Olde England

I thought I had already blogged this passage From AJP Taylor's English History. Apparently not.

Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card.

He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police.

Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service.

Links

Interview about embodied cognition with Andrew Wilson and Sabrina Golonka in Psychology Today. Good discussion of what it is not, and the example they use (of how people catch balls in flight) gets the essential point across: there is no Newtonian model in our minds, we don't use a "computational, representational system that mentally transforms the input into motor commands" to predict where the ball will fall and then go there. As in so many other areas, we use heuristics.

Jeff at Cheap Talk has a lovely little post about why moving to California may disappoint. The ones who move are the ones who are over-optimistic, and so are more likely to be disillusioned.

It also explains why people who are forced to leave California, say for job-related reasons, are pleasantly surprised at how happy they can be in the Midwest. Since they hadn’t moved voluntarily already, its likely that they underestimated how happy they would be.

Surely this also works in the other direction: you expect something to be really bad, and you are pleasantly surprised. In both cases, it is better to be a pessimist than an optimist. Lesson learnt.

Karl Smith at Modeled Behavior makes a point which wise men have made before, but which we never seem to learn: being sincere is just not good enough.

It is this blog’s overarching conceit that none do more harm than those who seek to do a principled good. The selfish will always accept a Coasian bargain. True believers will stop at nothing.

A quick note

To say that this tweet by Emanuel Derman goes to the heart of the matter.

RT "@ritholtz: How your brain tells you where you are http://bit.ly/waNnfv $$" …why not say "the molecules in the neuron know"? Thats Puzzle

Settling down

Nowhere outside the Hilly Flanks did people have so much to defend. Even in 7000 BCE, almost everyone outside this region was a forager, shifting seasonally, and even when they had begun to settle down in villages, such as Mehrgarh in modern Pakistan or Shanghan in the Yangzi Delta, these were simple places by the standards of Jericho. If hunter-gatherers from any other place on earth had been airlifted to Cayonu or Catalhoyik they would not, I suspect have known what hit them. Gone would be their caves or little clusters of huts, replaced by bustling towns with sturdy houses, great stores of food, powerful art, and religious monuments. They would find themselves working hard, dying young, and hosting an unpleasant array of microbes. They would rub shoulders with rich and poor, and chafe under rejoice in men's authority over women and parents' over children. They might even discover that some people had the riht to murder them in rituals. And they might well wonder why people had inflicted all this on themselves.

From Ian Morris' Why The West Rules- For Now.

Organizing

Note: Edited for clarity.

John D Cook quotes Hayek in this post.

Man in a complex society can have no choice but between adjusting himself to what to him must seem the blind forces of the social process and obeying the orders of a superior.

I guess this is Hayek's answer to the question of just how many ways there are in which we can organize production. Coase assumes the same options in his writings about the nature of the firm, when he contrasts hierarchies and markets.

"Complex" is the key word. "Simpler" societies did have other ways of organizing these matters. For much of human history, we lived in a world without markets, where economic life was organized by means of convention and tradition. It is markets which are the real innovation, and as the work of Elinor Ostrom has shown, convention and tradition play a role even in wealthy societies today.

I certainly do not romanticize traditional societies, and I do think markets are preferable to bosses. Even if you are working for a boss, you are infinitely better off when there is a market for your work. However, reading that passage from Hayek could leave you with the impression that there are only two ways to organize economic life. There used to be more, and we may yet come up with others.

After all, it was Hayek who said that "the mind cannot foresee its own advance."

Simply being

Note: Edited to correct some egregious mistakes in grammar.

Here is Steven Landburg arguing that if we believe rocks exist, then we should also believe that mathematical objects exist. After all, rocks are mostly empty spaces.

Now here’s what genuinely baffles me: Apparently there are people in this world (and even, occasionally, in the comments section of this blog) who haven’t the slightest doubt about the existence of rocks, galaxies, squirrels, and the rest of the physical universe, but who suddenly turn into hardcore skeptics re the existence of mathematical objects like the natural numbers.

and also

Why on earth would, say, a scientist, commit to the belief that there’s a physical universe out there but not a mathematical one, when we know that our perceptions of the physical universe demand constant revision, whereas our perceptions of the mathematical universe are largely eternal. My conception of the natural numbers is very close to Euclid’s; my conception of an atom bears almost no resemblance to Demosthenes’s.

He then goes on to discuss what this implies for the existence of God. Now, Steven Landsburg is far more intelligent than I am, and also incomparably more knowledgeable about Mathematics. In this matter, though, I think he is wrong.

I really doubt it is true that his "conception of the natural numbers is very close to Euclid's." We now think of the natural numbers as being embedded in the real number continuum, a concept which Euclid would have found incoherent or even abhorrent. Why stop at the real numbers? We've gone and created Non-standard Analysis, with its infinitesimal and infinite numbers. Whether this changes our conception of the natural numbers depends on what you mean by "conception." We can now subtract any natural number from any other, which Euclid would have said is nonsense. I think that is a big change in our conception of the natural numbers. And we can divide any natural number by any non-zero natural number, and we believe the result is meaningful. Again, a big change in our conception of the natural numbers.

None of this, however, is my point. I just think that the very word "exists" is too baggy and commodious to be useful by itself. When we say something exists, we should say (or it should be commonly agreed) in what sense we mean to use the word. Rocks exist in the sense that when I kick one with my foot, it hurts. Numbers exist in the sense that I can use to them to count and measure, and they form a coherent system. Words are conventional things, and we are being lazy when we simply assert that something "Does exist!" "Doesn't!"

When I was in college, I went to visit a friend of a friend, and he was reading a book or article titled "Do holes exist?" I don't remember anything about it except the title, and the impression it made on me: "is this what philosophers spend their time on?" I guess it must have been one of these. These days, I wouldn't be so dismissive: to remind us that meaning is often a matter of convention is a valuable service.

I think Reuben Hersh may have thought much more deeply about these matters than Landsburg. I would love to see a debate between them.

Norvig contra Chomsky

I came across this post at LanguageLog through this tweet by Ms Moximer (@Melody).

It is all good, but for me the best parts were these remarks by Martin Kay (emphasis added)

Now I come to the fourth point, which is ambiguity. This, I take it, is where statistics really come into their own. Symbolic language processing is highly nondeterministic and often delivers large numbers of alternative results because it has no means of resolving the ambiguities that characterize ordinary language. This is for the clear and obvious reason that the resolution of ambiguities is not a linguistic matter. After a responsible job has been done of linguistic analysis, what remain are questions about the world. They are questions of what would be a reasonable thing to say under the given circumstances, what it would be reasonable to believe, suspect, fear or desire in the given situation. If these questions are in the purview of any academic discipline, it is presumably artificial intelligence.

This is precisely the point.

Chomsky and Norvig are talking about different problems.

Chomsky looks at the work which has been done, for example in machine translation, and finds it inadequate because machines make some very obvious blunders. These blunders are evidently because the machine has no "understanding" of that which it translating. However, how could a machine ever understand language? It would require it to understand our way of life, to understand what we mean by "love", and "fear" and "hope" and "home" and "laughter", and indeed "understanding". It would have to have beliefs, comparable to the beliefs we humans hold. How many other animals would understand what we mean by "laughter"? Would an intelligent alien species understand?

This is not to say that Chomsky is wrong. Maybe this is what Wittgenstein would say too; that people use language, and that to understand language, you need to be a person, and you need to understand how we live. I just liked the distinction between questions about language and questions about the world.

Plain speaking

Andy Walsh writes about his running partner

The idea is as follows. Whenever Dave has a meeting with a representative of any of the abovementioned agencies, he takes with him his Penalty Box, into which the relevant factotum must pay a forfeit if she uses any of the following expressions:

acceptable (or unacceptable); appropriate (or inappropriate); empower(ing); person centred (or person oriented); developmental; non-judgemental; rights-based; forward-looking ; in partnership. If a project or service is ever said to be rolled out then Dave claims a double forfeit. And if any mention of the date is made in such a way as to imply it has a particular moral relevance then that is triple. Hence if a social worker were to say of his opinion that it is “judgemental and not an appropriate comment to make in this, the 21st Century” then he’d hit paydirt.

Dave may be an angry man, but I have to respect his spirit and intelligence.

Dave’s strategy has a pleasing consequence, one that is more than merely financial. He has discovered that in being denuded of the above expressions the social worker, probation officer and counsellour suffers a pleasing paralysis of expression and of thought.Meetings that used to take several hours are now over in minutes. It has become obvious to him that the Wittgensteinians have a point: that there is no pre-linguistic “given”, that thought and experience are mediated by and logically consequent upon language. Strip these statutory representatives of their language game and they become like putty in his hands. He used to spend his time running from these people, now he knows that, with the help of his Penalty Box, he can philosophise them away.

It is easy to mock governments, bureaucrats, and politicians for their crimes against language: the stock phrases, the empty gestures, but equally grave atrocities are committed in any large organization, including corporations which are supposedly disciplined by the need to earn a profit. I would love to see such a scheme introduced into all workplaces, except that we may be left dumbfounded, unable to speak without our favorite cliches to hand. "Globalization", "localization", "customer centric", "new paradigm", "cloud computing", "restructuring", "agility", "rigorous". Corporate language is anything but rigorous. I cannot remember the last time I heard "wisdom", "patience', "kindness", "humility", "moderation".

Perhaps large corporations are refuges for mediocre minds, but surely small firms are little furnaces of original thinking, since they have to be oh-so-responsive to the darwinian pressures of the marketplace? I don't know, but I suspect not, since the main requirement for survival is to be able to anticipate the needs of your customers, and the best way to do that is to be something like them. I don't think original thinking is necessary to operate any business, or indeed in academics or anywhere else in life. Note that I am not saying that original thinking cannot be observed in large organizations, or small ones, or in academia, or government, nor that the market doesn't discipline corporations more than governments, or start-ups more than large firms. All I am saying is that the market only requires you to be somewhat better than your competition is some way, as judged by your customers. It rewards you for being useful to someone, rather than original thinking, and that is not a bad thing.

We use language to communicate, but we communicate more than facts and opinions, we also signal loyalty, telegraph subservience, assert authority, warn of rebellion. Organizations are little societies above all, and societies are all about hierarchy. Again, I am not saying that organizations are only about sociology! However, the similarities between North Korea and your employer or customer are not entirely coincidental. Xavier Marquez had a fascinating blog post about cults of personality.

Here is where cults of personality come in handy. The dictator wants a credible signal of your support; merely staying silent and not saying anything negative won’t cut it. In order to be credible, the signal has to be costly: you have to be willing to say that the dictator is not merely ok, but a superhuman being, and you have to be willing to take some concrete actions showing your undying love for the leader. (You may have had this experience: you are served some food, and you must provide a credible signal that you like it so that the host will not be offended; merely saying that you like it will not cut it. So you will need to go for seconds and layer on the praise). Here the concrete action required of you is typically a willingness to denounce others when they fail to say the same thing, but it may also involve bizarre pilgrimages, ostentatious displays of the dictator’s image, etc.

Read the whole thing! Perhaps this is why we are presented with the sight of apparently intelligent people who seem to have replaced their brains with jargon generators: they (we?) are merely signalling their commitment to the supposed values of the organization, and the direction it is moving in. Fortunately, employees, unlike North Koreans, have the option to exit, which prevents organizations from collapsing completely into self-contained little worlds like North Korea. When companies are in crisis, the exigencies of survival take precedence over the need to signal loyalty, and a temporary period of plain speaking follows. Something like this happened in Cuba when the Soviet Union collapsed, and cheap imports were no longer available. Plain talking is more likely when senior management is replaced, and the new leaders can blame the old ones for all the woes of the unit, and take whatever steps are necessary to save it, and employees can demonstrate their new loyalties by denouncing the old dispensation and recommending changes. This obviously hasn't yet happened in Cuba, though Raoul has taken over from Fidel. Again, motives are more complex (and admirable!) than I am indicating here, and the benefits of this newfound freedom are real, whatever the motivation may be: a period of Hayekian discovery within the centrally planned Universe of the corporation.

Why do (should?) we care for plain language? I do think there is an aesthetic argument for good writing, though that need not always be clear writing. Imaginative literature relies on artful language for its effect, and this may require it to be obscure. For most other writing, however, where we claim to be describing how something is, it may be good manners to be clear, so your readers can more easily examine your argument. It may also be a sign that you have taken some trouble to think matters through, and to express yourself clearly, though some people seem to be congenitally incapable of expressing themselves clearly. Besides these, reading Orwell had convinced me that it is because it is difficult to lie in plain language, while jargon can be used to cloak many crimes.

If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.

However, this passage from Kevin Macleod as quoted by Brad DeLong, makes a good case that Orwell is simply wrong on this point.

There's no necessary connection between political truth and verbal clarity. Let's take some writers whose politics Orwell would reject. Nothing could be stronger than Orwell's detestation of Fabianism and Stalinism. George Bernard Shaw stood for the first and more or less endorsed the second, yet The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism is a delight to read. Not all the Communists and fellow-travellers were hacks. (Orwell's citation of a rant from that quarter is tellingly under-referenced: 'Communist pamphlet' - I ask you!) T. A. Jackson and A. L. Morton wrote their best-known books in clear and vivid English. John Strachey was at his most lucid when he was at his most wrong. Professor J. B. S. Haldane's science essays are still read for pleasure. The Trotskyist C. L. R. James wrote one literary masterpiece; Trotsky himself was constitutionally incapable of writing a dull page, and in Max Eastman he found a translator worthy of his style.

This now seems correct to me. "Truth" is about how well your model of reality fits the world, clarity is about how easily your readers can understand what you are saying. However, the world is complicated, and human society is the worst of it. For example, an economy is a whirlpool of feedback loops and circular flows, and we will always find it diffcult to trace the consequences of any policy or event. Think how hard it is to see how even simple programs work. To believe that we will be able to judge the truth of a theory if we are given a clear, elegant exposition, we need to assume that we already know the truth of the matter and can then compare it to the theory. This, however, is an empirical question. By definition, we can understand a clear writer more easily than an obscure one, but to judge whether the what he has writen is the truth is another matter altogether. At best, we will be able to more easily detect some of the more obvious logical errors he has made.

Maybe.

Twitterstream Waltzingmonkey 08 Feb 2012

Freedom! : http://t.co/UHKUz7By
Bryan Caplan : being single is a luxury. http://t.co/Cp9vB5lg
MT @lucaswiman: just had my "I had the same startup idea but it sounded illegal" moment. I finally feel like Silicon Valley is my true home
RT @RogerHighfield: I fixed my iMac's desire to be a hairdryer by unplugging #macsareasannoyingaspcsreally
taxes: large effect on timing, moderate effect on financing, little-to-no effect on behaviour (how hard people work): http://t.co/IC1UHJWs
RT @lucaswiman: Tom Blomfield: Automate Everything http://t.co/GbVDpUXj (via Instapaper)
RT @rosieseed: irony in one perfect picture. http://t.co/C5OHmSuc

Freedom

The creator of Ruby on Rails speaking about why he uses Ruby. It may seem like a topic only a programming geek could enjoy, but it is actually an interesting example of the use of a speech to rally the troops.

"Why Ruby?" - RubyConf X Keynote from David Heinemeier Hansson on Vimeo.

Hansson speaks of the human experience of writing programs in a language, the importance of trusting the users of a language, and the value of freedom. That seems to be his main point, that Ruby trusts its developers, and doesn't babysit them. He asserts that the creators of other languages (he names Java) just don't trust their developers, and so deny them freedom.

It is a bravura performance. I loved this quote from Larry Wall

The very fact that it's possible to write messy programs in Perl is also what makes it possible to write programs that are cleaner in Perl than they could ever be in a language that attempts to enforce cleanliness. The potential for greater good goes right along with the potential for greater evil.

There is so much I agree with in the talk: the point that when people are denied the opportunity to do what they really want to do, they go off and find some way to do it anyway, the idea that not everything should be functional, that you should do some things just because you want to, that it is lovely that Ruby is such a developer-centric language. Above all, though, I was intrigued by the talk as an example of rhetoric in action. This is something I increasingly notice about how people around me use language. It was interesting to see what he left out, and what he left in, what he emphasized, and what he downplayed.

He treats "freedom" as a simple matter of being left alone to do what you want, and of course he is right. However, while he find it offensive that Java is strongly typed, there are good reasons why the people who designed it took those decisions, and it is not only about not trusting your users. I wonder how useful Ruby would have been back in 1995, when Java was created, and hardware wasn't what we are used to today. He talks about the culture of Unit Testing in Ruby, and this is something I applaud. However, it is also especially necessary when your developers can change almost anything, including the language itself. It is much easier to to trust your developers today, with modern hardware and testing tools.

For an interesting contrast, John D Cook writing about Java and trust.

This is uncomfortable to talk about, and so the decision is usually left implicit. Nobody wants to say out loud that they’re designing software for an army of mediocre programmers to implement, but that is the default assumption. And rightfully so. Most developers have middling ability, by definition.

Maybe the future does belong to languages which trust give developers more freedom, but that doesn't mean that the past should've belonged to them too.

Twitterstream 07 Feb 2012

My tweets and re-tweets today; hopefully use some of this in my blogging someday

RT @elidourado: More rapes committed in America against men than women. http://t.co/Puc1LcIB
RT @daniel_lende: Debt: The First 5000 Years – Extended Interview http://t.co/nFnr3WLO Great interview - 50 plus minutes with @DavidGraeber
RT @DKThomp: The Death (and Life) of Marriage in America http://t.co/xNcHoaPu cc @justinwolfers
RT @WiringTheBrain: I've got your missing heritability right here - or why geneticists are asking the wrong question: http://t.co/9hmY803r
RT @ModeledBehavior: The Deserving Poor http://t.co/Nzcm81pZ
RT @sciammind: RT @sebastianseung: "the mind is the music that neural networks play" Terry Sejnowski on CONNECTOME http://t.co/INvulnVs
Tsk tsk. RT @PennyRed: This is absolutely brilliant - Stock Photos of Women Looking Remorseful After Sexual Encounters http://t.co/7l3xoQDF
RT @harpers: “We are not revolutionaries in mink coats!” shouted one speaker. “I am!” replied a woman in a mink coat.—Weekly Review: http://t.co/VQh3JQj4...
RT @TwopTwips: MEN. Make it a Valentine's Day she'll always remember by simply forgetting it. (via @a_stoth)

Here I am again, making it up as I go along

Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror doesn't like it that Apple refuses to place more than one button on the front of the iPhone.

Apple's done a great job of embodying simplicity and clean design, but I often think they go too far, particularly at the beginning. For example, the first Mac didn't even have cursor keys. Everything's a design call, and somewhat subjective, but like Goldilocks, I'm going to maintain that the secret sauce here is not to get the porridge too cold (no buttons) or too hot (3 or more buttons), but just right. I'd certainly be a happier iPhone user if I didn't have to think so much about what's going to happen when I press my home button for the hundredth time in a day.

He is right, of course, and he also admits that what is "just right" is subjective.

However, I can think of at least one good reason why Apple might have decided to follow this rule.

Imagine you are leading a team of developers, and you tell them to design a phone. All existing phones and cluttered. Start with a clean slate, you tell them, think different. Your designers know what phones look like, and cannot unlearn that knowledge. You are likely to get a design which is very similar to what exists, with some minor tweaks. Alternatively, you get a radical, impractical design.

However, tell them to design a phone with exactly one physical button, and you give them something to start with. To make it work, they will have to rethink everything about the phone, but the people on your team are less likely to fight each other on behalf of their individual "visions" of what a radical new design should be like. The rule is one of those constraints which serve to goad creativity, and channel it.

As Eugene Wallingford writes in that post I've linked to above

Just as too much freedom can paralyze a novice with an overabundance of possibility, too much freedom can inhibit the competent programmer from creating a truly wonderful solution. Sticking with a form requires the programmer to think about resources and relationships in a way that unconstrained design spaces do not. This certainly seems to be the case in the arts, where writers, visual artists, and musicians use form as a vehicle for channeling their creative impulses.

I don't think "two buttons" would have worked as well. It wouldn't have distinguished their product quite so radically, and it might not have energized the designers as effectively.

Obviously, not all constraints serve to release potential creativity. Mediocre companies are great at creating constraints which serve only to irritate and frustrate. You need a master designer: we know that Apple had that.

Respice te, hominem te memento

Over at the Google Blog, Joshua Bloch informs us that practically every implementation of one of the most famous algorithms in the world is defective.

Fast forward to 2006. I was shocked to learn that the binary search program that Bentley proved correct and subsequently tested in Chapter 5 of Programming Pearls contains a bug. Once I tell you what it is, you will understand why it escaped detection for two decades. Lest you think I'm picking on Bentley, let me tell you how I discovered the bug: The version of binary search that I wrote for the JDK contained the same bug. It was reported to Sun recently when it broke someone's program, after lying in wait for nine years or so.

Of course, the bug only manifests itself under extreme conditions (arrays containing a billion or more elements), but this is

1. an elementary algorithm
2. which we have known about since the 1940s
3. and which has been studied in detail by some of the most intelligent people in the world
4. and taught to the brightest students at some of the finest schools in the world
5. and implemented in every computer language around
6. and used to build any number of applications

and we find a bug now?

Bloch continues

And now we know the binary search is bug-free, right? Well, we strongly suspect so, but we don't know. It is not sufficient merely to prove a program correct; you have to test it too. Moreover, to be really certain that a program is correct, you have to test it for all possible input values, but this is seldom feasible. With concurrent programs, it's even worse: You have to test for all internal states, which is, for all practical purposes, impossible.

The binary-search bug applies equally to mergesort, and to other divide-and-conquer algorithms. If you have any code that implements one of these algorithms, fix it now before it blows up. The general lesson that I take away from this bug is humility: It is hard to write even the smallest piece of code correctly, and our whole world runs on big, complex pieces of code.

What can we be sure of? Like a object lesson in the need for scepticism. I don't want to overstate the case, but we can't catch a simple bug in an elementary algorithm; almost half a millenium after Vesalius, we discover a "new" muscle in our own bodies, and we still imagine that we can be sure we know why an economy goes into recession, discern how to "manage" large and complex corporations, or foresee how the world climate will fare in a hundred years.

Postscript: None of this is to say that I don't think that AGW is not a reality, or that we shouldn't do anything about it if it is, or that the Economy does or doesn't need stimulus; only that we should be much more modest in our claims of knowledge, and positively applaud people who acknowledge their mistakes, while mocking and reviling those who are thrust their little truths on us. Post-Postscript: Since his post dates back to 2006, maybe I should've written that Bloch "informed us", but what he reported is news at least to me.

Like Salmon

Mo Costandi at the Guardian

The journey undertaken by newborn neurons in the adult mouse brain is like the cellular equivalent of the arduous upstream migration of salmon returning to their hatching river. Soon after being born in the subventricular zone near the back of the brain, these cells embark on a long-distance migration to the front-most tip of the brain. Their final destination – the olfactory bulb – is the furthest point from their birth place, and they travel two-thirds of the length of the brain to get there

Coasian Copyright

Simon Wardley has a suggestion.

If Congress wants to stop online piracy, there's another way. Ban all content which is not creative commons or equivalently licensed material (e.g. GPL) from the internet. Any infraction should be treated as other security violations and made the responsibility of the copyright holder for not taking enough security measures to ensure that their content never reached the internet.

Is Economics Useless?

I had a long exchange of emails with a friend about this topic. I am not a trained economist, but I play one in these debates. It is hardly a new topic, and I have little new to add, so I won't report on the discussion itself.

However, I think these blog posts by Rajiv Sethi and Adam Ozimek are good examples of the pleasures of counter-intuitive thinking which are available to those who know a little Economics.

Rajiv Sethi's point is simple and important

What I was trying to do in that post was to evaluate two incompatible statements: Warren Buffet's declaration that he pays a substantially lower tax rate at 18% than any of his office staff, and Mitt Romney's conflicting claim that his effective tax rate is close to 50%, the sum of the corporate tax rate and the rate on long-term capital gains. I argued that since the corporate tax is capitalized into prices at both the time of purchase and the time of sale, it ought not to be simply added to the capital gains tax to determine an effective rate.

As I now understand it, thanks to Rajiv's post, if we eliminated the capital gains tax, the owners of those assets would receive a windfall as prices go up, but then the long term trend in their value would be unchanged from before. This is an economic argument, and not a matter of accounting. It is also very simple: with (very!) little knowledge of economics, anyone can understand it, but to actually think of this for yourself is another matter. I am impressed! For contrast, this post by Steven Landsburg.

As an aside, since asset prices are now going to be higher at every point in the future, what happens to their ownership? I haven't thought that through, but this certainly seems to be a one-time transfer of wealth to those who own assets today from those who don't, and it probably will have no effect on capital formation, etc. Why? Because what really matters is what Adam writes about in his blog post.

In his post, Adam Ozimek writes about the long run employment level, and points out that at full employment (almost by definition) you can only create jobs by destroying others.

But if output has doubled at Capitalist B’s factory, then surely he has taken market share from his competitors, which means his competitors have most likely had to lay workers off, perhaps half of them. The fact is that direct jobs creation that we see can often be completely offset by job destruction that we don’t, and in the long run it pretty much has to be.

So when you hear a capitalist-politician boasting about his track record in creating jobs

By all means, point out that his claims are unjustified at best. Score the political point that the politician has opened himself up to. But the job of the economist is not to accept false terms of debate because doing so is the best way to make the politician look bad. An economist should point out that in the long run job creation doesn’t matter, it’s productivity and innovation that matters, and declare that if the politician wants us to judge his contribution as a capitalist he should tell us about the productivity and innovation he delivered.

What the posts by by Adam Ozimek and Rajiv Sethi have in common are that they are both about the long run equilibrium, and about how the aggregate can be different from the individual. The real value of economic thinking is in getting us try and think in this fashion. Its is a very unnatural way of thinking. In many ways, it is like studying fluid dynamics, and I don't mean hydraulic macro! The evolution of the system is very sensitive to initial conditions, and so its future is impossible to predict in any detail, and we can at best work out some of the features of its final state. There is a reason there is a million-dollar bounty on the Navier-Stokes equation.

The great Thomas Schelling wrote an essay "What do Economists know?" in which he praised accounting identities as being analogous to the invariants which Physicists find so valuable: they are valuable precisely because they are what remain unchanged amidst the chaos of economic change, and they offer a point from which to start thinking about what is going on.

What Can I Call This Post

Just wanted to save this picture of rock climbing in the Yosemite.

From the National Geographic.

On Being The Right Size

I know I've shared Haldane's essay before, but this little piece is quite simply the best essay I've ever read. A work to read again and again, full of wisdom which goes well beyond biology. Scaling: the very idea!

Comparative anatomy is largely the story of the struggle to increase surface in proportion to volume.

Origami

Robert Lang speaking at TED

Shared by @MathUpdate on Twitter.

Metaphor needed

Simone Schnall writes about embodied cognition at Edge. It seems I cannot link directly to her comments.

Philosophers and psychologists grappled with a fundamental question for quite some time: How does the brain derive meaning? If thoughts consist of the manipulation of abstract symbols, just like computers are processing 0s and 1s, then how are such abstract symbols translated into meaningful cognitive representations? This so-called "symbol grounding problem" has now been largely overcome because many findings from cognitive science suggest that the brain does not really translate incoming information into abstract symbols in the first place. Instead, sensory and perceptual inputs from every-day experience are taken in their modality-specific form, and they provide the building blocks of thoughts.

I am not sure I understand what she means.

What does she mean by "modality-specific"? We know that our senses are not isolated from one another. It is not only by observing synaesthetics that we know this. The recent work on hacking our senses has shown us that we can train one sense to use the inputs which would normally feed another, and evoke a real, useful "image" (whether visual, aural, or otherwise) which we would normally not be able to experience. For example, the article I've linked to describes how scientists have been able to teach visually impaired people to see with their tongues(!). We know that they are actually "seeing" the image because they have been able to replicate the results with people who can see normally, and can compare the experience with normal vision.

She describes experiments which suggest that people associate the word "Up" with virtue, power, and God, while they associate the word "Down" with vice, weakness, and the Devil; that people who had just moved up on a mall escalator were more likely to give to charity than those who had moved in the other direction. These are all alright, but I find them unsatisfying.

Surely there have been more convincing experiments which show that the body is much, much more than merely an appendage to the brain?

We already know that the body can do a lot without the brain being involved. It is not only headless chickens which can run but, as this old and terrible experiment shows, decerebrate cats can too.

What is more, it seems that nature uses some very simple tricks to enable the body to work without close supervision from the brain. We know this because now even we can create things which walk without central processing.

I had previously blogged about some scientists who were able to build a mechanical spider which could walk across a wire mesh with large, gaping holes. The key to building a body which "naturally" does what you want it to do, without having to refer everything to a central computational model of the world and the body in it, is to use the right materials and shapes. Wisdom without knowledge. Behold the Octopus!

I came across Simone Schnall's piece via Janet Kwasniak's blog post. As she puts it:

They point out that computers can simulate brains (or more or less anything). But there is a difference between being able to simulate the weather in order to predict it and treating a computer as the model of how the weather engines work. The same applies to brains. Computers are very useful tools for studying various simulations of the brain, but the brain is not a computer.

She is absolutely right, of course, but by that standard, only computers are computers. The question is rather: in what ways is the brain like a computer, and in what ways is it not?

I agree with what they say: my point is that Schnall has chosen some very weak examples to illustrate the idea behind embodied cognition. I understand that the Edge Annual Question is not the place to look for deep discussions, but this may leave readers with the idea that Embodied Cognition is an airy-fairy topic. On the contrary, it is a sea-change in how we think about the mind, the brain, and the body, and how those relate to each other.

We are very far from understanding all of this, but these various experiments, and the little machines we are building, are clues to a much more interesting relationship between brain and body.

As Andrew Wilson wrote, Embodied Cognition is not what you think.