Almost Great Moments in Science

Let's take a moment to celebrate the uncommon genius of  Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov.

What did Professor Ivanov do, you well may ask?

He was the first man to attempt to create a human/ape hybrid using artificial insemination.

Wikipedia calls this proposed beast a 'humanzee'. While this is pretty good, I personally would prefer 'humangatan', but I'll take either.

So how does one attempt to create such a monstrosity, well may you ask?

On February 28, 1927, Ivanov inseminated two female chimpanzees with his own sperm. On June 25, his son inseminated a third chimpanzee with his sperm. 

This guy is really trying to give Giles Brindley a run for the money in the stakes of 'most outrageous science experiments conducted on oneself'.

The Ivanovs left Africa in July with thirteen chimps, including the three used in his experiments. They already knew before leaving that the first two chimpanzees had failed to become pregnant. The third died in France, and was also found not to have been pregnant.

Boo-urns.

So putting human sperm into female chimps wasn't doing the trick. Did he just pack up and call it quits then? Oh no he did not!

Upon his return to the Soviet Union in 1927, Ivanov began an effort to organize hybridization experiments at Sukhumi using ape sperm and human females.... In the spring of 1929 the Society set up a commission to plan Ivanov's experiments at Sukhumi. They decided that at least five volunteer women would be needed for the project.

Great news, comrade sisters! The Party has selected you to 'volunteer' to be impregnated by a chimp. For the glory of the Soviet Union!

Okay, those women would have won hands down the 'human self-experimentation award'. 

However, in June 1929, before any inseminations had taken place, Ivanov learned that the only postpubescent male ape remaining at Sukhumi (an orangutan) had died. A new set of chimps would not arrive at Sukhumi until the summer of 1930.

Given that you haven't heard of humanzees, you can probably guess that things didn't work out.

In the course of a general political shakeup in the Soviet scientific world, Gorbunov and a number of the scientists involved in the planning of the Sukhumi experiments lost their positions. In the spring of 1930, Ivanov came under political criticism at his veterinary institute. Finally, on December 13, 1930, Ivanov was arrested. He was sentenced to five years of exile to Alma Ata, where he worked for the Kazakh Veterinary-Zoologist Institute until his death from a stroke on 20 March 1932. 

Lame. You can always rely on the commies to spoil everybody's fun.

This whole thing is apparently not as wacky as you may think:

In 1977, researcher J. Michael Bedford discovered that human sperm could penetrate the protective outer membranes of a gibbon egg. Bedford's paper also stated that human spermatozoa would not even attach to the zona surface of non-hominoid primates (baboon, rhesus monkey, and squirrel monkey), concluding that although the specificity of human spermatozoa is not confined to man alone, it is probably restricted to the Hominoidea.

Okay, so humaboons and humonkeys are out, but humibbons might be a possibility. How is nobody investigating this?

Frankly, I think there should be way more research into creative mixed breeds of animal. Consider some of the awesomeness we already know is out there:

Ligers and Tigons

Grolar Bears (or Pizzly Bears, if you prefer):

I think to stimulate interest, these need to be referred to as 'mashup animals'. Sure, the purists at the zoo think this kind of thing is an abomination. Tell it to Charles Darwin, you ninnies! Do you think nature cares about your foibles? Grolar bears occur in the wild, for crying out loud.

The singular advantage of the humanzee, however, is the possibility of a hilarious spectacle whereby earnest people debate whether current law requires that the humanzee be allowed to vote. At which point universal suffrage will have jumped the shark even more than you already thought was possible.

On the Supreme Court and Gay Marriage

-First and foremost, read the damn decision. Otherwise you'll be one of those absolutely insufferable people who view every court decision as a 'Gay Marriage Yay!' or 'Gay Marriage Boo!' pantomime. These people have zero conception that there actually is a question of law going on, and that a badly decided case with a desirable policy outcome will create other problems down the road that the pantomime crowd never think about.

You can find a pdf of it here. I heartily recommend reading Scalia's dissent, even if you're broadly happy that gay marriages in one state will now be federally recognised. In fact, you should especially read Scalia's dissent if you're broadly happy with the policy aspects of the decision.

-As I mentioned to you a few months ago, Justice Scalia predicted way back in 2003 that the Supreme Court was going to legalise Gay Marriage, and that Lawrence v. Texas (which overturned the Texas anti-sodomy statue) was merely a prelude to this result, the Court's protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

Well, the Court this time decided not to settle the Elephant in the Room question of whether for a State to prohibit gay marriage violates the 14th Amendment equal protection clause  (which, if they did, would have decided the issue once and for all). Instead, it was held that for the Federal government to define marriage to exclude gay marriages in states which allowed them was a violation of the 5th amendment because it served no legitimate purpose and thus was a violation of basic due process. From the majority opinion:

DOMA instructs all federal officials, and indeed all persons with whom same-sex couples interact, including their own children, that their marriage is less worthy than the marriages of others. The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity. By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others, the federal statute is in violation of the Fifth Amendment. This opinion and its holding are confined to those lawful marriages.

In other words, we're not deciding the substantive issue of gay marriage, just one part of it. Roberts wrote separately just to emphasise this point:

But while I disagree with the result to which the majority’s analysis leads it in this case, I think it more important to point out that its analysis leads no further. The Court does not have before it, and the logic of its opinion does not decide, the distinct question whether the States, in the exercise of their “historic and essential authority to define the marital relation,” ante, at 18, may continue to utilize the traditional definition of marriage. The majority goes out of its way to make this explicit in the penultimate sentence of its opinion. 

In other words - listen up you lower court punks, don't think we've given you carte blanche to insist on gay marriage everywhere.

Scalia mocks the majority super hard for this feint of judicial modesty:

The penultimate sentence of the majority’s opinion is a naked declaration that “[t]his opinion and its holding are  confined” to those couples “joined in same-sex marriages made lawful by the State.” Ante, at 26, 25. I have heard such “bald, unreasoned disclaimer[s]” before. Lawrence, 539 U. S., at 604. When the Court declared a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy, we were assured that the case had nothing, nothing at all to do with “whether the government must give formal recognition to any relationship that homosexual persons seek to enter.” Id., at 578. 

I haven't forgotten Lawrence, you clowns.

Now we are told that DOMA is invalid because it  “demeans the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects,” ante, at 23—with an accompanying citation of Lawrence. It takes real cheek for today’s majority to assure us, as it is going out the door, that a constitutional requirement to give formal recognition to same-sex marriage is not at issue here—when what has preceded that assurance is a lecture on how superior the majority’s moral judgment in favor of same-sex marriage is to the Congress’s hateful moral judgment against it. I promise you this: The only thing that will “confine” the Court’s holding is its sense of what it can get away with. 

In other words - at least own up to what you're proposing, rather than maintaining this nonsense that this is all just about the solemn dignity of states to define marriage however they wish (a notion that will last about 5 minutes into the oral arguments for the next case).

I do not mean to suggest disagreement with THE CHIEF JUSTICE’s view, ante, p. 2–4 (dissenting opinion), that lower federal courts and state courts can distinguish today’s case when the issue before them is state denial of marital status to same-sex couples—or even that this Court could theoretically do so. Lord, an opinion with such scatter-shot rationales as this one (federalism noises among them) can be distinguished in many ways. And deserves to be. State and lower federal courts should take the Court at its word and distinguish away. 

Ha!

In my opinion, however, the view that this Court will take of state prohibition of same-sex marriage is indicated beyond mistaking by today’s opinion. 

If there's anyone in the country who disagrees with the last sentence, I'm yet to meet them.

-Laws are complicated things. I am quite certain that the vast majority of the people who are sure that the Defense of Marriage Act is a hateful piece of legislation designed only to injure gays have not tried to deal with the mess that is overlapping definitions of different terms when the laws of different jurisdictions come into conflict. Even the notion of a 'US Resident' is virtually impossible to get a clear answer on - there's tax residence, and immigration residence, and driving license requirements (which I've heard dozens of answers about) etc. So even if you didn't want to limit the federal definition to exclude gay marriage, there are plenty of other reasons why you might want a uniform definition. Scalia mentions some of them:

To choose just one of these defenders’ arguments, DOMA avoids difficult choice-of-law issues that will now arise absent a uniform federal definition of marriage. See, e.g., Baude, Beyond DOMA: Choice of State Law in Federal Statutes, 64 Stan. L. Rev. 1371 (2012). Imagine a pair of women who marry in Albany and then move to Alabama, which does not “recognize as valid any marriage of parties of the same sex.” Ala. Code §30–1–19(e) (2011). When the couple files their next federal tax return, may it be a joint one? Which State’s law controls, for federal-law purposes: their State of celebration (which recognizes the marriage) or their State of domicile (which does not)? (Does the answer depend on whether they were just visiting in Albany?) Are these questions to be answered as a matter of federal common law, or perhaps by borrowing a State’s choice-of-law rules? If so, which State’s? And what about States where the status of an out-of-state same-sex marriage is an unsettled question under local law? See Godfrey v. Spano, 13 N. Y. 3d 358, 920 N. E. 2d 328 (2009). DOMA avoided all of this uncertainty by specifying which marriages would be recognized for federal purposes. That is a classic purpose for a definitional provision.

If you are expecting the boosters of the recent decision to provide you with a clear answer to any of the above questions, I would advise you not to hold your breath.

-As for myself, I find myself broadly disliking the decision, but for conflicting reasons. As a matter of policy, I'm fine with gay marriage. If I were minded to vote (or registered to vote. Or allowed to vote), I'd vote to allow it. So to that extent, while it's not high on my list of priorities, I'm happy enough with the practical aspects of the outcome (subject to the previously mentioned practical concerns).

But I deeply hate judicial activism. It poisons the legal certainty that lets people organise their lives according to well-settled precedent. Democracy may have plenty of flaws, but the makeup of the current Supreme Court seems to have managed to reproduce most of the maladies and perversions, just on a micro scale. We've got 4 (mostly) conservative justices, not all of whom can be relied on to produce politically conservative outcomes, 4 consistently liberal justices who can unfailingly be relied on to produce politically liberal outcomes, and Justice Kennedy playing the role of the entire swing voting electorate -  inscrutable, unpredictable, and of principles that are, shall we say, difficult to forecast. The voters in this case are definitely smarter, but do you think the policies produced are better?

Judicial activism - combining all the disfunction of democracy, but without the benefit of the law of large numbers and De Moivre's theorem!

In other words, judicial activism is just one more manifestation of the many ways that this republic has decayed from the original founders' vision. I second the Moldbug critiques of such a vision, but it's certainly a zillion times better than the monstrosity we're currently saddled with.

At the risk of this post being an 'All-Scalia-All-The-Time' one, I cannot help but excerpt his closing remarks

We might have covered ourselves with honor today, by promising all sides of this debate that it was theirs to settle and that we would respect their resolution. We might have let the People decide. But that the majority will not do. Some will rejoice in today’s decision, and some will despair at it; that is the nature of a controversy that matters so much to so many. But the Court has cheated both sides, robbing the winners of an honest victory, and the losers of the peace that  comes from a fair defeat. We owed both of them better. I dissent.

As do I.

The dangers of reading the fake government org chart instead of the real government org chart

The problem with getting distracted and waiting several days to write about a story is that by the time you get around to it, the narrative you had in mind may have already been overtaken by events.

Athenios put me on to this story last week about how the conservative-led Greek government decided to abolish the national broadcaster. On fully four hours notice. Which is absolutely hilarious. Tired of a bunch of subsidised lefty whingers moaning about 'austerity'? Tired of paying money hand over fist for the privilege of such preening stupidity in the middle of the worst economic downturn your country has seen since the great depression? Think it's ludicrous to continue paying these nincompoops while pensions have been cut 40%?

Well, I would agree with you! Conservatives are often accused of having a ' go along to get along' tolerance of the ever expanding role of the state. When someone attempts a genuine rollback of some small part of the repulsive leviathan that is modern bureaucratic government, I cannot help but applaud. In addition, the move of shutting them down overnight, without any notice in advance, is surely a better plan than fighting for incremental cuts and waging month after month of the public relations equivalent of the battle of Dien Bien Phu. Machiavelli told you long ago that if pain is needed, better to bring it all at once:

Hence we may learn the lesson that on seizing a state, the usurper should make haste to inflict what injuries he must, at a stroke, that he may not have to renew them daily, but be enabled by their discontinuance to reassure men’s minds, and afterwards win them over by benefits. Whosoever, either through timidity or from following bad counsels, adopts a contrary course, must keep the sword always drawn, and can put no trust in his subjects, who suffering from continued and constantly renewed severities, will never yield him their confidence. Injuries, therefore, should be inflicted all at once, that their ill savour being less lasting may the less offend; whereas, benefits should be conferred little by little, that so they may be more fully relished.

If you strike at a king, strike to kill. So far so good, as of last Wednesday.

Unfortunately, kings do not always die so easily. How do you think they became King in the first place? I'm guessing that you, like me, probably imagined that you just turn off the damn power at the TV station, and that's that. It turns out that taking a public broadcaster off the air is not as straightforward as you might imagine. The first thing that happened is that the public broadcasters of the other European nations decided to continue broadcasting the now illegal Greek public TV from their own satellites. And I don't mean that François Hollande and Angela Merkel decided this. I mean that a bunch of EU public broadcasting bigwigs unilaterally decided to use taxpayer funded assets to intervene in the domestic disputes of a sovereign (ha!) nation. Strange, they don't talk about that kind of thing in civics class, do they?

Next, all the Greek journalists went on strike. As you do in Europe. Given they're not really inclined to work even at the best of times, it's not like they needed much encouragement. So now most Greeks aren't getting any perspective on the news except from ... you guessed it... Greek state TV, who continue to broadcast on the Internet, and now have dropped all pretense of neutrality and gone the full retard in terms of opposing the government. Where media leads, public opinion follows.

And in the most recent move, the courts come in to order the broadcaster be put back on the air. Thought you could shut down your own department eh? Wrong!

The net effect of this is that it's looking like this saga which started so quixotically may end up being the downfall of the conservative government. The main discussion now is about whether the government may be able to stave off the full scale collapse of their coalition if the prime minister resigns.

To begin with bluster and later take fright at the enemy's numbers, as the great Sun Tzu observed, shows a supreme lack of intelligence. The Government seemed to be of the naive opinion that the bureaucracy answers to the will of the elected representatives, and if their performance was sufficiently unsatisfactory, they could and should be fired, just like in any other company.

Joseph McCarthy thought the same thing. They were both wrong.

Postscript:

In a grimly hilarious sidenote, MSCI, the company who compile stockmarket indices for various countries, took the heretofore unprecedented step of downgrading the Greek market from 'developed' to 'emerging'. As MSCI noted:

Further,the MSCI Greece Index has not met the Developed Market criterion for size for the last two years. If it were not for an exception to the index maintenance methodology that requires the index to have at least two constituents, only one security would currently qualify for inclusion in the MSCI Greece Index.

Ooh, that's gotta burn.

The announcement is doubly comical for the absurd use of the euphemism 'emerging' in this context. As Athenios quipped, 'Emerging? More like submerging!'

The one ambivalently bright side of the NSA scandal(s)

The great Robert Fogel, sadly recently departed, noted in his discussion about slavery that the system was, for the most part, very efficient. One point he liked to emphasise is that people are so used to the notion of efficiency being applied to good ends that they don't consider the alternative possibility - efficiency as applied to evil in fact produces monstrous outcomes.

A similar tension exists in the way people understand the spy services. Whenever you see Hollywood depictions of the CIA (or just shadowy agents of some secret department, standing in for the CIA), 90-odd percent of the time they are displayed as having a sinister level of competence in their ability to pull off evil actions. They're everywhere, they see everything, and they can hunt you down. Of course, Jason Bourne wins in the end, but you're not left in any doubt that most of the time, the government gets its way.

This view eventually permeates a large amount of social thinking on the matter. Consider the 9/11 truthers - according to their claims, the government managed to organise a massive conspiracy to plant all sorts of explosives inside two skyscrapers, demolish them with people inside, make it look like planes were crashing into them on live television, and blame the Muslims. All while keeping this totally under wraps, except for the keen eyes of the producers of 'Loose Change'.

You could spend hours debating with these clowns about whether fire can actually melt steel, but it seems you might get much further by simply noting, 'Have you been to the DMV recently? What impression did that give you about the competence of the average government employee?'

This is the default Shylock rule - when you're thinking about the government, assume it will be run by folks at the DMV. Can you trust the government to clean up after Katrina? Think the DMV. Is it likely that the next round of financial regulation will prevent the next housing crisis? Think the DMV. Can you create police SWAT teams all over the country in rinky dink places and not have them consistently raiding the wrong houses while looking for marijuana? Think the DMV.

But... what about the CIA? Surely, if competence exists anywhere, it must exist there, right? When it really counts, when the chips are down, these guys are the pros, and they wouldn't screw it up?

Except, you know, with the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

The point of the DMV rule is not that it's always right. It's just that it tends to be a fairly good predictor of what's actually going to happen.

I wrote a while ago about the fact that before this latest news broke, you tended to read a lot of stories about Chinese hackers tooling on the US - hacking into Google, diverting all internet traffic to China, that kind of thing. You'd very rarely hear about any US operations - the only exceptions were cases like Stuxnet which accidentally got released into the wild. In other words, you'd hear about the good side of the program (the US is releasing a computer virus to screw up Iranian centrifuges for enriching uranium) at the same time as the bad (this wasn't meant to be in the papers, meaning the virus got found out).

When I didn't read anything about US Cyber operations, I applied the DMV principle and assumed that these clowns just didn't know what they were doing. But the alternative was always that they were so good at what they were doing that you never heard about it. Since, of course, you weren't meant to.

As it turns out, the NSA has been spying on Americans like J Edgar Hoover on a dirt-digging mission to cover up for his cross-dressing proclivities.

Say what you will about the ethics of these programs (and I tend to be considerably wary of them) - they don't seem incompetent. They seem scarily competent. They seem like The Bourne Identity, when in reality I was expecting a cross between Fawlty Towers and Yes Minister (except with everyone being like the Minister).

The bad news is that this the NSA seems to play extraordinarily fast and loose with the 4th amendment, and has enormous power to spy on American citizens in a way that would make the Founding Fathers spin in their graves faster than a virus-ridden Iranian centrifuge.

The good news is that for the fraction of the things the NSA does which are likely beneficial to the country (and even the most jaded skeptic would probably admit that this fraction is non-zero), they can hopefully apply the same level of competence.

And if you can actually get the privacy destroying parts of the NSA's work removed (which, sadly, you probably can't), this whole imbroglio might actually be good news.

In other words, the government may be negative NPV, but it's not pure evil. So jacking up competence will at least have some effects on the revenues side of the ledger.

Miscellaneous Irreverant Joy

And some fact to round it out:

Social trends I do not understand

Bumper stickers that announce 'My Child is an Honor Student at [XYZ] Elementary School'.

To me, this just seems to be the height of poor manners on so many levels.

Every time I see these stickers, I wonder 'Who exactly is this for?' The random guy behind you in traffic? Why the hell would he possibly care? At least with political bumper stickers, there's the justification of the theory, however misguided, that you might change someone's vote by implicit messaging (although to even state that idea out loud is to realise how ludicrous it is.) But here, it is impossible for the owner of the sticker to not realise that the world couldn't possibly care less.

And what message exactly are you trying to impart to John Q. Citizen, even supposing they do listen? There's two obvious implications of the sticker:

1. I am very proud of my child, whom I love dearly.

2. My child is very intelligent (and yours is not).

My responses to these would be:

1. No $#!7. That's so unusual for parents! Why not just get a sticker that says 'I love my children'? What's that, you say? Because it would sound ridiculous and obvious, like boasting that you always flush the toilet?

2. You're bragging about your child's grades? Do you realise how pathetic that sounds?

The second one, which I suspect is the point of the stickers, just seems so loathesomely gauche and shameless that it's hard to know where to begin. Suppose you're the type of person who loves to mention how much money they make, or how many women they've slept with, or what type of car they drive. You reach middle age, and every interesting thing you've done is getting further and further in the past. You need to justify your insecurities to a world that is passing you by. But sadly, it is getting harder and harder to find opportunities to just insert monologues about your accomplishments into conversation like a misguided V2 rocket aimed roughly at London. People are sick of the same stories about your long-ago glory days. How might you make up for the failed dreams of your youth?

Easy! Just get into vanglorious sloganeering about your child's accomplishments! Better yet, launder it all through the a cheap, see-through veneer of parental love and adulation. Nobody will ever spot the hidden subtext.

Putting a child's A+ test on the refrigerator is a sign of pride and love that the child will see.

Putting a crude boast about the same on your car is tacky and classless.

Head to Head

1. Pride or Pride?

2. Superman or Superman, as well as (to loosen the definitions a bit) Superman or Superman?

3. Somebody that I used to know, or Somebody that I used to know? (and for a rematch between the same artists, Easy way out or Easy Way Out?)

And for the bonus round, Ben Folds did an entire multi-round contest against himself on the 'Way to Normal' : The b**** went nuts or The b**** went nuts,  Free coffee or Free coffee, and a bunch of others.

The Hammer and I used to play this game a lot. My answers in the comments

The most logical software purchasers, on the other hand....

‘The Best-run businesses run SAP’

Let’s heroically assume that this statement is true.

It’s a long way from this statement to the statement they’re implying, which is that ‘The best-run businesses are well-run because they run SAP’.

It is an even larger stretch from there to the statement they actually want you to believe, namely ‘If you run SAP then you too will become one of the best-run businesses’.

It is depressing, but highly probable, that people too stupid to understand these distinctions are in charge of deciding enterprise software choices for major corporations. At a minimum, the marketing folks at SAP seem to believe that the people in charge of deciding whether to buy their products are actually fools.

Holger Danske

The statue of Holger Danske sits in Kronborg castle in Helsingør, Denmark. According to the legend, as told by the guide at Helsingør, Holger was a knight who was the son of the Danish King. He was lent to Emperor Charlemagne as a surety by the Danish King to guarantee the payment of a debt after the King unsuccessfully fought against Charlemagne in battle. The Dane didn't pay up, and after a few years Charlemagne was going to kill Holger. Right before the execution, a messenger came in saying that the border lands had been invaded, and the emperor left for the battle, taking Holger with him. While on the field, Holger came across a knight riding scared away from battle. Holger took his armor, and went into battle, fighting bravely for Charlemagne. At the end of the battle, Charlemagne went to congratulate one of his knights, and when he lifted his visor, he was surprised to see it was Holger. He decided to set him free. Holger began the long walk back to Denmark. When he finally arrived, he sat in a chair in the basement of the castle, waiting for the castle members to come back. He stayed asleep, and his beard grew so long it touched the floor. The legend concludes by saying that Holger dreams and sees all that goes on in Denmark, and will rise again to defend Denmark in its time of need against foreign invaders.

You can learn a lot about a culture from its mythology. The Danes were a fearsome, militarily powerful people. If they turned up on your doorstep in 1000AD, you would have done well to follow the advice of AC/DC to 'lock up your daughters, lock up your wife, lock up your back door and run for your life'. It would be trite, but nonetheless true, to note that the possibility of modern-day Danes (or indeed any of the Scandinavian descendants of the Vikings) inspiring the same response is ludicrously, preposterously unthinkable. And this holds true no matter how large a military force they were commanding - the shift is first and foremost in mindset.

Holger Danske still inspires Danish people though. The great Hans Christian Andersen wrote a short story about it. The Danish resistance group in World War 2 named themselves after him. But it does so because of the history. The story on its own strikes a strange chord that clashes with modern sensibilities. Even if this were the age of legends, I cannot imagine a story like Holger Danske resonating enough today to get started and spread through the populace, were it not already a famous story.

The notion of military heroism is largely an anachronism in the West. The ideal modern image is the soldier as a brave and tragic victim. They are noble when killed or injured. They are suffering when separated from their loved ones, and selfless in their sacrifices. Even the right buys into this narrative to some extent. We must 'support our troops'. You hear this more than that we must 'celebrate our troops'. The stories about troops that resonate are those of pathos. We want to hear about the man who died bravely on the battlefield to save his companions, not the guy who bravely kicked tons of enemy ass and lived unscathed to tell the tale.There's no shortage of stories of incredible bravery in Iraq or Afghanistan. But for some reason, you mostly hear about them in the context of soldiers who have died. The heroism is mainly there to add poignancy.

Holger Danske is old fashioned because it envisages a natural warrior aristocracy. In an age of radical egalitarianism, we can have 'heroes', but not a 'hero'. Because most people will never be truly heroic in their whole lives, the whole concept must be sufficiently diluted to cover nearly everybody. Today, you are a 'hero' for volunteering in a soup kitchen, or doing an AIDS fun run. What word, then, would you use to describe Simo Häyhä? Or Ben Grierson? Or, indeed, Holger Danske? He's not administering to the needy, he's not interested in being a glorious victim in a fatal last stand. He's interested only in kicking enemy ass on your behalf to keep the land safe for those of his countrymen without his courage, strength or skill. And that is what modern man truly cannot abide - the implication that nature has furnished us with natural betters, and we should celebrate and admire them, and be grateful when they lead our country to great achievements. They are not servants of the public. They are kings, ruling over us by right of their strength of character and proud lineage.

We live indeed in a Kingless age.

Morgan Stanley is not your friend

Not if you are their client. Not if they're underwriting an IPO you're purchasing. And certainly not if they're just trading on the other side of the market against you.

What, did you expect something else? Is this surprising to you?

Then I have bad news for you. You have no business picking your own shares to day trade in equity markets.

The Greek sent me this interesting Atlantic article about the debacle surrounding the Facebook IPO.

It's rather long, and I have mixed feelings about it, so let me give you the quick version.

Facebook had a big IPO coming up. As the date neared, they realised that revenue projections were going to be lower than expected, because more people were switching to (low ad revenue) mobile services than they'd forecast. They released a form with the SEC that buried this news while meeting technical disclosure requirements. Institutional investors figured this out from their brokers and banks. Joe public did not.

There's an interesting story here, but I found it hard to get through, because it started in the following manner:

Uma Swaminathan tuned the television set in the living room of her ranch style home in the suburbs of East Brunswick, N.J. to CNBC. It was 9:00 a.m. on May 18, 2012, a day the retired schoolteacher thought might make her rich. She logged onto her Vanguard brokerage account on her computer and placed an order for 5,000 shares of Facebook at $42 a share.

Like a bad movie, I already knew how the rest of this was going to play out from the first paragraph. The author clearly has sympathy with the lady in question, and invites the reader to as well.

With short hair, brown skin, and few wrinkles, Swaminathan looks much younger than her 68 years. She spent most of adult life as a suburban mom, making tofu for her daughter's friends at theater rehearsals, taking her three sons to soccer practice and Boy Scouts, and volunteering in the local community. She served a term as president of the Indian American Association of New Jersey.

My immediate responses are threefold:

1. These sound like admirable things to do.

2. A similarly glowing list could be compiled about just about anybody.

3. If this is story about financial markets, what about the above listed background made her think she was an ideal candidate to start trading actively?

Her interest in the stock market didn't develop until her husband died about 13 years ago. Her four children had already moved out to attend college or to pursue their careers. Swaminathan was left with her late husband's 401(k) retirement account, when she started dabbling in the market, investing in stable companies like Microsoft. Not long after, she began to follow the news coverage of initial public offerings (IPOs) -- when private companies enter the public market -- and came to know of the phenomenon known as the first day "pop." On the day that companies would debut on the stock market, the price would tend to shoot up before stabilizing. A year earlier, she watched as social networking site LinkedIn's stock price closed up 109 percent on its opening day.

Okay, we're going to hear a lot of sympathetic stuff later in the article. But let's just unpack some of these statements. Roll the tape again:

[She] came to know of the phenomenon known as the first day "pop." On the day that companies would debut on the stock market, the price would tend to shoot up before stabilizing.

So IPOs historically go up, on average (we'll come back to that phase in a second) on their first day. So what? Do you think that you're somehow owed a large first day return? For what? What did you do to earn them?

And in a question that might be viewed as immensely patronising, except for everything revealed by her subsequent actions: do you think that positive average returns are the same as uniformly positive returns?

Financial markets combine two distinct roles. There is a positive sum problem of real resource allocation - prices send signals about which companies should be able to expand their operations, and what the economy should produce more of. But there is also a zero sum problem of trading - if I buy and the share goes up, I make money relative to the alternative case if I hadn't bought. But the guy I bought it off loses money relative to if he hadn't sold.

So this woman might have made money. But who would have lost? Whose story is not being told here?

Most of the time, the company who sold it to her. The standard answer in the finance literature is that IPO underpricing is about companies getting ripped off by their unscrupulous advisors. So finally, the academics get their way, and Facebook is definitively not ripped off with its IPO price. So instead the story gets written about the woman who bought the Facebook shares and lost money. But that's inevitable - if someone makes money, someone else loses.

[Diversion: Academics have written hundreds of papers on the reason IPOs are "underpriced" because of the first day pop. But really, do you think CEOs look at stories about the 'biggest IPO flop ever' and think to themselves, 'Wow, that's what I want! That Zuckerberg guy managed to get absolute top dollar for his worthless shares!'. And if they don't, can you really blame them?]

But it's more than that - the woman wasn't buying shares in the IPO from Facebook, but in the open market. She was buying them off some other investor. Maybe she was buying them from Goldman. Maybe she was buying them from some other small investor who doesn't get an Atlantic story written about them. Who knows.

The point is, suppose she'd made money. Someone else sold too low immediately on the open. Would you feel equally sorry for them? Maybe if they'd gotten a glowing article written about how they volunteer at their local soup kitchen or whatever, but ordinarily, no, you wouldn't.

As the grievance studies professors are fond of saying - some narratives are privileged, and others are not.

Let's jump back to a statement at the beginning.

[O]n May 18, 2012, a day the retired schoolteacher thought might make her rich.

You thought you'd get rich trading IPO stocks as a retired schoolteacher.

The Greeks have a word for the feeling I experience reading those words, and it is catharsis.

She'd never placed such a big bet on just one stock, but she felt a personal connection to Facebook. She had been using the site to connect with family and friends since 2009, and almost everyone she knew had an account.

...

Facebook shares hit the market at an opening price of $38. Minutes later, Swaminathan's online order was executed, and the retired schoolteacher had just spent approximately half her life savings.

You put half your God damn life savings into a single stock? And an IPO stock at that? Are you out of your mind?

First of all, this shows that you have absolutely no idea about even the very basics of finance. Idiosyncratic risk? Diversification? Anyone? Anyone at all?

Second, it shows that you don't even understand the strategy you're implementing. IPO underpricing is a statement about average returns to a strategy of buying a ton of IPO stocks. It is not  a strategy for putting all your money into a single stock. If you are counting cards in blackjack, you want to place lots of bets over and over because the odds are in your favour. You do not want to put all your money on one hand. If you don't understand this, again, you don't understand the very basics of finance. 

I want you to remember this, reader. Because there's an entire article about how this is all JP Morgan's fault, and Vanguard's fault, and NASDAQ's fault, and FINRA's fault.

Madam, I submit to you the following - your belief that you would make tons of money by putting half your life savings into Facebook stock was not something you learned from JP Morgan, or Vanguard, or NASDAQ, or FINRA. It was not something you got from financial academia, or textbooks, or even moderately sophisticated blogs. I don't know where you got it. I suspect from naive extrapolation.

Don't get me wrong. There is another side to the story, one about investment banks giving selective advice to their favoured clients and the game being rigged against small investors. This is all true. But you don't need me to tell you that story - the whole article is about that. We can argue about what, if anything, should be done to fix this problem.

But to my mind, this is just a smokescreen. Why?

Because if you're putting half your life savings into a totally fair and not rigged IPO stock, there's a large chance that the story would still have the same ending. That's what happens when you take a huge bet on a single volatile asset. If I had to hazard a rough guess without looking at the actual data, I'd say it's a bit less than a 50% chance for a one-off bet, since IPO stocks do rise on average on the first day. But if you're doing this strategy multiple times, it starts becoming way more likely.

Financial markets are like a circular saw. You can use them to fashion a beautiful oak table if you know what you're doing.

You can use them to chop your own leg off if you don't.

You may think this is all rather harsh. Some poor woman still lost a ton of her life savings. Don't I feel sympathy for her?

Of course I do. It's a tragic story. She clearly had no idea what she was doing, and got fleeced by Wall Street.

As the great Theodore Dalrmpyle put it, people can both be figures of sympathy and also acknowledged as being significant architects of their own misfortune.

One can, in other words, be a victim, but also partly responsible. The two are not at all contradictory.

And this is worth mentioning, because this is not really a human interest story. It is, after all, a policy story. The author wants you to believe that this unfortunate woman's losses are primarily the fault of Wall Street Greed and Crony Capitalism.™ More taxes on crooked banks! More regulation!

The real problem here is the one that the author doesn't want to talk about - there are plenty of individuals investing in financial markets who have not the vaguest clue what they are doing, and a number of them are going to lose a lot of their life savings.

One way to deal with this is to load up on paternalism - only let sophisticated people with demonstrated knowledge trade. This might solve the problem. Then again, it might not. It would also come with a number of undesirable side effects.

The other way to deal with this is reflect on the sad and imperfect universe we live in, and the wisdom that the Gods of the Copybook Headings would have told us, much more in sorrow than in scorn:

"A fool and his money are soon parted."

The sadness of things coming to an end

A breakup song that I would wager was not inspired by an actual breakup:

‘Go on now, go! Walk out the door!
Just turn around now, you’re not welcome anymore.
Weren’t you the one who tried to break me with desire,
Did you think I’d crumble? Did you think I’d lay down and die?’

A breakup song that would wager was:

‘The single saddest thing I ever heard you say,
Was on the day I told you I had to go away,
You said ‘Darling baby please, if you really mean to leave,
Can’t I just hold you a little while longer?’

It's not even my breakup, and it twists my heart to hear it.

Among the best things to recommend about a lifelong marriage is that one never needs to go through another breakup, at least until death do you part.

That must be an immensely relieving feeling.

Miscellaneous Joy

-Apparently someone took the Simpsons marketing scheme as a literal suggestion.

-So various IRS employees were apparently hassling conservative groups about their tax-exempt status. As part of the 'nothing to see here, move along' explanation, we got this classic from the IRS spokesweasel:

Lois G. Lerner, the IRS official who oversees tax-exempt groups, said the “absolutely inappropriate” actions by “front-line people” were not driven by partisan motives.

You don't say? Care to speculate what they were driven by then? Anything at all?

If a diplomat is a man sent abroad to lie for his country, a government PR spokesman is a man sent to the press meeting to lie for his federal funding.

Fosetti nails the real story here.

-Comedy gold from Reddit:

Hate Generalisations? You Probably Just Hate Statistics

One of the most oft-repeated nonsense claims by a certain type of low-wattage intellectual lefty is that one 'shouldn't generalise'. (For reasons that are worthy of a separate post', this seems to me to be reasonably correlated with people who also proudly announce that they 'don't judge').

Apparently, one of the Worst Things In The World you can do is to notice that information about the generality of a distribution may useful in predicting where a specific point in the distribution will lie.

For those people that don't like to 'generalise', I wonder what, if any, statistical measures they actually find interesting or legitimate.

What is an average, if not a statement that lets one generalise from a large number of data points to a concise summary property about all of the points combined? Or a standard deviation? Or a median?

The anti-generalisers tend to apply their argument ('assertion' is probably a better description) in two related ways, varying slightly in stupidity:

a) One should not summarise a range of data points into a general trend (e.g. 'On average, [Group X] commits murders at a higher rate than [Group Y]').

b) One should not use a general trend to form probabilistic inferences about a particular data point (e.g. 'Knowing statement a), if I also know that person A is in Group X, and person B is in Group Y, I should infer that person A has a higher probability of committing a murder than person B').

Version a) says you shouldn't notice trends in the world. Version b) says you shouldn't form inferences based on the trends you observe.

Both are bad in our hypothetical interlocutor's worldview, but I think version b) is what particularly drives them batty.

But unless you just hate Bayesian updating, the two statements flow from each other. b) is the logical consequence of a).

Now, this isn't a defence of every statement about the world that people make which cites claims a) and b). To a Bayesian, you have to update correctly.

You can have priors that are too wide, or too narrow.

You can make absurd mistakes that P(R|S) = P(S|R).

You can update too fast or too slowly based on new information.

And none of this has even begun to specify how you should treat the people you meet in life in response to such information.

None of my earlier statements are a defence of any of this. The first three are all incorrect applications of statistics. The last one is a question about manners, fairness, and how we should act towards our fellow man.

But there's nothing wrong with the statistical updating.

If your problem is with 'generalising', your problem is just some combination of 'the world we live in' and 'rationality'.

Suppose the example statements in a) and b) made you slightly uncomfortable. Let me ask you the following:

What groups X and Y did you have in mind when I spoke about the hypothetical murder trends example? Notice I didn't specify anything.

One possibility that you may be thinking I had in mind was that X = 'Blacks' and Y = 'Whites'. People don't tend to like talking about that one.

In actual fact, what I had in mind was X = 'Men' and Y = 'Women'. This one is not only uncontroversial, but it almost goes without saying.

As it turns out, both are true in the data.

Do inferences based on these two both make you equally uncomfortable? Somehow I doubt it.

And if they don't, you should be honest enough to admit that your problem is not actually with statistical updating, or 'generalisations'. It's just trying to launder some sociological or political concern through the action of browbeating the correct application of statistics.

So stop patronisingly sneering that something is a generalisation, and using that as an implied criticism of an argument or moral position. Otherwise zombie Pierre-Simon Laplace is going to come and beat yo' @$$ with a slide rule.

The Ladder of Saint Augustine

By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Saint Augustine! well hast thou said,
That of our vices we can frame
A ladder, if we will but tread
Beneath our feet each deed of shame!

All common things, each day's events,
That with the hour begin and end,
Our pleasures and our discontents,
Are rounds by which we may ascend.

The low desire, the base design,
That makes another's virtues less;
The revel of the ruddy wine,
And all occasions of excess;

The longing for ignoble things;
The strife for triumph more than truth;
The hardening of the heart, that brings
Irreverence for the dreams of youth;

All thoughts of ill; all evil deeds,
That have their root in thoughts of ill;
Whatever hinders or impedes
The action of the nobler will;--

All these must first be trampled down
Beneath our feet, if we would gain
In the bright fields of fair renown
The right of eminent domain.

We have not wings, we cannot soar;
But we have feet to scale and climb
By slow degrees, by more and more,
The cloudy summits of our time.

The mighty pyramids of stone
That wedge-like cleave the desert airs,
When nearer seen, and better known,
Are but gigantic flights of stairs.

The distant mountains, that uprear
Their solid bastions to the skies,
Are crossed by pathways, that appear
As we to higher levels rise.

The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.

Standing on what too long we bore
With shoulders bent and downcast eyes,
We may discern--unseen before--
A path to higher destinies.

Nor deem the irrevocable Past,
As wholly wasted, wholly vain,
If, rising on its wrecks, at last
To something nobler we attain.

What could possibly be worse than having Kim Jong-un as your next-door neighbour?

Conceivably, not having him.

Think about it. At the moment, North Korea is constantly making belligerent threats and acting like it's going to go crazy and attack South Korea, Japan and/or the US at any minute.

The smart money says this is just bluster. Their main business is shaking down rich countries for money by threatening them with "annihilation". Of course, Brecher pointed out how absurd this prospect is:

It’s grotesque that the US is afraid of North Korea’s handful of tiny nuclear weapons. To see how weird that is, go back to the Nukemap site and see the effect of North Korea’s tested nuclear weapons on Beijing (so you can compare this radius with the huge American and Soviet weapons). Set the app for North Korea’s 10kt nuke, tested this year. You’ll see that the kill radius is limited to the core of downtown Beijing. Then, when you have some sense of how small the death-circle for the NK bombs really is, try them on an American city.

I used L.A., because it’s the nearest big city, and was amazed what a tiny hole the North Korean bomb would make in the giant ant’s nest of greater Los Angeles. It basically carves out a rough square where I-5, 10, 1o1, and 110 slice through downtown.

The same is not necessarily true for South Korea. The North Korean artillery, not to mention its numerous hidden tunnels, could likely impose serious damage on Seoul should the North be feeling so inclined. 

America's response has been, effectively:

Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.

We will therefore pay you cash to go away.

In other words, they don't really believe it's in North Korea's actual interests to start a war. They just need to bluster to keep the coin coming in. South Korea puts up with the ritual humiliations, because it's easier than calling their bluff and risking a war that nobody wants.

So from this perspective, what's going on is just another round of the charade. It's annoying and embarrassing to the South, and every now and again they lose some soldiers or sailors to a random attack, but it's probably not going to get to the level of real threats.

On the other hand, what exactly would happen if the west got its way, and Kim Jong-un announced that he was going to implement a peaceful transition to democracy and unification with the South?

Well, the good news is that it would take a lot of the military tension from that part of the world, which would be a huge relief to South Korea. But then what?

Then, they'd have to attempt the gargantuan task of trying to integrate 24 million starving peasants into their society.

For comparison, think about the effort it took to integrate East Germany into West Germany. And East Germany was perhaps the most industrially developed of the Soviet bloc countries. Still, East Germany has been a veritable sinkhole of money and effort for the West. Even now it's still not as developed.

According to the most recent CIA numbers (the only ones that list an estimate for North Korea), the North Korean GDP per capita is around $1800 in PPP terms, with a population of 24.4 million. South Korea, by contrast, has a GDP per capita of $31,200 in the same dataset, and a population of around 49.7 million.

So in the short run, if the South wanted to make each North Korean as luxuriously rich as the average Cuban ($9900 per year), it would cost the average South Korean $3977 per year.

Given that the current South Korean government spending is 30% of GDP, or $9360, this would mean that South Korean government spending would have to go up by over 42%. Per year. Possibly forever.

By contrast, South Korea's defense budget is only 2.7% of GDP, or $824 per person. Even if you could eliminate your army altogether as a result of reunification, it wouldn't even come close to paying for itself.

If the South were to fully equalise the wealth per person, the GDP per capita ($21,519) of the combined country would be between that of Aruba and that of Estonia.

To make matters worse, North Korean civilians have been brainwashed from a very young age to think that South Korea and America are the devil. I'm guessing this is going to cause some teething problems. Living under such a psychotic state must be incredibly scarring. I wonder whether you don't just 'end up like a dog that's been beat too much', as Mr Springsteen eloquently put it. If you think that this isn't going to create all kinds of untold social problems, then you're much more optimistic about human nature than I am.

As a starting point, given these people would have the right to vote, it would be a scary and wacky experiment to see what happens when you add an extra 50% to the electorate made up of people who have been starving to death for the past few decades and may or may not believe that the United States is the reason for this.

It can't be fun living next door to a country with a leadership as psychopathic as the Kims. But it's not clear that the likely changes will be much better in the near future either.

True Story

Ha!

(via SMBC)

Wild Guesses About the Boston Bombings

I was going to write a post discussing my hunches about who it was that pulled off the Boston bombing. I was, but then Gary Brecher beat me to it, with a much better piece. NSFW Corp is now behind a paywall (which you should subscribe to, if only for the War Nerd), but if you click this link in the next 48 hours, you'll get to see the column. If you just skip over there and only read his column, I wouldn't blame you.

Update: Link fixed

He focuses on a few points, one or two of which I'd thought of myself.

Brecher discusses the two more likely possible culprits, namely that it was some Arab/Subcontinent/Muslim terrorist group, or that it was some domestic Timothy McVeigh type.

He comes down on the side of the former, as do I. If there's one guy who's early stage prediction I'd want to have on my side on this one, it's the War Nerd. He's got a pretty good track record on these predictions. We'll see what turns out.

Firstly, I'd also thought that the two bomb setup, with one after the other, suggests these guys knew what they were doing. It seemed like the classic case of attracting people in with the first blast, to help with survivors, then targeting them with the second blast.

This suggests the work of a pro, which doesn't tell you much, but also implies something else that Brecher doesn't discuss - that the terrorists likely viewed the first responders to blast #1 as not only legitimate but also desirable targets for death.

That takes a certain cold-heartedness. Right-winger types may have enormous and/or irrational hatred of certain groups, like government employees. But they don't traditionally hate volunteer rescuers in tragedy situations. Anyone who wants to target those folks has a true disgust at the entire society. There may be Timothy McVeigh types who do fit into that category, but for some reason it just doesn't gel with my picture of their psychology. For instance, even McVeigh himself expressed a certain amount of "regret" (though that word may be too strong given his descriptions) about the fact that the building he bombed had a daycare centre in it, and thus a number of children were killed:

McVeigh noted that he had no knowledge that the federal offices also ran a day care center on the second floor of the building, and noted that he might have chosen a different target if he had known about the day care center. According to Michel and Herbeck, McVeigh claimed not to have known there was a day care center in the Murrah Building and said that if he had known it, in his own words:

"It might have given me pause to switch targets. That's a large amount of collateral damage."

True, children in daycare aren't exactly the same as volunteer rescuers, and true, calling them 'collateral damage' is extraordinarily cold and callous, so the level of sympathy is not exactly overwhelming. Still, even to McVeigh, this was a target to be avoided. It seems less likely, but not impossible, that Al Qaeda or an equivalent group would say the same thing.

The other part in Brecher's argument where I think I have something to add, even if the conclusion remains the same, regards the role of the significance of the date and event.

A number of commentators pointed out that the fact that the bombing occurred on April 15th, which is both Tax Day and Patriots Day, might suggest that this some right wing domestic terrorist.

In other words, we have the Boston Marathon on April 15th. Does this make it more likely the attack was motivated by the former (probably more likely under foreign terrorism) or the latter (probably more likely under domestic terrorism).

Let's suppose that each group might have thought of their part first. What would have been the consequences?

If you were a foreign terrorist group targeting the marathon just as a high profile event with lots of spectators, it wouldn't matter at all that it was on tax day. Brecher is right that this probably wouldn't even occur to you. You just bomb the marathon on April 15th because that's when the marathon is.

On the other hand, suppose you were a domestic terrorist wanting to target something for tax day. The question is, would you know or think to check whether the Boston marathon was on that day?

My guess is that the leap in imagination in the second case seems unlikely. If you started wanting to protest taxes, isn't it more likely that you'd think to bomb the IRS? Or at least some government facility?

I'd guess that most guys who were incensed enough about Tax Day to bomb something would be rather unlikely to know that the Boston Marathon was that day. Unless you happened to know about it specifically, or were googling odd phrases like 'What big events happen on April 15th?', I doubt the marathon would occur to you as a target.

So in other words, targeting the marathon in the first place you get you April 15th. Targeting April 15th would probably not get you the marathon.

This is all weak evidence, but it's not nothing.

The other point that Brecher makes, which I hadn't thought of at all, but is very interesting, was this:

The other reason I doubt the McVeigh theory is a vague one, not something I can prove, just something that, to me at least, tilts the probabilities away from a domestic group: geography. Weird as it may seem, right-wing American irregulars tend to attack on ground they consider theirs, aiming to kill alien influences. The territory they consider worth saving is usually South, the inland West, and the Sun Belt — but definitely not Boston. Massachussets is long since lost, as far as they’re concerned. Look at the biggest right-wing terror attacks: Oklahoma City, 1995; Atlanta, 1996; Knoxville (Unitarian Church) 2008; Wichita, KS (George Tiller shooting), 2009. Oklahoma, Georgia, Tennessee — those are all hardcore red states, and the right-wingers who attacked in those places aimed at alien, blue-state institutions: Federal employees, abortionists, and Unitarians, those Satanically broadminded bastards.

When the McVeigh types do strike at a target in the blue states, it’s usually one obviously linked to their pet hates, like when that 88-year old Nazi shot a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in DC in 2009.

Huh.

In the end, Brecher thinks that it's likely to be linked to Pakistani terrorism. We shall see. He also includes this interesting aside about why Pakistani terrorist groups are really pissed off about drone strikes:

The drone attacks are very effective but very insulting, strange as that sounds. It’s much more infuriating to be killed by an unmanned machine orbiting over your village than to be shot in combat. It’s the way you’d kill a bug, and it’s created a deep hatred in the FATA.

Huh again. Read the whole thing.

If you think that it is ill-advised to speculate on who committed this repugnant act so early on due to the high risk of being shown to be a fool, I can definitely see your point. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. Still, I don't feel it's rude or disrespectful in itself to speculate about who might have done this. Quite the contrary - I'd hope very much that a bunch of law enforcement and counterterrorism officers are busy going through exactly the same kinds of reasoning, along with all the more concrete evidence, to find the bastards that did this.

And the White House burned, burned, burned!

Anything on the heels of the last post is bound to be flippant. So it goes.

So why not go the full flippant? I finally came across a youtube clip of the Canadian song about 1812 that Gary Brecher referenced in his series of posts on the War of 1812.

To fully appreciate it, you need to know the original 'Battle of New Orleans', by Jimmy Driftwood (although I grew up with the Johnnie Horton version), celebrating the American victory at the Battle of New Orleans.

Anyway, let's just say that the Canadians focus on some of the more neglected bits of the war. Without further ado, 'The War of 1812, by 'Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie' (safe for work, despite the strange band name):



Comedy gold!

The real humor is not actually any disagreement on the events of the war, but on how you choose to label the belligerents. From the American perspective, they were fighting the British, and it's respectable to take a bit of a beating from them, even getting your capital burned down, because the Brits were, after all, the major superpower at the time.

But from the Canadian perspective, the Americans invaded Canada, and were repelled by Canadians. As such, it was Canada beating America, which suddenly sounds a lot funnier. America lost to Canada? Really? You can seen why the Americans aren't keen to remember that part of the tale.

Of course, the distinction is entirely a modern one. What was invaded was British North America, which later became Canada, but at the time was part of the British Empire.

As long as you understand both views, I find it funnier to describe them as fighting the Canadians, because the failed invasion of Canada is one the more farcical bits of North American history. Although nothing beats the Fenian Raids. Now that was ridiculous!

On the Ex-Ante and the Ex-Post

Some thoughts on the occasion of receiving an email from a friend. He went down to the Boston marathon to watch his friend finish, and was planning to view things at the finish line. He found it too crowded, and walked up the street. This caused him to miss the first explosion, which was right near where he was originally standing. It also put him right next to where the second explosion was. By sheer coincidence, in the shock from the first blast, he started to walk towards the finish line, the site of the initial explosion. This caused him to be just far enough away from the second bomb when it exploded, right near where he'd been. He managed to escape unhurt.

I don't know about you, but studying enough statistics has had a subtle but deep effect on how I view the world. We who aspire to rationality make all our decisions in the realm of ex-ante calculations. When you understand probability, you realize that it doesn't make any sense to regret betting on heads when tails comes up as the winner, just as it doesn't make any sense to thrill at having chosen tails. You can only organise your life around things you know now, and decisions are only truly good or bad when evaluated according to what you knew at the time.

And yet...

When all that's said and done, you don't eat the expectation, you eat the coin flip. Every day, it tumbles through the sky, and all you can do is gird your loins and brace for whatever happens at the end. You plan and plan, and still, one day when you're not thinking, everything comes down to whether or not you took three steps in the right direction or not.

Different people give lots of different names to that - chance, luck, fate, God, Kamma. Ultimately, they're describing the same thing - whether you live to write the email or you don't.

In the end, it just wasn't your day to die. I'm extraordinarily glad of that. You get to see the sunrise and keep your health, and we get to keep our friend. Somewhere else, other people are receiving much sadder emails.

Such is life.

How did I not know about this?

The great Desmond Dekker:



Music this good was being played in 1968? Unheard of!

(via Steve Sailer)

42

Apparently they're making a movie called '42'.

Knowing only this much about the movie, it's a useful way to segment people into a couple of groups based on the first association that comes to your mind from that number, either

a) Ah, that's Jackie Robinson's old number.

b) That movie must be about the answer to life, the universe and everything.

If I ranked people according to the chances that I'd find them interesting based on whether they thought of various combinations of a) and b), it would probably go:

1. b) only

2. Both a) and b)

3. Neither a) nor b)

4. a) only.

Your mileage may vary, but if you're reading this blog, I'm wager that it probably won't vary much.

Why school group work sucks

If you, like me, were a nerdy type-A personality at school, you probably loathed getting put into groups for assignments. Inevitably, you'd be stuck with some bunch of lazy idiots who could credibly commit to either:
a) not caring if they got a terrible grade, and hence being uninterested in working, or
b) not being capable of getting a good grade even if they did work.

Both of these would get you to the most common outcome - the smart kid does all the work, usually ostentatiously announcing beforehand that the dumb kid is going to screw it up and thus insisting that he leave it alone, all the while still resenting the dumb kid for his idleness. The dumb kid laughs at the smart conscientious kid slaving away like a sucker.

Teachers would always spin you a bunch of junk about this being useful preparation for the real world, and how it was important for you to learn to work with people you didn't necessarily pick.

Looking back now, I realise that this was all a crock of crap - school group assignments prepare you for nothing useful, and all the irritation you felt was in fact completely justified.

The standard complaint is that you're being allocated into groups you didn't pick, and with hugely varying levels of skill. Neither of these really describes the real world. You get to pick the company you work for, even if you don't get to choose who is on every project with you. That said, it's highly unlikely that any semi-competent manager would lump together one guy who knows what he's doing and a bunch of morons who don't. Hopefully, there's a minimum level of competence required to maintain gainful employment, and you're unlikely to be stuck with someone truly awful.

That said though, it's become increasingly obvious that this isn't the real problem that makes school projects uniquely worse than real-life group projects.

No, the real problem with school projects is the following:

Everyone has accountability, but nobody has authority.

In other words, everyone is responsible for the performance of the group, but nobody has the authority to actually order anyone to do anything. If someone does a bad job, or hands things in late, or generally is so clueless that you'd rather do it yourself, there's not much you can do. If it gets really bad, you can complain to the teacher. But they generally don't want to deal with your whinging.

The assumption is that general social sanction for shirking, combined with the fact that everyone needs to work together to get the marks, should be enough to make it work. But isn't it obvious that setting up a mini-communist state for mark allocation is always going to produce a free-rider problem? And that the equilibrium is going to be that the guy who cares about it more does all the work?

This is like some Frankenstein version of real world group tasks. In most corporate settings, you're going to have a boss or team leader who is directly responsible for the team's performance, and can order people to do certain things on pain of getting fired. Hand the report in on Friday at 12pm or you get canned. Simple enough. Your boss may be an idiot, in which case it's a huge pain (of a very different sort). But at least there is a single person with the incentives to see the group succeed, and the authority to make it happen and solve the co-ordination problem.

If people get to pick their own groups and there's multiple assignments, the repeated game aspect can deter shirking somewhat.

But in general, teachers create a horrible system for assignments that simply teaches smart kids that the world is full of moochers, and that you'll end up doing a disproportionate share of the work only to see some slacker enjoy the fruits of your labour.

You might argue that this lesson is crucial for teaching them about the operation of the tax system and pork-barrel public-sector employment, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree.

I'd like to think that this was the well-thought-out plan all along, but somehow I doubt it. The only way to fund these taxes is to have businesses whose internal team dynamics are so different that productivity results and there's a surplus to be stolen in the first place.

Lazy Song Lyric Tropes - 'Critics'

F*** critics, you can kiss my whole @**hole

 -Jay-Z, '99 Problems'

One of the most patently absurd lyrical devices that musicians seem addicted to is their constant war against unspecified 'critics'.

If you listen to song lyrics, the 'critics' hate everybody. They spend all day just slagging off musicians in print, and apparently there is sufficient demand for this service to provide them with a lucrative living. At least I assume there must be, given how many times these musical curmudgeons feature in song-writing.

Reader, have you or anyone else you know of ever read anything by pop music critics? Why would you? These days, if I want to find out whether a musician is any good or not, it takes me 5 seconds on youtube to pull up their most popular song and decide if it sucks. If I want suggestions of music that I haven't heard of, I open up Pandora  and plug in a musician, and out comes similarly themed music that matches my tastes surprisingly well.

The only critic I've ever read is Jay Nordlinger, and that's for his non-music writing. More to the point, Nordlinger is drawn (typically, in my limited exposure) from the one category of music that does still have significant numbers of critics, namely classical music. If I go through the list here, maybe a third of them seem to relate primarily to classical music. Yet you don't hear Gustavo Dudamel ranting mid-concert because the New York Times panned his latest performance.

Musicians are famous for being lazy and uncreative on average in their choice of subject matter. My guess as to why 'critics' feature so prominently, especially in rap songs, is that
a) these clowns have nothing really to say, and this fills at least 10 seconds of ranting,
and
b) the main point of most rap music apparently is to bignote oneself, and setting up a strawman army of imaginary 'haters' is a great way to make it seem like you're generating a buzz and some controversy.

And they are imaginary. The surest sign this is all a fantasy by the song-writer is that the critics are never actually named. This is like the musical equivalent of the 13 year old boy bragging to his friends about that totally hot French chick that he hooked up with while on holiday with his parents. Serious You Guys, she totally dug me! What's that? No, I forgot to get a photo. Why do you ask? Whaddaya mean, nobody's ever personally witnessed me get any attention from a real-life female ever?

If you call out a critic by name, I'll make an exception. So when KRS-One decides to rant about C. Dolores Tucker, at least you know there's an actual person there. (Whether it's interesting or not is another question). Otherwise, assume it's all nonsense.

Lame.

To slightly modify Juju from Jurassic 5:

Homo I'ma hurt ya feelings
Name brand talkers...pretty ass earrings
Where are all your critics about which you obsess?
The only one I know of shares your IP address.

F*** critics? No, f*** you Jay-Z, think up something remotely original to talk about.

Seeing the Gay Marriage Legal End Game Before Everyone Else

The US Supreme Court is currently considering arguments for and against gay marriage. In the prognosticating about what was going to happen, and given John Roberts' willingness to cave at the last minute on Obamacare, I think Pax Dickinson's view is probably a fair bet:

"My guess is that SCOTUS will arbitrarily legalize gay marriage in all 50 states. Cthulhu only swims left."

The latter part is a rather reliable prediction, especially in the long run, but it's a somewhat noisy predictor for any particular Supreme Court decision. Cthulhu swam right, at least temporarily, on the question of the Second Amendment. Maybe gay marriage will break the same way, although I wouldn't bet on it.

That said though, there's someone who called all this much earlier, saying that the Supreme Court was going to impose gay marriage on the country. They made this prediction way back in 2003, in fact.

See if you can guess who it was (answer below the fold).

The Evolution of Shylock Holmes on Democracy, Part 2

(...continued from Part 1)

The aftermath of the financial crisis saw the election of Obama, and the resulting stimulus bill was basically just the laundry list of every wasteful pork barrel project that was waiting for a crisis to ram it through. Predictably, this resulted in an increase in the size of government that was (as always) promised to be temporary, but which ended up being (as always) permanent. Obamacare saw the takeover of the US healthcare system with ever more regulation and deceptive hiding of costs (every ‘child’ insured until 26! ‘Free’ coverage of pre-existing conditions), resulting in something that was likely to be worse even than a fully socialised model. The ever-expanding bureaucracy of federal, state and local governments in the west was choking and relentless, showing no sign of stopping. The contraction of the private sector in the recession only served to highlight how the only expanding sector was government paper pushers, passing laws to burden private business.

Not only that, but the longer things went on, even the legislative achievements of Republicans became harder to see the benefit of. George Bush’s most impactful domestic policies were increasing seen to be another permanent expansion of the bloated entitlement state with Medicare Part D prescription drugs for seniors, the creation of the repulsive and loathsome TSA, and No Child Left Behind. The latter actually seemed like a good idea under standard conservative thought that the problem with bad schools was the teachers unions. The more you read, it seemed like the problem was really just bad students, and the whole idea was that standardized testing would make all students above average. Which, of course, didn’t happen. The 2012 Republican candidate had passed the same damn healthcare policy that conservatives were now complaining about. If this was the practical difference between the two parties, what was the point?

This was mostly just grumbling and disillusionment about domestic policy, but the view that Republicans probably wouldn't do much to reverse things was dispiriting  The election of Obama probably had a larger effect on the perception of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which was perhaps more central to the question. Once the administration of the wars was no longer being carried out by “our guys” (as increasingly tenuous as that label was becoming), conservatives, myself included, were able to view the whole affair without nearly as much instinctive partisan support of the decisions made up to now. You started to hear well-reasoned paleo-conservative  voices on the right making sound and persuasive arguments about the folly of trying to turn these places into Switzerland – what the hell were we still doing there, almost a decade on? Sure, it was important to attack Al Qaeda and maybe even send a message to third world dictators to deter them from acquiring weapons of mass destruction (though opinions on the last one varied). But why did that involve trying to run the places in a really half-assed way for years on end, resulting only in the deaths of the most honorable and courageous soldiers the US was producing? If we wanted to kill terrorists, why not just blow up the place and leave?

The Arab spring managed to destroy the last of my faith that democracy might have even neutral effects on third world countries, let alone that it was going to foster economic development and liberty. The cathartic satisfaction of seeing the architect of the Lockerbie bombings getting his just desserts made way for social chaos and the attack on the Benghazi embassy. Meanwhile, Mubarak, who was not nearly as bad as Gaddafi, got the boot and it was quickly apparent that he wasn’t going to be replaced being a western-leaning liberal like the Sandmonkey, but instead by the Muslim brotherhood. That may be the last time I let my optimism about getting rid of the devil you know cloud my better judgment.

And then came along Moldbug, to put a lot of this stuff in a new perspective. With a longer time frame, reactionaries were seen to have been losing slowly but inevitably for the last several hundred years. Not only that, but it was only when one was willing to remove the sentimental attachment to the idea of suffrage did it seem obvious that the rise of democracy and the rise of socialism were unlikely to be a coincidence. Rather, they were viewed as one of the likely (if not the only) stable Nash equilibria of the voting game: 51% will always get together to expropriate the remaining 49%. I’d always known that this was a possibility. These days, I tend to think that it’s probably an near-inevitable result of democratic systems – sometimes you get there slower, sometimes you get there faster, but socialism is where it ends up. At last, you had a very parsimonious explanation of both why conservatives kept losing and why they kept being surprised about this fact – they were wedded to a romance about universal suffrage that blinded them to the fact that this was the likely cause of the ruin of the things they valued. To say that the 49% deserve to be eaten because they’re not the 51% tends to undermine the ‘getting the government you deserve’ argument.

To the extent that democracy is thus the means by which you empower the many to expropriate the few, it is no longer a moral neutral, it is in fact a moral bad. In this setup, the west works despite democracy. It doesn’t work without regard to democracy, and it certainly doesn’t work because of it. Even democratic boosters must occasionally look at the story of Greece in recent years and wonder about the ability of western democracies to correct course, particularly if there isn’t some superior not-really-democratic body like the EU to force their hand.

All this raised the larger question : what if the same thing was true in the West that you’d previously identified in the Arab spring and the third world? That in the long run you could either be free to vote, or free in the other aspects of your life, but not both?

I’m not certain of this conclusion. An awful lot hinges upon what you think about the relationship between democracy and the widespread technological improvement and associated economic growth of the 20^th century. If you think that this was tied to democratic systems of government, you’d very likely stick with it. But the evidence on this is hard to interpret. There’s a big time-series trend, for sure, and the US was probably the most innovative country of the 20^th century. But the Soviets had a space program too, and the Nazis weren’t short on good physicists either. It’s hard to know what to think on this one.

The small-c conservative in me, however, is still skeptical of grand schemes for change. This is not based so much on the idea of needing to preserve the world as it is, but rather on the imperfectability of human knowledge. Most elaborate theories of government, including appealing ideas like neocameralism, may suffer from the same problem as No Child Left Behind – they sound great in theory, but the seductiveness of a given theory as being intellectually consistent nonetheless fails for reasons that you hadn’t thought about in advance. In other words, part of the problem of the communists was that they had an unrealistic view of human nature. The other part, however, was that they had excessive hubris about their ability to remake the world into some alternative utopia. To somewhat correct the first but retain the second may lead to disaster almost as surely, if your understanding of human nature turns out to be better but still incomplete.

So Shylock of 2013 is skeptical about our current governing arrangements, but unclear of what to replace them with. At a minimum, I’m much less certain that government in the west is carried out in anything like an optimal fashion. It’s striking how little experimentation there actually is in different methods of government. This makes me suspicious of claims that we’re at some kind of global maximum. Frankly, I’m not even sure we’re at a local maximum. You may think there’s a lot unresolved questions about something like a sovereign corporation. But honestly, what makes you so confident that it would work worse than the State of California? How about just less suffrage? If voting isn’t a moral right, would government work better if voting were limited to net taxpayers or property owners?

Moldbug once wrote that to not believe in democracy in the 21^st century is a little like not believing in God in the 17^th century. In this regard, I guess I’m a democratic agnostic, leaning skeptical. I find myself uncertain where most people are sure.

We’ll see what I think in 5 years time. Not many who lose their faith tend to regain it, however.