How to Diss an Ex-Lover as a Rock Star

The current corner solution in my listening playlist is the song 'Gives You Hell' by the All American Rejects:

It's a classic of the 'You know how you didn't want to date me in high school? Well I'm a rock star now, bitch!' genre.

It's apparently quite a popular theme, with the other notable example being Cee-Lo Green's song 'Fuck You' . This reinforces my conclusion that a lot of famous rock stars were actually losers in high school. Not all of them, of course, but certainly the ones singing about all the girls that barred them. You know who doesn't have a song like that? Jon Bon Jovi. You know why? Because he was probably knee-deep in pussy, both in high school and ever since, and has barely given the question a moment's thought.

Cee Lo Green - Exhibit A

Tyson Ritter - Exhibit B

Jon Bon Jovi - One of these things is not like the other.

But as Roissy pointed out, it's very difficult to make this kind of point as a rock star without looking kind of pathetic. To wit, you're implicitly saying two things:

1. I was lame back in high school and girls didn't like me, and

2. I'm still so hung up on this fact that I need to compensate by flaunting my rock star status and talking up how much better I am than that guy who she was being boned by at the time.

Which brings me back to the All-American Rejects. The chorus is catchy

When you see my face,

hope it gives you hell,

hope it gives you hell.

When you walk my way,

hope it gives you hell,

hope it gives you hell.

But it's the bridge that's really well done. They make a very good attempt to deal with point 2.

Truth be told, I miss you.

And truth be told, I'm lying.

Very nice. They implicitly acknowledge the possibility that writing this song means he's still obsessing about the girl in question. Trying to deny this outright would not look credible, and would seem too desperate to appear over her. So he opens with what seems like an admission of this fact. Psychologically, it's him baiting the girl. He knows that if she is regretting her decision to ignore the guy, she will likely cling to the fact that she's still desirable in his eyes.

But knowing this is what she wants to think, he follows his admission with a clever quip (and some very nice word play) that implies the previous line was a joke. He might find her still attractive in some way. But he's not really bothered by the whole thing. In other words, the song is his idle and humourous reflection on high school, not a burning grudge he has to get off his chest. And that is the only way you can successfully deliver this kind of song.

Nice work, All American Rejects.

Efficient Algorithms in Estimating Personalities

Fair-minded people attempt to reserve judgment about others until they've given the other person a good chance. You don't want to write a person off too hastily, since it might spoil you from being friends with them, and also makes it less likely that you'll see the good parts of their personality.

Perhaps because I've studied too much statistics, I don't quite think this way.  The mark of a good algorithm is that it reaches the best possible conclusion with the smallest possible amount of data. For certain you don't want to form conclusions that aren't justified by the evidence available. But if the person is actually a dickhead (or if they're a nice guy), then you want to reach that conclusion in the shortest available period of time.

For better or worse, I form aggressively fast estimates of other people's personalities. I would say that the impression I form within the first 15 seconds ends up being internally correct about 85% of the time after more data is added. By that, I don't mean to say that if I think a person is a tool within 5 seconds, then they're actually a tool by some cosmically objective measure (thought they might well be). I just mean that if I hang out with them for another week, 85% of the time I'll still think they're a tool at the end. This may still be judging too quickly (with the initial judgment colouring my subsequent perceptions). But on the other hand, there are a non-trivial number of reversals - cases where I write someone off  and then subsequently change my mind. So it's not a final decision.

The fact is, you already know a huge amount about a person within a few seconds if you pay attention. Suppose I'm sitting in a cafe and I see a girl across the cafe talking to loudly to her friend about a guy she knows. What will I be thinking?

Firstly, she's complaining about a guy. This is a weakly bad sign for several reasons. One, if the first randomly chosen words coming out of her mouth are a complaint, it raises my estimate she's likely to be a princess and/or high maintenance. At a minimum, it suggests someone slightly pessimistic about life, and disinclined towards seeing the happy side of things.

Second, the impression of princess behaviour is reinforced by the fact that I can hear her conversation two tables away. This implies a subtle lack of consideration for the other cafe patrons. It also implies a lack of shame about airing one's relationship dirty laundry to her friend (which is understandable) and other nearby strangers (which seems a little more self-involved).

But it's not all bad traits. The girl seems fairly well put together - she's fairly pretty and dresses nicely in a conventional fashion. Takes care in her appearance, hair nicely done. Early 20's. White. We're sitting in a trendy suburb, which suggests a middle class upbringing. Probably graduated college a couple of years ago and working some regular white collar job. Slim - probably goes to the gym a couple of times a week. The fact that she's sitting in a cafe with her friend indicates a general level of sociability, as well as hinting at acceptable SWPL tastes.

If I've gotten the above correct, I start thinking about more speculative propositions (i.e. still true on average, but more likely to be wrong). I'd wager that her parents are probably still married and she came from a fairly stable home. The indications of princess behaviour raise my estimate that she was doted on too much by parents - only child perhaps. Not unlikely that she has either a cat or a small dog.

Back to the conversation she's still going on about the guy. It sounds like he's some guy she's dating, and he's blown her off from some date. Suggests a susceptibility to dating assholes, which is not uncommon for princesses. She won't break up with him though - her complaints hide a sense that she likes his aloofness. Doesn't seem self-aware enough to realise this.

Overall, if I were single I'd be mentally estimating that she seems like more trouble that she's worth as a dating prospect in any medium term sense. I'm not writing her off completely - I'd want to talk to her a bit more and find out if she's just having a bad day and is actually quite sweet. You'd probably have a better estimate after a first date. But as a betting man, that's not how I'd wager. I don't like princesses, or complainers.

The point of this story, dear reader, is that I'm thinking all of these thoughts within the first couple of seconds of overhearing her conversation. Sometimes (such as hearing the above complaint about a boyfriend), it's within the first half a second.

The reality is that behaviours are highly correlated. You might feel that you're completely inscrutable and that I don't know you personally. But if I'm paying attention, I don't need to - I can take what I observe, and add in the information from years of observing about how personality traits tend to go together. It's the same way that you only need to enter 5 movie choices before Netflix can suggest movies to you - it knows the correlations of your choices, and that's enough.

Given enough data about the world, nobody is a mystery. It's all just correlations.

Thoughts on the culture of Fiji

The Fijians that I spoke to seemed universally lovely people and very friendly.They always greet you with a loud 'Bula', which apparently translates as both 'hello' and 'alive'. It's certainly said in a way different from the western 'hello', being yelled and gesticulated. At first I thought that this was a sort of tourist shtick (and I'm sure to some extent it was) but it seemed to persist outside situations where the person had anything to gain out of you, and outside the main resort areas. I came to the conclusion that they were actually just really nice people. The only other comparable place I've been in this regard is India. The main difference is that Fijians seem far less inclined to try to rip you off, at least in taxi interactions (which, given the large information asymmetries inherent and unlikeliness of repeat interactions, seem to be a reasonable proxy).

On the other hand, there is a certain rawness to the Fijian culture. I don't know exactly what word I'm after here - something like 'primitive', but without the condescending connotations that has. 'Primeval' perhaps, but that's not quite right either. I was on a whitewater rafting trip inland, and there was a village there. We were going down the river, and heard a commotion ahead including some loud animal noises. As we got closer, I realised that the noise was coming from a group of small children, perhaps around age 5 or 6, holding large sticks and laughing while attempting to beat a stray dog to death. I yelled out at them angrily as we approached, and they stopped, unsure of how to respond to the adult authority figure yelling in a foreign language. This gave the wounded dog enough time to jump in the river and escape. 1km downstream, we came across other children from the same village, happily swimming up to our rafts and playing around with us when we got out of the water. The juxtaposition was quite jarring. Particularly so since I'm sure that if we'd come across the children in the former group on a different day, they would have been just as adorable, out in the water greeting us too.

Wikipedia tells me that warlord who united Fiji, Seru Epenisa Cakobau, renounced cannibalism in 1854 on his conversion to Christianity.

What is Seen, What is Not Seen

It is a categorical mistake to think that actions should be judged by their intentions alone rather than their consequences, at least when those consequences are predictable. In the personal sphere, the focus is perhaps more on what the actions say about the individual, and feelings of discomfort and intention can loom large. Judging by intention can capture many important aspects about the morals of the person, which is often what we are interested in knowing.

But in the political sphere, the choice is clear. Politicians cannot have the luxury of doing what feels right, because the impacts are too large. Your feelings are insignificant compared with the cold equations of what results your actions will produce. As Eliezer Yudkowsky puts it, "Shut up and multiply"

Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard was facing a large number of boat people arriving in Australia. He implemented a policy of putting all asylum seekers into detention offshore (and outside Australia) while they were processed, and taking a hard line on their applications. John Howard is denounced as horribly cruel by lefites.

What is seen:



Kevin Rudd gets elected as the Labor Prime Minister. Half-way through his term, he gets rid of the offshore processing, a process followed up by new Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard who continues to relax rules on immigration detention. Plaudits follow from lefties.

Q: If the expected cost of seeking asylum in Australia is reduced by making conditions easier and increasing the probability of successful applications, will the likely number of asylum seekers:
a) increase
b) decrease
c) remain unchanged.

What is not seen:


Such is the nature of incentives. You can ignore them, you can pretend they aren't there, you can plead that this wasn't what you intended. And yet they remain.

Q: If a percentage x of asylum seekers travelling to Australia by boat will drown in transit, and the number of asylum seekers increases, the number of asylum seekers drowning will:
a) increase
b) decrease
c) remain unchanged.

What is seen:

The Prime Minister's invitation to the opposition to join a bipartisan group came as authorities continued to search for more victims from the boat which smashed into rocks at Christmas Island yesterday, killing at least 28 men, women and children.  ...

The boat, with up to 100 asylum-seekers aboard, was washed onto rocks and broke up, throwing men, women and children into the water. At least 42 people survived, including 11 children, but authorities are still unsure how many remain missing.

 And yet, behold the complete inability to identify the problem.

'Islander frustrated at Navy response time to Christmas island Asylum seeker boat crash'

'Advocate queries why boat wasn't stopped'

Let me put this in the plainest terms I can:

The problem is not the @#$%ing navy.

Let's go back to the quote I had earlier:

The Prime Minister's invitation to the opposition to join a bipartisan group came as authorities continued to search for more victims from the boat which smashed into rocks at Christmas Island yesterday, killing at least 28 men, women and children.  ...

When you screw up badly enough, the seen becomes large enough that even dullards start to figure out the unseen. And that unseen has her fingerprints all over it.I bet she wants a bipartisan group all right. 

Julia Gillard has proven herself manifestly unwilling or unable to shut up and multiply. Her political career deserves to go to the same watery grave as those poor buggers on Christmas Island, tragically and predictably responding to the incentives set up by the Labor Government. 

Hyperbolic Discounting #2 - Nightclubs

Following on from the previous post on hyperbolic discounting, the other example where people seem to show much too much short term impatience is in nightclubs. 

For most nightclubs, even very expensive ones, it’s not too hard to get in without too much hassle if you go there when the place is deserted shortly after opening time. But as soon as the place starts filling up, the bouncers get free rein to exercise their pea-brained messiah complexes and start jerking you around by making you wait for hours.

The question is, why are people so unwilling to just chill out in a half-empty club for half an hour? Is it really worse than standing outside in the queue for 30 or 45 minutes because you turned up late? And if the half-full club is unbearable, why is the full club so awesome that you’re willing to wait so long for it?

It seems that people place an enormous discount rate on the club being awesome at the moment they walk in. So much so that they’re willing to endure a far crappier experience of standing in line for a significant fraction of the time they’d otherwise be in the half-full club. Which doesn’t make much sense to me.

Then again, I guess it depends on your model of the average person in a nightclub. If it's this:

then perhaps it's not really such a surprise.

Hyperbolic Discounting and New Release Movies

In economics, discounting refers to the way that you reduce the value of future costs and benefits. In the simplest example, $1 today is worth more than $1 in one year’s time. The reason for this is that I can earn interest on that dollar over the year. So if the interest rate is 4%, then the value of $1 in a year is $1 / 1.04.

When you discount things at a constant continuous rate, this is called exponential discounting. The value of $1 at time t when the interest rate is r is equal to exp(-r*t).

Hyperbolic discounting refers to the tendency to apply very high discount rates for the short term, and lower discount rates in the long term. Which is a fancy way of saying that people are very impatient for things they could get right now, but more patient when the thing isn't going to arrive for a while anyway. It’s irrational, because it leads to preference reversals.

For instance, if you ask people whether they’d prefer to receive $10 in one year’s time or $11 in one year and one day, most people pick the $11. But if you ask them whether they’d like to receive $10 right this instant or $11 tomorrow, more people will pick the $10. Implicitly, the value they place on waiting for the first day is much higher than the value they place on waiting for the 366^th day. But this leads to reversals. Take the guy who picked the $11 in one year and one day. Now fast forward 365 days. He’s now going to wish he’d taken the $10/one year option, because that’s what he wants when the choices are between the immediate and the one day delay. Hence he changes his mind.

(For a good example for the econ-minded, Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier have a great paper on gym memberships. They argue that hyperbolic discounting explains why people sign up for monthly and annual gym memberships and end up paying much more than if they'd paid for each visit).

To my mind, there’s loads of cases where people apply hyperbolic discounting, and they really can’t stand waiting. But let me give you one that stands out for people applying ridiculous short term discount rates – new release movies.

It’s amazing the amount of @#$% people will go through in order to see a movie on its opening weekend, or even worse, on opening night. They’ll line up for hours. They’ll sit in the second row and get neck spasms. They’ll sit in a packed theatre, knowing that there’s a good chance there’ll be someone in the seat in front of them at least partially blocking their view. And if you’re seeing it on opening night, you have to suffer double the indignity of spending your three hours in line next to losers dressed up in Harry Potter outfits, and reflecting how you apparently have similar tastes and preferences in life.

And for what? It’s the same movie that you can see 3 weeks later with no line, in a pleasantly empty theatre. I can understand it if’s a mystery movie where someone might spoil the ending. But how the hell does that explain Cheaper By the Dozen 2? Are people worried that their friends will spoil the enjoyment of the nuanced plotlines by giving them spoilers?

My best guess is hyperbolic discounting – when something is the latest new craze, people want to see it NOW! The alternative (which I also find plausible) is that most of the value of a movie is either a) sharing the excitement with people who’ve just seen it,  or b) signaling to your peers that you’re one of those cool people who sees things as soon as they come out.

Shylock says – lame.

The good news is that hyperbolic discounting can be overcome. You know how?

Think your way to better decisions.

The Past is Another Country (Henry James Edition)

Make no mistake about it - your own country a century ago would be virtually unrecognisable to you. But not for the technological reasons people typically think of. No, the real reason is that your fellow countrymen would have values that would be entirely alien to you. I think this is a good antidote to excessive conservative nostalgia about the distant past. You can be nostalgic about the founding fathers all you like, but if most modern young conservatives actually had to meet them, there's a good chance you'd find them appalling racists and sexists, while they'd find you disgustingly hedonist libertines.

I mentioned Mr James' work a few days ago. I was put into him by my friend OKH. A lot of James' writing focuses on social interactions between men and women, particularly in the context of the different attitudes of Europeans and Americans. American women tend to be portrayed as somewhat free and risqué in their tendency to defy traditional expectations of behaviour.

But here's what's flabbergasting - 'risqué' in this context means an unmarried woman of 20 or so walking around Italy with a man she isn't married to, unaccompanied by any family relations, and not being ashamed of it. 'Scandalous' is walking around with two men. Remember, these are supposedly the values of polite American ex-pat society in Europe around the end of the 19th century.

As OKH pointed out, this mindset is much, much closer to the modern Muslim world than it is to the modern America. Moreover, these values managed to serve society very well for centuries. And yet modern conservatives look at the Islamic world and find its treatment of women to be very repressive. Rightly so, in my opinion. But it takes on a whole new perspective when you realise that similar attitudes were harbored by the vast majority of your fellow countrymen just outside living memory.

In other words, it's unclear whether George Washington would feel he had more in common with a modern fundamentalist Muslim than a modern atheist liberal American, even though the latter would consider himself Washington's heir much more than the former. Politically, one imagine's he'd side with the modern American. But culturally? It's hard to say.

The Abyss of Human Nature

Come, dear reader, and gaze into the abyss of what happens to human nature when man can find no purpose to worship higher than himself.

Listen to these chilling rationalizations from married women who have affairs. In this regard I'm sure that married men who have affairs give rationalisations that are probably just as revolting - this is merely the particular material I have in front of me right now. Since GS has observed that my posts sometimes come across as leaning towards misogyny, let me emphasise that my words are about humanity in general, not just women.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/relationships/8140103/Why-are-so-many-married-women-having-affairs.html

Tall, strong-featured and dressed in a cashmere sweater and wool trousers, Sheila is the kind of woman you see in the aisles of Waitrose, the front row of the school carol service. But once every fortnight or so she tells Peter, 48, a company director, that she's meeting a (well-briefed) girlfriend for dinner. Instead she goes to a motel room to see her lover, Michael, also 46, a medical sales rep whom she met at a conference.

Shylock's advice - if your married friend is asking you to be her cover for an ongoing affair, it's time to find some better friends.

Thousands of women like Sheila are enjoying what they believe to be no-strings flings. Having witnessed the devastation divorce wreaked on their parents' generation, they have no desire to end their marriages. Instead they are searching for variety in an otherwise humdrum routine.

Ha ha ha! Yes, clearly they've certainly learned the really important lessons about the problems of divorce. Not the ones about the importance of maintaining a happy, honest and loving relationship. No, the ones about staying in the marriage but doing whatever the hell you please.

Okay, so to my mind Sheila seems like a horrible human being. But how does Sheila justify this to herself? Surely she's at least a little guilty about this whole thing? Let us go and take our visit, as Mr Eliot put it:

'I love Peter dearly,' Sheila says. 

Generally, it is pointless to argue over the definition of a word like 'love'. But in this case I'm willing to make an exception and say... No. No you don't. You just like getting stuff out of him, and it's been so long that you've forgotten there was ever a difference. As it turns out, she admits as much:

'He's a good husband, and father. I like cooking with him and gossiping about the neighbours. He's my pal and I'd never want to lose that. 

So, does this make your behaviour better, or worse?

Sex with Michael is a purely separate thing; it's about erotic abandonment, being seen as just a woman rather than as Peter's wife, or "the doctor" or a mum.

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that for Peter, her having sex with Michael is not in fact a purely separate thing. But she's not done justifying herself:

Any working mother will know what I mean. Every woman needs something that is hers alone. Some of my friends ride, some sing in choirs, I have Michael.'

Yes, of course. Helping out at a bake sale, riding a bicycle, getting boned by a pharmaceutical rep - what's the difference?As Sesame Street would say - one of these things is not like the other. Note too the cynically self-serving way she tries to claim this as a symptom of the stress of being a 'working mother', which all women will understand.

Most people, women and men alike, will understand your feelings that a marriage after 20 years is not as exciting as it was at the start. But for the sake of all that is right in the world, I hope that they don't all understand why you're having an affair.

To properly understand Leila's motivation, let me remove a few extraneous words from the previous paragraph:

'I ...  I ... my... I'd ...I... my... I ...'

The rest is just noise.

The number of people having affairs is impossible to know, as few are truthful about their sex lives, but the recent Way We Are Now nationwide survey conducted by Relate showed that 34 per cent of women respondents admitted to being unfaithful, compared with 32 per cent of men.

Those, my friends, are some truly terrible odds, for both men and women.

Listen to just how mercenary they are about the whole thing:

Laura, 51, a reflexologist from Hertfordshire, with a teenage son, has had three affairs over the past 10 years with men she has met on various websites.

She uses specialised software to make sure her computer shuts down moments after she uses it and its history is wiped clean. She has two mobiles: one for general use and one for EMAs (extramarital affairs, to use the jargon), which can only be accessed by a pin number and is set on silent mode so that her husband, Brian, an events manager, can't hear texts arriving. She checks at the same time every day before hiding it – separately from the sim card – in her Christmas-present drawer. 'Then if Brian did find it I'd say I was going to give it to our cleaner,' she explains, cradling her large glass of merlot.

You can feel the ice running through this woman's veins. As a matter of writing, I do enjoy the way the author subtly and expertly puts the knife in with the line about the merlot.

But let me tell you the part that is the most difficult. The Dog That Did Not Bark in this whole story is the feelings of the spouse they're cheating on. It seems that none of these women give any evidence that they've stopped to think about how painful it must be for their husband of 20 years that their wife is having an affair. Their only thoughts about their husbands relate to how they can avoid being caught.Now, human nature being what it is, it does not surprise me that people are selfish. But how can you be married to someone for that long, and not actually find their feelings to be an important consideration? How can you be so stupid to not realise that once your start having an affair, you will eventually get caught, and your marriage will be over, with horrible consequences for a lot of innocent parties?

Like most of the women I spoke to, Minna worried not so much about her husband learning of her affair as about what discovery would mean for their children. 'He's an adult but if they discovered this other side to me it would overturn their cosy little world,' she says with a shudder.

He's an adult. Ergo, that's where the obligation ends. And as for the kids, she's worried partly (and correctly) that it will be very sad and disruptive consequences for them. But my guess is that she's also worried because her kids (if they find out) will justifiably hate her. The feeble excuses she makes for herself will not wash with them. As for her husband, it seems like she couldn't give a toss.

Of course, their rationalizations are actually dreary and predictable - evil is banal, after all. 

Plank 1 - I'm actually doing this FOR the marriage:

Laura is adamant that her affairs are saving her marriage rather than putting it at risk. 

Great, so tell your husband! I'm sure he'll agree.

Plank 2  (which of course contradicts plank 1) - Actually my husband forced me into it.

'Brian irritates me, like all my long-married friends are irritated by their husbands. He leaves the loo seat up, burps and expects his washing to be done as if by magic. He's got a bit fat and resents any suggestion that he lose weight.

Meanwhile, I presume that she has kept the same figure she had at age 20, and puts out just as much as before.

But that's all a fig-leaf actually. Here's why she's actually doing it:

I'm looking to be adored, to be treated like a goddess much more than I'm looking for sex. 

Fewer things are as ugly to witness as naked selfishness stripped of all pretensions. 

As if this all weren't enough, the author finishes with what is clearly the pressing question underneath all this: 

But can a woman really have her ego bolstered, without losing her heart? 

If there is any justice in the world, I certainly hope not.

The Most Exciting Thing at the Bulls Game

I was talking about this story with JS earlier this evening. I was at a Chicago Bulls game a few years ago. The Bulls weren't very good and were losing, but the crowd was reasonably into it.

But what was fascinating to me is that the loudest cheers of the day, by an order of magnitude, were for the Dunkin' Donuts race. This is the one where a TV screen shows a bagel, a donut and a cup of coffee racing around a track. Each person got a card with a character's name on it, and if your character won, you got a free donut.

Watching this tinny video, you probably don't get the sense that the crowd was actually going nuts for this race. But believe me, they were.

Just think about that. You're cheering for fictional characters in a race whose outcome is already pre-determined. Not only that, but the value of what you win is perhaps a dollar, at a venue where you pay five bucks for a coke. My guess is that most of the people who won wouldn't actually be bothered collecting their free donut anyway.

And yet this event excited people in a way that world class athletes did not. Remember, these were people who self-selected for their willingness to pay a good amount of money to watch these athletes perform. I wonder what the players think when the Cup of Coffee gets louder cheers than they do. Probably a mix of humbling embarrassment and contempt for the crowd. Maybe something along the lines of 'Hey, the guys who come and cheer for me might actually be imbeciles, given they also cheer for a Donut. I wonder what that says about the worth of my endeavour?'

JS mentioned that he saw a similar thing when the Lakers were on the verge of winning by a large enough margin that Jack in the Box would give everyone two free tacos. There at least the outcome was genuinely in doubt.

Now, I would happily dismiss this with glib snobbishness as an example of the mental capacity of basketball fans. But the tens of thousands of people there weren't idiots, they were instead completely representative of humanity at large. And when you realise this, you realise how fascinating the whole thing is in terms of psychology. Truth be told, it actually WAS more exciting than the basketball game! There is an large appeal of games of chance, and a truly massive appeal at the prospect of getting free stuff, no matter how worthless.

Not only that, but people will anthropomorphise fictional characters, and cheer for them even though they know that the race is fixed. And when you ask them about it at the end, they will probably deny that this was the high point of the game. Except their cheers bely the fact that they were yelling louder for that, unprompted, than they were when the cheerleaders and TV screens were urging them to yell 'defense!'. What people really want in life, it seems, is to win a free donut. That will bring them more happiness than the basketball game they paid fifty bucks to see.

I walked away with the sense that if you actually understood all the implications of this one event, you would know a great deal about human nature and human folly.

Vegas Part 3 - Network effects of entertainment

Vegas also illustrates wonderfully how little of economic growth is driven by actual resources any more, and instead comes from the network effects of people interacting with each other  - either as producers of ideas and services, or just network effects from recreation (as in Vegas). People want to be near other people, and it's largely arbitrary as to where exactly that will be.

If you looked at a cross section across Nevada near Vegas, you get a picture roughly like the following:

In terms of the inherent resources present or the natural picturesqueness of the surrounding mountains, views and landscapes, Vegas looks exactly like all the nearby parts. Except that everywhere else nearby is worthless uninhabited desert, whereas the Vegas strip is priced closer to Manhattan. But Manhattan has a much more gradual decline in land prices as you move away from the centre - you wouldn't be sad to live in Brooklyn, for instance.  In Vegas, it's precipitous. 5 minute drive away from Las Vegas Blvd? You may as well be in Bakersfield.

The principle at work is no different from other places - why exactly is Manhattan much cooler than Long Island, other than the buildings and people already there? It's just that in Vegas it's the most pronounced, because you have an incredible metropolis situated right next to desert parts that could be scenes from Mad Max. It's also a city that sprang up without even any of the initial seeding geographical advantages of places like New York and Chicago (shipping, primarily). There is literally nothing to distinguish Vegas from anywhere nearby.

When network effects dominate, the location of cities is largely arbitrary. 

You're Not Persian, You're Iranian

Okay, so if you're either, you're probably both, but they're answers to quite different questions. 

Why do people from Iran always want to refer to themselves as 'Persian', rather than 'Iranian'? I am certainly no expert in this area, but my rough understanding is that 'Persian' is an ethnicity (and distinct from, say, 'Arab'), whereas 'Iranian' is a nationality (and distinct from, say 'Iraqi'). But when someone asks 'where are you from?' or 'where does your family come from?', they're asking about nationality.  You'd certainly find it odd if someone from England responded that 'I am Anglo-Saxon' when asked where he was from.

It's as if some PR flack from Madison Avenue decided that 'Iranian' had far too much negative baggage associated with terrorism, but 'Persian' sounded old-worldly and vaguely mystical. So no matter which question was asked, just answer 'Persian'. Pretend that you've just walked out of 500BC when 'Persia' actually described a specific empire! You'll have no trouble getting work as an extra for the movie 300 or as a model for "a stowaway on a merchant ship, known by no one, scorned by all!" (a la Prince of Persia).

Still, the Madison Avenue guys would have a point. Don't believe me? Here are some random images that came up on the first page of the Google image search for 'Persian'.

Persian

Persian

Persian

Now, let's compare this with some random image selections from the first page of the search for 'Iranian'

Iranian

Iranian

Iranian

Hmm, come to think of it, maybe it's not so strange after all.

A Thought Experiment

If a man's height were subject to as much fluctuation as a woman's weight, I wonder if women would still have the reputation of being less attracted to the opposite sex based purely on physical appearance.

The Rudest Word in America

When people think about rude words, they usually focus on their raw power to cause offense. This tends to prioritise the usual suspects like n***er and  c**t. (Although in the case of n***er, Americans don't get offended by the word in general, just when a white person says it - nobody blinks at its use in gangster rap)

But let me suggest an alternative measure of how rude a word is. It's based on squeamishness of people in using it. So in this view, the real test is the extent to which ordinary people will avoid using the word when it's actually appropriate, and reach for a synonym (especially a euphemistic synonym) instead.

So based on this metric, let me suggest the following word:

Toilet.

It's amazing the lengths people here go to in order to avoid using the word. In Australia, it's common for people to ask 'Where are the toilets?.' Not here. They go to the 'bathroom'. This is used regardless of whether the room is a combined bathroom/toilet (such as in a house) or whether it's obvious that there's only a toilet (e.g. in a restaurant).  This sometimes gets modified to the 'washroom', as if to emphasise even further that it's the bodily cleaning aspects of the 'bathroom' that they're after, rather than the toilet. They use the 'restroom', as if they're going for a relaxing sit down and chill out. Occasionally, it's referred to as the 'little boys/girls room', whatever that means.As for the purpose of their visit, it's to 'use the facilities'. Or 'wash their hands'. Or 'powder their nose'.

The only time that people use the word at all is when they're unavoidably  forced to refer to the mechanics of the device ('The toilet is broken/clogged'). And even then, oblique references to the 'bathroom being out of order' are common.

And yet I bet everybody would claim that they're perfectly fine using it. They just, you know... don't really want to.

Exactly.

Bullying and Incentives

Human nature and human motivations are rarely simple. Pithy rhetoric and evocative examples cannot paper over the fact that the same actions and incentives will motivate some people (often lots of people), but will always manage to frustrate and deter others. This is made more difficult by the fact that people often make statements about principles that are really just stories from their own lives with the names removed. But since they're phrased as principles, they end up in inevitable conflict with other people who have different principles which are really just different stories from their own lives.

There's been an interesting thread going on Hacker News about bullying. It started with this quite moving post by Single Dad Laughing, where he talks about what it was like to be bullied. It ends with a plea for adults and contemporaries to show more love for bullies, so that they will be less likely to be mean to those around them:

So, please, I beg you. If you're an adult, put your arm around your own kids. Put your arm around your neighbor's kids. Put your arm around every kid you can. If you're a student, put your arm around the bully and the bullied. You simply don't know what person needs to feel like somebody loves her. You simply don't know what person's life you will save by showing him that, today, you care. And tomorrow you'll still care.

Regardless of whether this is actually good policy or not, I think it's a very good mark of character to be able to look back years later and forgive. Had I been bullied like that, my attitudes with respect to bullies would probably be closer to Kurtz's edict to "Exterminate all the brutes!".

It did however prompt this reply from Sebastian Marshall, where he says that the bullied are much better off fighting back, even if they lose:

But son, as soon as someone puts their hands on you, they've crossed a line. @#$% them up. It's the only thing these vicious freaks understand. They're wild animals. They make violence on you, you need to show them that you're the stronger, bigger animal. When someone attacks you maliciously for no reason, you need to impose your will on them.

Even if you lose, lose swinging. They respect it. Be a tough fight.

This "talk it out" $#!* doesn't work, it's been the dogma for the last 30-50 years, it assumes the nobility of human nature will win out. It doesn't. It's nonsense. It just simply doesn't work.

I think the best summary of this position was from commenter 'Legion', in terms of advice to his future children:

"You are allowed to defend yourself. You will avoid physical conflict whenever possible, but should you ever be physically threatened or subject to ongoing torment, you have the GREEN LIGHT to use physical force to protect yourself, OR to assist a friend who is unable to protect themselves."

"You may get in trouble with your school. THIS IS OK. Your well-being is more important than their rules. If you get suspended for three days, then I'll take three days off work and we'll keep up with your studies. I will be on your side. Do not let concern over the school rules stop you at all from defending yourself."

"However, you will never use force to do anything but protect yourself or your friend. If I find that YOU have been the aggressor, I will smite you."

Single Dad posted a follow-up that noted that he didn't actually say that the bullied should be trying to reach out to bullies, but rather adults and contemporaries around them.

What I find interesting about this whole exchange is that disagreement about the basic premises of bullying doesn't mean that these policies are mutually exclusive.

Reasonable people disagree deeply on why men do evil things.

The Single Dad Laughing premise seems to be that nasty bullying actions by kids tend to indicate a response to feelings of inadequacy, loneliness, and a desire to inflict hurt on a world that has been cruel to you, usually to make up for a lack of love from those around you. In this view, if you make the person feel wanted, you take away the underlying source of their nasty behaviour. To my mind, the best evidence in favour of this proposition is the fact that a lot of bullies do tend to be generally unhappy, and don't have many actual friends.   Additionally, bullies can grow out of their behaviour when their life circumstances change.

The Sebastian Marshall premise is instead that some people are just inherently mean, and can only be deterred, not reasoned with or made to become your friend. Psychologically, bullying gives the feeling of power and control over a weaker person, which some people enjoy as a mark of status and respect. I think the best evidence in favour of this is that bullies are usually very careful in picking their targets - they deliberately avoid people likely to fight back, people with friends to back them up, and those who will generally make it hard for them. This suggests that deterrence from the bullied (in the form of fighting back) is likely to have large effects on stopping the problem.

The reason this is important is that it gets to the moral question of the culpability of the bully. Under the first premise, the bully is ultimately to be pitied, as well as (although probably not as much as) the bullied. Under the second premise, the bully is human scum, preying on the weak, and deserving of punishment and reprobation.

Personally, I'm closer to the Sebastian Marshall school, but that's not really important. Certainly in the case of children, it seems highly likely that poor home circumstances contribute to bullying problems, but that makes me only slightly more sympathetic to bullies. And it certainly doesn't make me misty-eyed about the power of deterrence.

But putting aside culpability, it seems that both policies can be implemented simultaneously. That is:

a) Adults and those in positions of power should try to show love and affection, thereby trying to win over those bullies capable of redemption, and

b) Kids being bullied should fight back hard and immediately, indicating that they are not soft targets. Fighting back on your own behalf creates deterrence. Fighting back on behalf of your friends and the weak creates extended deterrence, and both reduce the incidence of bullying.

I am certainly not one who thinks that wisdom is always (or even generally) found in balancing out all competing sides to an argument.

But the world is a complicated place nonetheless.

The Power of Marketing

The Last Psychiatrist has an interesting post about the images that marketers use to subtley convey cool:

It's easy to think that the ads are designed to draw in the demo shown in the ads, but that's not the way advertising works, and consequently that's not how America works. If you're watching it, it's for you. These ads play heavy during late and late late night talk shows: the target is boring middle aged white people. Blackberry isn't targeting gays and limber blondes, it's pretending they are already on board so you don't feel like a dork without a touch screen.... They know you better than you know yourself. Strike that: they know the lies you tell yourself better than you.

It reminded me of a conversation with AL years ago during our undergrad days. The question he posed, not dissimilar from Enrico Fermi's 'Where Are They', was this:

If marketers are so brilliant, why are all the people studying marketing at uni complete dumb@$$es?

Which brings me to the question of how much marketers know me better than I know myself. To help answer the question, let me quote from some marketing material that Château Holmes recently received from United Airlines. It was in a separate fold-out book attached to some letter:

"The day miles got set free"

One sunny morning, a man woke up to find his miles anxiously tugging at his toes. "Let's go out and play", they seemed to say. Unable to resist, the man decided to see where his miles could take him. Turns out, they could take him almost anywhere.

This was as far as I got before throwing it across the room in rage.

Who exactly is this drivel appealing to? 5 year olds with a frequent flyer account? Senile old people with too many miles on their hands? I honestly have no idea. But someone signed off on spending thousands of dollars, printing up this junk and sending it across the country. In entirely unrelated news, United Airlines posted a Net Loss of  $651m in 2009, and a Net Loss of $5.348b in 2008.

Some marketers have deep understandings of human nature, and manage to cleverly work this in to the messages they convey. On the other hand, most of the clowns you knew in uni doing marketing? Yeah, they're still clowns.

Second Person Obituaries

For various reasons, my family tends to take a very matter-of-fact approach to death. As I grew up, it became apparent that this wasn't in fact the norm. Most people seem to avoid contemplating it altogether, and find any significant focus on it to be morbid. I find it more surprising that one could go through long periods of one's life and not reflect on one's own impermanence, but that's human nature for you.

But in the Holmes household, I remember my uncle would frequently read the obituaries each day in the paper, sometimes out loud. I think he was just interested. One of the things he used to point out, which I still find interesting, is the number of  condolence notices written in the second person - 'Bob, you were a great father to us all.'  I guess it takes people a while to come to terms with the fact that their loved one is really gone.

My uncle was of course no man to scorn another man's mourning. But his sadness towards death was devoid of a desire to hide what it was, which allowed him to appreciate the ironies that death entails, and indeed help to make it more bearable (an attitude he maintained when my grandparents died, so he walked the walk here).

And those who tend to view death as a fairly ordinary occurrence are more apt to notice that it's strange to write to the dead through the medium of the public notices of The Sydney Morning Herald. If one's messages are in fact being delivered to heaven, wouldn't they be just as likely to get there if you just wrote it on a piece of paper in your room? And if it's just a public expression to celebrate and mourn the person's life, why address it to the deceased?

I told him that when he dies, I'm writing him a notice in the paper addressed to him personally, done in his honour.

Doing What You Love

If you looked at all the advice that's dispensed, and compare the numbers for 'Frequency That Advice X is Given' and 'Actual Value of Advice X', some of the most frequent and useless seems to be the admonition to 'Do What You Love.'

To my mind, the best job to aim for is the one that maximises (roughly speaking):

P(Getting & Keeping Employment in Job X) * [(Wage in Job X) + (Personal Non-wage enjoyment of Job X, expressed as an equivalent dollar value)].

For simplicity, call this P*(W+N)

'Do What You Love' says to focus on N, and ignore the rest.

Viewed from this perspective, it's obviously stupid to ignore P and W.

But it's even worse than that. Maximising N will generally cause you to aim for jobs that you can't get, and that pay nothing. The problem is that if your tastes are the same as everybody else, N is likely to be negatively correlated with P and W (holding constant the demand for the end product being produced)

Suppose Bob loves playing X-Box and sleeping with hot women. Should Bob aim to become a video game tester or a porn star?

Seen from this perspective, it's obvious. Lots of guys enjoy these things, so the competition for these jobs is huge (P is low for male porn stars and video game testers). Because lots of people are competing for the jobs, the market clearing wage will be low (W is low for male porn stars and video game testers).

Same for being a political staffer, a journalist for the New York Times, an intern at a trendy nonprofit, or a sitcom writer.

On the other hand, it's possible to modify this advice to something more useful:

"Do things you love more than the average person."

Things that you love more than the average person will be roughly loading up positively on N. So you'll still be more likely to end up in jobs you'll somewhat enjoy. But more importantly, they will also be loading up positively on P and W. Jobs that fewer other people enjoy will have less competition and higher wages. This is doubly true if you think that lots of other people are foolishly following the 'Do What You Love' advice.

In other words, you don't have to love reaching into clogged toilets to be a plumber. You just have to dislike it less than the average person. Because plumbers make some pretty serious coin. You know why? Most people can't stand the prospect of reaching into clogged toilets.

Combine this with the secondary part of :

"Do things you are better able to do than the average person."

(which will also lead towards higher P and W) and you're a long way to a good rule of thumb.

Finish it off with:

"Do things that there's a high and reliable demand for the end product being produced"

(which focuses on some of the demand determinants of P and W), and you've got a pretty damn good way of evaluating employment.

I remember Coyote making a similar point a while ago.

The Psychological Effect of Colour in Photographs

I'm not sure if this is a common reaction, but I certainly notice it in myself. I don't know why, but I find it surprisingly hard to relate to people in historical black and white photographs. 


There's no good reason for this - human nature hasn't changed much in the past hundred years (if ever), and it's a fair bet that if you'd been born then, you'd have ended up just like everyone else at that time. But for some reason, when you take away the colour, it stops being a world I can relate to and becomes instead some point in the vast prehistory of places far removed from the present. For colour photos, however grainy, the world is recognisable. It's a place that you conceivably could be in.


Don't believe me? Compare these two photographs.


Below is a photo of some World War I prisoners of war. The people in it could be your grandfather. Change the clothes slightly, and they could be you:

Now compare the same photo in greyscale:

Such a trivial difference. And yet, it may as well be another planet.

I think this is part of the reason that World War I always seemed like a faraway country of which we know nothing, so to speak.

The Veneer of Civilisation

From Theodore Dalymple, in the WSJ

"Writers have always loved to describe situations in which a man or men (rarely women) have been isolated in the most difficult circumstances, individually or collectively. Generally speaking, what those writers have tried to show is that the civilization of civilized men is but a veneer that is easily stripped off by a little (or much) adversity. Man is thus what he has always been: a wolf to himself. They rarely draw the conclusion that the veneer is the most important thing about civilization."

It is indeed.

Incidentally, this forms part of the basis for why I love Heart of Darkness so much. At the end, the narrator shies away from stripping away the illusions about Kurtz from his wife - civilisation may be hypocrisy and sham, but if the alternative is savagery, then one must embrace the sham, however reluctantly.

British Tax Dollars At Work

The real problem of generous welfare is not that society can't afford it. America and Britain are rich places, rich enough to afford quite a lot of stupidity. No, the real problem is what generous welfare does to the culture and mindset of those who receive it.

To see an example of everything wrong with welfare gone wild, check out this story from Britain.

Kelly Marshall saved her benefit money to help pay for breast enhancement.

... she plans to save more of hers for liposuction and a tummy tuck. Miss Marshall, who has never worked, rakes in almost £29,000 a year from benefits - and last year spent £4,500 to go from a 34A to a 34DD.

I have no problem with Kelly Marshall spending her money however she sees fit. Milton Friedman would (and did) agree. Thrift and savings are also not to be derided. If she simply spent her money on booze, drugs and fast food (like so many in Britain's welfare slums), the story would be so common as to be entirely unremarkable.

But surely, this suggests that the government is giving her way more money than needed to avert poverty. The Daily Mail tries to gloss over this angle, with the opening line:

Most families who are due to lose their child benefit are worrying about how they'll make ends meet without it.

And yet, this wretched woman is apparently living the life of Riley on the same payments. Hmm, incongruous isn't it?

But no, let us delve deeper into the cultural morass:

For Kelly Marshall, who has five children by four different fathers,

Classy!

Mia, 11, Nio, ten, Lenni, three, Kallie, 11 and Lewis, 16

Naming your child with a misspelled version of Keanu Reaves in The Matrix (the dates line up too) - double classy!

Okay, maybe I'm being too harsh. It's possible she's just misunderstood, and has had some bad luck in her life?

To see the real disgrace, just listen to the sense of shameless entitlement this harridan has:

'I know most people will think it is wrong I am spending taxpayers' money on my looks. But I deserve it because I am a good mum.'

...

'I always take the kids abroad,' she said. 'We have been to Tenerife and Cyprus, and this year we have been to Magaluf twice. 'Each holiday costs about £2,000, but it's good to get away, and the kids and I deserve it.'

Deserve. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

'But I don't think me or my children should miss out on nice things just because I have never worked.'

No, of course not. Free Government money for everyone! It just falls from the sky!

To her credit, Kelly does seem to evince a dim awareness of where all this largess is coming from, even if she's a little weak on the precise accounting:

'My mum worked all her life and she paid taxes so I feel I am getting what I deserve,'

Okay, so she does realise that taxpayers are picking up the tab somehow. I am going to go out on a crazy limb here, and predict that her mum didn't pay nearly enough taxes to cover the value of what her daughter will receive from the government (even assuming that her Mum was relieved of any obligation to contribute towards anything else the government does).

Note too the flimsy moral excuses she produces for this outrageous behaviour. Her mum once worked, so she 'deserves' a free ride forever. This fascinating moral position of intergenerational virtue is not expounded at length, which is a great shame. Nobody is the villain in their own narrative. That is why the word 'deserve' appears so frequently - in her moral universe, somehow she's doing the right thing shamelessly mooching.

But eventually, we get to the heart of the matter:

'I don't care that it is at the taxpayers' cost,' she told Closer magazine. ...

No, no she doesn't. In fact, she wants to rub this fact in your face, parading for a photo holding a wine glass, and showing off her taxpayer-funded jeans collection.

That is the real tragedy of long term welfare. Out of the high and worthy desire to help those who are down on their luck, come such poisonous consequences. It's not that people work less. It's not that people lose motivation and purpose in their life, as all connection between effort and outcome is severed. It's not that people get lazy and shiftless.

No, the tragedy is the sense of sheer ungratefulness that comes from receiving large payments, year in year out, no questions asked. Grateful receipt of charity makes the donor feel happy, even if the original need for charity wasn't great. Neutral receipt, people can stomach that too. But habitually resentful receipt of charity is a very ugly aspect of human nature to witness.

Unfortunately, I suspect that is what long term welfare commonly produces.

George Orwell, a man with great sympathy for the plight of the unfortunate, said as much in 'Down and Out in Paris and London:

"A man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor--
it is a fixed characteristic of human nature; 
and, when he has fifty or a hundred others to back him, he will show it."