Predictable Preference Reversals in Procrastination Choices

In the category of 'stupid mistakes I make that I will admit to', let me add this one.

Procrastination is a classic sign of hyperbolic discounting. It's what happens when you know that something is in your interests to do, but you don't want to pay the small upfront costs just yet. You'll do it soon, really. As a result, it creates in predictable preference reversals. After you're done procrastinating, you'll wish you hadn't. Moreover, even as you're doing it, you know that you'll later regret it. But you do it anyway.

My mistake is not that I procrastinate and wish I didn't (although that happens too). It's more that hyperbolic discounting also causes me to procrastinate with things that aren't optimally enjoyable. So how does this mistake work in this context?

Procrastination typically tends to take the form of lots of small chunks of time. You tell yourself that you'll only waste five minutes, and then you'll work. Five minutes passes, then you want to spend another five, and so on. You may end up wasting a lot of time, but the decision has to be made incrementally because it's only the really immediate effect that has the high discount rate. In other words, in 5 minutes time, you really are willing to work. The problem is that '5 minutes time' keeps turning into 'now', when you aren't willing to work.

Someone who is hyperbolically discounting will only do so in tasks that individually require a small amount of time. Like checking one more blog. Or playing one more game of solitaire. They generally won't set aside in advance a large chunk of time to waste, such as by watching a TV show, or worse, a whole movie.

But here's where the preference reversals come in. In total, I will often waste 2 hours of time over the course of a day. If I could commit in advance to wasting this time and then getting on with work, I would rather spend it watching at least one TV show, or maybe a whole movie.

But I won't want to commit to that, because standing in the present, the first 5 minutes seem like acceptable procrastination, but the remaining 85 seem like an unconscionable waste of time when I should be working. They'll only seem like acceptable procrastination when they turn into 'now'.

An alternative title for this post is "Why, 6 months later, I still haven't watched 'The Hangover' that SMH lent me, even though I honestly believe it's a good movie"

Resist the Festivalisation of Weddings

There seems to be an increasing trend in modern society towards ever more elaborate weddings. It’s not enough to have wedding plus reception. Obviously you need both bachelor parties and spinster parties.

But there’s been a proliferation of new add-ons.

Americans are big on the ‘rehearsal dinner’, which seems to have spiraled out of control from being ‘just the wedding party’ to ‘wedding party plus out of town guests’ to ‘practically everybody’. So now you’ve got to plan not one, but two huge parties.

And since the out of town guests will be there the day before, it would be a shame to not have some activity with them during the day too. Bam, there’s more planning and hassle.

And if two days wasn’t enough (and let’s not forget the local guests, slumming it with only a single full day of proceedings), there has been the pernicious proliferation of ‘next morning brunch’. I can think of nothing more ghastly as the Groom than to have to stagger down the next morning to put on my cheery face again. Plus most of the young people would rather be asleep too, especially if they’ve been out late the night before. So it’s basically only the oldies who’ll be enjoying it.

Screw that. If I had to plan a wedding (which mercifully I do not), you know what I’m going to be doing the morning after my wedding? Getting laid. Failing that, I’ll be asleep. Failing that, I’ll be on a plane to Tahiti. But come hell or high water, I sure won’t be glad-handing all the guests AGAIN.

And if three days of stuff isn’t enough (not including the bachelor parties), there’s now the engagement party. This is for all the other guests that you didn’t want to invite to the wedding, so now you get to plan a third party. Thankfully lower key, but that doesn’t help much. In truth, it probably would have been cheaper to just invite the additional guests to the wedding and cancel the party, but that doesn’t seem to occur to people.

This is of course either in addition to (or hopefully in substitution of) ‘bridal showers’, another excuse for the bride and her friends to get together, and the bride to get more presents. Traditionally, this wouldn't concern me, so I wouldn't care. But in this golden age of equality, it has been sometimes transformed into a ‘couples shower’.

Good God in Heaven, what kind of sackless man agrees to host a ‘couples shower’? You take a female tradition, and insert yourself into it like an emasculated appendage to bride-zilla. And on top of that, the concept of a ‘shower’ (unlike just a ‘party’) is that the guests are required to bring gifts. How tacky! How classless! How do you send out an invitation saying ‘Come to this party, bring me more presents!’ and not feel like a tool?

Thankfully, all these things have served one very useful purpose - they provide an excellent screening mechanism for potential brides.

To wit, the more elaborate wedding the bride wants, the less I am likely to want to marry them. They don't have to be as curmudgeonly as me (because let's face it, that's asking a lot), but a little skepticism towards the idea of 'three straight days of celebrating meee!!!!!' wouldn't hurt.

It is a strong signal of quality if your bride-to-be is more excited by the idea of marriage than the idea of a wedding. It is a strong negative signal if the converse is true.

Why you want an Internet phone

Apart from the fact that you get mobile access to the internet, which is immensely useful.

No, the really handy thing is that they massively reduce the awkwardness of sitting on your own in a given social situation. Sitting at a restaurant alone makes you look like a loner, a loser who's been stoof up by their friends, or never had any friends to begin with.

Reading a book is almost worse, because it means you came prepared for the prospect of sitting alone, which makes you even more of a Nigel No-Mates.

But with an Internet phone, you could be checking email from dozens of your friends! People won't know if this is true, since the motions of reading through 20 emails from loved ones look very similar to the motions of reading a blog. You could be casually passing a minute or two until your friends arrive. But not only that, it gives you something mechanically satisfying for defusing awkwardness. You can avoid eye contact with other people in the room without it looking like you're avoiding them. You've got something to do with your hands, so you don't need to fidget (other than the phone).

And to top it all off, it actually does make it more fun to sit on your own. Over time, this makes sitting on your own seem less pathetic, since it looks like you're having more fun.

In entirely unrelated news, the Myer Briggs personality tests record me as an introvert, and the fact that you're reading this means you probably are too. Which is why you should get an Internet phone if you're one of the 5 people who hasn't already.

On Alexandra Wallace and Jack Stuef (Words have consequences)

Over at Popehat, Patrick links to the story of this guy Jack Stuef, who wrote a despicable article at the blog 'Wonkette' mocking Trig Palin, Sarah Palin's disabled son. The post has since been deleted.

In the comments thee, I wrote about why even though the guy is clearly a fool and a dickhead, I still feel uncomfortable at all the internet piling on:

I guess I might be the only voice of dissent here. Not that the article wasn’t reprehensible, and the guy a real piece of work. But I’m reluctant to pile on too much.

It’s just that people say horribly nasty things all the time, but mostly it doesn’t ruin the entire rest of their life. And broadly I think that’s as it should be. Even if you think it’s just in an absolute sense if this article ruins Jack Stuef’s reputation, it’s hard to see it as just compared with the lack of any consequence for all the other nasty stuff that people say to each other in private, in jokes, behind each others backs, all the time. The only difference here is the internet.

And these stories always tend to go the same way. Person writes a blog post or uploads a video with something flippant and risque on an offensive subject. They’re feeling on a roll, laughing to themselves and not thinking too hard. They’re forgetting that all the tone and inflection they have in their head doesn’t get translated in writing. And they press ‘post’. And suddenly it goes viral, they get a torrent of hate, and they’re forced to belatedly reflect on how the article would appear to someone who didn’t find the joke funny. But by that point it’s too late. They can’t take it back, the internet never forgets, and that’s all people will see when they google their name, forever.

I've never written anything that bad in a public forum, but I’ve sure sent emails I regretted, often following exactly the first half of the script above.

Does writing a post like this make you an insensitive d*ckhead? Absolutely. Is the post substantially more nasty than civilised people would think, even in jest? Sure. But should it ruin your whole life? To me, no. This guy seems like a piece of crap, but I still feel a bit sorry for him, the same way I did for Alexandra Wallace.

Reading it over now, it sounds more sanctimonious that was intended. (Once again, inflection is hard to convey!) Patrick pointed out, quite rightly, that this guy is a professional writer on a large blog, who writes this kind of nasty stuff for a living. Which is a fair point. In other words, this isn't the case of someone who wrote something ill-considered that just spread far wider than they intended (like Alexandra Wallace, the girl who posted a dumb video complaining about Asian students at UCLA and got hounded out of the school).

So maybe it is appropriate in this case.

In which case, let these remarks be not about Jack Stuef, but about the impact of the internet on people's ill-considered statements.

A good number of the worst decisions I've made in my life have taken on similar forms to narrative above. Find something funny in your head, do it quickly in the heat of the moment thinking it will be a hilarious gag, and then 5 minutes later (when I've calmed down) realise it wasn't that funny and the other person will be quite offended or hurt, but that it's too late to take it back.

I've been lucky that the times I've done this, it so far hasn't led to any permanent life-altering consequences. Alexandra Wallace has not been so fortunate. She, unlike me in the past, made the mistake of making the joke on the internet.

If she'd said her rant to her friends, they might have laughed. They might have rolled their eyes. They might have stopped talking to her, called her a racist scumbag, and trash-talked her to everyone they knew.

But she wouldn't have been on the receiving end of the 5 minutes of internet hate, which made her decide to leave UCLA, and made this video the first thing that every potential employer and acquaintance will ever see when they type her name into google. Even if she'd printed this in a newspaper 30 years ago, it would have been disseminated much less.

The only difference is the internet. Things can be spread far further, and far faster, than the person intends. And they can't be taken back.

In other words, the consequences are now way way worse, even if the sin of saying shitty things is the same sin that it was 50 years ago.

One argument against having laws that aren't widely enforceable is that the people who get punished get sentences that are way harsher than the many others who did the same thing, but were lucky enough to not get caught. And this offends peoples sense of fairness, that ideally the same actions should get the same consequences.Think of music piracy. The RIAA lashes out at the tiny number of people it can sue, vainly trying to deter  the millions of others it knows it can't stop.

It's the same here. There are millions of people who write really nasty things on the internet - the world is full of clowns and fools. But I still find myself uncomfortable with the process that periodically singles out a couple of of them for massive punishment as a symbol of the sins of the many.

How to arrange a meeting via text message when there's bad reception

So I spent the weekend at Coachella (of which you will hear more soon). But one thing that stuck with me was how bad people are at sending text messages when they need to meet up at these types of big concert festivals. There's way too many people for the mobile phone towers to accommodate, so you you don't know exactly when the person will receive the message. Spotty reception makes people check their phones less frequently, and this makes the problem worse.

But people don't take this into account at all when they're trying to arrange to meet someone. They send text messages in exactly the same way as if they would be read and delivered instantaneously. And it's a disaster.

The typical message will be something like this:

Bob (t+0:00): Hey, want to meet up?

Sam (t+1:00): Sure where do you want to meet?

Bob (t+2:00): I'm at the Strokes. Want to join me?

Sam(t+3:30, who received the last message after the Strokes had finished playing): Where are you now? Want to meet at the food tent?

etc.

In other words, they never meet up.

You need to design your messages quite specifically with a few principles in mind:

1. Don't try to arrange anything within less than say, 2 hours. You won't know when they'll receive it, and it will just confuse matters when they receive it after the time you suggested.

2. As a corollary, never base anything on where you are now or where they are now, unless you're planning to stay there for ages.

3. Try to arrange matters with messages that require the smallest possible number of replies. They should be able to just respond with 'yes'. Even better is if they don't need to respond at all.

4. To do this, add the largest amount of detail immediately, and suggest a default option.

5. Assume that whoever you send the message to will not know how to respond sensibly, so direct their actions.

6. Suggest meeting points that are completely obvious to everyone. Avoid anything ambiguous.

So how does this work? Here's an example

A message that requires one response, and a simple response at that. My default:

Do you want to meet up? How about the Ferris Wheel at 5pm? If that doesn't work, I could also meet there at 2pm, 4:30pm or 6pm, so feel free to suggest another time or place

You can even write things that don't require any responses, particularly if you don't know if they'll be able to respond in time (and don't mind waiting):

Let's meet up. How about the Ferris Wheel at 5pm? If I don't hear from you, I'll wait there from 5 until 5:10pm, and if I still haven't found you I'll come back at 6pm and wait until 6:10pm

The second message can be acted on even if they receive it 15 minutes before, and won't have time to message you back.

These messages obviously look a bit odd to the normal banter people send back and forth. But rest assured, I meet up with the people I want to meet up with, and most of the OMG LOL teen set don't.

Forward planning matters, suckas!

"I know a place that'll saw your legs off!"

Consent is a murky concept.

No, I'm not talking about the "She may have been nearly passed out but she was totally asking for it, and besides, I was drunk too".

I mean the question of exactly what the law will allow you to consent to in terms of an assault.

At one extreme, the law has long recognised that you can't consent to be murdered. The German cannibal who killed and ate his apparently consenting victim was charged with murder anyway, and the same thing would be true in nearly all first world countries.

And most people are quite happy with this. The average person's response to the plea "But he wanted to be killed!" is likely to be "Stiff shit. Off to prison for you, freak." And that's not unreasonable, certainly as a matter of policy. Murder is not a tort against the victim (for which the victim receives compensation), but a crime against the state (for which the offender receives punishment). And the State reserves the right to punish you, regardless of whether the other person agreed to it.

On the other hand, you can consent to be slapped. You can consent to a boxing match. You can consent to be whipped by a dominatrix.

But somewhere between the two extremes, things get less clear. Should you be able to consent to get your arm sawed off? What about just cut really badly?

This question came up in the context of a lawsuit against Jeff Williams of St Petersburg, Florida, who was paying homeless men to be beaten up on camera by scantily clad women.

Now, the question is not whether you should be revolted by this behavior. This guy is a repulsive excuse for a human being.

But to the law, that's not the point. Can you honestly draw a sharp distinction between this and say, mixed martial arts?

Let's look at the injuries suffered:

Shaw suffered broken ribs, a dislocated jaw, back injuries and a dislocated arm on two different visits to 73 16th St. S. Grayson, the suit says, sustained bruises and multiple lacerations.

Sounds bad, but take a look at the early UFC fights - they were just as bad or worse.

You can definitely point to differences. The guys may have mental problems. There weren't medical people on hand in case something went awry.

But be honest, is that really what's wrong here? Would you be actually happy with the situation if it were only homeless guys without evident mental problems and a doctor around?

And sooner or later, you run into the reason this gets thorny:

"They’ve come back many times, which makes it pretty consensual," Williams said.

And this is where things get weird. Nobody appears to have been charged with an actual crime. That's what happens when people (through their elected representatives) decide that some assaults are too unconscionable to be consented to.

That's not what's being argued here, at least by the state.

Instead, this is argued as being a tort against the homeless guys themselves. I'm no expert on US torts law, but this seems odd to me, because they got exactly what they consented to. As a matter of decency, I hope they win and get the injunction. As a matter of law and precedent, I'm more hesitant.

I think instead it's a response to the fact that the average person finds this intolerable for reasons they would struggle to articulate clearly. Torts law is not the right instrument for this, but it is more flexible, and can be used (in this case for getting an injunction) when the police aren't willing to make a prosecution.

It seems we are finding out what philosophers have known for a long time - namely, that law can never be a substitute for morality. Society functions not because we can outlaw all possible bad behavior, but because they have citizens with a sense of shame and decency.

In a society full of scumbags like Jeff Williams, it will always be impossible to outlaw every disgusting act.

(Link via Marginal Revolution, subject line via The Simpsons  - search for 'Power Plant Commercial' on the page)

The End(-Game) of the Affair

What exactly are married people thinking when they start an affair?

I don't mean, "Whoa, I'm finally gonna get laid! That hasn't happened in years!". I mean, how exactly do they see things ending when you start boning your secretary? (I'll take the perspective of the man, but the point is the same)

In some ways, boning a hooker is more understandable in practical terms. It's also despicable and repugnant, but within the mindset of someone completely callous to other people's feelings, I can see how they figure they can get away with it. You're away on business, you find some prostitute for one night only, you don't end up with the clap, and you tell yourself you'll never do it again and your wife won't find out. The latter part might be true, the former part probably isn't.

But what about when you set out on an ongoing affair with someone?

As far as I can see it, there are no good endings to that story.

And that should be obvious to the people involved even before they begin.

But apparently it isn't, at least judging by how often they do it.

The first point to note is that as the length of the affair increases, the probability that your wife will eventually find out converges to 1. The chances that you'll slip up somehow, or get inadvertently found out through some voicemail, missed call, something, are too high.

And when that happens, the results are as predictable as they are horrible. Hurtful recriminations, your children hate you for ever. Most likely you get divorced, the courts take two thirds of your money, you try to justify why you're not actually an asshole. Best case scenario, the secretary becomes wife #2, and you're much poorer.

Alternative best case scenario, your wife forgives you  but the relationship never quite recovers, you break things off with the secretary who now hates you too, and you have to live with the hurt you've inflicted on your loved ones.

If you want out of the marriage, aren't you better off doing that up-front?

I can think of maybe two explanations.

The first, less likely, is that the person has effectively made up their mind they want a divorce, they don't care about their wife's feelings, but they need some alternative female figure there for certain before they're willing to cut the cord. Seems like a very costly way to go about it (for both you and them), but it's at least internally consistent if your have a huge risk aversion, a complete lack consideration for your wife, and an underlying fear of abandonment.

The second, and I think more likely explanation, is just that they actively avoid thinking about the question. They focus on managing the immediate part (don't let wife find out, lead on secretary that you might leave your wife eventually but keep expectations reasonable) and don't think about the long-run. When these thoughts creep in, convince yourself that it will work out somehow, even if all the options are in front of you and they're all bad. Hyperbolic discounting takes care of the rest.

Never underestimate the ability of people to live in denial about the eventual outcome of their poor choices.

Political biases are hard to spot

The last few months have revealed a positive aspect to Barack Obama's presidency that I hadn't considered:

Namely, I think it has been extremely useful to have a war against a nasty dictator being carried out by a Democratic president.

I think this is doubly true given that only a relatively small amount geopolitically seems to ride on the outcome of it.

The reason for this is that I think the average political-minded person will end up with a much more nuanced version of American military action. I think when all is said and done, you will end up with more of a consensus opinion on military action that is far less driven by partisan differences, and that's really important for national security issues.

Tribalism being what it is, people's view of any policy is coloured by their sense of who is carrying it out. Liberals screamed bloody murder when Bush invaded Iraq, while conservatives were largely supportive (with neoconservatism being ascendant as a school of thought).

On the other hand, I think the last few months have really added evidence in favour of the following - had the Iraq invasion been launched by Clinton instead, far more Democrat voters would have supported it. Not all of them, but a good chunk. Additionally, more Republicans would have probably opposed it.

Now, part of this might be explicitly partisan - you just want to see your side win. But I don't think that's the interesting bit. I think that the positive sides of the action actually seem more apparent when your guy does it.

The funny thing is that it's not until you see the same thing being done by the other guy that the bias actually reverses itself, because you're now minded to see the other side of the argument. Which is why a number of Democrats are on board with bombing Libya, while a number of conservatives are opposed.

People respond to this shift  in one of three ways.

The least introspective simply ignore the contradiction (Libya good, Iraq bad, so what!   /   Iraq good, Libya bad, so what!)

The somewhat introspective but hubristic will rationalise the distinction (the uprising in Libya was organic and that's important, the Iraq one wasn't - never mind that the brutality against civilians was the same in both cases  / in Iraq we had a clear goal of regime change, in Libya we're bombing stuff without knowing what we're doing - never mind that the goal of Iraq shifted after the invasion ).

The introspective and honest will be forced to admit that maybe they hadn't properly considered before (maybe it's okay to bomb truly awful dictators even if the country does have oil / maybe thankless nation-building projects are a horrible sinkhole of lives and money )

For my part, I've become increasingly skeptical of the extent to which fostering democracy in third world is likely to produce better outcomes for the west. In particular, I now tend to think that democracy is the symptom of a society that works, not the cause. What causes society to work is more likely a set of values devoted to pluralism, peaceful resolution of disputes, and a view of fellow countrymen based on shared ideas rather than tribalism. In other words, if there's already some form of civil society you end up with democracy. If there's not, you end up with stories like the following, where a mob of Afghans decide that the appropriate response to some nobody Pastor in the US burning a Koran is to murder a bunch of UN workers. If that's how the average person in the society thinks, what outcome exactly do you expect from taking a vote?  If that's what we've got for 10 years of effort, what the hell are we doing there?

And I think that consensus opinion will shift towards a kind of synthesis along the following lines - bomb nasty regimes and places that screw over the US, but don't send in ground troops with the aim of turning the place into Switzerland.

And I think there's a good argument that this ought to have been the policy all along.

But there were very few people arguing for this course of action in 2003. And had McCain won in 2008, we wouldn't be anywhere near this view now.

Wealth and Happiness

A fantastic essay at the Atlantic about the extent to which wealth brings happiness, discussing survey data from very rich households in a forthcoming Boston College study (which I will be sure to read when it comes out).

“I realized good and evil are equally distributed across the economic spectrum and not particular to the wealthy or the poor,” [sociologist Paul G. Schervish] says.

Exactly right. Contra Ayn Rand and Karl Marx, virtuous wealth and virtuous poverty are both myths (although the latter is probably more widely believed these days than the former).

Incidentally, as an economist I have from time to time been guilty of laughing at sociology as a discipline.Guys like Paul Schervish and John Havens remind me that it's a very bad habit to get into, as a lot of interesting work is done there.

I also very much liked these lines towards the end:

If anything, the rich stare into the abyss a bit more starkly than the rest of us. We can always indulge in the thought that a little more money would make our lives happier—and in many cases it’s true. But the truly wealthy know that appetites for material indulgence are rarely sated. No yacht is so super, nor any wine so expensive, that it can soothe the soul or guarantee one’s children won’t grow up to be creeps.

Just so.

As a man who makes a living from finance and economics (albiet one far too poor to speak of these things firsthand), I endorse every word. Read the whole thing.

Text Messaging and Being An Old Fogey

I remember clearly the first time I realised that I was definitively a generation older than the current crop of teenagers. It was when I read this:

"The average teenager sends 3339 text messages per month".

The average. Lord knows what the sample maximum was. For teenage girls the average was 4050.

And it instantly made me feel like a cranky parent in 1950 railing about Elvis wiggling his hips. Not in the sense that I was scandalised or offended - frankly, the stupidity of teenagers knows no bounds, and the other things they would have been doing are inevitably just as vapid. No, more just in the sense of not really understanding what's going on. Holy Lord in Heaven, why would you want to spend that much time typing to someone on a tiny keyboard? If each text message takes you 10 seconds to type, that's 9 and a half hours of typing on a keyboard the size of your palm. If each message receives a reply that takes you 5 seconds to read, that's another 5 hours. It's an average of 6 texts per waking hour.

The New York Times ran a piece recently talking about how lots of people are giving up the phone call. (I don't link to the New York Times, for reasons I'll explain some other time). And while I'm in agreement on the general undesirability of phone calls with random people, I find myself preferring the phone for organizing things with people you know reasonably well. The bandwidth of the phone is just so much larger - you can talk way faster than you can type, and exchange information much faster (particularly information requiring several iterations of response and adjustment) . Sorting out a place to meet takes about 30 seconds on a phone, or 10 minutes of back and forth on text messages. I just don't understand why more people don't want to get the boring organization conversation over faster, and get on with their lives. There's also no substitute for when you want to find out if someone is available right now. If they don't answer the phone, they're not free. Hyperbolic discounters like myself don't want to wait 5 minutes to find this out.

The bigger point, though, is that text messagers are forever tied to their phone. 6 messages an hour is about right, because you don't just send 500 messages in two hours then stop, you do it continuously over the day. They're never fully paying attention to whatever task, conversation or event is at hand, because they always interrupting to continue their stop-motion conversation with someone else somewhere else. I dislike phone calls as much as the next man, but I resent even more being tied to my phone for that long at a stretch.

And you kids don't know what real music is anyway. Back in my day, we had to walk 10km to school, uphill in both directions. And back in my day, that skirt you're wearing would have been called a belt.

You being easy makes my life hard

Let me reprise a conversation that I have frustratingly often. See if it sounds familiar:

Shylock: So, where do you want to go for dinner?

Friend: I dunno. I'm easy.

Now, what's frustrating about this is that "I'm easy" is typically said in the tone that implies that their lack of preference is making your life simpler, because they're not placing any restrictions on possible places to eat.

In reality, saying "I'm easy" is almost never making the person's life simpler. You know why?

Because the problem is very rarely that the person has a list of 50 restaurants in mind, and is trying to optimise over both your preferences (in which case, you having no preferences would actually simplify the matter).

Instead, the problem is almost always that the person asking is short of ideas on possible places to go. That's why they're asking. In which case you being 'easy' is not helping matters at all.

Here's the subtext of what is actually being asked and replied.

Shylock: [I am feeling uncreative in thinking of possible restaurants we could eat at. Rather than admit to this directly, I will pose the question as trying to elicit your preferences over general food types or specific restaurants. Will you help me by generating some suggestions?]

Friend: [No, I too am feeling lazy, and so shall pretend that you're trying to solve a different problem and offer you no help. Moreover, I shall do this in a tone that suggests you should be grateful for my lack of help]

When looked at in this light, part of he blame lies with the initial questioner for not phrasing the question in a way that makes it clearer exactly which problem is trying to be solved (i.e. "What tastes do you crave" vs. "Help me generate suggestions")

So, if someone asks you this, let me suggest a much better response:

Friend: If  you have a place in mind and it would make the process simpler for me to be of few wishes, I can eat anywhere . On the other hand, if you don't have anywhere in mind and it would help for me to generate suggestions, I can do that too.

Trust me, your friends will thank you.

I'm with Big Red

Jerome Cardinal recently sent me this great video currently doing the rounds of this kid getting bullied who snaps and bodyslams the hell out of the bully. Check out the full video at Popehat, it's well worth your watching.

The outrage brigade, of course, is scandalised that a child would ever resort to violence to solve their problems. As Patrick notes, they never seem to muster the same level of outrage at the initial bullying, which passes without comment. But once the faux shock of educational professionals and bullying experts is passed over, the overwhelming internet consensus opinion seems 'Good on Big Red! Way to teach that little shit a lesson.' I find myself in complete accordance with this.

The position of schools tends to be that it's never okay to fight back, and you should always just report it to the teachers. This is of course completely at odds with the criminal law in just about every jurisdiction on earth. When someone assaults you, you have the right to use reasonable force in self-defence. There's no 'schoolyard exception' to this in the law. Don't listen to what the principal says, kids - if someone attacks you with illegal force, you are completely within your rights to defend yourself with legal force. Centuries of common law tradition will have your back, even if the teacher doesn't.

As I noted in the comments at Popehat, the only thing that could have made that video more awesome would have been if, when Johnny McTurd was lying on the ground, Big Red started yelling at him “Do you see what happens? Do you see what happens, Larry?”.

I salute you, Big Red. You're probably embarrassed about the fact that you're on video all over the world. But doubt not this fact - lots and lots of people get bullied, and most of them wish they could do what you did. Read through the comments at the Popehat thread and see how many people have stories to report about how they were in situations just like yours, including lots of people who went on to do awesome things.

And this is the tip of the iceberg. For every one that has a story about successfully getting rid of bullies, I'm guessing there are at least 10 more who didn't ever have the courage to fight back, but always wished they had. They're not commenting in the internet threads because it's a painful memory that they don't like to bring up, but they're cheering you on all the same. In fact, those people are cheering you twice as hard.

You're an internet hero today. Wear it with pride, mate.

Stated vs. Revealed Preference in Abusive Relationships

It is always a good rule of thumb that when people say they want one thing and consistently do another, this should make you suspicious of whether they actually know what they want. Or in economists terms, when people's stated preferences and revealed preferences diverge, they are probably screwing something up. ("Screwing something up" is in fact a technical term :)  ).

Economists, for largely good reasons, tend to trust revealed preference. Talk is cheap, but when the chips are down, go with what people actually do. Usually this is a good way to bet - when a guy tells you he wants to see more opera but actually spends his weekends watching TV, it's a fair bet that he doesn't actually want to see opera, he just likes the idea of it.

But what about a woman who is in an abusive relationship who manages to leave and tells you she really wants to be done with the man, but then keeps going back again and again after he apologises?

In that case, it's not so simple. Right-minded people immediately jump to the conclusion that the woman actually wants to leave, and must somehow just be being prevented from this (such as by threats from the man).

The trouble with this view is that it has difficulty explaining why there is such cyclicality - women will leave, and then come back, many times over. It can't be that they never can find a way to leave. Even if you have all the sympathy in the world for such women, you're still left with a puzzle of trying to explain what the hell they're doing. In other words, something funny is going on.

One of my favourite papers in economics looks at this. They argue that women in abusive relationships have time-inconsistent preferences - in other words, they truly do want to leave when they leave, but they predictably change their mind and return to the guy. Hence their preferences are inconsistent over time.

They study a fascinating case that provides evidence for this - the case of 'no-drop' laws, whereby when a woman complains of domestic violence, prosecutors are obliged to proceed with the case even if the woman subsequently recants her testimony. This tends to happen a lot, which should also make you suspicious - if the guy is already in prison pending charges, what's the harm in going to trial?

When these laws were passed, they resulted in a drop in violence of men towards women - no surprises there. But here's where it gets interesting - the law also resulted in a drop of murders of men by abused women. The authors argue that people with time-inconsistent preferences need commitment mechanisms to stop them changing their mind. Murder is one such mechanism, albiet a very poor choice. These no-drop laws work because they substitute a much less costly commitment mechanism, helping women stop themselves from predictably going back to their man. They might be my favourite example ever of 'nudging' type laws, where you can stop people making bad mistakes by subtly crafted laws.

The reason this is such a fantastic paper is that it gets towards the heart of understanding why people end up in these crappy situations. The feminists of the world would tell you that the women are 100% victims, and that if they're returning to the men, it must be because of threats - we just need to be harsher on the men. In fact, believing this misplaced sympathy would cause you to completely miss the bigger picture of how these relationships persist, and what you can actually do to help end them.

Sympathy is not a substitute for analysis. And you can depend on it that when stated preference and revealed preference diverge, it's a situation worth your studying.

The Lies we tell ourselves

An old story, but a revealing one.

Pamela Anderson, former 'Baywatch' star, made one of the original sex tapes. This was when she was married to Tommy Lee, the drummer for the band Motley Crue. The tape was apparently stolen from their home. Bear in mind this was back in 1997, when the internet was much less developed and it was harder for these things to go viral. A second tape that she'd made with Bret Michaels of the band 'Poison' also surfaced in 1998.

She and Lee got divorced. Since that time, she got engaged to Kid Rick, and then broke up with him, before finally marrying him in July 2006. The marriage only lasted a few months, with them filing for divorce in November 2006. It was announced that Anderson had miscarried a few weeks earlier. The fact that the marriage was premised on a pregnancy and terminated on the conclusion of such is entirely plausible, and sufficient to explain all the actions involved. Additionally, one does not need to reach for conspiracy theories to describe the marital breakdown of a woman who married her first husband after knowing him for 96 hours. All this is given. But it's not what I want to talk about.

What is far more interesting is the rumor that the divorce was triggered at least in part by the movie 'Borat'. In the film, Pamela Anderson is the love interest of Borat, and the movie features a couple of non-explicit clips from Anderson's sex tape with Tommy Lee. But Anderson is playing herself, with the plot being that she gets kidnapped by Borat by being put in his 'marriage sack'. In other words, she comes across as pretty normal. The sex tape scene is mainly a joke to show that Anderson is not the virgin that Borat thinks she is. The joke, in other words, is about Borat, and Pamela Anderson is just being Pamela Anderson.

So goes the story, there was a private showing of the movie at the Anderson/Rock home held by Universal chief Ron Meyer. Kid Rock (Robert Ritchie) apparently was furious after the screening:

"Bob started screaming at Pam, saying she had humiliated herself and telling her, 'You're nothing but a whore! You're a slut! How could you do that movie?' — in front of everyone. It was very embarrassing," the source said.

Now, it bears repeating that this movie actually made Pamela Anderson appear in a better light than her actual actions in real life did. In the movie, she didn't appear naked (which she's done dozens of times, in Playboy and elsewhere). She didn't sleep with anyone. She didn't even pretend to sleep with anyone. She wasn't even shown as being a slut.

And bear in mind, all of Pamela Anderson's horrible relationship choices were known to Kid Rock long before they got married. She's made sex tapes with two separate men, both of which are readily available on the internet. Her naked body can be seen just by googling her name.  If you're marrying this woman, let's just say, "caveat emptor".

No, what the movie actually did was publicly draw attention to and make light of the fact that she had been boned by her ex-husband. It is incredibly difficult for any man to maintain an even temperament watch himself being cuckolded on camera by another man. Even if it was in the past. Even if it was before she knew him. It is virtually impossible for a man to maintain an even temperament while jokes are publicly made for the whole world to see about his wife's past escapades.

As far as I can tell, the screening did two things, both of which made the marriage terminal.

The first was that it forced Kid Rock to publicly witness an acknowledgement that his wife had been boned by another man in the past, and that this was on film. You don't need a PhD in psychology to hypothesise that Kid Rock probably spent a good deal of his time avoiding thinking about this question. You don't have to be a marriage counselor to imagine that this issue may have been a source of friction beneath the surface of their marriage (or indeed above the surface). Having this comforting amnesia ripped off in a public setting was likely a major source of discomfort.

But that alone I don't think would have done it. Kid Rock must have been fairly tough-skinned at dealing with these kind of jokes.  He had to be. How can you marry a woman who was famous for appearing on TV in a tight bathing suit, then appearing in Playboy, then appearing in multiple sex tapes, without acknowledging her past actions?

But there was something else this time.

This time, Pamela Anderson herself was in on the joke. She was happy to be part of a movie that made joking references to his cuckolding. The jokes were mild, no doubt. But not to him. In the eyes of Kid Rock, she had joined the chorus of laughter at him about the fact that he married a woman famous for being boned by someone else.

And that was what he couldn't abide.

But you can't admit that. You can't say 'How could you publicly acknowledge your past marital relations and be a part of a comedy scene vaguely about that?'. You can't say 'How can you force me to publicly endure recognition of the existence of your sex tape by watching small, inexplicit segments of it'. Because both of those are ridiculous-sounding complaints, even though they're the actual problem. So what accusation does he reach for? In his desperation to hurt her in return, what does he say? Let's rewind:

"Bob started screaming at Pam, saying she had humiliated herself and telling her, 'You're nothing but a whore! You're a slut! How could you do that movie?' — in front of everyone. It was very embarrassing," the source said.

Let's examine the three complaints in reverse order.

3. "You're a slut"

Yes. But that's old news. Why did you marry her then?

2.  "You're nothing but a whore"

Yes. But that's old news. Why did you marry her then?

1. She had humiliated herself

Wrong. She humiliated you.

Or more specifically, Tommy Lee humiliated you. She just reminded you publicly of the fact, and was in on the joke.

And that has to end in divorce.

Hell hath no fury like a person exposed to truths they've known but tried to ignore.

The Elderly are Invisible

I was sitting in a park near my apartment this morning, drinking my coffee and watching the world go by. While sitting on my bench, an old man (who must have been at least 80 or so) with one of those wheeling walkers shuffled by. He said hello to me (and another person he passed), walked a few paces past me, and started leaning against the back of the bench next to mine. He did a few leg stretch things, then meandered over towards some nearby stairs and slowly walked down a few of them  (one at a time) and back up again, holding both rails the whole time. I confess to wondering if he'd made it down and up okay, but he seemed reasonably sure-footed, if very slow.

I remember Papa Holmes once making the point to me that once you reach middle-age, you become invisible. People's eyes are drawn towards young, vibrant beautiful people (of whatever sex). When you start getting past the point that you are attractive, people stop noticing you. It's almost as if you don't exist - when they walk past you, you are just another obstacle in their automatic collision detection software, the same as a tree or a lamppost. If you asked 20 people that just passed you, nobody would be able to remember that you were there.

There is an old people's home near my apartment, and while most of them do not venture out very far, it seems almost certain that I've passed some of them before while walking. I can't remember it happening though. Without the contemplation encouraged by having nothing to do on a park bench on a Sunday morning, I almost certainly wouldn't have noticed this man either.

As Al Pacino's character put it in the movie 'Any Given Sunday', "when you get old, things get taken from you.". I think he's right, but I would modify it slightly. Things are lost, but not taken. The difference is one of agency, but it is an important one.

I found myself reflecting on how much the elderly have lost that you and I take for granted in our youth. I bound up and down stairs without thinking about it. I swim in the ocean. I drive my car. I fly for 18 hours to a foreign country. I dress myself, bathe myself, and go to the toilet without noticing that I don't need anyone to help me. I reflect on my health only on the odd occasion when I get a cold. I eat whatever food I wish. I pass a pretty girl in the street, and she smiles at me. I have friends I can call and go out to a bar, cinema, cafe, or restaurant.

You may depend on it, dear reader, that there will come a time when you can no longer do all these things.

Indeed, there may come a time when you can do none of these things.

As I got up to leave, the old man was resting on the seat part of his walker. As I walked off, I stopped to talk to the man. I smiled and lamely tried to make conversation by saying that he had a better seat than I did. He smiled back and said 'Good', in a tone that implied that he hadn't heard the statement properly and assumed I was asking how he was. I walked off, regretting my awkwardness at not stopping and talking more. I wondered how many others were sitting in the retirement home nearby, without anyone who visits.

The elderly are indeed invisible. Old age is dukkha, as the great recluse said.

"Black People = Slaves"

An excellent and very even-handed discussion by Orin Hargraves of the censorship of the word 'nigger' in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'. 

The bit I find so funny about this is that for some reason, it's always the books that are the most sympathetic to the plight of minorities and the underprivileged that attract this kind of censorship. Write 'Heart of Darkness' and scores of post-colonial pinheads line up to call you a racist for describing the hair of Africans as 'woolly' and not giving them enough dialogue. But nobody bothers to censor Mein Kampf, for instance - what would be the point? If however you tell a story that is an immensely powerful critique of the institutions and attitudes towards slavery, people can't wait to bring out the big red pen. There's little sense that these kind of actions make it less likely that people will actually read the book (and thereby receive its anti-slavery message), but when was that important compared with posturing and feeling self-righteous?

Orin also quotes this hilarious justification by the censor-in-chief:

In this edition I have translated each usage of the n-word to read "slave" instead, since the term "slave" is closest in meaning and implication. Although the text loses some of the caustic sting that the n-word carries, that price seems small compared to the revolting effect that the more offensive word has on contemporary readers.

I thought the best response to this was from D.L Hughley:

"They took 'nigger' out of Mark Twain and replaced it with slave. ... that's not an upgrade. ... I'd rather be a nigger than a slave. If you call me 'nigger' I can go home; if you call me 'slave' I've got to go with you."

Just so. Slavery is deeply, enduringly offensive at the core of its very idea. 'Nigger' is just a word. Moreover, in this case it's a word being employed by Twain in the assault on the far more serious evil.

On the other hand, I'm deeply excited by the prospect of the Alan Gribben revised version of many other popular works of contemporary scholarship. Take, for instance, "Shoot 'Em Up" by Nas, as interpreted by Alan Gribben:

"One 44, Two 45s
Three loaded clips
Four free slaves roll
One free slave drives"

Or the Alan Gribben version of Chris Rock's comedy sketch 'Black People vs. Niggers'

"There's some shit going on with black people right now
It's like a civil war going on with black people
There's two sides, there's black people and there's slaves
and slaves have got to go."

Some people may describe Alan Gribben as a humourless, pompous, preening buffoon. I would not be inclined to disagree with those people.

Posting Political Stuff on Facebook

Perhaps I'm the only one who thinks this, but I always find it incredibly boorish when people post political status updates on Facebook. They always have a smug condescension about them, as the person (giddy with the mind projection fallacy), assumes that every one of their acquaintances can't wait to hear their latest thoughts on Palin, Obama and everything else that we're already frustratingly overexposed too. They're rarely saying anything actually original or insightful either, just boilerplate and talking points repeated as if they're hilarious bon mots.

The thing I wonder is whether the people stop and consider what fraction of the audience agrees with them (it's always lower than you think) and whether those who disagree are likely to appreciate the verbal intrusion (they're not). Facebook isn't twitter, where people are explicitly signing up to read your nonsense. People may friend you for many reasons, not all of which involve wanting to read your every thought. It's like if you happened to run into an acquaintance from work that you hadn't seen in a while. Would you launch into a tirade about abortion or gay marriage? Of course you wouldn't. And yet give people a keyboard, and they suddenly feel that no thought is too contentious to not be imposed on everyone you've ever met. This is a thoroughly bipartisan feeling of mine - I may agree with some of the conservative sentiments, but I feel just as put off by their airing in this forum, knowing that plenty of other people won't like them.

That's why I prefer the blog. If you want to read my political writings, you have to seek them out. I'm not press-ganging my friends against their will into being an audience for my screeds. The scheme is an opt-in one, not an opt-out one, and the audience thus selected for people who, by revealed preference, are happy to read my rantings, however inane and reactionary.

A pledge for science

There is one action that any airline can take that will ensure my loyalty for years. Not just mine, but I'm sure lots of other customers too. In fact, I pledge to buy airline tickets (for any price difference up to $100 in excess of an equivalent fare) exclusively from the first airline that allows electronic devices to be used throughout flight, including takeoff and landing.

The rule against them is the most ludicrous superstition ever. It's just staggering how the advanced technology that puts a plane in the sky can persist with the cargo cult lunacy that thinks that an ipod can cause a plane to crash.

Can anyone, honestly, give me a halfway plausible hypothesis as to how a non-transmitting device is supposed to interfere with a plane's navigation systems? The closest I've ever heard is 'something about electrical fields and magnets'. But that's absurd - it's not like it's an industrial strength magnet being waved near the cockpit, it's PSP being used 30m away for crying out loud. Even the arguments about transmitting devices like phones are weak to the point of being pathetic. With non-transmitting devices, they're not even trying to make a coherent case.

Proponents claim that there's anecdotal evidence that phones can interfere with navigation systems. You know what else has 'anecdotal evidence'? Astrology. Teleportation. Alien spaceships giving people anal probes. In fact, I'd wager the anecdotal evidence for the last one is several hundred times more voluminous than that in favour of electronic devices interfering with planes.

Honestly, if this is the standard to ban something, how can you establish any scientific proposition ever? You're only allowed to use things that nobody has ever told a story claiming that it happened? Anecdotally, people praying to God has fixed faulty planes. Should we mandate that too?

Consider the following examples that demonstrate the lunacy of the current rule:

-Electronic wristwatches use circuits too, but apparently these aren't able to crash the plane. Don't ask me why. They're too small, but apparently the tiny noise-cancelling device in my Bose headphones isn't. Skeptics might claim this has something to do with the impossibility of getting people to not wear watches or to remove the batteries from their watch. What would they know!

-Very few computers are shut down when people travel, they're mostly in sleep mode, a low power state in which the computer remains on. But mysteriously, this is okay too.

-TVs in the back of seats contain electronic circuits, and often remain on during takeoff. I guess they're sprinkled with magic non-interfering pixie dust.

-Pacemakers contain circuits too. Better turn that thing off, Beryl! It's for the good of everybody on the plane, you understand.

not to mention my personal favorite:

-The average plane has, what, 100 passengers? Maybe 200? Assume that 95% of them have phones. Now, what are the chances that among them, not a single one of those passengers managed to:

a) forget to turn off their phone

b) leave their iphone on, having not figured out that pushing the top button on the iphone doesn't actually turn it off

c) leave it on intentionally as an act of defiance

The chances, in short, are basically zero. Which leads us to the conclusion that virtually every single flight probably has at least one phone on during takeoff and landing, and miraculously they're not all crashing.

It's time to strike a blow for science. Take the pledge to buy from science-friendly airlines, and in the mean time, leave your ipod on as an act of defiance.

Hippy Parents Make Me Rage

What is it with lame new-age parents and their refusal to impose any discipline on their children?

I was stuck on a plane with this couple with three young kids. One of them, apparently 2 years old, kept unbuckling her seat belt as the plane was taking off. The dad, some shlumpy herb beta type, kept insisting that she be able to sit on his lap. The air hostess (who, truth be told, was a bit of a bitch) told him that she was over two, and had to be in her seat.

Takeoff went okay, but then we got a repeat performance at landing. This guy got in a big argument with the hostess demanding to speak to the captain (who, the hostess pointed out, was in the process of trying to land the plane). But amazingly, at no point did he actually make any serious attempt at trying to stop the bratty kid unbuckling her seat belt, other than cooing type stuff. Forget raising your voice, even just a simple stern talk discussing why it was really important that she stay seated would have been welcome. But no, no inconvenience was too small for his bundle of joy. It was just the responsibility of the airline to bend to his child's wishes.

The hostess pointed out that if she wasn't seated and buckled up, they wouldn't be able to land the plane. The guy turned around to the cabin, announcing that she was buckled in and looking for moral support.

The lady behind me (who had a child of about 10) said to him and the rest of the cabin, 'you don't want to know what I think.'

Amen, sister.

High Pitched Voices

One thing I find surprising in modern America is the number of women with high-pitched voices. Now, I may be imagining this, but to my ear the average Australian girl speaks at something closer to the alto rather than soprano end of the scale like here. And this puzzles me, because we're talking about white people drawn from fairly similar Anglo-Saxon and European genetic stock. I don't know of any obvious 'high-pitched' races, and certainly not any that also would explain (by virtue of differing demographic representations) the average female pitch in the two countries.

But here's where it gets weird - we normally think that voice pitch as something you're born with. It wouldn't be high on my list of culturally determined things, and certainly not something that people deliberately change.

And yet that's where the data seems to point me. Either consciously or unconsciously, some fraction of women are deliberately speaking in higher pitched voices. My guess is that part of the appeal is that of appearing more girly and youthful. Women's voices drop too when they hit puberty, but not by nearly as much as men. By talking like an 8 year old, it has the same appeal as getting a Brazilian wax, but visible for the whole world.

Consistent with this, having a high-pitched voice is a fairly strong negative signal on my 3 second judgments of personality. This is not because I find the actual voice intolerable, or because it's a massive moral or character failing. But it's about correlations - a desire to make yourself look artificially girly and innocent is likely to be correlated with you being superficial and annoying (conditional on the voice being artificially high, and not just naturally high).

The signals to respond to the most are those that are the most informative about personality in general, not necessarily those that are the biggest problems in themselves. Can you think of any other signal of superficiality that you can identify within half a second of a person talking, regardless of what they're talking about?

Me neither.