Teeming Multitudes

The Ordinary Mysteries of Life

2012-01-27T04:29:00.000-08:00

Spoiler alert: If you have not watched The Descendents, and are planning to do so, this blog post gives the game away. And this post will make much more sense if you have seen that movie.

Alain de Botton believes that secular museums get it wrong when they exhibit religious art. For the people who created these works, and the audiences they had in mind, these were more than works of art. By arranging their exhibits purely in terms of their place in the history of the art, the museums lose the opportunity to communicate the real meaning of these works

Christianity, by contrast, never leaves us in any doubt about what art is for: it is a medium to teach us how to live, what to love and what to be afraid of. Such art is extremely simple at the level of its purpose, however complex and subtle it is at the level of its execution. Christian art amounts to a range of geniuses saying such incredibly basic but extremely vital things as: "Look at that picture of Mary if you want to remember what tenderness is like"; "Look at that painting of the cross if you want a lesson in courage"; "Look at that Last Supper to train yourself not to be a coward and a liar".

When I first saw it, I thought the recent movie The Descendents is a fine example of such art, which shows us how to live. It is a classic morality play. The main character is Matt King, an everyman hero, a man who learns after his wife's death that she had been betraying him, and struggles to protect his children and bring them back together into a family. We watch him being challenged repeatedly, and see him respond with modest grace. There are many other characters, but King is in every single scene, and the story is about him and how he restores peace to his life. I felt for him throughout the movie, and wanted him to find happiness.

However, is he a good man? Would Alain consider his behavior a good model for others? King's wife might have disagreed; after all, she cheated on him and was planning to ask him for a divorce. His father in law doesn't seem to hold him in any high regard. At least one of his friends blames him for his wife's straying. When he learns that his wife was sleeping with another man, his response is to seek out that man, to give him a chance to see her one last time before her death. Who does that? A gentle man, or a weak one?

He is instinctively conservative. Born into great wealth, he chose to do nothing with it, and lives on what he earns as a lawyer. He did not buy his wife the boat she craved, but there is no sign that he intends to use his money at all, whether for great purposes or trivial. He is the sole trustee of a vast family estate on Hawaii, and has to decide what to do with it before the trust expires in seven years. The laws against perpetuities are intended to protect the living from the whims of the dead: property which has been inherited in trust should be employed as the living wish to use it. However, there is no sign that he feels burdened: all he wants is for that land to remain as it is, another thing which he does not wish to use or change.

He was unable to handle the two women in his life. He took refuge in his work to avoid his wife, and sent his daughter away to an institute for troubled girls. When his wife dies, and he learns that she had been planning to leave him, he seems to spend very little time wondering why. The movie ends with him and his two daughters on a couch, watching a documentary on TV.

So, is The Descendents the story of a fine, modest man who responds with charity and generosity to the pain he has to suffer? Or is it the tale of an emotionally cramped, over-cautious man, whose self-isolation brings disaster on himself and his family, and who seems to have learnt nothing from the experience? Dear Reader, you will not be surprised to know that I believe the answer to my question is "both, and neither". Even if it is the latter, we have to empathize. This man is suffering. He may not be an actively good man, but he means no harm, and is certainly not an actively bad one. If he has a fault, it is that he is passive. Certainly I appreciate the pleasures of a quiet life. Without a clue to his motivations, his behavior is hopelessly ambiguous. A good man, and a weak one, can be hard to tell apart: the movie makes that point very well.

The director has achieved this effect artfully, by what he has left out. There are no clues which can help us resolve the uncertainty about his character. There are no flashbacks. The main character does not confide his thoughts to a diary; he does not have an extended conversation with a friend of family member; he does not confess to a priest. There are no soliloquies: there is only one episode where the director allows King to address the audience directly. We observe his behavior, and infer his character, as we do with most of the people we know in the real world. This is what I like best about this movie: the director uses the resources of the cinema to show us everything, and yet leave us wondering who it was we were watching all along. In the end, King remains a mystery. The director is not writing an abstract treatise on how to live. He is showing us the ordinary miseries of a particular man's life, and won't let us draw any lessons from it.

Alain de Botton may be correct when he says that the original intent of Christian art was propaganda: to shows how to live a Christian life. He may also be correct that this art served to console and guide the viewer, and that it could still serve that purpose for some of us. I doubt we need reassurance and help any less than those who lived five hundred years ago. However, I wonder if their art is what we can draw any consolation from that art , if we no longer believe what those who created those works believed. They lived in a hierarchical, ordered world with God everywhere, where man's duty was ordained by the place assigned to him by heaven.

Many of us live in a world without any signs to guide us. When Alain De Botton asks us to look to the great masters for lessons in how to live, he is reducing the possible range of reactions we can have to that art: he assumes that there is only one possible response. When we look at St Catherine, we are required to view it as a lesson in how to face death fearlessly, but why should we see it as that? And if we do, can we not seek out other teachers from whom we can learn the same lesson?

Consider the story of Petronius. When the "arbiter of elegance" at the court of Nero fell under Imperial suspicion, he committed suicide.

He did not fling away his life with precipitate haste, but having made an incision in his veins and then, according to his humor, bound them up, he again opened them, while he conversed with his friends, but not in a serious strain or on topics that might win for him the glory of courage. And he listened to them as they repeated, not thoughts on the immortality of the soul or on the theories of philosophers, but light poetry and playful verses. To some of his slaves he gave liberal presents, a flogging to others. He dined and indulged himself in sleep, that death, though forced on him, might have a natural appearance.

To him, his death was as inconsequential as his life was frivolous. He was fearless in death, but his manner of dying was as different as possible from that of the Christian martyrs. Which is better at helping us find meaning in life and courage in the face of death? For some of us secular modernists, both are too alien to be of any use at all. We are no longer able to seek lessons from art because, for us, art is another ambiguous element of an already illegible world.

How do you know you have a brain?

2012-01-24T09:11:00.000-08:00

RJ Lipton posts at Godel's Lost Letter about the use of slime molds for computation. They are

no more than a bag of amoebae encased in a thin slime sheath, yet they manage to have various behaviors that are equal to those of animals who possess muscles and nerves with ganglia — that is, simple brains.

Scientists have been using slime molds to model various situations, and have been able to demonstrate that they come up with interesting "answers"

One of the driving forces behind the new computational interest in slime molds is a seminal experiment performed by Atsushi Tero of Hokkaido University. He grew the mold Physarum polycephalum on a standard dish, but placed both attractors and obstacles on the dish. The attractors were food—oat flakes if you must know—and the obstacles were bright light. The mold is attracted to food—who is not?—but is camera shy and tries to avoid bright light. Tero for fun arranged the attractors and obstacles to model the major centers in the Greater Tokyo Area. The mold initially filled the whole dish, but over time evolved into a network that connected the centers in a way that closely approximated the actual Tokyo rail system.

No single cell is "aware" of anything except its immediate environment, and yet the creature quickly converges on a particular configuration. Of course, life is full of such phenomena. A single-celled embryo in a reasonably hospitable environment quickly arrives at a "solution": a functioning adult. An adult body which manages to continue to function through all the insults life throws at it.

Or our brains. Like every other part of our bodies, it is descended from the original embryo. At no point is any neuron aware of anything more than its immediate surroundings, and yet the whole organ is capable of rich behavior. Even more impressive is how robust it (and the human body in general) is. The various parts of our bodies vary significantly from one person to another, and yet they are able to work together, to the point where people can have their viscera on the wrong side of the body, and never come to know it.

Bradley Voytek over at Oscillatory Thoughts blogged a fantastic, mind-blowing post about the incredible resilience of the human brain: "Why we don't need a brain". Most of the rest of this post simply plagiarizes what he has written.

He describes a case reported by Professor John Lorber, and includes the CT scan published with the study.

There's a young student at this university... who has an IQ of 126, has gained a first-class honors degree in mathematics, and is socially completely normal. And yet the boy has virtually no brain.

To be more exact

To put this in perspective, at its largest parts, this boy's brain was still only half the size of a normal brain. Total volume appears to be well below that.

Voytek rejects Lorber's theory that this indicates enormous redundancy in the human brain. The question he asks is simple: given what we know about the terrible consequences suffered by victims of stroke, how could this boy be so normal in all important respects?

He then describes another case ( "How much brain is really necessary" ) published by Distelmaier: a young girl born with hydrocephalus that caused a severely underdeveloped brain. Surgeons treated the hydrocephalus with a shunt to remove fluid, and the result was that, at 20 months, her cerebral and cerebellar hemispheres had managed to do quite a bit of catching up and, as he puts it:

At 34 months the authors performed a followup neurodevelopmental examination of the girl. Although she had some developmental delay (particularly motor problems), she appeared to be socially and cognitively well off, especially considering where she started!

He ends with a paper by Desmurget, Bonnetblanc, and Duffau ( "Contrasting acute and slow-growing lesions: a new door to brain plasticity" )

Desmurget and pals were basically trying to reconcile some strange clinical observations: if a patient has a stroke to an "eloquent" part of the brain (basically neurosurgeon-speak for language or motor cortex), there are clear behavioral deficits. That is, damage to eloquent cortex causes speech problems or paralysis/hemiparesis.
Paradoxically, however, patients with low-grade gliomas (a type of brain cancer), could undergo surgical removal of large parts of brain tissue in the eloquent cortex without any noticeable behavioral consequences.

The reason appears to be that a stroke is practically instantaneous. A glioma grows over the years, and can become enormous. In the meantime, however, the brain adapts, other parts of the brain take over from the damaged areas, and when the surgeons come along and excise the growth, the consequences for the person are relatively minor. You can recover from enormous damage to your brain, provided it happens slowly enough.

I obviously find this simply wonderful. How, as some brain tissue dies off, other parts take over and ensure that the organism is able to function. This is a kind of computational problem, similar to that of the slime molds, and I guess the organ solves it by using feedback from the external world to train itself. I assume something similar happens during the "critical period" for vision.

This is all computation of a kind. However, this is obviously very different from how our computers work today, though the Internet, and other more robust networks of computers do show similar capabilities. Fascinating, but I don't know enough about the subject. Time to get a copy of Lewis Wolpert?

Role Playing

2012-01-21T06:18:00.000-08:00

I recently came across this blog post by Eli Dourado, in which he quotes the book Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse. I will quote the whole passage, because it is necessary to read it all, to understand the point it is making.

Seriousness is always related to roles, or abstractions. We are likely to be more serious with police officers when we find them uniformed and performing their mandated roles than when we find them in the process of changing into their uniforms. Seriousness always has to do with an established script, an ordering of affairs completed somewhere outside the range of our influence. We are playful when we engage others at the level of choice, when there is no telling in advance where our relationship with them will come out—when, in fact, no one has an outcome to be imposed on the relationship, apart from the decision to continue it.

To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as though nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful with each other we relate as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise; everything that happens is of consequence. It is, in fact, seriousness that closes itself to consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself.

I thought of this passage the next day, as I was being inspected by security before I entered the office building: that sense of playing a role according to an unwritten script was suddenly very palpable. Isn't this the point of all ritual, whether in a courtroom or a church? To exclude the possibility of surprise?

The story SOPA

2012-01-20T10:03:00.000-08:00

The big story in recent days has been the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), and how various important sites on the Internet have shut down to protest these bills. I'm strongly opposed to these bills, but I've not been following the story very closely because I find it implausible that such radical legislation will pass, when so many powerful corporations are arrayed against it.

Of the little I've read, three pieces have made an impression. None of these are particularly original, but two of them are well expressed, and thought provoking. The third is not.

Over at The Leisure of the Theory Class, Eran Shmaya writes

But what about protection of “intellectual property” ? Clearly this is not a necessary condition for a civil society. It’s also not a necessary condition for production of knowledge and culture. We had Plato and Archimedes and Cicero and Shakespeare and Newton before it occurred to anybody that Bob has to get Alice’s permission to reproduce a code that Alice wrote.

This seems correct to me. As the Economists would say, knowledge is non-rivalous, even if it is (with the help of the law!) excludable. Jefferson put it much more elegantly when he wrote to McPherson.

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

We want to reward people who create new knowledge and art, and to encourage them in their work. We create this artificial form of property so that those who use their work repay them some part of the value they receive.

And Eran is right when he writes that

I realize some people lose their job because of online piracy. Also, Some people lost their jobs following the introduction of ATMs. But we view ATMs as positive development since it made a certain service way cheaper. My guess is that the same is true about intellectual piracy — it makes distribution of culture and knowledge cheaper and therefore makes also the production of culture and knowledge cheaper. True, some companies, particularly the established ones, are damaged by intellectual theft. Other companies, particularly startups, benefit.

Intellectual property, like other forms of property, is a form of protection offered by society because its benefits outweigh the costs. All forms of property are artifical, of course. If the same piece of land could be used by any number of people, each in their own way without any causing any inconvenience to others who wish to use the same piece of land, we wouldn't allow anyone to own land either.

Eli Dourado blogs

There are a positive number of murders each year. If we put more resources into investigating and prosecuting murders, there would be fewer murders. Nevertheless, it is not at all clear that we are spending too little on murder. The optimal number of murders is positive, not zero. The best policy with respect to murder is to try to maximize the net benefits of the policy, not to minimize murders.

OK, with you so far.

Suppose a new technology were introduced that made it easy to get away with murder (e.g., David Friedman’s plan for Murder Incorporated). This technology makes it extremely costly, though, say, not impossible, to stop murders from occurring. What happens to the optimal amount of murder enforcement? The amount that must be spent to deter each murder has gone up, so the price of deterrence has gone up. Consequently, society should aim to deter fewer murders. Under some extreme circumstances, we might even be better off if murder were legalized (and if people were advised to just be more polite to each other).

Similarly, whatever your prior belief about copyright enforcement, the Internet has made it easier to get away with copyright infringement. The amount that must be spent to deter each instance of copyright infringement has increased. Consequently, society should aim to deter fewer instances of copyright infringement, not more instances as SOPA supporters advocate.

This seems logical to me, and the extension to copyright law follows immediately. It is much more costly to enforce copyright law in the age of the Internet, which means that we should try less, not more.

However, the commentators on his blog had a good point to make: this is true only if the benefits of deterring murder (or copyright violation) are constant. If the costs go up, and the benefits go up too, it is no longer clear what we should do.

As Zac Gochenour wrote in the comments

Put another way, to use your murder example, the cost of a small amount of murders is relatively low as long as people can more or less go about their lives normally without living in constant fear of murder. In the extreme, if murder became cheap and rampant, the survival of the species might literally depend on ending murder, in which case we might dedicate a lot of resources to stop it. Just think of the “DC Sniper” from a few years back: people were afraid to even leave the house, so the social cost of murder had risen drastically (so it made more sense to stop it).

But then

Enough devil’s advocacy. I would respond thusly: copyright infringement is getting cheaper (information wants to be free) at the same time that the benefits of a larger public domain are getting greater (see Benkler’s “The Wealth of Networks”) and it seems clear that if not now, then soon, the net benefit of even a token amount of copyright protection will be negative. So not only has the cost of enforcement gone up (meaning we should invest less in enforcement as you describe) but the benefit of enforcement has actually declined sharply as well.

Greg Mankiw's blog post struck me for different reasons. He is the most distinguished (or at least the most famous) of these three writers. His post is also the most badly thought out, and poorly argued.

The anti-SOPA crowd argues that this is a matter of basic liberty. But it's not. In a free society, you don't have the freedom to steal your neighbor's property. And that should include intellectual property. Moreover, it is the function of the state to enforce those rights. We don't leave it up to civil litigation to protect property rights (although that is part of the solution). We give the state substantial powers to stop theft. Just as owners of tangible personal property have good cause to call for a police force and a system of criminal courts, owners of intellectual property have good cause to ask the state to stop those who would infringe on their rights.

For this level of analysis, you don't need a Harvard Economics professor who used to chair the Council of Economic Advisors. Your garden variety drunken uncle can do as well.

I wonder if the next paragraph from his post explains why he holds this view better than any Economic theory of public goods could

This is an important economic issue for the United States. We are large producers of intellectual property: movies, novels, software, video games, TV shows, and even economics textbooks.

Emphasis added. He ends his piece by firing a salvo of platitides at the reader

Believers in free enterprise, property rights, and economic liberty should be among the most vocal advocates of laws to stop intellectual piracy.

I have no reason to quote him here, except that I found his piece startling crude and pointless, and it seems I am not the only one to feel this way. Over on Twitter, it seems both Matt Yglesias and Modelled Behavior agree.

Money

2012-01-17T08:47:00.000-08:00

Pretentious title notwithstanding, John Medaille has written a very nice article about David Graeber's new book Debt: the first 5000 years.

I loved this story he tells

On his 21st birthday, the nature writer Francis Thompson was presented by his father with a bill for all the expenses of his upbringing including the costs of his birth and delivery. Francis paid the bill, but he never spoke to his father again.

As Medaille writes

There is no doubt that the father was correct to point out to his son the obligation that he had, but in quantifying that obligation, he converted it into a debt, for that is the difference between an obligation and a debt: an obligation becomes a debt when you can put a number on it. “I owe you one” is an obligation; “I owe somebody $10″ is a debt. Obligations bind people together even after they have been “paid.” But debts bind us only for as long as the debt exists. The relationship dies on payment of the debt. We might say that obligations bind us together, while debts drive us apart. By quantifying the obligation, Thompson’s father offered him the opportunity to dissolve it, to discharge it, and in doing so to end their relationship; his son took the offer and was no longer his son.

The story he summarizes is truly extraordinary: from the gift economies of the ancient world through the Shekels of Mesopotamia, through Rome and Medieval England, to today's money.

The whole story of how England stopped using tally sticks was completely new to me.

Tally sticks circulated in England for 500 years. It is worth noting that when the Bank of England was founded, in 1694, one quarter of its capital was in the form of tally sticks. But the bankers wished to monopolize the creation of money, and immediately set out on a long campaign to get the tally sticks outlawed. And they got their wish when the Liberal party came to power in 1832. One of their first acts was to fulfill the agenda of the Bank of England. All of the tally sticks were gathered together and burned in a stove in the House of Lords. However, the fire got out of hand and burned down the Houses of Parliament.

Money involves debt. Debt indeed predates money, and it is obvious that some debts will never be paid. He ends his article with a plea for amnesty, what I gather would be something like the "jubilees" of the ancient Hebrews, but he doesn't explain how he would do this.

Medaille may not be aware that this is essentially what many economists have been arguing for. Inflation is exactly that: a way to reduce the real burden of debt, transferring wealth from the creditors to debtors.

It may seem like a fraud, a kind of theft, but if the debts were incurred with a certain expectation of inflation (which seems plausible), then slow growth and unexpectedly low inflation is only a windfall gain for creditors, and higher inflation merely claws some of those gains back.

To me, that is a secondary point. Graeber's book challenges many of the assumptions we carry around with us. A subject like anthropology provides a valuable service when it looks at how we live today, and says to us "it need not be like this, you know. Other societies, at other times and in other places, have done things differently. We can tell you how some of them worked."

Why did I write this post?

2012-01-17T07:59:00.000-08:00

Over at the Modeled Behavior blog, Karl Smith has written a lovely little post on causation.

As he puts it

Suppose you had figured out actual causation. How would you know?

I was reminded of a (Five year!) old post of mine, quoting a story I read about causation in Dennett's book "Freedom evolves".

Causation is a subtle concept. Experiments don't prove causation (whatever that is) except in the simplest case. We are far too confident that we know what we are talking about.

Deresiewicz on Leadership

2012-01-14T03:31:00.000-08:00

Two fine bloggers have recently quoted William Deresiewicz's article on leadership: John D Cook and Vivek Haldar. I was deeply moved when I first read this article. I have now read it again, and I still think it is a wonderful little essay, an excellent work of inspirational rhetoric. On its substance, though, my feelings are more mixed.

I still agree with much of what he says.

I agree that many of those who are accepted into elite schools are actually meek conformists, who were selected precisely because they jumped through hoops to please their teachers and seniors.

However, I don't think those who did not get into those schools are any better at independent thinking: maybe they simply lacked self discipline.

I agree when he writes that

excellence isn’t usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you.

or that

I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea.

This blog post is an example of that. Maybe I will have a third thought soon, and repudiate what I am now writing. After all, the mind cannot foresee its own future.

I agree with him that leadership requires independent thought. I would add that leadership is for those who have grown accustomed to solitude, who won't crumble at the first sign of being isolated. I also agree that this requires long preparation: a battlefield is no place for philosophy. I agree that we discover what we believe by saying it out loud, to friends who we can trust.

However, Deresiewicz never considers some important questions: What is this leadership? Why do we need it? Why are so many large organizations so inhospitable to independent thought?

There can be good reasons why he wouldn't discuss these questions. He is speaking to young officers, many of whom will soon be going off to war. These deflating questions are hardly what they need as they begin their careers.

This passage, though, makes me wonder if he has ever asked these questions even to himself:

We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them.

It seems to me that Deresiewicz himself is the prisoner of an ideology of leadership, which attributes America's "power and wealth" to leadership. This is pernicious nonsense, which encourages and delusions of grandeur among the powerful.

Leadership is not something you do alone. It is requires other people to allow you to lead. At times of great stress and uncertainty, people who seem to know what to do will attract followers. Independent thinking becomes necessary. When times are good, independent thinking needs to justify itself: the safest thing to do is what has always been done.

Leadership is not only a matter of your traits or behavior. The same behavior may be considered arrogant and obstinate, or decisive and strong-willed, depending on the context. A person may be said to be delusional or visionary, depending on the situation and, above all, on the outcome.

As Joseph Nye notes in this article about charisma, the classic example is Winston Churchill

Followers are more likely to attribute charisma to leaders when they feel a strong need for change, often in the context of a personal, organizational, or social crisis. For example, the British public did not regard Winston Churchill as a charismatic leader in 1939, but, a year later, his vision, confidence, and communication skills gave him charisma, given Britons’ anxiety after the fall of France and the Dunkirk evacuation. And then, in 1945, after the public’s focus had turned from winning the war to constructing a welfare state, Churchill was voted out of office.

He also points out that

Similarly, the business press has described many a CEO as “charismatic” when things are going well, only to withdraw the label when profits fall.

The same man suddenly appears deluded and out of touch. Churchill could have testified that it also works in reverse: during the years before 1939, he was considered obsessive and paranoid for constantly warning of the danger posed by Hitler. Today, we consider him a prophet: that is not what his contemporaries called him.

This is not to say that charisma doesn't exist, or that there are no born leaders. We are attracted by confident people who seem to be in control of the situation. We often lack confidence in our own views, and happily drown our own doubts when faced with the certainties of others.

As Nye writes

Non-verbal signals account for a major part of human communications, and simple experiments have shown that some people communicate non-verbally better than others. For example, a Princeton University study found that when people were shown images of two candidates in unfamiliar elections, they could predict the winners seven times out of ten.

No doubt the leading candidate gains in confidence, and that confidence makes him seem even more dominant, even more assured of victory over his increasingly demoralized opponent, and the voters can probably detect this in their body language, setting up a self-fulfilling expectations of success and failure.

Dan Kahneman describes how he discovered the "illusion of validity" while trying to identify future leaders for the Israeli Army

The stars we saw on the obstacle field were most likely accidental flickers, in which a coincidence of random events — like who was near the wall — largely determined who became a leader. Other events — some of them also random — would determine later success in training and combat.

You may be surprised by our failure: it is natural to expect the same leadership ability to manifest itself in various situations. But the exaggerated expectation of consistency is a common error.

I think Deresiewicz's article is valuable, but not because it shows us how to become leaders. The behaviors he describes may be necessary for leadership, but are certainly not sufficient. Leadership is not necessarily a good thing, and can even be harmful. The worship of leadership can subvert respect for due process and the rights of the little people who come in the way of the visions of great men.

The article is valuable as a reminder of virtues which are worth practicing for their own sake.

The Red Queen is dead

2012-01-11T11:00:00.000-08:00

When I was in my first year of grad school, I read both Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, and Matt Ridley's The Red Queen. They changed the way I saw the world. Back in high school, I had read Milton Friedman's Free to Choose, and it had had a similar effect on my thinking.

As I've grown older, and learned more, I've come to think of these books as perfect examples of the damage a beautiful model can cause to a young, impressionable mind.

The Red Queen applies crystalline logic to the War of the Sexes: pregnancy and child-rearing are expensive and risky for females, but sex is cheap for males. One man can make every woman in the world pregnant, but a woman can have no more than a dozen or so children in her lifetime. The canonical example is Genghis Khan: by some accounts, practically everyone alive today is descended from him. Given these facts, it makes evolutionary sense for men to be promiscuous, but women should be chaste.

The logic is flawless, but how about the premises?

Genghis Khan lived late in our species history. Go back a few thousand years, and practically all of us were hunter-gatherers living in small bands. Any man in these bands who tried to monopolize the women would in short order find a scorpion waiting in his sleeping bag. He would need the help of other men to get anything at all done. A very "successful" man would probably still have many more children than even the most fecund woman, but it is unlikely that men and women differed greatly in the number of children they had. Women could always band together to put any man in his place.

Greg Downey at the PLoS blog Neuroanthropology has published the first of three blog posts about what he calls the "long, slow, sexual revolution". I was very glad to read this, and not only because of the very NSFW video included with the post, nor simply because it introduced me to the delectable Julia Zimero.

Human reality is complicated, and our picture of it needs to be a little messy, a little contingent, too. I no longer think that any aspect of the real world can be understood without data: Nature is far too subtle for our unaided imagination. Einstein would never have thought of Special Relativity without Michelson and Morley. I don't know enough about this topic, but I am looking forward to breaking the ice which has locked my thinking in place for far too long.

Educating the senses

2012-01-10T07:38:00.000-08:00

Resuming the art motif, I liked this sentence from an interview with a musician.

"Art is stuff that teaches you to use your senses"

A very good interview. I don't know if I would consider Laurie Anderson's work to be art, but it makes me uncomfortable, and that must be good.

HT: The Browser

Old books

2012-01-10T06:20:00.000-08:00

William Deresiewicz's speech on Solitude and Leadership, quoted in Vivek Haldar's blog

"...most books are old. This is not a disadvantage: this is precisely what makes them valuable. They stand against the conventional wisdom of today simply because they’re not from today. Even if they merely reflect the conventional wisdom of their own day, they say something different from what you hear all the time."

TS Eliot, quoted by John D Cook in a post on his great blog

"There never was a time when those that read at all, read so many books by living authors rather than books by dead authors. Therefore there was never a time so completely parochial, so completely shut off from the past."

Errol Morris

2012-01-07T23:10:00.000-08:00

I loved The Fog of War.

Jad Adumrad and Paul Kedrosky tweet about a delightful little film by Errol Morris: the Umbrella Man.

Nigel Warbuton tweets about this little video in which Errol Morris talks about how photographs relate to the real world.

Iran in The Atlantic

2012-01-07T21:51:00.000-08:00

A great collection of photos from Iran in the Atlantic, but this one of archer Shiva Mafakheri is stunning.

Picasso: the new Norman Rockwell?

2012-01-07T05:27:00.000-08:00

In my previous post, I compared Norman Rockwell unfavorably to Picasso, Matisse, and Pollock. It is possible to see most Rockwell paintings without really noticing them. They are what we still expect a painting to be. However, the works of Picasso, Matisse, and Pollock still take us by some surprise. A painting is never merely "realistic": the artist must choose what to include, and what to exclude, what to emphasize, and what to downplay. In the case of these artists, it is even more clear that this is what they have done. They do not even pretend to be trying to replicate reality as we see it. Thus, they reinvent the art, and make us pay attention.

In this post, Chris Dillow argues that

the dominant cultural form of late capitalism is pastiche - the soulless imitation of past achievements, devoid of conviction

He uses a musical performance in a "music contest" to illustrate this.

There are good commercial reason for this phenomenon. In this tweet, John D. Cook quotes Stanislav Datskovskiy

Employers much prefer that workers be fungible, rather than maximally productive.

A machine for manufacturing musical stars puts performers on notice that there is an endless supply of singers who could replace them, and so keeps them in their places. Recycling old favorites is cheap and safe: the audience knows what to expect, and don't need to apply themselves to decide whether they like what they are listening to. The supply of music to perform is vastly greater than if the performers had to regularly come up with new works to perform: the writers and composers are shown their places.

However, while I adore Dillow's crabby blogging, I fear this post is not up to his usual standards of rigor. He is right when he says that

On the one hand, growth and profitability requires that culture be commodified. For capitalists, it is useless if we merely contemplate past artistic accomplishments. We must instead buy new ones.

He is simply wrong when he says that

On the other hand, though, capitalism is unable or unwilling to innovate, as the benefits of such innovation cannot be reliably captured**.

Capitalism is capacious enough to contain many contradictions. There are markets for reality shows and televised music contests, but there are also markets for original music. Anthologies are published, but so are new works of fiction and poetry, even experimental ones. Entirely new genres emerge, and some move on to become mainstream. This is almost always the work of young people, who become nicely reactionary once they are middle-aged, and the art of their youth has been installed as the new standard from which any deviation is obvious perversion. If, instead of "capitalism", he had written "corporations", or "large corporations", I would have agreed whole-heartedly.

How is this relevant to the discussion of Picasso, Matisse, Pollock, and Rockwell? Just that the distance between Pollock and Rockwell is not a constant, and is growing smaller with time. Several generations have now grown up with Pollock in the cultural background. We can still find people who find such works meaningless and incomprehensible, who won't be satisfied until painting is indistinguishable from photography, but these painters have become canonical: we can look at their work with pleasure, and without (much) shock. The pleasure is welcome, but the absence of shock means that we are probably no longer seeing what those who first encountered them saw. We have grown habituated, and again need someone to show us how to see. Note: I am obviously no professional art critic, and these are hardly original thoughts. There have obviously been many artists, and schools, since Pollock. I think Pop Art is the closest to having gone mainstream. Going "mainstream" isn't a bad thing; it only means that the style has been completely absorbed into the community, its lessons understood; the opposite of this isn't some state of purity, but sterility and failure.

Picasso could draw?

2012-01-06T07:51:00.000-08:00

I saw the image on the left in a post on Simen's beautiful blog, and I immediately thought "What a beautiful Pollock", and then "Norman Rockwell could paint like Pollock? Then why didn't he?"

Later, I read this post by Vivek Haldar about Iteration in painting, and I realized that some people would think "Picasso knew how to draw realistically? Then why didn't he?"

What is my point? Other than that I am an elitist intellectual?
Not, of course, that Rockwell should've painted like Pollock. It's that when I look at Rockwell's paintings, I see a technician, someone who could paint, but I wonder why he bothered. What he did, others could do too. Picasso and Matisse had technique, but they then tried to tried to do with the medium what others had not done.
Ironical, because what I have written is hardly original, but these two paintings illustrate this point so beautifully that I felt I had to save this juxtaposition for later. In this blog post.
There is a problem with this point of view, of course, and I'll address that in my next post.

Resume

2012-01-06T07:41:00.000-08:00

Google wrecks the Reader, and I realize that I need a new way to extend my memory: a place to stow what I choose to salvage from the Internet every day. Hence, back to the blog. For now.

One more Philippe Halsman

2010-05-27T07:12:00.000-07:00

Jumpology

2010-05-24T06:49:00.000-07:00

The first image is of Dali, the second is of Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham. The photographs are by Phillippe Halsman. They are both from this article in the New York Times. (The slide show won't allow me to reuse the images, so hunted them down on the Internet.)

When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping, and the mask falls, so that the real person appears

Space Shuttle: Time Lapse Movie

2010-05-24T06:00:00.000-07:00

Give this man his Nobel

2010-05-20T12:06:00.000-07:00

Craig Venter presides over a second Genesis.

Like Shelley’s protagonist, Dr Venter and Dr Smith needed some spare parts from dead bodies to make their creature work. Unlike Victor Frankenstein, though, they needed no extra spark of Promethean lightning to give the creature its living essence. Instead they made that essence, a piece of DNA that carries about 1,000 genes, from off-the-shelf laboratory chemicals. The result is the first creature since the beginning of creatures that has no ancestor.

It seems that the development was long expected, and that synthetic DNA is not new. Craig Venter created the first "functioning" artificial virus as long ago as 2003. That is the heart of this story, and all similar stories: that we now take accelerating change so much for granted. As the image shows, this achievement was possible because productivity in DNA synthesis has been increasing at a pace which looks exactly like Moore's law, but faster.

Most philosophers will not be surprised, but how will most people react to passages like the following? I don't expect any real change in the philosophy of the man in the street: we will live our lives, and these episodes will never quite sink in:

It demonstrates more forcefully than anything else to date that life’s essence is information. Heretofore that information has been passed from one living thing to another. Now it does not have to be. Non-living matter can be brought to life with no need for lightning, a vital essence or a god. And this new power will allow the large-scale manipulation of living organisms.

As I think back on the developments we have seen in Science and Technology in the recent past, it strikes me that I cannot even begin to imagine what the world, or we humans, will look like in 20 years time. In many ways, we will fall far short of Star Trek (I would be amazed if we managed inter-stellar, or even regular inter-planetary travel) but who knows in how many ways we will exceed that fantasy?

Postscript: More from Sciencedaily.

Bloggingheads dialog on Authenticity

2010-04-26T20:27:00.001-07:00

Short Story

2010-04-15T06:20:00.000-07:00

More O'Henry than Chekov, but still..This French short movie is set in the metro and is called J’Attendrai Le Suivant (I’ll Wait for the Next One). It was nominated for an Academy Award for the Best Short Film in 2002.

More here

The Butterfly Stroke

2010-04-10T02:24:00.001-07:00

How to Swim: Basic Butterfly

The Libertarian Illusion

2010-04-08T10:55:00.000-07:00

Two excellent posts over at Will Wilkinson's blog.

In one, he agrees with David Boaz that there was never any golden age of freedom in the United States.

And again I say, when [Future of Freedom Foundation president Jacob Hornberger] says “our American ancestors,” he’s thinking only of our white ancestors. Maybe only of our white male ancestors. Maybe even only of our white male property-owning ancestors. Many millions of Americans would read these paragraphs and say, “My ancestors didn’t have the right to worship in their own way. My ancestors didn’t have the right to keep and bear arms. My ancestors didn’t have the protection of centuries-old legal procedures. My ancestors sure as heck didn’t have the right to keep what they produced, or to pursue an occupation of their choice, or to enter into mutually beneficial trades. In fact, my ancestors didn’t even have the minimal right of ‘the absence of physical constraint.’

In the other, he discusses the fact that what we would call "conservative" changes with each generation

Conservative conceptions of American identity are ad hoc, opportunistic, and evolving, but they are conservative conceptions in large part because they deny that they are in fact contingent or historically conditioned. That’s how they go on meeting the needs of Americans who long for rootedness, continuity, and a sense that their political commitments are based on transcendent, fixed moral truths, and the authority of tradition.

Looking at India, or anywhere for that matter, you see exactly the same phenomenon: people idealizing the past, a desire for "rootedness, continuity, and a sense that their political commitments are based on transcendent, fixed moral truths, and the authority of tradition". Its when this desire for faith is threatened that people lash out with desperate rage.

iPad roundup

2010-04-08T10:38:00.000-07:00

For a product which was mocked when it was merely a work in progress, lots of people seem to have fallen in love with the iPad.

John Gapper says that the iPod is better for periodicals, the Kindle for books.

Tim Wu says that the iPad is Steve Jobs' final victory over Steve Wozniak.

Nick Carr argues that the move away from the Hobbyists' ethic is not both inevitable and right. The comments are good. One points out that

Citrix has released an iPad app that lets you access a hosted virtal Windows machine. If Amazon did the same for EC2, you could use your iPad to control an entire cloud-bank of wildly inexpensive Linux machines. Sounds like "generativity" to me. I think the Luddites still think that "the computer is the computer". Think of the iPad as a screen, not an entire computer

John Gapper wonders whether publishers will be able to make full use of the potential of the iPad.

Markets and Communities

2010-03-31T10:56:00.000-07:00

Interesting conversation between Will Wilkinson and Stephen Marglin of Harvard. I listened to this because Stephen Marglin is a distinguished radical/communitarian Economist and because I hoped that listening to a smart man I confidently expected to disagree with would kickstart my brain.

As expected, I disagreed with most of what he said. What was unexpected was that I largely agreed with him about what the costs and benefits of a market economy are. We disagree about the weights to assign to those losses and benefits.

The heart of his argument seems to be:
1. belonging to a community is extremely important to human flourishing
2. a market economy replaces a way of life where we contribute to the community, and depend on it, with one based on impersonal trade
3. this has led to tremendous gains in productivity and in the wealth of nations
4. however it has also alienated people from one another; we are no longer embedded in our local communities but are part of an vast, abstract, extended market system
5. this is nobody's fault; it is the unintended consequence of decisions taken by individuals over several generations
6. this has terrible consequences for many of the people in our communities, especially the weakest and poorest
7. to repair this damage, we must always consciously take into account the effect on our communities of the decisions we take; we need to choose what will bind our communities closer together, even if not a single member of our community is better off as a result of that decision. In a sense, the "community" becomes an interested party to all our decisions and choices.

Stephen Marglin explicitly recognizes the terrible costs of living in an all-enveloping community, but I wonder if he realizes how bad it can get.

I agree with much of what he says, especially about the costs borne by the weakest people in a society, but I am sure he recognizes just how impossible it is for a society to reverse such a move, even if everyone in that society wishes it. Simple Game Theory suggests that this genie can never be returned to its bottle.

More than that, I wonder if he recognizes how many people actually crave freedom from community, and welcome markets specifically for that reason.

Drawing on the experiences of a group of informants who participated in an ethnographic study of house moving in Montréal, Canada, my article shows that people often confront the social expectations and consequences of the gift economy—for example, they try to avoid indebtedness—by shifting back and forth between the gift economy and the market. But more importantly, and contrary to what the work of many consumer researchers would lead one to expect, it shows that people may escape to the market.

This is besides the obvious problem of deciding which community I belong to. If it is human to want to belong to a community, it is equally human to see those who do not belong to that community as not only outsiders, but also enemies, or even sub-human. Brad DeLong quotes Hirshmann and Adam Smith to show that classical economists believed that the growth of trade would be one more stage in the self-domestication of Man; as he notes

Even Smith's self-interested and calculating market agents are sociable ones: they exchange, and perhaps they cheat--they don't kill, rape, burn, and steal. Which is odd, given that fifty years before Smith was born not far from his house there were lots of people who saw others not as potential partners in acts of mutually-beneficial commerce but instead as either (i) clan allies, (ii) clan enemies to be killed, or (iii) strangers to be robbed.

I am glad I listened to the talk. I was not convinced by his arguments, but I do now better understand what I think, and why.

Sacred Values

2010-03-10T06:59:00.000-08:00

Scientific American on negotiating sacred values

What truly distinguishes sacred values from secular ones is how people behave when asked to compromise them. When people are asked to trade their sacred values for values considered to be secular—what psychologist Philip Tetlock refers to as a “taboo tradeoff”—they exhibit moral outrage, express anger and disgust, become increasingly inflexible in negotiations, and display an insensitivity to a strict cost-benefit analysis of the exchange. What’s more, when people receive monetary offers for relinquishing a sacred value, they display a particularly striking irrationality. Not only are people unwilling to compromise sacred values for money—contrary to classic economic theory’s assumption that financial incentives motivate behavior—but the inclusion of money in an offer produces a backfire effect such that people become even less likely to give up their sacred values compared to when an offer does not include money.

A recent study observed this effect in the case of the Iranian nuclear program

After giving their opinions on Iran’s nuclear program, all participants were asked to consider one of two deals for Iranian disarmament. Half of the participants read about a deal in which the United States would reduce military aid to Israel in exchange for Iran giving up its military program. The other half of the participants read about a deal in which the United States would reduce aid to Israel and would pay Iran $40 billion. After considering the deal, all participants predicted how much the Iranian people would support the deal and how much anger they would feel toward the deal. In line with the Palestinian-Israeli and Indonesian studies, those who considered the nuclear program a sacred value expressed less support, and more anger, when the deal included money.

Reservations

2010-03-09T12:22:00.000-08:00

It was great fun to read Steven Landsburg's marvellous suggestions for electoral reform (of the US Senate) on the same day that the Rajya Sabha passed the Women's reservation bill in the midst of a riot by its members.

Divide senatorial constituencies according to the alphabet, so that instead of a senator from Alaska and a senator from Wisconsin, we’ll have a senator for everyone whose last name begins with AA through AE. The point being that it’s easy to think up earmarks and pork barrel projects that will benefit the citizens of Alaska at everyone else’s expense, but not so easy to think up pork barrel projects that will benefit everyone whose last name happens to begin with Q.
Give each voter two votes to cast in every senatorial election. You get one vote to cast in your own state and one to cast in the state of your choice.
Again, this forces senators to answer to broader and more diverse constituencies, diluting the power of localized special interests.
This one’s not in the book but should have been: Give each senator a personal budget so that once he;s voted for $X billion worth of spending, he’s not allowed to vote for any more spending until he gets re-elected. This pits his various sub-constituencies against each other, so that the New York Senator who lobbies for subsidies to New York City is sure to get a negative earful from upstate.

I am normally against reservations; I think they are a clumsy way to get the results they are meant to achieve. If we are looking to achieve social justice, a combination of land reform and a Citizen's Basic Income would be far preferable. However, I am actually inclined to support reservation for women in Parliament.

These are MPs, for Gods sake: they don't need to know anything, or have any skills. Most of them are ciphers at best and criminals at worst:

The disclosures seemed to have little impact on the 2004 election: 128 of the 543 winners had faced criminal charges, including 84 cases of murder, 17 cases of robbery and 28 cases of theft and extortion. Many face multiple criminal counts—including one M.P. who faces 17 separate murder charges—and no major party is beyond reproach.

They certainly cannot claim that reservations would displace better qualified candidates. In fact, looking at the process which generates such winners, it would probably be a good idea to ensure we let in a large fraction of those who would otherwise never get through. Success in these races is nothing to be proud of.

The one issue with reservation for women is that the women who eventually do stand will be proxies for the violent, stupid men who would otherwise have stood for election.

The electoral model I would really like to see is one the ancient Athenians were familiar with: a system based on lottery. Everyone participates by default, and those who "win" the draw serve as MP for 5 years before returning to civil life.

Up

2010-03-08T08:49:00.000-08:00

Daniel Drezner was hoping it would win, but surely it should have been at least nominated for Best Picture?

The end of the Western World

2010-03-06T06:46:00.000-08:00

Wonderful, thought-provoking talk at George Mason University by Stephen Davies on the death of Western Civilization. While listening to it, I had to take breaks almost every 15 minutes to think things through.

By the "death of western civilization", he means something very different from what Spengler and others like him have in mind. He believes that there was a meaningful sense in which there used to be a civilization we could call "Western", which was a bridge between one civilization you could call "Christendom", and another we can call "Modern" (a curiously archaic term).

Whether you agree with his thesis depends to some extent on whether you agree with his definition of "civilization": a collection of people who share a certain collection of concepts and possess a shared understanding of a set of symbols. Whether you agree with all that he says, he is well worth listening to.

Beyond Little Albert

2010-02-18T02:52:00.000-08:00

An article by carl Zimmer on fear in mice and men.

American psychologist John Watson decided to see if he could teach an 11-month-old baby named Albert to become scared of arbitrary things. He presented Albert with a rat, and every time the baby reached out to touch it, Watson hit a steel bar with a hammer, producing a horrendous clang. After several rounds with the rat and the bar, Watson then brought out the rat on its own. “The instant the rat was shown, the baby began to cry,” Watson wrote in a 1920 report. “Almost instantly he turned sharply to the left, fell over on his left side, raised himself on all fours and began to crawl away so rapidly that he was caught with difficulty before reaching the edge of the table.”

Oddly, just reading this description got my heart going faster

In the 1980s Caroline and Robert Blanchard, working together at the University of Hawaii, carried out a pioneering study on the natural history of fear. They put wild rats in cages and then brought cats gradually closer to them. At each stage, they carefully observed how the rats reacted. The Blanchards found that the rats responded to each kind of threat with a distinct set of behaviors.

The first kind of behavior is a reaction to a potential threat, in which a predator isn’t visible but there is good reason to worry that it might be nearby. A rat might walk into a meadow that looks free of predators, for example, but that reeks of fresh cat urine. In such a case, a rat will generally explore the meadow cautiously, assessing the risk of staying there. A second, more concrete type of threat arises if a rat spots a cat at the other side of the meadow. The rat will freeze and then make a choice about what to do next. It may slink away, or it may remain immobile in hopes that the cat will eventually wander away without noticing it. Finally, the most active threat: The cat glances over, notices something, and walks toward the rat to investigate. At this point, the rat will flee if it has an escape route. If the cat gets close, the rat will choose either to fight or to run for its life.

Turns out that fear in humans is very similar to fear in mice.

Fear, the new results suggest, is not a single thing after all. Rather, it is a complex, ever-changing strategy mammal brains deploy in order to cope with danger. When a predator is off in the distance, its prey—whether rat or human—powers up a forebrain network. The network primes the body, raising the heartbeat and preparing it for fast action. At the same time, the forebrain network sharpens the brain’s attention to the outside world, evaluating threats, monitoring subtle changes, and running through possible responses. Another important job it performs is keeping the midbrain network shut down so that, instead of fleeing at top speed, a prey animal keeps very still at first. As the predator gets closer, however, the forebrain’s grip on the midbrain loosens. Now the midbrain becomes active, orchestrating a powerful, quick response: fight or flight. At the same time it shuts down the slower, more deliberative forebrain. This is no time for thinking.

It came from Newcastle

2010-02-18T02:44:00.000-08:00

An article by Robert Allen on why the Industrial Revolution was British. He argues that Britain boostrapped its way into the Industrial era. I have excerpted heavily below, while trying to point out the main points.

First, success in trading Woollen textiles with Europe, and later Asia and America

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries a European-wide market emerged. England took a commanding position in this new order as her wool textile industry out competed the established producers in Italy and the Low Countries. England extended her lead in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by creating an intercontinental trading network including the Americas and India.

As London grew, the price of wood soared and houses began to burn coal; thanks to this coal, Britain had the cheapest energy in the world

As London grew after 1500, the price of wood fuels rose and by the end of the sixteenth century, charcoal and firewood were twice the price of coal per unit of energy. With that premium, consumers began to substitute coal for wood. Instead of a wood burning hearth in the middle of a large central room, houses were built with narrow fireplaces and chimneys to burn coal. The coal burning house was invented. It then paid to mine coal in Northumberland and ship it down the coast to London. The coal trade began. On the coal fields (in Newcastle, for instance), Britain had the cheapest energy in the world. Energy was more expensive on the European continent and particularly expensive in China (Figure 2).

The growth of trade and maufacturing led to increased demand for labour, and soon the British had the highest wages and living standards in the world

After the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century, the standard of living of workers everywhere was high; they typically earned three or four times subsistence. In the ensuing centuries, population growth in Europe and Asia led to falling real wages, so that most workers ended up in the eighteenth century earning just enough to purchase the subsistence standard of living. The only countries to avoid that fate were Britain and the Low Countries. Their populations, in fact, grew more rapidly than those elsewhere, but this effect was offset by the booms in their economies due to international trade. Workers in London and Amsterdam did not, however, buy four times as much oatmeal as they needed for subsistence. Instead they upgraded their diets to beef, beer, and bread, while their counterparts in much of Europe and Asia subsisted on quasi-vegetarian diets of boiled grains with a few peas or lentils. Workers in northwestern Europe also had surplus income to buy exotic imports like tea and sugar as well as domestic manufactures like books, pictures, watches, and better clothes.

Thus it made sense to look for technology which could substitute capital (cheap energy) for labour; the demand for innovation led to supply.

High wages and cheap energy created a demand for technology that substituted capital and energy for labour. These incentives operated in many industries. Pottery, for instance, was manufactured in both England and China. The design of the kilns differed greatly, however. English kilns were cheap to build but very fuel inefficient; much of the energy from the burning fuel was lost through the vent hole on the top (Figure 4). The typical Chinese kiln, on the other hand, was more expensive to construct and, indeed, required more labour to operate. Figure 5 shows how heat was drawn into the chamber on the left and then forced out a hole at floor level into a second chamber. The process continued through many chambers until the air, by then denuded of most of its heat, finally exited up a chimney. In England, it was not worth spending a lot of money to build a thermally efficient kiln since energy was so cheap.

These technologies made sense only because energy was so cheap in Britain

The French government was very active in trying to promote advanced British technology in the eighteenth century, but its efforts failed since the British techniques were not cost effective at French prices. James Hargreaves perfected the spinning jenny, the first machine that successfully spun cotton, in the late 1760s. In 1771, John Holker, an English Jacobite who held the post of Inspector General of Foreign Manufactures, spirited a jenny into France. Demonstration models were made, but the jenny was only installed in large, state supported workshops. By the late 1780s, over 20,000 jennies were used in England and only 900 in France. Likewise, the French government sponsored the construction of an English style iron works (including four coke blast furnaces) in Burgundy in the 1780s. The raw materials were adequate, the enterprise was well capitalised, and they hired outstanding and experienced English engineers to oversee the project. Yet it was a commercial flop because coal was too expensive in France.

With time, energy efficiency improved to the point where others could adopt these technologies

The Industrial Revolution was confined to Britain for many years, because the technological breakthroughs were tailored to British conditions and could not be profitably deployed elsewhere. However, British engineers strove to improve efficiency and reduced the use of inputs that were cheap in Britain as well as those that were expensive. The consumption of coal in steam engines, for instance, was cut from 45 pounds per horse power-hour in the early eighteenth to only 2 pounds in the mid-nineteenth. The genius of British engineering undermined the country’s technological lead by creating ‘appropriate technology’ for the world at large. By the middle of the nineteenth century, advanced technology could be profitably used in countries like France with expensive energy and India with cheap labour. Once that happened, the Industrial Revolution went world wide.

Marvellous stuff: read the whole thing.

Lords of Finance

2010-02-12T04:19:00.000-08:00

Teddy Grenfell, the head of Morgan Grenfell, the House of Morgan's London arm, on Winston Churchill:

"We, and especially Norman, feel that the new Chancellor's cleverness, his almost uncanny brilliance, is a danger. At present, he is a willing pupil but the moment he thinks that he can stand on his own legs and believes that he understands economic questions he may, by some indiscretion, land us in trouble."

The book includes a marvellous passage describing how Churchill cut to the heart of the question of whether Britain should return to the Gold Standard. In fact, of course, he went against his better judgement, and disaster followed.

Good move

2010-02-10T20:50:00.000-08:00

What is Martin Wolf doing reporting this from Delhi?

The Indian government has offered to suspend contracts with mining companies in central and eastern parts of the country in a bid to persuade leftwing Maoist rebels to lay down their weapons.

Palaniappan Chidambaram, the home minister, said that the Indian government was seeking to bring Maoists militants to the negotiating table by insisting that mining contracts be reviewed to provide royalty payments for local communities

Anyway, I was glad to see this on the home page of the FT yesterday, and I wish our papers gave it more prominence.
The main motivation is the Naxal threat

India began what is expected to be up to a three-year offensive against guerrillas active in at least 11 of the nation’s 28 states in October. At least 818 people died in Maoist violence in the first 11 months of 2009 in a campaign that has targeted infrastructure and officials. Maoists are estimated to hold 33 of India’s 600 districts.

Large parts of India do not have title deeds, notaries, and other elements of what we consider property rights. When a company opens a mine, many parties benefit: the company's employees, shareholders, customers, the overall economy. It seems only wrong that these benefits are at the expense of those living on that land, epecially when they are often the poorest of the poor. I think Ninan depicts it beautifully here.

The Sociology of Facebook

2010-02-08T09:02:00.000-08:00

Truly excellent article in the New York Review of Books. I loved this opening description of "social networking"

What is "social networking"? For all the vagueness of the term, which now seems to encompass everything we do with other people online, it is usually associated with three basic activities: the creation of a personal Web page, or "profile," that will serve as a surrogate home for the self; a trip to a kind of virtual agora, where, along with amusedly studying passersby, you can take a stroll through the ghost town of acquaintanceships past, looking up every person who's crossed your path and whose name you can remember; and finally, a chance to remove the digital barrier and reveal yourself to the unsuspecting subjects of your gaze by, as we have learned to put it with the Internet's peculiar eagerness for deforming our language, "friending" them, i.e., requesting that you be connected online in some way.

Very, very good discussion of how Facebook has changed as it began to move away from its origins as a site for students of elite universities.

Magnetic attraction

2010-02-08T07:22:00.001-08:00

I had never really understood that magnetism is a consequence of special relativity, as this post by Steven Landsburg explains so clearly.

Self destruct

2010-02-04T08:51:00.000-08:00

Article, in the New York Times about how Microsoft has been sabotaging itself, by a former vice president at Microsoft.

Classic stories of how corporate bureacracies eat their children, even if "top management" tries to protect them.

For example, early in my tenure, our group of very clever graphics experts invented a way to display text on screen called ClearType. It worked by using the color dots of liquid crystal displays to make type much more readable on the screen. Although we built it to help sell e-books, it gave Microsoft a huge potential advantage for every device with a screen. But it also annoyed other Microsoft groups that felt threatened by our success.

Engineers in the Windows group falsely claimed it made the display go haywire when certain colors were used. The head of Office products said it was fuzzy and gave him headaches. The vice president for pocket devices was blunter: he’d support ClearType and use it, but only if I transferred the program and the programmers to his control. As a result, even though it received much public praise, internal promotion and patents, a decade passed before a fully operational version of ClearType finally made it into Windows.

And

When we were building the tablet PC in 2001, the vice president in charge of Office at the time decided he didn’t like the concept. The tablet required a stylus, and he much preferred keyboards to pens and thought our efforts doomed. To guarantee they were, he refused to modify the popular Office applications to work properly with the tablet. So if you wanted to enter a number into a spreadsheet or correct a word in an e-mail message, you had to write it in a special pop-up box, which then transferred the information to Office. Annoying, clumsy and slow.

Morituri te salutant

2010-02-04T07:04:00.000-08:00

An article on the strange past-times of our ancestors.

Gladiator matches were not free for alls. Each gladiator had a certain attack and defence weapon combination, and these were matched between pairs of fighters so none had an unfair advantage. Men of equal, speed, strength and skill were also matched together to ensure a fair fight.

Since no point system existed, fighting was always pursued until a decisive outcome, which could be any of the following alternatives: defeat through death, defeat due to injury preventing further combat, defeat due to exhaustion, a win, with the bestowal of a palm branch or a laurel crown, or a draw, with both opponents being allowed to depart the Arena alive. This was the most unlikely case, since the superiority of one fighter had to be proved to enable the public to reach a verdict.

The final decision of the loser's fate resided within the hands of the games’ organizer. To this end he appealed to the mood of the plebs. Upon the cry of iugula (lance him through), it was expected of the vanquished that he would set an example of the greatness of manhood (exemplum virtutis) and would motionlessly receive the death thrust. The turning down of the thumb signified to the spectators, not that the gladiator should be put to death, but rather that the gladiator was dead.

After the final blow, arena servants carried the combatant on a stretcher into the carcass chamber and gave the twitching body a deathblow. It is not known exactly how this execution was performed. The executor, a costumed arena servant, associated with the Roman god of death “Dis Pater” or the Etruscan counterpart “Charun” carried a deadly hammer accompanying the gladiator on his last journey.

CO2 emissions by country over time

2010-02-02T19:07:00.001-08:00

Upholstery and Personality Types

2010-02-01T06:20:00.000-08:00

Robert Sapolsky on how the link between personality types and heart disease was discovered.

It was the mid-1950s, and he and Rosenman were having an unexpected problem with their successful cardiology practice: they were spending a fortune reupholstering the chairs in their waiting rooms. There seemed to be no end of chairs that had to be fixed. One day a new upholsterer came in to see to the problem, took one look at the chairs, and discovered the type A-cardiovascular disease link. He announced it semicryptically, with the words: What the hell is wrong with your patients? People don’t wear out chairs this way. The front-most few inches of the seat cushions and the armrests--and only the front-most few inches-- were torn to shreds, as if some very short beavers had spent the night in the office craning their necks to savage the chairs. Obviously these particular waiting rooms were far from peaceful places. The patients habitually sat on the edges of their seats while fidgeting and clawing away.

Hacking your senses

2010-01-30T01:27:00.000-08:00

A nice article in Wired Magazine on how people are hacking their own senses; had shared this on Facebook, but I just spent 30 minutes searching for it. Clearly, should have been on my blog.

During a long brainstorm session, they wondered whether the tongue could actually augment sight for the visually impaired. I tried the prototype; in a white-walled office strewn with spare electronics parts, Wicab neuroscientist Aimee Arnoldussen hung a plastic box the size of a brick around my neck and gave me the mouthpiece. "Some people hold it still, and some keep it moving like a lollipop," she said. "It's up to you."

Arnoldussen handed me a pair of blacked-out glasses with a tiny camera attached to the bridge. The camera was cabled to a laptop that would relay images to the mouthpiece. The look was pretty geeky, but the folks at the lab were used to it.

She turned it on. Nothing happened.

"Those buttons on the box?" she said. "They're like the volume controls for the image. You want to turn it up as high as you're comfortable."

I cranked up the voltage of the electric shocks to my tongue. It didn't feel bad, actually — like licking the leads on a really weak 9-volt battery. Arnoldussen handed me a long white foam cylinder and spun my chair toward a large black rectangle painted on the wall. "Move the foam against the black to see how it feels," she said.

I could see it. Feel it. Whatever — I could tell where the foam was. With Arnold ussen behind me carrying the laptop, I walked around the Wicab offices. I managed to avoid most walls and desks, scanning my head from side to side slowly to give myself a wider field of view, like radar. Thinking back on it, I don't remember the feeling of the electrodes on my tongue at all during my walkabout. What I remember are pictures: high-contrast images of cubicle walls and office doors, as though I'd seen them with my eyes. Tyler's group hasn't done the brain imaging studies to figure out why this is so — they don't know whether my visual cortex was processing the information from my tongue or whether some other region was doing the work.

On Socialism

2010-01-29T22:44:00.000-08:00

An article in the Times of London on Tony Blair's appearance before the committee investigating the Iraq war.

Last night declassified documents released by Downing Street revealed that Mr Blair had already indicated Britain’s support for regime change in Iraq six months before the 9/11 attacks.

and

Earlier the former Prime Minister said that many of the arguments used to justify overthrowing Saddam’s regime now applied to Iran. He said that Iran was now a greater risk to Britain than Iraq was at the time that he ordered the invasion in March 2003

A blog post by Chris Dillow on arguments against government intervention in financial markets.

In its early days, one feature of the research into cognitive biases was the emphasis it placed upon the fact that “experts” were as prone to error as laymen. In Kahneman and Tversky’s classic Judgment Under Uncertainty, for example, David M. Eddy showed that doctors commonly misinterpreted diagnostic probabilities, whilst Stuart Oskamp wrote that “professional psychologists are no better interpersonal judges, and sometimes are worse ones, than are untrained individuals"

Governments are large bureaucracies, just like any large corporation. Individuals within Governments face exactly the same pressures to conform and comply which people in companies face. Government ministers are as prone to be delusional as CEOs. However, when governments get things wrong, they do so on a scale which no individual firm can manage. The Iraq war was just one such error of judgement. Another was the US government's role in feeding the housing bubble in the US.

Starting in 1993, Fannie and Freddie have affordable housing goals—30% of Fannie and Freddie’s purchases of loans have to be loans made to borrowers whose income was below the median income in their area. These are interim goals. In 1996, the interim goal becomes firm at 40%. In 1997, the number rose to 42%. In 2001 it rose to 50%. The Bush Administration increased this number to 52% in 2005, 53% in 2006, and 55% in 2007.

The "right" argument against government ownership of the means of production is not that private property is a natural right, but that government ownership results in an unacceptable concentration of power. The market is a means to displine and punish poor management. Markets (especially financial markets) will fail regularly, and will experience cycles of boom and bust, and there is a role for government in mitigating this, but markets are still the least bad means of organizing our economy.

Accidental Laws

2010-01-29T06:16:00.000-08:00

One of the challenges for Physics is to explain where the laws of Physics come from. Why these laws and no others? Where do the constants of Physics come from? Feynman wrote in his lectures about the ratio of the repulsion of two electrons due to electricity, and the attraction of the two electrons due to their masses:

where does such a large number come from? It is not accidental, like the ratio of the volume of the Earth to the volume of a flea. We have considered two aspects if the same thing, an electron....Some say that we shall one day find the "universal equation", and in it, one of the roots will be this number.

In the same passage, he considers the possibility that this constant could vary with the age of the Universe.

In this Edge interview, Leonard Susskind suggests an alternative, based on a combination of String Theory and the Anthropic Principle: that there is no deep reason for these constants and the laws of nature. These values and laws vary from one part of the Multi-verse/Mega-verse to another, and we happen to be in a part where these values are such that they can support living creatures like us.

Gradually physicists and cosmologists are coming to see our ten billion light years as an infinitesimal pocket of a stupendous megaverse. At the same time theoretical physicists are proposing theories which demote our ordinary laws of nature to a tiny corner of a gigantic landscape of mathematical possibilities.

Interesting throughout.

Computers and Humans

2010-01-25T05:51:00.000-08:00

More on computers, as the greatest Chess master of all writes a wonderful, wonderful book review.

Kasparov on what the computer game has done to how people play.

The heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn't care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves, and counts them up again... It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn't good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn't been done that way before. It's simply good if it works and bad if it doesn't. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.

Given how Maths has long been plagued by philosophical arguments of "but what does it mean?", "are numbers real?" and so on, I wonder if something similar will result in Maths as well. Young Mathematicians who have grown up with computers may take a similarly pragmatic view of what their predecessors considered essential matters of style and good practice.

On how easy access to vast databases of games gives young players unprecedented advantages

In the pre-computer era, teenage grandmasters were rarities and almost always destined to play for the world championship. Bobby Fischer's 1958 record of attaining the grandmaster title at fifteen was broken only in 1991. It has been broken twenty times since then, with the current record holder, Ukrainian Sergey Karjakin, having claimed the highest title at the nearly absurd age of twelve in 2002. Now twenty, Karjakin is among the world's best, but like most of his modern wunderkind peers he's no Fischer, who stood out head and shoulders above his peers—and soon enough above the rest of the chess world as well.

Whereas the article by Kenneth Rogoff was on how humans are using computers to cheat in tournaments, and others are responding by using computers to detect those cheats, and the implications of all this for our understanding of what we mean by "intelligence", Kasparov is more interested in how differences between humans and computer can result in gains from trade.

In what Rasskin-Gutman explains as Moravec's Paradox, in chess, as in so many things, what computers are good at is where humans are weak, and vice versa. This gave me an idea for an experiment. What if instead of human versus machine we played as partners? My brainchild saw the light of day in a match in 1998 in León, Spain, and we called it "Advanced Chess." Each player had a PC at hand running the chess software of his choice during the game. The idea was to create the highest level of chess ever played, a synthesis of the best of man and machine.

And this passage is purest Economics:

Having a computer partner also meant never having to worry about making a tactical blunder. The computer could project the consequences of each move we considered, pointing out possible outcomes and countermoves we might otherwise have missed. With that taken care of for us, we could concentrate on strategic planning instead of spending so much time on calculations. Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions... A month earlier I had defeated the Bulgarian in a match of "regular" rapid chess 4–0. Our advanced chess match ended in a 3–3 draw. My advantage in calculating tactics had been nullified by the machine.

Italics added.

In 2005, the online chess-playing site Playchess.com hosted what it called a "freestyle" chess tournament in which anyone could compete in teams with other players or computers...Lured by the substantial prize money, several groups of strong grandmasters working with several computers at the same time entered the competition. At first, the results seemed predictable. The teams of human plus machine dominated even the strongest computers. The chess machine Hydra, which is a chess-specific supercomputer like Deep Blue, was no match for a strong human player using a relatively weak laptop. Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.

The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and "coaching" their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.

The "freestyle" result, though startling, fits with my belief that talent is a misused term and a misunderstood concept. The moment I became the youngest world chess champion in history at the age of twenty-two in 1985, I began receiving endless questions about the secret of my success and the nature of my talent.

Again, italics added

Where so many of these investigations fail on a practical level is by not recognizing the importance of the process of learning and playing chess. The ability to work hard for days on end without losing focus is a talent. The ability to keep absorbing new information after many hours of study is a talent. Programming yourself by analyzing your decision-making outcomes and processes can improve results much the way that a smarter chess algorithm will play better than another running on the same computer. We might not be able to change our hardware, but we can definitely upgrade our software.

Even though he has been intrumental in encouraging the use of computers in Chess, I was struck by how he is interested more in using Chess and Chess-playing software as a laboratory to explore human intelligence, rather than as an end in itself. He ends with a plea for programmers to try and mimic the the human, creative, elements of intelligence.

This is our last chess metaphor, then—a metaphor for how we have discarded innovation and creativity in exchange for a steady supply of marketable products. The dreams of creating an artificial intelligence that would engage in an ancient game symbolic of human thought have been abandoned. Instead, every year we have new chess programs, and new versions of old ones, that are all based on the same basic programming concepts for picking a move by searching through millions of possibilities that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s.

Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism and the demands of the market. Brute-force programs play the best chess, so why bother with anything else? Why waste time and money experimenting with new and innovative ideas when we already know what works? Such thinking should horrify anyone worthy of the name of scientist, but it seems, tragically, to be the norm. Our best minds have gone into financial engineering instead of real engineering, with catastrophic results for both sectors.

Comparing US cities with National Economies

2010-01-23T01:29:00.000-08:00

I came across this via the Economist's link exchange.

Dreaming children

2010-01-22T03:53:00.000-08:00

Wonderful little post at mindhacks on the dream life of children.

What an absolutely marvellous line.

Preschoolers’ dreams are often static and plain, such as seeing an animal or thinking about eating.

Deaton on Statistics

2010-01-21T07:31:00.001-08:00

William Easterley summarizes Angus Deaton's AEA Presidential Address on comparing economic statistics across countries.
What struck me was this passage about India.

The World Bank’s recent 40 percent upward revision of the global poverty number was based on an absurd procedure that led to the paradox in the quote.

To make a long story short, the World Bank decided to boot richer India out of the group of poorest countries used to determine the poverty line, which made the poverty line higher, which made Indian (and global) poverty higher – all because India was richer. This misguided revision of the poverty line, which accounted for virtually all of the upward revision, was not clear to virtually anyone until this new paper by Deaton.

Two horrifying stories

2010-01-21T07:11:00.000-08:00

The first is a book review of "Last Train from Hiroshima" in the New York Times. The book is about those who survived both atomic attacks in Japan. The review is so horrifying that you wonder what the book is like. Scenes which Goya or Picasso could never have imagined.

Mr. Pellegrino follows his survivors as they trudge through wastelands that make “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy read like “Goodnight, Moon.” He describes the so-called “ant-walking alligators” that the survivors saw everywhere, men and women who “were now eyeless and faceless — with their heads transformed into blackened alligator hides displaying red holes, indicating mouths.”

The author continues: “The alligator people did not scream. Their mouths could not form the sounds. The noise they made was worse than screaming. They uttered a continuous murmur — like locusts on a midsummer night. One man, staggering on charred stumps of legs, was carrying a dead baby upside down.”

The second is a post at the Foreign Policy blog about whether CNN's Sanjay Gupta, who is a doctor, did the right thing when he treated patients in a field hospital in Haiti.

A somewhat convoluted CNN.com writeup of the incident reveals that Gupta -- after a team of Beligan doctors and nurses left a field hospital due to security fears -- "monitored patients' vital signs, administered painkillers and continued intravenous drips. He stabilized three new patients in critical condition."

I think he did exactly the right thing, but the photo which accompanies this post! I first saw it 16 years ago, and I remember it, and the story of Kevin Carter who won the Pultizer prize for taking this photograph and then killed himself.

Seeking relief from the sight of masses of people starving to death, he wandered into the open bush. He heard a soft, high-pitched whimpering and saw a tiny girl trying to make her way to the feeding center. As he crouched to photograph her, a vulture landed in view. Careful not to disturb the bird, he positioned himself for the best possible image. He would later say he waited about 20 minutes, hoping the vulture would spread its wings. It did not, and after he took his photographs, he chased the bird away and watched as the little girl resumed her struggle. Afterward he sat under a tree, lit a cigarette, talked to God and cried. "He was depressed afterward," Silva recalls. "He kept saying he wanted to hug his daughter."

A work of art

2010-01-20T08:35:00.000-08:00

The Economist's Free Exchange Blog

A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter is an artwork by Caleb Larsen, currently for sale on eBay. If it hasn’t sold in the next couple of days — the minimum bid is $2,500 — it will go back on eBay. On the other hand, if it does sell, it will still go back on eBay. That’s what it does, as clearly explained in the legal contract accompanying the work:

Artist has created a work of art titled “A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter (2009)” (“the Artwork”) which consists of a black box that places itself for sale on the auction website “eBay” (the “Auction Venue”) every seven (7) days. The Artwork consists of the combination of the black box or cube, the electronics contained therein, and the concept that such a physical object “sells itself” every week.

...Many artists have tried to remove their art from the commercial aspects of the art world — by making it free, for instance, or by putting on performances, or creating public installations. This one does it by making an artwork which is so commercial that it can’t be collected. You could buy the piece today, and it might be worth $100,000 in a few years’ time. But you wouldn’t own it in a few years time, and you would have personally gained only a tiny fraction of the increase in the piece’s value, if anything at all.

I know this is very different, but it somehow reminded me of this other self-referential toy

Computers and Art

2010-01-19T09:43:00.000-08:00

Two articles about what computers have been getting up to. What struck me about both is that they describe how computers are moving beyond raw computational problems and are now helping with problems which require "taste". Computers are now better at distinguishing fake paintings from genuine ones, and can mimic the style of chess grandmasters so that humans can no longer tell whether they are playing a human or a computer pretending to be that particular human.

The first is about the use of computers to distinguish fake paintings from authentic ones. The approach is based on the idea of a visual vocabulary which is distinctive to each artist. This vocabulary consists of "words" termed "filters" which can be used to very compactly describe any work by that artist but would be much less efficient at describing a work by another person.

To carry this out computationally, the team obtained very high quality scans of all the Bruegel drawings, both authenticated ones and fakes. They broke the digital images of the authentic ones up into tiny patches, each just a few pixels wide, and then used a machine learning algorithm to identify a small set of those patches that could be used as filters, in imitation of the visual system. The algorithm picks the filters so that the smallest number possible is needed to generate every patch in the Bruegel. These formed the “words” of Bruegel’s own unique visual language.

The team was inspired by how the human visual system has evolved to very efficiently encode the world we find ourselves in; presumably, if we had evolved on another planet, or underwater, our visual system would have use a very different set of filters.

Graham, Rockmore and Hughes applied these ideas to art authentication by imagining an organism that had somehow managed to evolve a visual system while only ever viewing Bruegel drawings. The organism would be able to see Bruegel drawings using very few filters, but when it looked at anything else — including fake Bruegel drawings — it would have to use many more.

The second is an article by Kenneth Rogoff in which he describes what he thinks the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Economy will be.

Many commercially available computer programs can be set to mimic the styles of top grandmasters to an extent that is almost uncanny. Indeed, chess programs now come very close to passing the late British mathematician Alan Turing’s ultimate test of artificial intelligence: can a human conversing with the machine tell it is not human?

Ironically, as computer-aided cheating increasingly pervades chess tournaments (with accusations reaching the highest levels), the main detection device requires using another computer. Only a machine can consistently tell what another computer would do in a given position. Perhaps if Turing were alive today, he would define artificial intelligence as the inability of a computer to tell whether another machine is human!

An owl in flight

2010-01-19T02:38:00.000-08:00

Beautiful streamlining. From here

Carrots disguised as sticks

2010-01-18T07:59:00.000-08:00

John List has been conducting experiments to see if the Endowment Effect can be used as a motivator.

At the beginning of the week, some groups of workers were told that they would receive a bonus of 80 yuan ($12) at the end of the week if they met a given production target. Other groups were told that they had “provisionally” been awarded the same bonus, also due at the end of the week, but that they would “lose” it if their productivity fell short of the same threshold.

Objectively these are two ways of describing the same scheme. But under a theory of loss aversion, the second way of presenting the bonus should work better. Workers would think of the provisional bonus as theirs, and work harder to prevent it from being taken away.

This is just what the economists found. The fear of loss was a better motivator than the prospect of gain (which worked too, but less well). And the difference persisted over time: the results were not simply a consequence of workers’ misunderstanding of the system.

Lets see what happens when our HR managers get to learn of these results.

Does propaganda work?

2010-01-18T06:29:00.000-08:00

It seems yes. At least during the Rwanda genocide.

Not all villages are in line of sight of the two national transmitters. The effect of being so? When a village has full rather than zero radio coverage, civilian violence increased by 65 percent and organized violence by 77 percent.

Markets and Game theory

2010-01-18T06:23:00.000-08:00

Two posts from Jeff Ely.

First: Why do we sit through movie previews in theaters? Because we will always arrive early because we want the best seats in the house (or at least, we don't want to be stuck in the worst seats).

In fact, even if the theater publicized the true start time we would still come early. The reason is that we are playing an all-pay auction bidding with our time for the best seats in the theater. Each of us decides at home how early to arrive trading off the cost of our time versus the probability of getting stuck in the front row. The “winner” of the auction is the person who arrives earliest, the prize is the best seat in the theater, and your bid is how early to arrive. It is “all pay” because even the loser pays his bid

Since we are going to get there early anyway, the theaters auction off our attention to advertisers and even if we dislike the previews, we are not willing to enough to make it worthwhile for the theatres to stop them

And this even explains why theater tickets are always general admission. Let’s compare the alternative. The theater knows we are “buying” our seats with our time. The theater could try to monetize that by charging higher prices for better seats. But it’s a basic principle of advertising that the amount we are willing to pay to avoid being advertised at is smaller than the amount advertisers are willing to pay to advertise to us. (That is why pay TV is practically non-existent.) So there is less money to be made selling us preferred seats than having us pay with our time and eyeballs.

Is this actually true? I thought we could now (at least in Mumbai) specify the seats we want when we buy movie tickets?

Second: why Google "handicaps" the most popular links when they auction off keywords.

Sponsored links are paid advertisements. They are sold using an auction that determines which advertisers will have their links displayed and in what order. While the broad rules behind this auction are public, google handicaps the auction by adjusting bids submitted by advertisers according to what google calls Quality Score. (Yahoo does something similar.)

Google does not really want the weaker, less popular advertisers to win, but by giving them an advantage, they force the stronger, more popular advertisers to bid more for their keywords.

The idea is based on the well-known principle of handicaps for weak bidders in auctions. Let’s say google is auctioning links for the keyword “books” and the bidders are Amazon.com plus a bunch of fringe sites. If Amazon is willing to bid a lot for the ad but the others are willing to bid just a little, an auction with a level playing-field would allow Amazon to win at a low price. In these cases google can raise its auction revenues by giving a handicap to the little guys. Effectively google subsidizes their bids making them stronger competitors and thereby forcing Amazon to bid higher

The strays of Moscow

2010-01-18T02:23:00.001-08:00

A Financial Times article.

Russians can go nutty when it comes to dogs. Consider the incident a few years ago that involved Yulia Romanova, a 22-year-old model. On a winter evening, Romanova was returning with her beloved Staffordshire terrier from a visit to a designer who specialises in kitting out canine Muscovites in the latest fashions. The terrier was sporting a new green camouflage jacket as he walked with his owner through the crowded Mendeleyevskaya metro station. There they encountered Malchik, a black stray who had made the station his home, guarding it against drunks and other dogs. Malchik barked at the pair, defending his territory. But instead of walking away, Romanova reached into her pink rucksack, pulled out a kitchen knife and, in front of rush-hour commuters, stabbed Malchik to death.

Incentives

2010-01-18T02:20:00.000-08:00

Two articles which discuss incentives.
First, an article by Tim Harford in the Financial Times.

Just over two years ago, British soldiers in a remote region of Afghanistan came across a solitary man sowing seed – wheat rather than poppies. This was risky and unusual: a planting at the turn of the year was very late, and the area had been made dangerous by incessant fighting. But the farmer had his reasons. Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan, had been assassinated a couple of days earlier. The man reckoned that wheat prices would soar as a result and wanted to cash in...

There has been a tendency among commentators and politicians to treat the “hearts and minds” aspect of counter-insurgency as a popularity contest. But the “voters” are not casual spectators, trying to choose between the Taliban or the coalition forces; they are individuals weighing up complex choices in difficult circumstances.
He concludes

I have been as guilty as anyone of being fascinated by behavioural economics. But the financial system did not fail because of some psychological trait, but because it was riddled with damaging incentives that were hard to spot because the system was complex and changing quickly. So, too, with counter-insurgency: Mackay started by thinking about economic psychology but ended up focusing on complexity, and what it takes to create an organisation capable of adapting to complexity. It has taken me too long to come to the same conclusion myself.

Next, an interview in the New Yorker magazine with Nobel Laureate Hames Heckman on what remains of the Chicago School.

I want to distinguish between two different ideas. The Chicago School incorporates many different ideas. I think the part of the Chicago School that has been justified is the claim that people react to incentives, and that incentives are important. Nothing in what has happened invalidates that idea. People did react to incentives—clearly they did. It turned out that the incentives they were reacting to weren’t socially beneficial, but they definitely reacted to them. The other part of the Chicago School, which Stiglitz and Krugman have criticized, is the efficient-market hypothesis. That is something completely different.

I think it is important to put it into historical perspective. In the late nineteen-forties and nineteen-fifties, when Keynesianism was really dominant, that sort of Keynesianism—so-called hydraulic Keynesianism—completely ignored incentives and the way people reacted to them. What Chicago did—Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and others—was to redress that balance. They did a whole lot of empirical studies that showed how people did react to incentives, such as changes in taxes or prices. That was incredibly influential, and it is still is.

Information and Markets

2010-01-15T22:08:00.000-08:00

From the Economist's Economics focus for last week. One of Hayek's insights was that markets are essentially an information processing device: converting desires and resources into consumption. More and better information is good for both buyers and sellers

By examining historical data for the price of fish as mobile-phone coverage was extended down the coast of Kerala in southern India between 1997 and 2001, for example, Robert Jensen of Harvard University showed that access to mobile phones made markets much more efficient, eliminating wasted catches and thereby bringing down consumer prices by 4% and increasing fishermen’s profits by 8%.

Similarly, Jenny Aker of the University of California at Berkeley analysed grain markets in Niger to see how the phasing-in of mobile-phone coverage between 2001 and 2006 affected prices. She found that it reduced price variations between one market and another by at least 6.4%, and more in remote and hard-to-reach markets. With transaction costs cut, prices for consumers were lower and profits for traders higher.

The article also describes how ITC introduced internet kiosks (e-choupal) in Madhya Pradesh in an effort to improve transparency in the market for Soybeans.

Farmers in the region sell their soyabeans to intermediaries in open auctions at government-regulated wholesale markets called mandis, a system that was set up in order to protect farmers from unscrupulous buyers. The intermediaries then sell on the produce to food-processing companies. The problem with this approach for the farmers is that the traders have a far better idea about the prices prevailing in different markets and being offered by processing companies. With only a few traders at each mandi, they can easily collude to ensure that they pay less than the fair market price; they can then boost their profits by selling on the beans at a higher price.

However, in a long supply chain, different parties have different interests. ITC had an interest in cutting the middlemen out, and stimulating the farmers to produce more.

By the end of 2004 a total of 1,704 kiosks had been set up, each of which served its host village and four others within a five-kilometre (three-mile) radius. The kiosks displayed the minimum and maximum price paid for soyabeans at 60 mandis, updated once a day, along with agricultural information and weather forecasts. ITC also posted the price it was prepared to pay for soyabeans of a particular quality bought direct from farmers at 45 “hubs” (mostly in the same towns as mandis). By setting up the kiosks, ITC enabled farmers to check that the prices being offered at their local mandi were in line with prices elsewhere. It also gave them the option to sell direct.

The result was that the farmers produced more, and earned more. The middlemen lost out, and ITC got to purchase more at lower prices.

She found that the presence of kiosks in a district was associated with an instant and persistent increase of 1.7% in the average price paid at mandis in that district. As expected, the availability of price information increased the level of competition between the traders, raising prices and reducing the variation in prices between nearby mandis. Farmers’ profits increased by 33%, and the cultivation of soyabeans increased by an average of 19% in districts with kiosks. And by buying some produce direct, ITC reduced its costs, which paid for the kiosks.

How has the Internet changed the way you think?

2010-01-13T08:55:00.000-08:00

Edge asks.

Daniel Hillis' answers

Today, most people only recognize that they are using the Internet when they are interacting with a computer screen. They are less likely to appreciate when they are using the Internet while talking on the telephone, watching television, or flying on an airplane. Some travelers may have recently gotten a glimpse of the truth, for example, upon learning that their flights were grounded due to an Internet router failure in Salt Lake City, but for most this was just another inscrutable annoyance. Most people have long ago given up on trying to understand how technical systems work. This is a part of how the Internet is changing the way we think.

I want to be clear that I am not complaining about technical ignorance. In an Internet-connected world, it is almost impossible to keep track of how systems actually function. Your telephone conversation may be delivered over analog lines one day and by the Internet the next. Your airplane route may be chosen by a computer or a human being, or (most likely) some combination of both. Don't bother asking, because any answer you get is likely to be wrong.

And

It would take a long time to explain Network Time Protocol, how it corrects for variable network delays and how it takes advantage of a partially-layered hierarchy of network-connected clocks to find the time. Suffice it to say that it is complicated. Besides, I would be describing version 3 of the protocol, and your operating system is probably already using version 4. It really does not make sense for you, even if you are a programmer, to bother to understand how it works.

Clay Shirky's answer is well worth reading.

To make a historical analogy with the last major increase in the written word, you could earn a living in 1500 simply by knowing how to read and write. The spread of those abilities in the subsequent century had the curious property of making literacy both more essential and less professional; literacy became critical at the same time as the scribes lost their jobs.

The same thing is happening with publishing; in the 20th century, the mere fact of owning the apparatus to make something public, whether a printing press or a TV tower, made you a person of considerable importance. Today, though, publishing, in its sense of making things public, is becoming similarly de-professionalized; YouTube is now in the position of having to stop 8 year olds from becoming global publishers of video. The mere fact of being able to publish to a global audience is the new literacy, formerly valuable, now so widely available that you can't make any money with the basic capability any more.

Raghuram Rajan

2010-01-13T05:18:00.000-08:00

Superb interview with Raghuram Rajan. As advisor to the Indian Prime Minister, he has some comments on the country, but I found the earlier parts of the interview much more interesting. Thought I would summarize the interview so I understand it better.

On why banks fund long-term, projects using short-term deposits

Why the private banking sector has never chosen safe narrow banking (with finance companies issuing long-term liabilities and making illiquid loans) is really the puzzle of the ages. It’s interesting because the form of the bank seems relatively similar across countries and over time. It’s a form that has endured, perhaps longer than the corporation. You can go back to Mesopotamia perhaps, but certainly to Italy, and they had banks in much the form that we have today.

His answer is that there are three benefits to this structure: a) obviously, it is always going to be cheaper to get people to lend you money short-term rather than long-term b) Since depositors keep taking money out and putting it into a bank, there is always someone checking that the bank has funds to pay the depositors. This is a credible check on the management of the bank and lowers the cost of borrowing and c) long-term loans lead to constant strategic debt renegotiation, with the borrower trying to convince the lender to change the terms of the loan. Demand deposits allow the bank to credibly commit to not attempt this, and so allow them to get funds more cheaply.

On why the "narrow banking" proposed by Marin Wolf and Mervyn King would not be a good idea

you would have much higher costs of long-term intermediation. The money market fund would be reasonably stable, presumably, and will continue to invest in fairly liquid instruments—that will not be a problem. But it would be a problem on the other side—the finance company funded with long-term debt: Long-term projects would find finance very costly...Less lending, less growth

I am not convinced by this, because the liquid bond markets we have now mean that a finance company can raise large sums of money for long periods of time, without any of the lenders having to lock themselves in for long periods of time; though this will mean they are exposed to interest rate risk on their capital. The cost of borrowing would go up: I just wonder by how much, and whether it may not be worth it.

He explains why he decided that financial innovations such as CDS and other derivatives had not reduced risk in the overall system: a) Banks cannot make money without taking risk; if they get some kinds of risk of their books, they must be accepting other kinds of risk which may be harder to spot, b) Employees were being penalized for taking on obvious risks, but this meant that they were taking on hidden risks. The Insurance companies were taking on "tail risk" by writing Credit Default Swaps and acting as though they would never have to pay up.

His model for why this crisis was so severe seems to be that banks were competing ferociously, and they took on just the risks which they felt were implicitly backed up by the government. The example he gives is liquidity risk, where banks assumed there would never be any shortage of liquidity because the Fed would drop interests rates as much as required. In fact, when the crisis came, the Fed dropped rates as much as they could, but the liquidity dried up because the banks were themselves in trouble and would not lend, nor pass the rate reductions on.

One thing I just don't understand is that he describes how the actions of the Fed caused moral hazard, and also says this

There is always some amount of regulatory capture. The people the regulators interact with are people they get to know. They see the world from their perspective, and, you know, they want to make sure they’re in their good books. And so it’s not surprising that across the world, you have a certain amount of the regulators acting in the interest of, and fighting for, the regulated.

and this

there was also a tremendous amount of political pressure, not to protect friends, but to encourage certain kinds of low-income lending. I think that pervaded the system.

but at the same time seems to believe that the cause of the crisis was excessive faith in the free market. Just don't get that.

Roll over, Turing

2010-01-12T12:20:00.001-08:00

Pythagoras, Archimedes, Euclid and now this? What were those ancient Greeks smoking? The Antikthera mechanism is old news of course, but the images in the article are mind-boggling.

Investing in BRICS and mortar

2010-01-12T10:04:00.000-08:00

Powerful article in the Financial Times.

The writer is not saying that the BRICs will not become really rich and powerful (though obviously nothing is guaranteed), just that there is no reason to believe that those who invest in companies in these countries are going to make any money.

Academic studies have shown there is no positive correlation between GDP growth and stock market returns – if anything the correlation is slightly negative...The reason for this counter-intuitive finding is that you do not buy shares in the statistical construct known as GDP. You buy the shares of real world companies. In immature fast-growing economies, the companies that end up winning the struggle for survival may not even exist yet. That was certainly so in the case of Japan’s economic miracle. In the 1950s there were more than one hundred motorbike companies. The market leader, Tohatsu, was driven out of business by the cut-throat pricing of a flaky upstart called Honda.

Companies in emerging markets are unlikely to generate the kind of cash needed for investment: they will repeatedly raise money on the markets. How does this help those who already hold shares in the company, unless the overall return on investment improves, and is there a real incentive for the companies to do that?

Then comes a ferocious warning about China: the stock market is overvalued, real estate even more so (apartment prices are at 50 times average household income while Japan at the peak of its real estate bubble saw ratios of 12 to 15 time average household income), and investment in fixed assets is 50% of Chinese GDP.

Just as there has never been a bubble that hasn’t burst in the end, so there has never been an investment boom that hasn’t been followed by a bust. If China’s investment-to-GDP ratio were to drop to the levels of 1960s Japan – not an absurd idea, since that is also where it was in China ten years ago – the impact would be catastrophic. China itself would face slump and the mother of all banking crises. A domino reaction would hit the commodity exporters and other emerging economies. The deflationary impact of Chinese overcapacity would be felt everywhere, potentially putting the world trading system at risk. And investors would come to view the “Bric” acronym much as they do “TMT” today.

America versus Europe

2010-01-12T04:45:00.000-08:00

Another interminable debate.

Here is the Economist's Free Exchange blog. Here is Tyler Cowen two and one.

I think Tyler Cowen two makes the most interesting points.

Women in the workplace

2010-01-12T04:01:00.000-08:00

Good article in the Economist.

Huge improvements all round, but economics is all about trade-offs.

But the biggest reason why women remain frustrated is more profound: many women are forced to choose between motherhood and careers. Childless women in corporate America earn almost as much as men. Mothers with partners earn less and single mothers much less. The cost of motherhood is particularly steep for fast-track women.

This is in line with what Chris Dillow reported sometime back.

Controlling for obvious things like education and occupation, lesbians earn 11% more than heterosexual women. Most of the male-female pay gap, then, is a penalty for heterosexual women only, not for women in general.

I was just happy to see that there is some data throwing light on this controversy, but there are consequences

Many professional women reject motherhood entirely; in Switzerland 40% of them are childless. Others delay child-bearing for so long that they are forced into the arms of the booming fertility industry. Some choose not to work at all, representing a loss to collective investment in talent.

The article also seems to be suggesting that children might be suffering because their parents are not spending time with them, but offers little evidence for this.

A survey for the Children’s Society, a British charity, found that 60% of parents agreed that “nowadays parents aren’t able to spend enough time with their children”. In a similar survey in America 74% of parents said that they did not have enough time for their children.

This could just be a case of parent's feeling guilty.

British children brought up in two-parent families where only one parent works are almost three times more likely to be poor than children with two parents at work.

This statement, of course, does not tell us which is cause and which effect, or even if something else is causing both.

There is some good news

Many talented women are already hopping off the corporate treadmill to form companies that better meet their needs. In the past decade the number of privately owned companies started by women in America has increased twice as fast as the number owned by men. Women-owned companies employ more people than the largest 500 companies combined. Eden McCallum and Axiom Legal have applied a network model to their respective fields of management consultancy and legal services: network members work when it suits them and the companies use their scale to make sure that clients have their problems dealt with immediately.

Asset bubbles and optimism

2010-01-11T06:14:00.000-08:00

A wonderful blog post by Jeff Ely about how people are working on constructing Economic models which could explain how optimistic investors could inflate a bubble. First, why this is a problem

Alp Simsek asks whether the presence of optimistic traders can inflate the price of assets, say housing prices. It seems obvious, but remember that investment in housing is leveraged using collateralized loans where the house itself is the collateral. If the optimists are borrowing from the “realists” to buy houses at overinflated prices, and they are offering up the house as collateral, then surely the realists aren’t willing to lend?

How the market works

Suppose that you are a realist and you are making a loan to me to purchase a house. A year later we will see whether housing prices have gone up or down. If they go up, I will pay off the loan and realize a profit. If they go down I will default on the loan. A key idea is to understand that the loan effectively makes us partners in the purchase of the house. I own it on the upside (and I pay you back your loan) and you own it on the downside. We pay for the house together too: you contribute the loan amount and I contribute the down pament.

The equilibrium price of the house will be determined by how much we, as partners, are willing to pay. I am an optimist and I would like to pay a lot for it, but I am financially constrained so my contribution to the total price is some fixed amount, my down payment. Thus, our total willingness to pay is determined by how much you are willing to pay to enter this partnership.

This means that it is the "realistic" lender who determines the market price which the asset goes for. However, assume the lender and the borrower agree on the likelihood of default, but the borrower is more optimistic as to what the house would be worth if the borrower did not default. In that case, the borrower would be willing to give up some of that upside in order to get the lender to participate. And the promise of that potential upside makes the deal more attractive for the lender as well, and makes him more willing to lend.

Lots to think about in this.

The Mass Market and the Long Tail

2010-01-11T05:47:00.000-08:00

A superb article in the Economist about how well the predictions of The Long Tail have worked out. The bottom-line seems to be that the niche market has grown and the market has grown more diverse, but the big blockbusters have actually increased their market-share.

In short, just because people have more choice does not mean they will opt for more obscure entertainments. That is especially clear in the book trade. A study of the Australian market by Nielsen, a research firm, found that the number of titles bought each year (measured by ISBNs) has risen dramatically, from about 275,000 in 2004 to almost 450,000 in 2007. Niche titles selling fewer than 1,000 copies each accounted for nearly all the growth in variety. Yet their market share fell. In Britain, sales of the ten bestselling books increased from 3.4m to 6m between 1998 and 2008.

Again

Although you might expect people who seek out obscure products to derive more pleasure from their discoveries than those who simply trudge off to see the occasional blockbuster, the opposite is true

apparently because

In “Formal Theories of Mass Behaviour”, William McPhee noted that a disproportionate share of the audience for a hit was made up of people who consumed few products of that type. (Many other studies have since reached the same conclusion.) A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read “The Lost Symbol”, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.

2009-10-16T11:14:00.001-07:00

William Golding and the capacity for evil reviewed by Allan Massie - TLS

2009-09-23T10:27:00.001-07:00

This is an experiment.

Voodoo Economics

2009-03-29T12:47:00.001-07:00

South Park on the state of Economics today.

HT: Greg Mankiw

Hopped up on Coffee

2009-03-29T12:45:00.000-07:00

A video of someone like me after a day of drinking coffee at work

HT: Ernie who also to a Malcolm Gladwell article about coffee.

Andrew Gelman has a nice post about someone who performed

a randomized, blinded, placebo-controlled experiment on himself

and

was astonished to see how much the caffeine had affected him. He was stronger -- his power output was 3 percent greater -- and faster. In fact, he said the average speed for his tests when he used caffeine was faster than his fastest speed when he was not using caffeine

Achilles and Hector

2009-01-25T17:56:00.000-08:00

Two birds in full throated song on a damp, dark winter evening in London, while people hurry past, bundled against the cold.

What a sight

2009-01-25T04:19:00.000-08:00

From Makezine

Since Time Immemorial

2009-01-25T04:06:00.000-08:00

Merriam Webster: a time antedating a period legally fixed as the basis for a custom or right.

While listening to the BBC, I was amazed to learn that this phrase has a precise meaning in English Law.

Checking online, I was even more astonished to learn just how long ago this phrase was defined. Wikipedia:

In 1276, this time was fixed by statute as the 3rd September 1189, the date of the coronation of King Richard I (Richard the Lionheart). Proof of unbroken possession or use of any right since that date made it unnecessary to establish the original grant. In 1832, the plan of dating legal memory from a fixed time was abandoned; instead, it was held that rights which had been enjoyed for twenty years (or as against the Crown thirty years) should not be impeached merely by proving that they had not been enjoyed before.

Overnight success can be a long time coming

2009-01-11T03:41:00.000-08:00

John Kay writes an article on why choice matters

Choice is not an end in itself, but a means to the good services everyone seeks. Choice is working best when no one wants to exercise it.

and on a pernicious myth about markets.

But those who defend the market system are often the system’s worst enemies. I recently listened to a group of businessmen deploring the anti-capitalist tone of much of what is taught in schools. They had a point. But they spoiled it by promoting a description of capitalism that was at once repulsive and false.

They talked about “wealth creation”, although most of what they described seemed to be a diversion of wealth for the benefit of particular individuals rather than the creation of new wealth. They thought private sector activities – such as securities trading and automobile manufacture – created wealth; while public sector activities – such as health and education – used wealth up. They stressed that financial rewards were the mainspring of innovation, apparently unaware that material gain was not even at the back of the minds of those who invented computers, discovered antibiotics or created green revolution crops.

Over at Coding Horror, Jeff Atwood perfectly illustrates this point

Honestly, I look forward to waking up someday two or three years from now and doing the exact same thing I did today: working on the Stack Overflow code, eking out yet another tiny improvement or useful feature. Obviously we want to succeed. But on some level, success is irrelevant, because the process is inherently satisfying. Waking up every day and doing something you love -- even better, surrounded by a community who loves it too -- is its own reward. Despite being a metric ton of work.

Wealth matters: it allows you to focus better on what you really want to do, but I would never be able to get any real work done if the only reason I had to do it was a bonus or promotion. Of course, to be able to take that attitude, you already need to have some amount of basic security.

Waltz with Bashir

2009-01-01T15:02:00.000-08:00

Watching Waltz with Bashir: A very good start to the year, and the second great animated movie I have seen this year.

I was drawn to seeing this movie by the poster above: it felt like a scene from Marine Drive in Mumbai. It is a documentary but, being an animation, it has no need for reconstructions of events which nobody filmed. Too much sepia, but the visuals are wonderful, the figures move stiffly but still do a great job of conveying emotion through body language, and the movie has a glorious soundtrack, and a very droll sense of humour.

I bombed Beirut, I bombed Sidon:

and Enola Gay

How distributed decision making typical of bureaucracies can help create atrocities by dispersing responsibility, how religions are only occasionally about what people believe, and how movies really are a multimedia art form.

Every single trailer in the theater felt like an advertisement for a computer game. The invention of photography forced painting to discover virtues other than realism, and the spread of the movies may have compelled novelists to discover qualities other than plot and scene. What will this new art do to old ones? We will have more movies which are made to go right into a computer game, but will we also see more works like Waltz with Bashir?

Merry Christmas

2008-12-21T13:21:00.000-08:00

A broadcast by the BBC of the Choir of Christ College, Cambridge, celebrating Christmas during the blackout of 1939.

There is something about fire

2008-12-21T09:50:00.000-08:00

My favourites from among the "images of the year", published by the Boston Globe. (Text taken directly from the article.)

HT: Paul Kedrosky.

A giant mechanical spider, part of a piece of free theater by French company La Machine entitled "Les Mecaniques Servants", walks along the waterfront in Liverpool, England.

A bull sarcophagus in which a member of the Ubud royal family was cremated burns during the funeral ceremony in Ubud, Bali, Indonesia

A man in a traditional "Perchten" costume performs during an Austrian league soccer match in Ried, Austria

The Guizer Jarl is silhouetted as members of his Viking Squad walk around a long boat with burning torches during the annual Up Helly Aa Festival

Lightning bolts appear above and around the Chaiten volcano, as it began its first eruption in thousands of years

The moon and stars light up Mount Everest, also known as Qomolangma, as seen from near Everest Base Camp in the Tibet Autonomous Region

Images of books on shelves are seen projected on the walls of the Tower of David in Jerusalem's Old City

North Face

2008-12-21T04:37:00.000-08:00

One of the most harrowing movie experiences of my life.

Peter Sellers

2008-12-07T08:52:00.000-08:00

Richard III: its been a hard day's night.

HT: Alex Ross

Credit crunch economics

2008-12-01T14:26:00.001-08:00

Thanks to Greg Mankiw

Mumbai

2008-11-27T14:13:00.000-08:00

Listening to the nauseating effluvia of Arundhati Roy on BBC Radio 4; how much better Emily Dickinson is at a time like this.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone

This is the Hour of Lead
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons recollect the Snow
First-Chill-then Stupor-then the letting go

Question

2008-11-24T15:09:00.000-08:00

Heard on this show on BBC Radio 4:

You keep reading about dead people who are identified using their dental records. If we don't know who they are, how do we know who their dentist is?

Phrase of the day

2008-11-24T14:51:00.000-08:00

Paraprosdokian

I want to die like my father, quietly, in his sleep—not screaming and terrified like his passengers

- Bob Monkhouse

A neat step

2008-11-24T14:32:00.000-08:00

The Thai army knows what to do with prima donna generals

A MAVERICK Thai general who has threatened to bomb anti-government protesters and drop snakes on them from helicopters has been reassigned as an aerobics teacher, the Bangkok Post said on Friday.

HT: Paul Kedrosky

Tom Peters

2008-11-24T14:22:00.000-08:00

Some management gurus are more modest than their followers. Tom Peters has lunch with the FT.

On whether management is getting harder

On the whole, Peters thinks not. We exaggerate the extent of change, he feels. It is the arrogance of modernity to believe that we face unique and unprecedented challenges. What people say now about the internet they used to say about the railways, the telegraph, the radio

On his book

It was not hard science. But what in management is? “It’s mostly luck, for God’s sakes!” Peters says. He feels the same way about this mega blockbuster that made his name: “A decent book with perfect timing” is his verdict. “There’s not an ounce of false humility in that.”

On his success

“Look,” Peters confesses, “I was born in 1942, in the US. I was protestant. I had relatively intelligent parents and I was white – that’s the first 99.9 per cent of it. Hard work may have done the rest.”

On his neighbour's success

“I had a neighbour who won a Nobel prize for his work on kidneys – he carried out the first effective transplant. I once asked him how he’d done it. ‘We did the most operations,’ he told me. At any point in time there are 10 people up there – one of them does the most.”

Malcolm Gladwell says says something similar about excellence in craftwork in his new book

Anything that is cognitively complex seems like it requires at least 10,000 hours… It’s deliberate practice, so it’s focused, determined, in environments where there’s feedback, where there’s a chance to really learn from mistakes. What’s fascinating about this notion that expertise arises only after 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is that it seems to apply incredibly broadly to an astonishing array of different professions - from playing chess to writing classical music to being a brain surgeon to playing hockey…

HT: Stefan Stern

Returning

2008-11-23T03:43:00.001-08:00

The New York Times on the reverse brain drain.

We learned new expressions: “He is on tour” (Means: He is traveling. Doesn’t mean: He has joined U2.); “What is your native place?” (Means: Where did your ancestors live? Doesn’t mean: What hospital delivered you?); “Two minutes” (Means: An hour. Doesn’t mean: Two minutes.)

I needed a nice car and a new television!

2008-11-23T02:36:00.000-08:00

Felix Salmon

The neuropsychology of art

2008-11-22T13:32:00.000-08:00

Abstract art is music on a canvas.

Science Daily

Chilled

2008-11-22T13:15:00.000-08:00

Analogy

2008-11-16T02:36:00.001-08:00

Chicago builds itself up, knocks itself down again, scrapes away the rubble, and starts over. European cities destroyed in the war were painstakingly restored. Chicago does not restore; it makes something wildly different. To count on stability here is madness. A Parisian can always see the Paris that was, as it has been for centuries. A Venetian, as long as Venice is not swallowed up in mud, has before him the things his ancestors saw. But a Chicagoan as he wanders about the city feels like a man who has lost many teeth. His tongue explores the gaps - let us see now: Here the Fifty-fifth street car turned into Harper avenue at the end of the trolley line; then the conductor hurried through the car, reversing the cane seats.

- Saul Bellow from "Chicago: the city that was, the city that is"

Getting Better

2008-11-13T13:56:00.000-08:00

Paul Kedrosky

Lawyers and Economists

2008-11-13T13:24:00.000-08:00

This post from the Economist's Free Exchange Blog is excellent. They quote a very cross Willem Buiter

Except for a depressingly small minority among them, lawyers know nothing. They are incapable of logic. They don't know the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions or between type I and type II errors. Indeed, any concept of probability is alien to them. They don't understand the concepts of opportunity cost and trade off. They cannot distinguish between normative and positive statements. They are so focused on winning an argument through technicalities, that they no longer would recognise the truth if it bit them in the butt. If you are very lucky, a lawyer will give you nothing but the truth. You will never get the truth, let alone the whole truth. Things have degenerated to the point that lawyers and the legal profession not only routinely undermine justice, but even the law.

It reminded me of this old post by Brad De Long

we had found that it was possible to make intellectual and policy progress in discussions with economists because we had all been trained to think analytically: to break the issue down into background assumptions about the world, beliefs about the principal causal mechanisms, and claims about the likely effects of different policies on those chains of cause-and-effect. When we disagreed--as we often did--we could quickly ascertain where and why, and then agree on how to go hunting for pieces of information that would help resolve the disagreement. This was in striking contrast with our collective experience with lawyers or media types, who would be vague about cause and effect, or shift premises in the middle of a meeting when they saw that making different background claims about the world would provide a smoother road to their desired conclusion.

Obamalatory

2008-11-13T13:17:00.000-08:00

HT: Don Bodreaux

This is getting worrisome

2008-11-10T13:12:00.000-08:00

Neuroimaging Of Brain Shows Who Spoke To A Person And What Was Said

Gorgeous

2008-11-09T11:57:00.000-08:00

HT: Tyler Cowen

Otto

2008-11-04T23:14:00.000-08:00

I really need to stop eating Octopuses

Once we saw him juggling the hermit crabs in his tank, another time he threw stones against the glass damaging it. And from time to time he completely re-arranges his tank to make it suit his own taste better - much to the distress of his fellow tank inhabitants

HT: Geekpress

A new dawn of American leadership is at hand

2008-11-04T22:41:00.001-08:00

HT: Greg Mankiw

This is one of the most extraordinary people ever, but I just wish the people of the United States would accept that what is truly extraordinary is their country, and that no politician is going to get them where they wish to go. I hope they are not disappointed in Obama- too many people are treating this like the Second Coming.

Camelot Redux

2008-11-04T14:29:00.000-08:00

I was listening to BBC Radio 4 when they broadcast an interview with a lady in the United States. She said she was voting for Barack Obama because her neighbourhood was run down, and the parks needed fixing and crime was soaring in her area.

Writing in the FT, Clive James puts it well

Great presidents inspire but they also deliver. The plain fact is, Mr Obama cannot deliver what he has promised. The problems he will confront are too difficult. The parallel with Tony Blair is impossible for a Briton to ignore. Enthusiasm among Mr Obama’s supporters is not just naive, it borders on the deranged, much like the enthusiasm in Britain in 1997 for Mr Blair. Remember how everything was possible, finally? “Things can only get better.” Look how that worked out

Postscript: It was even better when they spoke to a man in Kenya who hoped Obama would win because his village does not have water, power, or decent roads. He used exactly the same phrase the other woman used: "Obama will make a difference"

Moon fact of the day

2008-11-04T00:08:00.001-08:00

The surface area of the Moon is roughly equal to that of Africa.

Napoleon complex

2008-11-03T14:11:00.000-08:00

John Kay on the Great Man theory of History. A choice quote from Alasdair MacIntyre

One key reason why the presidents of large corporations do not, as some radical critics believe, control the US is that they do not even succeed controlling their own corporations.

~~More~~ More from John Kay on the same theme.

Postscript: Thanks to Gaddeswarup for the correction.

Today's miscellany

2008-11-03T13:34:00.000-08:00

The FT continues to be the Romantic's Wall Street Journal. Stefan Stern eulogizes Studs Terkel in the FT's management blog.

Work is about a daily search for meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor, in short for a sort of life, rather than a Monday-to-Friday sort of dying

The Economist's Free Exchange Blog on the American elections.

You'll have to excuse us if we're a little edgy today. It's kind of like Christmas Eve, if Christmas only came once every four years, and if sometimes instead of presents you received a beating.

And a nice cartoon from Greg Mankiw

The mother of all demos

2008-11-02T02:41:00.000-08:00

Jeff Atwood (of Stack Overflow) blogs about a product demo in 1968

On December 9, 1968, Douglas C. Engelbart and the group of 17 researchers working with him in the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA, presented a 90-minute live public demonstration of the online system, NLS, they had been working on since 1962. The public presentation was a session in the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the Convention Center in San Francisco, and it was attended by about 1,000 computer professionals. This was the public debut of the computer mouse. But the mouse was only one of many innovations demonstrated that day, including hypertext, object addressing and dynamic file linking, as well as shared-screen collaboration involving two persons at different sites communicating over a network with audio and video interface