure example of a non sequitur: the conclusion does not follow from the premise. If the Polish banking sector is indeed a competitive free market, then prices of banking services are always equal to their marginal costs. A new tax on a service increases its marginal cost. The end.

Back

Apologies to my readers for taking down my blog from its previous URL without explanation or notice. The cause of this was some sort of a blogger interface glitch that came up completely out of the blue and that I wasn't able to fix. Thus I've resorted to plan B, which was uploading the backup of my blog to a new location, which is right here. There was some loss of information in the process; I've lost quite a few of the most current posts and comments which for some reason did not back up correctly, plus a library of links that my blog used to feature. The last part is all my fault; I didn't keep a separate file with those links. Instead I kept them as part of an XML file with the entire layout of my blog, and now I am of course unable to restore it. Eventually all those links will be back.

Anyway, it's good to be back. I'll keep on trying to stun you with some more non sequiturs.