Efficient Algorithms in Estimating Personalities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advances in Spam Technology

Is it just me, or has there recently been a big increase in the number of bogus friend attempts on facebook from completely fictitious names? While I'm sure it would be fascinating to begin a dialogue with 'Meow Kuyus', 'Gracie Alexander' or 'Christina Chee', I suspect that the main activity would be a server somewhere in the Ukraine harvesting my facebook information. If you're reading this Meow, I hope you'll understand.

Advice to ex-pats arriving in America on how to not be annoying

Yesterday I received my Green Card, that famous piece of plastic for which so many billions of the world's poor yearn. Since I've already been working on these fair shores for a while now, I'm anticipating the enjoyment of some smaller benefits, namely:

a) Getting the fast locals-only line at US customs

b) Not having to deal with visas again, and

c) The prospect that after 18 months and 10 odd hours wasted at the DMV, the State of California may finally consent to grant me a driver's license.

But it did cause me to reflect on something else about being an ex-pat, which is this: few things are more boorish and unappreciated than people who move to a new country and proceed to bitch to everyone around them about things they don't like in the new place. On the whole, Americans are too polite to say what would be my obvious response - if you don't like it, then @#$% off. Since the tendency too complain about what is missing is strong, it's worth restricting this impulse to things that really bug you (in my case, political correctness and the low quality of the tea available), and let the other things slide.

A second, albiet milder, form of irritating behavior is to make generalisations about the locals, especially in the presence of such locals. Sentences of the form 'Americans are always X' tend to come off as presumptuous and condescending for most values of X, even when not intended as such. If you have to make them, save them for your foreigner friends, and even then use them sparingly.

A third way to irritate people, and perhaps the most subtle, is simply excessive comparisons about what is different in your home country. These are the least offensive of all, but they typically aren't nearly as interesting to the audience as they are to the speaker. It's a trap that I think nearly every newcomer falls into. When you first arrive you find yourself noting all sorts of things - the cheese is orange instead of yellow, the light switches move in the opposite direction to turn on, the sign for pedestrians to walk is white instead of green, etc. And you end up commenting on them because they're striking. But to someone who is used to orange cheese and up being the 'on' position for lights, it's not actually a fascinating point to bring up.

These things are all difficult to do. If you read this post again, you'll see that I've breached at least two of my own pieces of advice, and arguably all three. I never said the advice was easy to follow.

Prices are set by scarcity, not fairness

It is a ubiquitous fact about the world that wages and prices differ sharply from what people consider fair. Witness the perpetual outrage about how much CEOs are paid. Most of it, of course, derives from people who aren't shareholders of the companies in question, and whose stake in the matter is merely that of envy. The sophisticated frame the matter as one of corporate governance - wages are so high that it must be because the CEOs have undermined the proper function of the company board, and set their own outrageous wages. I enjoy pointing out to them that CEO wages of companies that are taken private (e.g. bought out by private equity, or by management) tend to be as high or even higher, despite these agency problems not being present. Typically they agree that this is a puzzle, but not enough to reverse their conviction about CEOs being paid "too much", however measured.

I was talking to EFS about the relative wages of the movers he recently hired when moving house. EFS is a professor at a prestigious school and he said that if he had to do the same job as the movers, even for his current pay, he wouldn't be able to do it. It seemed surprising that they do such a hard job, yet are paid relatively little.

As I pointed out, if you want to make a first-order guess at relative prices, figure out what is the scarce resource. Moving lots of boxes is tough work, but there's lots of people willing and able to do it. Ergo, wages are low. Being a university professor is cushy work, however most people are unable to come up with enough compelling ideas to publish successfully. Ergo, wages are high.

The real question is why people would think that fairness should have anything to do with prices. What, exactly, about the universe gives you the impression that it cares much about the human perception of fairness? This is doubly so if explicit efforts haven't been made to make the world fair - prices are set by the spontaneous order that emerges from billions of related transactions, and as Hayek pointed out, this system is far too complex for people to understand all the drivers of a particular price. Certainly it is possible to shape at least some economic events to human perceptions of fairness - just pass a law capping CEO pay. Markets won't clear properly, of course, but that's never stopped politicians before.

But if this hasn't been done, why would wages be expected to reflect fairness, other than through the conceit that the world should spontaneously operate exactly as we wish?

Michael Caine Impersonations

In the category of 'old but awesome':

Let me finish!

Accents are a minor hobby of mine, and the idea of duelling impersonations is a classic one.

A Mother@#$%ing [Stock] P.I.M.P.

In many studies in asset pricing, it is common practice to not include stocks with prices less than $5 - they're too small and unreliable in terms of what information is included in the price. And for good reason too, as told in the story of the 50 cent stock.

In another version of the famous story of Entremed story, Curtis '50 Cent' Jackson buys $750,000 in shares in a crappy stock, H & H Imports (HNHI in the over-the-counter markets). How crappy? Let MSN tell the story:

H&H is an extremely sketchy investment and even got the dreaded "going concern" notice last March as its auditor shared doubts about the company's future. The company reported less than $300,000 in revenue last quarter but lost $1.3 million, the Post reports.

So it might not exist as a company next year. What's the big deal?

There are some funny loans at the company as well, the Observer notes. H&H lent $141,000 to what it describes as "an entity in which our chairman's brother is an officer and owner." 

Now that's governance you can take to the bank! As long as it's a bank owned by your cousin's husband.

Okay, so you've lost a ton of money in a stock because you're a dumbass. How can you double down on stupid? Simple - start giving out dubious financial advice to people to buy the stock! Everyone knows the SEC has a great sense of humour about that kind of thing.

So in a move straight out of the Rene Rivkin playbook, 50 cent decides to start spruiking the stock to his twitter followers.

"You can double your money right now,"

"Just get what you can afford."

"They are no joke get in now."

Because people who invest in OTC markets are largely imbeciles, the share price rose 240% by the close of the next day's trading. Originally this was reported as a stroke of financial genius - 50 Cent had just increased the value of his holding by $8.7M!

Eventually, 50 cent (or more likely his lawyer) figured out that randomly posting tweets about stocks he owns and recommending their purchase (especially without disclosing his clear conflict of interest) was probably in breach of several securities laws, not to mention exposing him to a range of civil suits from morons that actually followed his advice. Some of the tweets were deleted, and he posted a series of hilarious follow-ups:

"I own HNHI stock thoughts on it are my opinion. Talk to financial advisor about it."

"HNHI is the right investment for me it may or may not be right for u! Do ur homework."

Apparently the financial genius is having second thoughts about the whole thing.

Shylock's prediction - given how ferociously the SEC pursued Martha Stewart for making about a buck eighty five on a dubious insider trading charge, I'll be surprised if we've heard the last of this incident.

Red hot tip kids - buy index funds, not shitty OTC stocks. If you're tempted to make an active trade based on something 50 cent says, it ought to be to short any publicly listed stock that he's pushing. And if you have a brain meltdown and decide to follow the financial advice of people whose business experience consists of making rap albums, save yourself the bother and just set fire to the money now.

Thoughts on the culture of Fiji

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

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

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

And another thing...

I'm now back in the US of A, and back to full-time work and part-time work procrastinating, so expect blogging to be back to pre-holiday levels. W00t!

Food Porn

The essential quality of pornography is not sex. The fact that is usually involves this is ultimately incidental.

No, porn involves more basic elements. It's ultimately a voyeuristic enjoyment of watching someone else carrying out a desirable activity that one fantasizes about. This then serves as a substitute for the (unavailable) option of doing it for one's self.

Seen from this perspective, plenty of porn doesn't involve sex at all. The most common one to me is cooking shows.

 
Porn

Cooking a great meal and enjoying both the tasty food and the satisfaction that you made it yourself is something deeply appealing to many people. It's also hard and time consuming. But it's easy to watch someone else do it and fantasise that you might do it yourself tomorrow.

The fiction of cooking shows is that they're teaching you how to cook. This is of course transparently false. How many people who watch cooking shows ever try out the recipes they see demonstrated? Even when they do, what's the relative proportion of time spent watching cooking versus doing cooking?

In food, as in sex, porn is usually a substitute for the real thing, not a complement. The people I know who are good cooks spend a lot of time cooking and trying out recipes, and basically no time watching cooking shows. The people who watch a lot of cooking shows seem to cook very little (The Hammer is one who comes to mind!).Of course, people need the fig leaf that it's about cooking skill - saying out loud 'I like watching other people make and eat food' seems absurd. 'I like learning how to cook' is however entirely respectable.

The principle goes much further. Many years ago, ADQL insightfully described the original Kill Bill as being 'blood porn', which got me thinking along these lines. (UFC and professional boxing are the same). It's all voyeurism and vicarious enjoyment - the only difference is the choice of sense pleasure.

The Musical Undertaker

You know what the worst phone call is that you can receive from your manager if you're in the music business?

"We think you should do a duet with Santana".

Nah man, it'll really kick-start your career again!

It's the surest possible sign that your career peaked a couple of years ago, and the best you can hope for from here on out is playing 6 nights a week at an off-strip hotel in Vegas and drinking yourself to an early grave, with a possible appearance on 'Where Are They Now?'.

Check out these depressing odds for duets he did with artists that I've at least heard of:

Name	Known For	Duet Year	Done Anything Worthwhile Since?
Rob Thomas	Push, 3am (1996)	1999	Released lots of shitty songs, 'Lonely No More' peaked at 5 on US charts but was still awful
Everlast	What It's Like (1998)	1999	No singles made Billboard charts, career death in slow motion
Eric Clapton	Layla (1971), Tears in Heaven (1992), lots of other good stuff	1999	No, but he's still cool
Lauryn Hill	The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998)	1999	Crashed and burned on second album, now hides from publicity
Wyclef Jean	Killing Me Softly (with the Fugees, 1996)	1999	Ran For President of Haiti and got universally mocked, filed for bankruptcy
Dave Matthews	Crash, 7x Platinum (1996)	1999	Yep, he's still got it. 2002's Busted Stuff was a great album
Michael Jackson	Billie Jean (1983), Bad (1987), Liberian Girl (1987), Black or White (1991), kicking ass	2001	Released some crap songs and then died, thereby making lots of people who'd called him a pedophile for the past decade pretend they'd liked him all along
Seal	Crazy (1992), Kiss From a Rose (1995)	2002	May as well not have
Chad Kroeger (of Nickelback)	How You Remind Me (2001)	2002	Album "All the Right Reasons" had commercial success. Got pelted with rocks during a heavy metal concert in Portugal in 2009, caused millions of LOLs as a result
Michelle Branch	All You Wanted (2002)	2005	Played 'All You Wanted' at concert, said 'Now here's something from my latest album..', whole crowd left (N.B. I have no specific evidence that this happened, but honestly, would you be willing to bet against me on this one?)
Steve Tyler (Aerosmith)	Walk This Way (1975), Don't want to miss a thing (1998)	2005	Continued to be despised by the other members of Aerosmith
Kirk Hammet (Metallica)	One (1989), Enter Sandman (1991), Nothing Else Matters (1992)	2005	Kept bitching that people were illegally downloaded his music, found that the strategy of suing your fans is not commercially viable

The second worst phone call is 'We'd like you to do a duet with Tom Jones'. I leave you to compile that list yourself.

Questions which, if legitimately asked, are very difficult to recover from

'Excuse me, what gender are you?'

If there's a snappy comeback to that one, I don't know what it is.

Rule of Law 1, Dirty Hippies 0

Via Hector Lopez comes the feel good story of the year:

THE cleaners arrived first - to hose away the filth beneath Clovelly beach's shanty town-on-wheels.

They were quickly followed yesterday by police and council rangers determined to evict a group of illegal campers who had set up their base at Clovelly beach.

In an operation stretching from Clovelly to Malabar, the inhabitants of 45 vans and stationwagons - about 100 backpackers - awoke at 6.30am to the rapping knuckles of council rangers and police to receive their marching orders.

Bwaa ha ha ha!!!

The only sad bit of the article is that it's not clear that any of the squatting backpacker pikies were actually served with the threatened $1100 fines.

There's so much I want to quote, but you should really just read the whole article.

In related news, when people ask me whether it bugs me that Perth is so isolated and far away from everything, I answer no.

Do you know what really sucks about being in Fiji?

Nothing.

Supply and Demand of Public Nudity

Men are both the principal suppliers and the principal demanders of public nudity.

Sadly, what is supplied is not what is demanded.

Conservatism, As Explained by Run DMC

In their hit 'It's Like That'. If there have been better ambassadors for conservatism in the hip hop world, I'm yet to find them.

Let's begin with Run's opening lines:

Unemployment at a record high

People coming, people going, people born to die

Don't ask me, because I don't know why

But it's like that, and that's the way it is

When faced with the many, varied problems of the planet, Run emphasises two strong conservative themes:

1. The insufficiency of human knowledge, and
2. The unchanging nature of the problems that humanity faces

Both of these are anathema to the world's central planners, who revel in the fact that their knowledge is supreme, and a glorious utopia is just around the corner if only we follow their wise prescriptions. If the communists had taken Reverend Run's message to heart, the 20th century might have looked quite different.

The chorus line, repeated many times throughout the song (It's like that, and that's the way it is) are an appeal to see the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. Man's lot in life is always unsatisfactory, an observation squaring firmly with John Derbyshire's "Conservative Pessimism".

But rather than stay at this high level, Run DMC have a lot of sensible advice for how to overcome this predicament. They tend to involve personal virtue and hard work, two themes not typically emphasised in the hip hop world.

People in the world try to make ends meet

You try to ride car, train, bus, or feet

I said you got to work hard to want to compete

It's like that, and that's the way it is ...

Compare this with most rappers, whose only conception of how to make money is writing rap tunes or selling drugs. The point of 'car, train, bus or feet' is that these are the means to get oneself to a real job. Selling crack you can do anywhere.

Economic success is emphasised as a means to overcoming many of life's problems, but Run DMC are far from crass materialists:

Money is the key to end all your woes

Your ups and your downs, your highs and your lows

Won't you tell me last time that love bought you clothes?

It's like that, and that's the way it is

...

Bills fly higher every day

We receive much lower pay

I'd rather stay young, go out and play

It's like that, and that's the way it is

The first two lines here are clearly ironic, as money won't erase all the ups and downs of life. Run himself notes that "I'd rather stay young, go out and play", reinforcing that the rat race is not something that even participants relish very much. But that's not the point. Instead, the point is encapsulated in one of my favourite lines in hip hop:

Won't you tell me last time that love bought you clothes?

Exactly.

But by far the best bit of the whole song is where Run DMC discuss how different levels of life outcomes can be explained by earlier effort:

You can see a lot in this lifespan

Like a bum eating out of a garbage can

You notice one time he was your man

It's like that (what?) and that's the way it is

The bum eating out of a garbage can is one of the staple images of left-wing sympathy. But Run DMC take this in a very different direction:

You should've gone to school, you could've learned a trade

But you laid in bed where the bums have laid

Now all the time you're crying that you're underpaid

It's like that (what?) and that's the way it is

Huh!

I love these lines so much. They make the whole song, in my opinion. It's easy to complain that you're not being paid a 'fair' amount. On the other hand, you can raise your wages by making the difficult and costly decision to invest in education. Did you do that? Oh no you didn't! And THAT'S why your wages are low.

When the message comes from pampered silver-spoon elites like me, it rings with a crass lack of sympathy. When it comes from someone who actually raised themselves up, it's much harder to ignore. The reason this message gets out so infrequently is that very few of the people who believe it are in a position to credibly preach it. Only Nixon could go to China, and only Run DMC can tell you that you're poor because you didn't work hard enough.

And while Run DMC are not blind to the many inevitable problems that people face (indeed, the song talks about many of them), they're firmly of the opinion that it's within each person's power to improve their lot:

One thing I know is that life is short

So listen up homeboy, give this a thought

The next time someone's teaching why don't you get taught?

Followed up with more good advice, throwing in the importance of a spiritual base:

Stop playing start praying, you won't be sad

...

When you feel you fail sometimes it hurts

For a meaning in life is why you search

Take the bus or the train, drive to school on the church

It's like that, and that's the way it is

But having taken such pains to emphasize the ways that people can help themselves, they end with a recognition of Matthew 7:1-2

Here's another point in life you should not miss

Do not be a fool who's prejudice

Because we're all written down on the same list

It's like that (what?) and that's the way it is.

Preach it, Reverend!

For those who think that I'm reading far too much into this analysis and that rap songs don't really have messages, I close with a link to a more modern rap song, Ludacris's song 'Move Bitch', with accompanying lyrics. I leave you to conduct the analysis of that song yourself.

Lady Gaga and the Evolution of English

The English language is extraordinarily flexible in terms of how it adapts over time. Pick up a copy of some Chaucer if you don't believe me. Not only do spellings change, but the words used to describe the same underlying concept change over time too.

Lady Gaga, a women not obviously conservative in most respects, is nonetheless fighting a culturally conservative battle in one arena - resisting the increasing disappearance of the word 'telephone', and its replacement with the abbreviated 'phone'.

'Telephone' had two main forms - as a noun, to describe the device itself, and as a verb, to describe the process of using the device to contact someone. The noun form is probably in 'endangered' territory. The verb form ('I telephoned John this morning') is almost 'extinct in the wild', having been thoroughly supplanted by its evolutionary successors, 'phoned' and 'called'. These have the obvious reproductive advantage of requiring only one syllable, rather than the clunky three, and in present tense form requiring 5 and 4 letters respectively, rather than 9. Thus does survival of the fittest operate in the language world.

Lady Gaga uses both forms in her song 'Telephone':

Call all you want but there's no one home

And you're not going to reach my telephone. 

...

Stop telephoning me...

Truth be told, it was probably a year since I'd heard the noun form in the wild, and perhaps a decade since I'd heard the verb form. And they sound odd and slightly jarring, in a way that you can't quite pin down. In fact, it was the Lady Gaga song itself that made me realise how long it had been since I'd heard the word used.

If you look at Google search results, 'phone' returns about 1.1 billion results. 'Telephone' returns about 211 million results. The top news result for telephone is from Pakistan:

 'Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), Chief Altaf Hussain had a telephonic conversation with the Chief of Jamiat-i-Ulema Islam (JUI-F) Maulana Fazalur-Rehman on Tuesday.' 

The subcontinent sticks to old-world English long after the originators have given it up. I remember my uncle talking about reading a plaque in India saying that a particular king had 'no male issue' (i.e. had no sons). When did you last hear that from a native speaker?

I suspect that even the Lady Gaga rearguard action won't be enough to save 'telephone'. Most of the steps in the evolution of language happen too slowly for most people to notice. But this is one you can witness yourself. If you wondered how Chaucer became modern English, this is the answer.

Ikea and the feeling of accomplishment

Ikea is an awesome store. The real genius of the place is that they make everybody feel like they’re a cross between a master craftsman and Macgyver. For someone not skilled in manual arts, it’s a great feeling to know that I started with a few bits of plywood and ended up with a bookshelf. It lets me indulge in the ludicrous fantasy that I could go down to the hardware store, pick up a few two by fours, and whip up a dining room table in a few hours.

The reality, of course, is that I could barely convert the two by fours into kindling in a few hours, let alone a table. But that’s where Ikea is brilliant – it’s like the clever parent that does all the hard bit in the cooking, and then lets the child stir it for a few minutes at the end and feel like they did all the cooking.

Of course, this feeling lasts until the point that you realize that the instructions in fact didn’t contain any words. And that pretty much places a hard constraint on how difficult the thing can actually be.

The second genius, of course, is that they sell stuff at absolutely rock bottom prices. I went there and bought a cooking pot for $3.50. Just think about that – you can barely buy a happy meal for $3.50. Somehow, they’re able to dig iron ore out of the ground, convert it into steel, heat it into a put shape, add a handle,  ship it across the seas, and sell it to me at $3.50. While making a profit.

I can conceive, barely, of how it might be possible to make a kid’s hamburger, soft drink and fries for $3.50. I cannot even begin to fathom how to make a saucepan for that much.

Their stuff is a bargain cheap imitation of an expensive product, but a good enough version that unsophisticated people can’t tell the difference. This appeals to me, because I find it a good description of myself.

Airplane Nervousness

A few years ago (I couldn't tell you exactly when or why) I started to get the tiniest bit anxious when airplanes would land. Only in a very mild way - I would think about it every time the plane was landing and there'd be a bit of turbulence. This was ameliorated somewhat by a discussion with a former commercial pilot who I was sitting next to once on a plane. He said that everyone gets nervous about landings, but in reality takeoff is the more dangerous part. If something goes wrong with the mechanics during landing, the plane doesn't drop out of the sky, as it can glide a bit and still be landed safely. But on takeoff, there's a period where the speed of the plane is high enough that you can't stop before the end of the runway, but not high enough that you're airborne. If something happens THEN, that's when you're in a bit of trouble.

Anyway, I find that a good cure for the whole thing is to put yourself in the shoes of the guy with the exact opposite disposition - Johnny Deathwish, who secretly desperately wants to be in a plane crash.

Like must suck for that guy. Every time he goes up, he gets a bit excited with anticipation when you go through clouds and thinks get a bit wobbly. He gets even more excited when you're landing and it's windy. Will this finally be the time? And yet no, every single time the pilot lands safely. Even when he thought it might finally happen, no dice. That's because plane crashes are incredibly rare.

Thought about this way, it becomes apparent how safe the whole thing really is. You move from the salient 'what if the plane crashes' to the probabilistic 'suppose I were predicting plane crashes based on all the plane trips I've been in, including the bumpy ones. How likely are they, really?'.

Pity Johnny Deathwish. Every time he gets in a plane, he winds up disappointed.

A Hypothesis for which I'm sure there are exceptions, but I can't think of any

Thusly:

Any food described as being 'a delicacy' is in fact stomach-turningly revolting.

What is Seen, What is Not Seen

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

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

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

What is seen:



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

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

What is not seen:


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

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

What is seen:

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

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

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

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

'Advocate queries why boat wasn't stopped'

Let me put this in the plainest terms I can:

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

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

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

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

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

Tradeoffs

The desire to resist the truth of opportunity cost is embedded deep in the human breast. This trait is not without its significant benefits, as it is the same stubbornness that produced antibiotics, airplanes, calculus and many other things of which you and I are the lucky beneficiaries.

But one way or another, people are deeply, desperately unwilling to admit that life involves painful tradeoffs and inevitable regrets.

As far as I understand it, the vast majority of men want three things:

1. To bone hundreds of hot women

2. To wake up next to a loving and faithful wife.

3. To not feel like a hypocritical @$$hole who goes around hurting the people he loves.

Unfortunately, you can have at most two of these three options. The only exception is psychopaths, for which the naive person envies their freedom. But even for them, it's a Pyrrhic victory - have you ever met a happy psychopath?

For the unlucky, the tradeoff isn't binding - they can't get either 1 or 2, after which 3 is cold comfort.

For those fortunate enough to be up against the binding constraint, it is sometimes easy to forget that the choice is always there. Experience is a dear teacher, but fools will learn at no other, as Mr Franklin observed. A lot of the time, this involves having 2, and pretending that shooting for 1 doesn't involve losing 3. But it does. It always does.

Tradeoffs - though you throw them out with a pitchfork, yet they return.

Hyperbolic Discounting #2 - Nightclubs

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

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

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

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

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

then perhaps it's not really such a surprise.

Hyperbolic Discounting and New Release Movies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shylock says – lame.

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

Think your way to better decisions.

The Antipodes

1. Upon arriving in New Zealand, it took less than 5 minutes to be addressed as 'bro'. Although in a Kiwi accent, to a US person it probably sounds more like 'brew'. I was saluted in this manner by a security screener. Sadly he didn't combine it with 'choice', which would have been even better.

2. Being back in Australia feels like this:

In other words, wonderful.

A heuristic for estimating car repair costs

Think there's nothing wrong at all, and it's just a routine service? $500 minimum (for an oil change), more likely a grand. Any known problem? Two grand. Funny noise? Two grand. 1 centimetre scratch on the bumper? Two grand. Broken tail light? Two grand.

This may not apply if, unlike me, you actually know something about cars, and can talk jive about how there's a problem with the water pump and the rear differential and blah blah blah.

But if your strategy resembles mine (bend over and prepare to take it every time you walk into the dealership) then I highly recommend the Shylock rule of 'if in doubt, the answer is two grand'. It's outrageous, but it makes the subsequent rogering a little less painful.

Slacker Summer Holidays Ahoy!

Dear readers,

I shall be wagging my normal duties, both workwise and blog-wise, for the next month. The occasion is a trip back to the motherland and Fiji. So posting will be lighter than normal until early January. Thanks for being part of the first three months of excitement!

Yours faithfully,

Shylock

Bwaa ha ha ha!

Let me just quote you the title of this post:

"Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations"

And people wonder why I like the idea of WebMD.

Fresh From The Courts

Australia's defamation laws are truly awful. If someone says something bad about you, rather than say manning up and responding in kind, you can instead sue them for hundreds of thousands of dollars for your hurt feelings and lost reputation, (however that's measured). No measure is taken of the additional hit your reputation suffers as a person of such feeble character that you go crying to the courts every time Bobby called you a nasty name.

They're so bad that they're a frequent destination for libel tourism, where someone in the UK who makes an allegedly defamatory statement on the internet gets sued in New South Wales, thereby taking advantage of Australia's laws that are very generous to plaintiffs.

But, every now and then, they serve a useful purpose. A newspaper makes allegations against a politician. The politician claims they've been defamed, and tries to sue a newspaper to salvage their career and get some cash on the side. The newspaper doubles down by claiming that the allegations are in fact true. And then you get hilarious additional newspaper articles with stories like this:

THE federal Labor MP Craig Thomson's mobile phone records, driver's licence details and credit card vouchers with his signature show he used a Health Services Union credit card to pay for the services of a Sydney escort agency, the Supreme Court was told yesterday.

I had never heard of Craig Thomson, nor the allegations against him, until today. Regardless of the outcome of the trial, I will make up my own mind about the likely truth of the allegations based on the evidence being reported. And with the addition of the magic words "the Supreme Court was told yesterday", newspapers can now repeat the allegations against him without the risk of a lawsuit themselves.

On the other hand, to gather a sense of how ludicrous Australian laws are, Tim Blair (who linked to the story), doesn't allow comments for these types of posts (and neither do I). That's because under Australian law, (contrary to all common sense) owners of blogs are responsible for defamatory statements made by commenters.

Oh well - at least we can take the occasional comedy value as a small recompense.

If you're not giving away your own money, it's not charity

Smug politician posing for publicity photo

Let me begin by saying that when people donate their own hard earned dollars to charity,  I applaud their actions almost unreservedly (unless the cause is supporting terrorism or something, but that's pretty rare). The law of trusts in Commonwealth countries tends to allow for quite a large range of charitable causes without too much requirement about the size of the overall benefit being produced. Which is as it should be. To my mind, the real benefit of charity is fostering generosity by the giver. The benefit actually produced is (I imagine) usually quite small.

That said, I don't like fun runs. Never have, never will. They strike me as a bogus form of charity, smugness and self-satisfied posturing masquerading as genuine help for the needy.

In particular, what I dislike about the typical fun run is that a lot of the people don't seem to be giving much, if any, of their own money. They're hassling friends and relatives to be generous to whatever is the cause du jour (which often seems secondary to their feeling that they're doing some good - anything will do). In actuality, they're using personal connections to guilt people into paying for a cause that the donors probably don't give a fig about, and betting that most people will pay you to just go away rather than look cheap.

Meanwhile, a good chunk of the donations go towards subsidising the event that the participant is engaging in, a bunch more goes to administrative expenses, and cents in the dollar actually flow to the charity in question.

This is the bit that's infuriating to me - I bet a lot of the participants are not only paying little money themselves, they're taking a chunk of the money they got from other people and using it to subsidise their own recreation! And they have the gall to feel smug and self-satisfied! The Chicago marathon costs $125 to enter, and this comes out of the pockets of your donors before the charity sees a cent.

Take the AIDS marathon. Let's see how they advertise themselves:

At the risk of being a world-class curmudgeon, I find pictures like this somewhat nauseating. Just look at the self-righteousness plastered all over their faces. And see how they advertise it - 'Run Inspired'. It's all about you, and how good you should feel about yourself. AIDS seems like an afterthought, except as a socially acceptable 'good thing that needs help'.

As SMH once pointed out to me, compare this (for instance) with the Jewish attitude that charity has to be anonymous!:

The Talmud (Babylonian Talmud, Bava Bathra 9b) feels that one who gives charity in secret is "greater than Moses." Charity, ideally, should be given in secret so that the two parties, the giver and the receiver, do not know each other (Babylonian Talmud, Chagigah 5a; Maimonides, Hilchos Matnos Aniyim 10: 7 -14).

Got that? Not only do you have to give your own money, ideally you get zero credit for it because it's anonymous. This ensures that you're not generating any awkward feelings by the recipient, and not doing it for public recognition.

Compare this with the crass ostentation of the AIDS marathon model. Not only do you have to tell all your friends (so that everyone knows how generous you are), but you're not even giving away your own money, you're giving away theirs! (At least the bit you're not taking for yourself)

If you want to run a marathon, pay for it your damn self, don't get your friends to pay for it while feeling smug about how charitable you are.

And if you want you want to help a charity (which I wholeheartedly endorse), write them a cheque directly and cut out the middle-men and professional fundraisers.

Lefty Establishment Media Circling the Drain, News At 11

I'm sure this:

FAIRFAX Media CEO Brian McCarthy has been forced out of the top job after failing to sell his strategic plan at a recent investor day. ...

Mr McCarthy's departure comes almost two weeks after he presented the market with his five-year strategic plan for the newspaper, radio and digital group.

However, his presentation and management restructure received mixed reviews from analysts and fund managers.

has nothing at all to do with this:

“On all the key performance indicators – circulation, readership and revenue – The Age is performing poorly,” the report says. “From being in a strong commercial position five years ago it is now dangerously close to the tipping point, where it could potentially go out of business, leaving Melbourne as a one-newspaper town.” 

Most of Melbourne already is, if we’re talking about people who actually buy newspapers.

In unrelated news, News Corp doesn't seem to be doing nearly as badly. It's a puzzle alright.

Not a Coincidence

It turns out I may have underestimated US/Israeli intelligence. Somebody at least has their eye on the ball:

http://www.debka.com/article/20406/

Prof. Majid Shahriari, who died when his car was attacked in North Tehran Monday, Nov. 29, headed the team Iran established for combating the Stuxnet virus rampaging through its nuclear and military networks. His wife was injured. The scientist's death deals a major blow to Iran's herculean efforts to purge its nuclear and military control systems of the destructive worm since it went on the offensive six months ago. Only this month, Stuxnet shut down nuclear enrichment at Natanz for six days from Nov. 16-22 and curtailed an important air defense exercise.

Unlucky!

While it behooves civilised men to not lightly celebrate death, I can say that if today is like the average day in 2006, there were around 124 deaths in the US today due to motor vehicle accidents who I mourn more than Mr Shahriari.

Embarrassing Yet Catchy Song of the Day

'Stay the Night', by James Blunt.

The embarrassment belongs entirely to me of course, not Mr Blunt - he'll be laughing all the way to the bank.

Two things to note in passing:

1. It's hilarious how much Blunt doesn't fit into the film clip. They're a bunch of cool, tanned surfer dudes and chicks. He's a pasty white emo Brit rock guy. No matter how they try to insert him in, it just looks jarring. Even in his own film clip, he comes across looking like the tagalong guy that wasn't actually invited on the surfing trip held by the cool kids. Which, I imagine, is probably how it went for him as a wee lad. Just look at how beta he comes across in Back To Bedlam (song titles including 'You're Beautiful', 'Goodbye My Lover', 'Tears and Rain', and 'Cry' - need I say more?)

2. It can't be an accident that loads of official music videos begin with a decent period of silence and or extraneous noise. My guess is that it's due to the rise of websites like Keepvid that let you download youtube clips and software like WinFF than let you convert the video into MP3s. The record companies respond by forcing you to listen to several seconds of annoying silence each time it comes up. Consistent with their general level of sophistication, this is of course easily circumvented.

Driving Ability and Near Misses

If you want to evaluate someone's driving ability, my guess is that it's far more informative to look at the number of near misses the person has than the actual number of accidents.

The main reason is that most people have a lot more near misses than they have crashes, which has two effects. First, it allows for much finer comparisons of  driving ability. Second, because there's more of them, the Central Limit Theorem has more time to kick in. This means that your number of near misses per year will likely be closer to your true average rate of generating near misses, while your number of accidents per year is likely to be further away from your true mean.

I was thinking about this the other day when I was a passenger in the Cuban Mafiosa's car as it veered towards a concrete barrier near a freeway exit.

After barely controlling my urge to swear and gesticulate, I was reminded of this old but awesome Slate interview with James Bagian. That guy kicks @$$. He implemented a similar system of analysing near misses when he was tasked with reducing medical errors at a VA hospital. It's seriously one of the best articles I've read this year. Check out some money quotes from the article:

James Bagian on how medicine deals with errors:

Take a very simple example: A nurse gives the patient in Bed A the medicine for the patient in Bed B. What do you say? "The nurse made a mistake"? That's true, but then what's the solution? "Nurse, please be more careful"? Telling people to be careful is not effective. Humans are not reliable that way. Some are better than others, but nobody's perfect. You need a solution that's not about making people perfect.

So we ask, "Why did the nurse make this mistake?" Maybe there were two drugs that looked almost the same. That's a packaging problem; we can solve that. Maybe the nurse was expected to administer drugs to ten patients in five minutes. That's a scheduling problem; we can solve that. And these solutions can have an enormous impact.

Seven to 10 percent of all medicine administrations involve either the wrong drug, the wrong dose, the wrong patient, or the wrong route. Seven to 10 percent. But if you introduce bar coding for medication administration, the error rate drops to one tenth of one percent. That's huge.

James Bagian on what it felt like to be the substitute astronaut who was meant to be on the Challenger Space Shuttle, watching it explode from the ground:

Was I sad that it happened? Of course. Was I surprised? Not really. I knew it was going to happen sooner or later—and not that much later. At the time, the loss rate was about 4 percent, or one in 25 missions. Challenger was the 25th mission. That's not how statistics works, of course—it's not like you're guaranteed to have 24 good flights and then one bad one, it just happened that way in this case—but still, you think we're going to fly a bunch of missions with a 4 percent failure rate and not have any failures? You gotta be kidding.

I present James Bagian with the Thomas Bayes Award for really, truly understanding probability.

I'd quote the whole thing, but really you should just click here.

And in honour of Mr Bagian's award, you should stay out of the cars of people who have near misses while driving!

Chick Magnet

Everyone gets boring pets, and I never figured out why. Why would you get a dog when you could get a marmoset instead?

Honestly, what chick wouldn't flip for a guy with one of those? Talk about peacocking. It's an instant conversation starter.

Okay, so it turns out there's a few hitches:

Hand-raising a baby callitrichid requires an incredible amount of devotion, time and emotional energy. To simulate their natural lives, infants should be carried by their owners as much as possible for warmth and emotional security....

Newborns should be fed every two hours around the clock and must be stimulated in the perineal area to urinate and defecate.

But look how cute they are! Surely that's worth it.

Hand-raised, bottle-fed babies are quite charming, but with the onset of sexual maturity, they become unpredictable, aggressive and dangerous to humans - including their owners. Consequently, people should be discouraged from keeping them as pets.

Bah, bunch of killjoys. I bet these people are just environmentalist weenies trying to stop anyone making a profit off monkeys, with some greenpeace hippie desire to keep them all in the wild.

Hmm, the website is called http://www.monkeys-for-sale.com/ ?

Ah well, it was a good dream while it lasted.

I'm going back to plan B for my pets - plants grown from food refuse. You can leave them outside for three weeks when you go on vacation, and they probably won't die. And if they do, who cares!

Magnitudes? We don't need no stinking magnitudes!

Have you noticed how few people think in any meaningful sense about how large different health risks are? People will know that 'smoking causes cancer' and 'living near power lines causes cancer' and 'eating burnt steak causes cancer'. But they will barely have even a hazy idea about how much the risks of each one is, and probably avoid all three. In reality, they're not even close - you're better off giving up smoking, but not sweating the steak and power lines.

The truth is that magnitudes are hard, so people just don't bother, even though they're really important. Directions are easy, but not actually very useful.

To illustrate, let me give you a range of different statements of different levels of usefulness.

0. 'Smoking is bad'

1. 'Smoking causes lung cancer'

2. 'Smoking increases the risk of lung cancer'

3. 'Smoking is associated with an increased risk of lung cancer'

4. 'Smoking is associated with a ten to twenty times as high chance of developing lung cancer'

5. 'Smoking is associated with a ten to twenty times as high chance of developing lung cancer, the death rate from lung cancer in the male population is around 80 per 100,000, the percentage of males in the US who smoke is 23.1 %, so your chances of dying of lung cancer if male lie between 15 per 100,000 and 26 per 100,000 if you don't smoke, versus between 260 per 100,000 and 297 per 100,000 if you do smoke'

6. 'Smoking is associated with ... [as before] for overweight versus normal weight people, for young vs. old people, for white/black/hispanic/men/women ... '

My hunch is that most people think about things in terms of 1. So let's analyze all the ways that people screw this up.

The difference between 0 and 1 is whether you have any understanding of the actual problem, or just arguing from authority. We can safely skip that one.

The difference between 1 and 2 is about statistics. The first one implies that Smoking = Lung Cancer. It's not clear, but I think people have in mind that smoking is a sufficient condition for eventually getting lung cancer. It's not, and that's a big deal. A bullet to the brain causes death in a very different way than smoking causes lung cancer.

The difference between 2 and 3 is quite well remarked on, as it's the correlation/causation problem. 2 may be right, but 3 is the correct description of what the statistics alone tell us. Still, the causal link with smoking is pretty well established, so I don't quibble with it here.

3 to 4 is the first question of magnitudes. I submit that for the majority of illnesses and risk factors, people have no idea how important various risk factors are. And it's really damn important. Because things that increase risk by a trivial amount probably aren't worth worrying about. (I say 'probably' -we'll return to this in a second). This is the level of information you get from the CDC, the guys who you'd expect to be right on top of things, and not to belittle them, it's important to know. I haven't looked for the burnt steak numbers, but I'm betting they're a lot lower.

4 to 5 tells you how prevalent the disease really is. And this matters a lot in terms of whether you should make real lifestyle changes. Because people care mainly about the actual chance of dying, not about relative changes in the changes of dying. Big percentage changes in things that are very unlikely to begin with don't have much impact. But even small percentage changes in very frequent risks can be worth it. So being 10 to 20 times more likely to acquire lung cancer (~80 per 100,000) is more important than being 10 to 20 times more likely to acquire stomach cancer (~5 per 100,000). When things are quite frequent (heart disease, car crashes) smaller changes get even more significant. Bear in mind the CDC doesn't tell me this - I had to calculate those numbers myself. If anything, I think that these numbers don't look very large, and that's part of the reason the CDC doesn't push them - even if I smoke, the chances of it actually killing me are apparently only 0.3%! Put that way, it doesn't seem like a big deal. Now, this doesn't give me all the information I need (how long did I smoke, what age am I etc.). But it's damn hard to say that this isn't actually relevant.

Finally 5 to 6 tells you how much the effects vary across demographics. It's highly unlikely that every group in society has a 10-20 times higher chance of lung cancer from smoking. And if there's differential impacts, you'd like to know whether it's worth it for you to give up smoking, not for the average person.

The reality is that you need a hell of a lot more information than 'smoking causes cancer' to conclude that it's worth it to give up smoking based on the cancer risk. As Gary Becker put it - it also depends how much you like smoking! And at a bare minimum, it's ridiculous to place the same importance on all risk factors without considering the actual risk they pose.

"It Can't Get Any Worse"

Pure comedy gold, from Brazil:

A Brazilian Clown, Francisco Oliveira Silva, has been cleared to enter Congress as the federal deputy for Sao Paulo after passing a literacy test that might have ruled him out.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11891910

From the BBC:

The 45-year-old television clown won more than 1.3 million votes after campaigning with slogans such as: "It can't get any worse."

"What does a federal deputy do? Truly, I don't know. But vote for me and I will find out for you,"

It's an excellent point. Honestly, I imagine most voters here have little idea what many elected offices are really for. (As John Derbyshire commented on the Secretary of State for Kansas - does he negotiate non-aggression pacts with Nevada?)

If there were an option to have a Congress of literal clowns who didn't actually desire to pass any significant legislation, I'd vote for them in a heartbeat. Mr Silva is quite right - it can't be worse that the current bunch of metaphorical clowns who delight in passing thousand-page value-destroying omnibuses, sight unseen.

Perspective

So if you read Hacker News, you've probably seen this a bunch of times.

But if you haven't it's highly instructive to consider the actual scale of the universe, both large and small.

It also taught me the measurement prefix 'yocto' (as in 'yoctometre', 10 to the power of -24 metres). Which is a cool sounding measurement.

The Past is Another Country (Henry James Edition)

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

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

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

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

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

From the department of unfair yet hilarious comparisons...

A great comparison in photos of Hiroshima and Detroit, 64 years after the atomic bomb.

One of the two cities in question was destroyed by an organised group unleashing destruction on the entire productive assets of the city.

The other did not have the UAW present, but had a nuclear blast instead.

Tugging on Superman's Cape

It's sometimes quite difficult in practice to distinguish between whether someone has giant cojones or just a giant martyr complex, especially as the two are not mutually exclusive. Such seems to be the case of Wikileaks' professional troll and attention-seeking d**head Julian Assange.

I had always thought his paranoid trend of moving around and playing spy games was just hilarious evidence of his desire to feel like some secret agent fighting crime and/or evil.

Perhaps tiring of the ridicule for being such a nutcase, he's decided keep pissing off first world governments until they respond enough to make his paranoia actually seem fairly justified.

The question is whether he's thought through the end-game of his provocations, which is this. In the long run, it is very difficult to make yourself a high-profile enemy of first world governments while also travelling around on a first-world passport (Australian) and staying in first-world countries ("a secret location outside London"). The dedicated open enemies of America all live in third world hellholes, and when they travel, they're not going through normal immigration procedures.

Assange seems to be currently right up against the limit of how much you can piss off the US without either a) ending up in jail or b) removing yourself from the first world altogether, and live entirely underground. Option a) is what happens when you were an attention-seeking wannabe martyr all along, or just massively miscalculate (and I don't think Assange is that dumb). Option b) is what happens when you actually have cojones in the service of some truly screwed-up ideals, consequences be damned (think Bin Laden). Although Bin Laden doesn't need to have a functioning web server capable of handling high traffic to carry out his plans, so I don't even know how viable it really is.

Since he shows no signs of stopping his escalations, my guess is that we'll have our answer soon enough.