On the Dying of the Darkness

In Chicago, on a summer's night, the sky at 2am glows with a dull grey orange. If modernity has a colour, it is this. The orange is the city, reflected back off the night clouds. The colour of streets illuminated to make it safer to walk in. The colour of houses with merriment and offices with productive work, extending the day long past the sun's descent over the horizon. The colour of man beating back nature. The colour of progress, in its old and apolitical sense of sheer advancement, of doing things that were once not possible.

And yet, few things in this universe are truly free. Wrestling with the full implications of opportunity cost, both in terms of battling it where possible and making peace with it as best you can otherwise, is a large part of the human condition. This concept has been studied by poets and economists alike. As I wrote about in the very first entry of this periodical, the best summary of opportunity cost, in my opinion, still comes from Bob Dylan.

The light dispels the darkness. Even reactionaries, no matter how committed, would hesitate mightily before wishing away this development.

But to choose openly does not mean one cannot regret the tradeoff. So what, thereby, is lost?

Chief among the costs is the splendour of the night sky.

In a capital city in Australia, where I grew up, you can still see the stars at night. Not the full panoply of the Milky Way, but enough to sense the enormity of the heavens.

For immediately conveying the sheer punyness of man on a cosmic scale, there is no substitute for the stars on a cloudless night, surrounded by pitch black. It is a scene which requires almost no explanation. Mere scale is enough to make one's own problems, and indeed one's very existence, seem picayune.

And nothing else quite has the same effect. Not the fury of the ocean in a storm, not the solitude of a silent forest, not the desolation of a wilderness far from other people. A wilderness can be traversed, a forest explored, an ocean sailed. Even when they threaten you, they can all be interacted with. But the stars can only be watched, and one's place in the universe pondered.

And increasingly, we don't see them. I suspect that a child growing up in New York City might go months without seeing the stars. Even as adults, the full visual of the Milky Way has mostly become something we see when on holiday in somewhere remote. Exteranally-prompted contemplation of one's place in the universe becomes similarly irregular.

Modernity is the era of light pollution.

Modernity is also the era of atheism, and (though less remarked), the era of narcissism.

I suspect these aspects are not entirely a coincidence.

Without the stars, one only sees the lights of the city. Without the heavenly panorama, one is less drawn to look at the night sky in the first place. And the same light that drowns out the stars attracts our attention downward, towards televisions, phones and computers.

The stars speak the irrefutable message that there are measures greater than man. Take that away, and man has no measure other than himself and his physical surroundings. The latter is atheism. The former is narcissism.

There are no simple causes of social phenomena, and it would be trite to ascribe great social changes to such Rube Goldberg-like developments as streetlights.

And yet, each restraint that gets eroded adds momentum to the changes already underway.

And this was known long before light pollution was even a concept. As Isaac Asimov noted, quoting Emerson:

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God?'

Suffering is Interesting, Ending Suffering is Uninteresting

One of the most important statements of Buddhist philosophy is the Four Noble Truths. These were taught by the Buddha in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, the first discourse he made to the five ascetics, who he had worked with during his first years after becoming a monk.

The Four Noble Truths are stated thus:

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving which leads to re-becoming, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there; that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for becoming, craving for disbecoming.

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering: it is the remainderless fading away and cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, non-reliance on it.

Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering: it is this noble eightfold path; that is, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration. 

Existence is suffering.

The cause of suffering is craving.

The cessation of suffering comes from the giving up of craving.

The way to give up craving and reach the cessation of suffering is to follow the Eightfold Noble Path.

These may be true. They may be false. That is up to you to decide, as the Buddha himself said.

But what is intriguing to me is the relative levels of interest in each of the Four Noble Truths. If you check Google's search results, you get the following number of hits:

"First Noble Truth" - 54,000 results

"Second Noble Truth" - 30,100 results

"Third Noble Truth" - 31,700 results

"Fourth Noble Truth" - 28,100 results

So to judge accordingly, people are far more interested to find out that the Buddha thought the world is miserable than to find out how the Buddha proposed to deal with this predicament.

Less than 60% of the people who found the First Noble Truth insightful enough to quote it displayed any interest in finding out how to actually get rid of suffering. Of course, the Buddha may just be wrong about all this. But then why quote the First Truth in the first place?

Not only that, but having gotten to the end, we're told that the way forward is the Eightfold Noble Path.

"Eightfold Noble Path" - 17,800 results

This, of course, is even less interesting to people than the Noble Truths themselves, hence another third of people drop away. Oh, you mean he was actually serious about ending suffering, and gave a detailed description of how to get there? Bah, who's got time for that!

As a result, Buddhism more or less gets reduced in the popular conception to Brad Pitt's pithy phrase in 'Se7en'

"You're right. It's all f***ed up. It's a f***ing mess. We should all go live in a f***ing log cabin."

So why is the First Noble Truth much more interesting to people than the rest?

Perhaps they don't believe the rest. This is possible, but given the frequency of repetition, I hear the Brad Pitt version quoted as if it's the actual main point of Buddhism. I think most of the 24,000 odd people who don't get past Truth #1 honestly don't know what the others even say.

If they haven't heard the other three truths, it's because they didn't resonate in a way that made people want to repeat them. So why is that?

I suspect part of it comes from what The  Last Psychiatrist said about narcissism, here:

The unconscious doesn't care about happiness, or sadness, or gifts, or bullets.  It has one single goal, protect the ego, protect status quo.  Do not change and you will not die.  It will allow you to go to college across the country to escape your parents, but turn up the volume of their pre-recorded soundbites when you get there.  It will trick you into thinking you're making a huge life change, moving to this new city or marrying that great guy, even as everyone else around you can see what you can't, that Boulder is exactly like Oakland and he is just like the last guys.   And all the missed opportunities-- maybe I shouldn't, and isn't that high? and he probably already has a girlfriend, and I can't change careers at 44, and 3 months for the first 3/4 and going on ten years for the last fourth, and do I really deserve this?-- all of that is maintenance of the status quo, the ego. 

and here:

Grandiosity is only one possible manifestation of a psychic process that went awry.  The essence, the defining characteristic of narcissism is the isolated worldview, the one in which everyone else is not fully real, only part a person, and only the part the impacts you.

Narcissism is self-protective.  It simultaneously allows for the reduction of the other to prop status, while reassuring you that this perspective is not wrong or dangerous because it's not about superiority. 

The First Noble Truth, quoted alone and out of context, can sound ego-validating. Your suffering is a cosmic truth that is inescapable! The misfortune you're suffering is pre-ordained in the structure of the universe. It's not your fault - you're perfect the way you are!

Truths two through four, however, inform you that it is your fault. Whether you find this demoralising or inspiring says a lot about you. Your misery is due to your actions and thoughts, but it's something within your power to change. That should be great news, but of course it isn't necessarily. Faced with the choice between continuing to suffer and changing oneself, are you really surprised that lots of people prefer the former?

And the number that go on to find the details of how to actually do it is smaller still.

The Buddha, of course, was not a psychiatrist in the modern sense, and The Last Psychiatrist is no Buddhist either. But they find common ground in the following observation about the modern world - the main craving that people have is not really craving for material things or money, but attachment to their ideas of self.

So it's well worth pondering The Last Psychiatrist's description for how to deal with the problem of ego:

"Help me, please, I think I'm a narcissist.  What do I do?"

There are a hundred correct answers, yet all of them useless, all of them will fail precisely because you want to hear them.

There's only one that's universally effective, I've said it before and no one liked it. This is step 1: fake it.

You'll say: but this isn't a treatment, this doesn't make a real change in me, this isn't going to make me less of a narcissist if I'm faking!

All of those answers are the narcissism talking.  All of those answers miss the point: your treatment isn't for you, it's for everyone else.

If you do not understand this, repeat step 1.

On Self-Centredness

Sometimes people are surprised when I say that I consider my biggest personality fault to be that I'm too self-centred.*

Okay, not everyone is surprised. Many just agree that I'm a piece of $#!7, and find this formulation to to be yet one more variation on expressing the same widely-agreed-on sentiment.

When people describe their own faults or characteristics in a way that surprises others, sometimes this comes from the fact that the traits they are remarking on are things they have observed in themselves for a long time, and worked on in some form for a long time too. This tends to happen when I tell people I consider myself introverted. I was only moderately introverted to start with, and I've worked on becoming more sociable with strangers for quite some time. If you saw 5 year old Shylock, or 12 year old Shylock, the description would not seem nearly as discordant.

Small talk with strangers may take effort, but it is not conceptually a particularly hard problem. Any problem that can be routinely solved by people of average intelligence simply cannot be that cognitively difficult - the obstacles must lie elsewhere, probably in the implementation and the psychology. But if one isn't born with the instinct for the talent, one has to work on it, just like everything else. The gratifying sign that one's work has been successful is if the extent of one's innate tendency in the other direction is not easy to spot by new acquaintances.

But I don't think that's what's going on with self-centredness.

I think the first mistake people make is that they mentally substitute the phrase 'selfishness', a concept which is generally is better understood. They then often substitute related terms like 'greedy' or 'stingy', which sneaks in the wrong connotation, namely that the metric of evaluation over which greediness is measured is money or material possessions.

I'm not particularly greedy for money. While I don't have a huge amount of it, at the risk of sounding extraordinarily presumptuous, I always just assumed that absent some big catastrophe, money would mostly take care of itself in my life. I suspect this attitude comes from the good fortune of growing up in an upper-middle class family and being of reasonable talents. It also helps that I don't have particularly extravagant tastes.

At least for me, the biggest benefit of having some money is not having to worry about it. The next benefit is buying one's way out of inconvenience and hardship. The next biggest is getting to do nice things for friends, family, and causes one supports. Add all that up, and I don't fit the classic stereotype of Scrooge McDuck.

Of course, attachment can be for plenty of things other than money. One of the things that's appealing about Buddhism is the much broader conception of the attachment to be uprooted. "My beautiful body". "My clever thoughts". You can probably guess from this august periodical which of those two I score badly on, and why I do worse on attachment, broadly defined, than greed, narrowly defined. These parts of attachment don't tend to get lumped in with greediness, which seems more concerned with the social aspects of morality. Thinking oneself clever seems to have a more indirect route to social harm (e.g. mocking others as stupid) than attachment to money (e.g. outright theft). That distinction matters less to Buddhism, which isn't primarily interested in social harm, but rather with one's own mental development.

But even this broader conception of attachment doesn't quite cover self-centredness.

I remember once reading that a self-centred person always thinks of themselves as the protagonist in their own play, and everyone else as the supporting cast. They never stop to consider that everyone else is the protagonist in his own play, too.

In other words, it comes from only thinking of things from one's own point of view.

A selfish person will hurt someone deliberately in order to get what they want. They will probably also construct a narrative that the other person deserved it (or indeed was being selfish themselves, for refusing to yield to their demands). A selfish person is just reluctant to give others things, especially if they impose some personal cost. They will still give things to people, especially loved ones. But the gifts will only be things that make both people happy. They will rarely be gifts that cause the giver to have to renounce something important.

A self-centred person, by contrast, will hurt people accidently, carelessly. Often they won't realise that their actions were going to upset people, and may not even know afterwards unless it's made quite plain to them. A self-centred person is not opposed to giving. They just tend to get presents that they themselves would like to get, not necessarily what the other person would actually want.

While I was growing up, when I would do some inconsiderate thing that upset someone in my family, I would often protest to Mama Holmes that 'I didn't think it would upset them.' 'That's the point', she would reply. 'You didn't actually think about it.'

So how does a self-centred person think of other people?

Other people's pain and suffering is viewed mostly as an emotion one experiences empathetically, but usually only when it is actually presented.

Self-centredness is not the same as being on the spectrum of autism, where one is simply unable to judge responses and thought processes in other people.

It's also not the same as sociopathy, where one feels no empathy when one witnesses others who are in pain.

Seeing other people in pain brings a self-centred person pain too. And so he tried to avoid that pain. Often this comes by lessening that other person's pain, which is a good thing. But sometimes it just comes by avoiding having to see the pain - not wanting to visit an elderly relative in a decrepit state, because you 'don't want to remember them like that', for instance. A truly empathetic person (which is the opposite of self-centredness) is likely to reflect on the other person's pain even when not in their presence.

I suspect that this is perhaps part of the test - how often do you think about the wellbeing of others in your life when the question is not specifically presented by direct circumstances? How often does the thought occur to you to randomly get someone a small present? Okay, now how often does it occur to you when the person isn't in front of you? Okay, now how often does it occur when not also prompted by seeing something that you know they like? In other words, how often does the bare thought 'I should do something nice for that person' occur in advance of you deciding what to get or seeing that person?

How often do you think to wonder about how a friend is doing that you haven't heard from for a while? Or do they mostly just drop out of mind?

A self-centred person is liable to assume that if they've done something a particular way and nobody has complained about it up to now, it must be fine. They very rarely stop and think explicitly, 'Gee, I wonder how this would make the person feel? I wonder if this action that benefits me might not be nice, even if they haven't complained about it'. In other words, because they don't think much about other people's feelings, unless prompted by the immediate impact they have one one's own feelings, they are relatively poor at judging the emotional impact of situations in which they haven't had the consequences made plain to them before.

When I first moved away to this great country, I would return home to Oz for holidays and have lots of people I wanted to see. I also needed to see my family too, partly just because I wanted to, partly out of a sense of familial duty (in the good sense of the term), partly out of a desire to not make them upset by my absence since they presumably would want to spend time with me too. So I made sure to schedule time with them.

But because there were so many friends to try to catch up with too, I was always trying to squeeze them in here and there where they were available, and where it was most convenient. To me. As you can imagine, this meant that I was forever trying to schedule an hour or two of "quality time" with Mum and Dad before racing out to meet my friends. At some point, Mama Holmes pointed out that I was always doing this chiseling. Once she'd pointed it out, it became obvious that it wasn't a very nice thing to do - the person always feels like they're on the clock, and being slotted into your busy schedule, which is the opposite of what you were trying to do. But of course, the fact that my actions might cause people to feel like this hadn't occurred to me.

The limited action in response, which is still useful, is to take the specific lesson - don't be stingy with one's time, especially with family. Don't schedule zillions of back to back appointments unless you're okay with people knowing that you're slotting them in. One more lesson in the rule of polite behaviour. Add them all up, work at it long enough, and you'll end up approaching the behaviour of a genuinely considerate person by the application of a lot of rules of thumb and general advice.

But the ultimate goal is the harder training - to explicitly think, in advance, 'I wonder how my choices are impacting the people around me.'

That's the only way to come across the nice things you could be doing for other people that you simply hadn't thought of.

And I don't think there's any shortcut to this, other than just getting in the habit of contemplating the welfare of people around you, especially those for whom it wouldn't occur to you naturally. You probably will naturally think of your parents. You may not naturally think of your secretary, or your janitor, or the guy you sit next to on the bus.

Writing or thinking about the necessity of it won't do. As the Last Psychiatrist put it :

<doing awesome>

is better than

<feeling terrible about yourself>

is better than

<the mental work of change>

You should memorize this, it is running your life. 

God, I miss that guy's blog.

I think that's enough writing as a substitute for the hard work for today.

---------

*Postscript. I recognise the irony of writing about self-centredness in an article filled mostly with personal examples and self-indulgent self-criticism. Unfortunately, the examples I know best here and can speak of are my own.

They're all IQ tests, you just didn't know it

Here's one to file under the category of 'things that may have been obvious to most well-adjusted people, but were at least a little bit surprising to me'.

Many people do not react particularly positively when you tell them what their IQ is, particularly when this information is unsolicited.

Not in the sense of 'I think you're an idiot', or 'you seem very clever'. Broad statements about intelligence, even uncomplimentary ones, are fairly easy to laugh off. If you think someone's a fool, that's just, like, your opinion, man.

What's harder to laugh off is when you put an actual number to their IQ.

Having done this a couple of times now, the first thing you realise is that people are usually surprised that you can do this at all. IQ is viewed as something mysterious, requiring an arcane set of particular tasks like pattern spotting in specially designed pictures, which only trained professionals can ascertain.

The reality is far simpler. Here's the basic cookbook:

1. Take a person's score on any sufficiently cognitively loaded task = X

2. Convert their score to normalised score in the population (i.e. calculate how many standard deviations above or below the mean they are, turning their score into a standard normal distribution). Subtract off the mean score on the test, and divide by the standard deviation of scores on the test. Y = [ X - E(X) ] / [ σ(X)]

3. Convert the standard normal to an IQ score by multiplying the standard normal by 15 and adding 100:

IQ = 100 + 15*Y

That's it.

Because that's all IQ really is - a normal distribution of intelligence with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15.

Okay, but how do you find out a person's score on a large-sample, sufficiently cognitively-loaded task?

Simple - ask them 'what did you get on the SAT?'. Most people will pretty happily tell you this, too.

The SAT pretty much fits all the criteria. It's cognitively demanding, participants were definitely trying their best, and we have tons of data on it. Distributional information is easy to come by - here, for instance. 

You can take their score and convert it to a standard normal as above - for the composite score, the mean is 1497 and the standard deviation is 322. Alternatively you can use the percentile information they give you in the link above and convert that to a standard normal using the NORM.INV function in excel. At least for the people I looked at, the answers only differed by a few IQ points anyway. On the one hand, this takes into account the possibly fat-tailed nature of the distribution, which is good. On the other hand, you're only getting percentiles rounded to a whole number of percent, which is lame. So it's probably a wash.

And from there, you know someone's IQ.

Not only that, but this procedure can be used to answer a number of the classic objections to this kind of thing.

Q1: But I didn't study for it! If I studied, I'm sure I'd have done way better.

A1: Good point. Fortunately, we can estimate how big this effect might be. Researchers have formed estimates of how much test preparation boosts SAT scores after controlling for selection effects. For instance:

When researchers have estimated the effect of commercial test preparation programs on the SAT while taking the above factors into account, the effect of commercial test preparation has appeared relatively small. A comprehensive 1999 study by Don Powers and Don Rock published in the Journal of Educational Measurement estimated a coaching effect on the math section somewhere between 13 and 18 points, and an effect on the verbal section between 6 and 12 points. Powers and Rock concluded that the combined effect of coaching on the SAT I is between 21 and 34 points. Similarly, extensive metanalyses conducted by Betsy Jane Becker in 1990 and by Nan Laird in 1983 found that the typical effect of commercial preparatory courses on the SAT was in the range of 9-25 points on the verbal section, and 15-25 points on the math section. 

So you can optimistically add 50 points onto your score and recalculate. I suspect it will make less difference than you think. If you want a back of the envelope calculation, 50 points is 50/322 = 0.16 standard deviations, or 2.3 IQ points.

Q2: Not everyone in the population takes the SAT, as it's mainly college-bound students, who are considerably smarter than the rest of the population. Your calculations don't take this into account, because they're percentile ranks of SAT takers, not the general population. Surely this fact alone makes me much smarter, right?

A2: Well, sort of. If you're smart enough to think of this objection, paradoxically it probably doesn't make much difference in your case - it has more of an effect for people at the lower IQ end of the scale. The bigger point though, is that this bias is fairly easy to roughly quantify. According to the BLS, 65.9% of high school graduates went on to college. To make things simple, let's add a few assumptions (feel free to complicate them later, I doubt it will change things very much). First, let's assume that everyone who went on to college took the SAT. Second, let's assume that there's a rank ordering of intelligence between college and non-college - the non-SAT cohort is assumed to be uniformly dumber than the SAT cohort, so the dumbest SAT test taker is one place ahead of the smartest non-SAT taker.

So let's say that I'm in the 95th percentile of the SAT distribution. We can use the above fact to work out my percentile in the total population, given I'm assumed to have beaten 100% of the non-SAT population and 95% of the SAT population

Pctile (true) = 0.341 + 0.95*0.659 = 0.967

And from there, we convert to standard normals and IQ. In this example, the 95th percentile is 1.645 standard deviations above the mean, giving an IQ of 125. The 96.7th percentile is 1.839 standard deviations above the mean, or an IQ of 128. A surprisingly small effect, no?

For someone who scored in the 40th percentile of the SAT, however, it moves them from 96 to 104. So still not huge. But the further you go down, the bigger it becomes. Effectively you're taking a weighted average of 100% and whatever your current percentile is, and that makes less difference when your current one is already close to 100.

Of course, the reality is that if someone is offering these objections after you've told them their IQ, chances are they're not really interested in finding out an unbiased estimate of their intelligence, they just want to feel smarter than the number you told them. Perhaps it's better to not offer the ripostes I describe.

Scratch that, perhaps it's better to not offer any unsolicited IQ estimates at all. 

Scratch that, it's almost assuredly better to not offer them. 

But it can be fun if you've judged your audience well and you, like me, occasionally enjoy poking people you know well, particularly if you're confident the person is smart enough that the number won't sound too insulting.

Of course, readers of this august periodical will be both a) entirely comfortable with seeing reality as it is, and thus would nearly all be pleased to get an unbiased estimate of their IQ, and b) are all whip-smart anyway, so the news could only be good regardless.

If that's not the case... well, let's just say that we can paraphrase Eliezer Yudkowsky's advice to 'shut up and multiply', in this context instead as rather 'multiply, but shut up about it'.

The strange thing is that even though people clearly are uncomfortable having their IQ thrown around, they're quite willing to tell you their SAT score, because everybody knows it's just a meaningless test that doesn't measure anything. Until you point out what you can measure with it. 

I strongly suspect that if SAT scores were given as IQ points, people would demand that the whole thing be scrapped. On the other hand, the people liable to get furious were probably not that intelligent anyway, adding further weight to the idea that there might be something to all this after all.

On Being Sensible

There comes a point in one’s life where one surrenders to the lure of the practical, rather than the romantic. Bit by bit, the arguments for whimsical and aesthetic considerations make way for the fact that it is generally better to simply have one’s affairs in order. I suppose this is part of what maturity means – the extension of one’s planning horizon, so that the present value of sensible choices outweigh the desire to do things merely for the je ne sais quois of seeing something new.

For those of us of a mostly sensible bent, the appeal of solid, practical decisions doesn’t need much extra boosting. But even among such as I, there is still romance, in the broad sense. It just shows up in unexpected places.

While I don’t know exactly when this shift towards sensibility occurred (or even if it had a particular turning point), I do know one of the marks of its arrival.

The clearest indicator, at least to me, is the choice of which seat to choose on the aeroplane.

At some point, the desire to be able to easily get to and from the bathroom becomes the thing one values in this microcosm of life’s choices. Stepping over people is a pain, not being able to pee when one wants to is a pain, waking up people who fell asleep at inopportune times is definitely a pain, especially for the introverted. Life is just easier when you don’t have to worry about these things.

And yet, sometimes an overbooked flight forces you into a window seat, and you remember when you used to pick the window to watch the world beneath. You gaze out into the silvery moonlight, with wisps of clouds floating below you. Tiny patches of criss-crossing light mark the small towns far distant, defying the sea of darkness. The steady glow appear as lichen, growing in odd patterns along the grooves of a rock in an otherwise barren desert.

How many generations of your ancestors lived and died without seeing a sight so glorious?

How many would trade this for slightly more convenient bathroom access?

It is worth noting that this tradeoff does not need to be explained to small children. They instinctively get what’s amazing about watching the world below at takeoff and landing.

Particularly for those of us whose affairs are mostly in order, it is worth being occasionally reminded of the lesson.

(related)

The limits of expected utility

It is probably not a surprise to most readers of this august periodical to find out that I yield to few people in my appreciation for economic reasoning. Mostly, the alternative to economic reasoning is shonky, shoddy intuitions about the world that make people worse off. Shut up and multiply is nearly always good advice - work out the optimal answer, not what makes you feel good. The alternative is, disturbingly often, more people dying or suffering just so you can feel good about a policy.

But perhaps it may be a surprise to find that I not infrequently end up in arguments with economists about the limits of economic reasoning in personal and ethical situations. There is often a tendency to confuse the 'is' and the 'ought'. We model people as maximising expected utility, usually over simple things like consumption or wealth, because these are powerful tools to help us predict what people will do on a large scale. But for the question of what one ought to do, it is particularly useless to do what some economists do and say, 'Well, I do whatever maximises my utility'. No kidding! So how does that help you decide what's in your utility function? Does it include altruism? If so, to whom and how much? Do you even know? A lot of ethical dilemmas in life come from not knowing how to act, which (if you want to reduce everything to utility terms) you could say is equivalent to not knowing how much utility or disutility something will give you. There's ways to find that out, of course, but those ways mostly aren't economics.

More importantly, this argument tends to sneak in a couple of assumptions that, when brought to the fore, are not nearly as obvious as the economics advice makes them.

Firstly, it's not clear that utility functions are fixed and immutable. This is perhaps less pressing when modeling monopolistic competition among firms, but is probably more first order in one's own life. Could you change your preferences over time so that you eventually got more joy out of helping other people, versus only helping yourself? And if so, should you? It's hard to say. You could think about having a meta-utility function - utility over different forms of utility. For the same amount of pleasure, I'd rather get pleasure from virtue than vice. This isn't in most models, although it probably could be included in some behavioral version of stuff (I suspect it may all just simplify to another utility function in the end). But even to do this requires a set of ethics about what you ought to be doing - you need to specify what behavior is utility-generating behaviour is admirable and what isn't. Philosophers have debated what those ethics should be for a long time, but you'll need to look outside economics to find what they are.

Mostly, people just assume that whatever they like now is good enough. Of course, they're assuming their desires don't raise any particular ethical dilemmas. You can always think about extreme cases, like if someone gains utility over torturing people. Most die-hard economists would probably still not give the torturer the advice to just do what gives them utility. They'd try to find wiggle ways out by saying that they'd get caught, but that just punts the question further down the road - if they won't get caught, does that mean they should do it? You'd probably say either a) try to learn to get a different utility function that gets joy from other things (but what if they can't?), or if they're more honest b) your utility isn't everything - some form of deontology applies, and you just shouldn't torture people for fun simply because you find it enjoyable.

Of course, if you admit that deontology applies, some things are just wrong. It doesn't matter if the total disutility from 3^^^3 dust specks getting in people's eyes is greater, you'd still rather avoid torture. Eliezer Yudkowsky implies that the answer to that question is obvious. How many economists would agree? Fewer than you'd think. I'm probably not among them either, although I don't trust my intuitions here.

But fine, let's leave the hypotheticals to one side, and consider something very simple - should you call your parents more often than you do? For most young people, I'd say the answer is yes, even if you don't enjoy it that much. Partly, it's something you should endeavour to learn to enjoy. Even if this doesn't include enjoying all of the conversation, at least try to enjoy the part of being generous with one's time. Though the bigger argument is ultimately deontological - children have enormous moral obligations to their parents, and the duties of a child in the modern age include continuing to be a support for one's parents, even if you might rather be playing X-Box. If you ask me to reason this from more basic first principles, I will admit there aren't many to offer. Either one accepts the concept of duties or one doesn't.

In the end, one does one's duty not always because one enjoys it, but simply because it is duty. Finding ways to make duty pleasurable for all concerned is enormously important, and will make you more likely to carry it out, but in the end this isn't the only thing at stake. There is more to human life than your own utility, even your utility including preferences for altruism. It would be wonderful if you can do good as a part of maximising your expected utility. Failing that, it would be good to learn to get utility from doing good, perhaps by habit, even if that's not currently in your utility function. Failing that, do good anyway, simply because you ought to.

Making the living as interesting as the dead

Dinosaurs are endlessly fascinating things. They may be one of the biggest common denominators interest of among young children, both male and female. They’re huge, they’re weirdly shaped, and perhaps most importantly, they don’t exist. You see only the skeleton, and drawings. As a consequence, you’re forced to imagine what they would have been like. This means that they get a romance and curiosity attached to them that seldom attracts to the animals that the world actually has. One wants what one can’t have, after all. What is Jurassic Park, if not a combination of Frankenstein and man’s attempt to recreate the Garden of Eden?

Of course, if dinosaurs actually existed, they’d just be one more animal in the zoo. You can take this one of two ways. Either dinosaurs are overrated, or we should be more interested than we are in things that actually exist. For aesthetic reasons, I prefer the latter choice - one ought to learn to take joy in the merely real. Of course, getting people to see that is easier said than done.

Doubt it not, a giraffe is as bizarre as any dinosaur. One may appreciate this on an intellectual level, but it is hard to view one with quite the same wonder. The most effective way I've seen to demonstrate the point is at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Firstly, the exhibits move from dinosaurs, to ice age skeletons, and then on to living animals, encouraging the juxtaposition quite naturally.

But most importantly, to get people to be intrigued by modern animals, the most successful trick is to show them not just a giraffe, but a giraffe skeleton. It encourages you to look at a giraffe the way you look at the dinosaurs. And when you do, you realise that it’s comparably tall, wackily elongated, and many of the elements of the skeleton share features with those in the previous rooms. They also show you a real giraffe next to it, completing the imagination picture you had to fill in on your own in the previous cases. But most of the room is filled with skeletons of living species. A rhino or a hippo skeleton could easily be placed in the previous rooms without seeming out of place. If you judge a dinosaur less by its age and more like a child would, as a strange giant animal, the dinosaurs still exist. We just stopped noticing them.

The message is subtle but powerful. You would do well to be less fascinated with dinosaurs, and more fascinated with animals. The dead are intriguing, but so are the living. The latter have the advantage that you can still see them. So afterwards, why not take a trip to the zoo?

Living the Dream!

It seems to me to be a stark reality about human nature that very few (if any) people's lives are actually 'living the dream' when viewed from the inside. The funniest* encapsulation of this sentiment that I remember was on a college t-shirt advertising a boys night out dubbed 'Escape From Reality'. On the back, was the heading in large letters 'Reality', with a picture of Carmen Electra. Underneath it was written 'No matter how good she looks right now, somewhere some guy is sick of putting up with her $#**.'

Salience being what it is, everyone reflects on the problems they have and not the problems that they don't. Are you in poor health? Missing a limb? Do you dislike your family? Are you short of money? Do you have lots of money but hate the job you're in? And if everything else seems pretty much okay, do you still feel a vague sense of purposelessness and ennui?

That's life, my friends. That's everyone's life. Because we live in an age of rampant hedonism and shallowness, the modern ideal of a life well lived is that of movie stars. People ask themselves the question 'would it be fun to change places with Brad Pitt for a while?' The answer is most likely 'Sure!'. But that's a very different proposition from the one that if you had to live like Brad Pitt forever, you wouldn't get sick of it pretty quickly. If you ask Dan Gilbert, it probably would only take you three months to get back to the same level of happiness you were at before. Do you really think that celebrities have no problems in their life that make them miserable? Really? None at all?

There is a certain type of person that goes on dating websites to broadcast how much they LOVE LOVE LOVE their life, their friends, their family, their career! I am always suspicious of these people. I mean, if I thought they were actually this happy, I would be most pleased - there's no resentment going on here. But the first giveaway that something is awry is the forum for this paean - let's just say that the platonic conception of someone whose life is already perfectly arranged probably doesn't include being on a dating website (even if you're just single cruising to meet new people to date - the ideal of that is having lots of friends of friends and meeting them at trendy parties and events).

Rather, it seems like the cult of self-esteem is colliding with the dreary reality of things being not quite right. The message, quite obviously, has nothing to do with the importance of convincing the rest of the dating world that one's life is already perfect (as if that were possible, or even desirable), but much more to do with trying to convince oneself. Cognitive dissonance being what it is, the awful prospect that maybe you made some bad choices has to be blasted away with denial, combined perhaps (in the case of the more introspective) with the sense of putting on a good face.

Personally, I'd be much more convinced by a dating profile with realistic descriptions of one's existence. I sure am REASONABLY HAPPY with the choices I've made so far! My life is quite okay most of the time, other than perhaps one or two respects.

Of course, if people actually started acting this way, facebook would be out of business overnight, as the number of people ritually blasting all and sundry with pictures bigging up their latest trip, party out, or academic year at Oxford would dry up immediately. If you're engaged in 'the dream' and you have a lingering uncertainty that it might not be all you'd hoped, better try to convince everyone else around you that at least you're much happier than they are.

*I say 'funniest' and not 'best' - that title of course belongs to the Great Sage.

Time-Inconsistent Male Hairstyle Preferences

In the world of male hairstyles, hair length functions something like a cross between mercury poisoning and a syphilis infection. Initially you have a small amount of hair, and you periodically treat the problem with scissors, as applied by a trained expert. You look around at the madmen in their ponytails, appearing like an obscene cross between the crying game and a manga appreciation society. "Ha!", you think. "I'll never look like those fools". And you don't. The hair keeps getting cut, the antibiotics get ingested, the madness is kept at bay, and everything goes on as normal.

But then some time in college, you get lazy and don't take your medicine. You start looking at your shaggy mop in the mirror, and the madness slowly takes hold. "Hey", you now reflect, "this actually looks pretty good! Luxuriant, even. Maybe I'll just let it grow for a while". What you don't count on is the fact that the hair itself is poisoning your ability to recognise what a clown you look like.

This is evidenced by the fact that more and more alarming warnings get completely ignored. Suddenly you need to wear a visor all the time to keep it out of your face. Next you're thinking of buying a headband. Finally, when none of that works, you convince yourself  that it would actually look good to have a full on pony tail. Chicks dig it, yo!

At this point, you have become the madman who doesn't realise he's gone mad. Friends and family gingerly try to intervene, but know it's a lost cause. They just have to wait until one day, you get sick of it and finally get a haircut.

And then, the mysterious cycle completes, in that within a few days you get used to it being short again. And after about a month or so, you look back on the long haired photos and reflect, "Wow, that really did look awful. I wonder why I let it grow for so long? I won't do that again".

But you might, reader. Like all time inconsistent preferences, when not poisoned by mercury you will struggle to forecast how you'll feel when in the throes of madness.

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 Flight Risk verdict is in...

So if you haven't been following, Isabella herself graced us with her presence in the comments to my post on the blog 'She's a Flight Risk'. I feel perhaps a little like the atheists in Rowan Atkinson's great sketch on hell - "you must be feeling a right bunch of nitwits". If you didn't read 'She's a Flight Risk' in time, it's alas gone back into the ether - jwz took it down, as he explained.

Way back in the day, AL once observed that the idea that people crave privacy was not exactly right. Instead, quite the opposite is true - as he put it, 'give people a chance, and they can't wait to tell you everything about themselves.'

The urge to confess our secrets is quite a deep one. People are wary, of course, of whom they can trust. But if you give them the right circumstances and audience, nearly everyone wants to tell their story.

I think the reason people get so misled on this point is that they keep thinking of privacy in terms of the desire for physical privacy. If I'm taking a shower, my desire for privacy may be best expressed by Mr Franklin's formulation of the right to be left alone. But the main privacy question these days is that of informational privacy. And here, people want something quite different - the ability to shape the narrative about one's self that the world has, and control the flow of information.

Suppose, like Isabella, you were on the run in strange foreign countries fleeing from pursuing relatives. You knew nobody, you could trust nobody, and revealing any details about yourself, even inadvertently, would spell disaster.

Can you imagine what a crushing burden that would be? You have only two options, both terrible.

The first is a superhuman effort to construct an entire fake back-story, and stick with it every minute of every day, for ever. Every true fact about yourself has to be substituted with some false story, a false name, an entire false identity. This would require not only enormous feats of self-control, but memory too - you have to keep track of everything you've told people already about your previous life.

And even if you manage this, the cognitive dissonance of the whole thing would be overwhelming. As soon as you finally start to get to know somebody well enough that you consider them a friend, you'll feel increasingly guilty about the fact that everything they know about you is a lie. You would desperately want someone you feel you can trust, but the only way you can get there is by demonstrating through long periods of stone-faced lies that you yourself are unworthy of the trust being reciprocated.

So what's the other alternative?

Isolation. Keeping to yourself, bearing the whole burden alone, and feeling yourself slowly being submerged, drip by drip, with the loneliness of unsought solitude.

Reading back over my original post, one bit of the reasoning now stands out as clearly wrong. I previously claimed that if you were going to run away, it would seem unlikely that you would you start a blog to describe your experiences.

The mistake is to assume that the relevant question is "if you were writing down the optimal list of how to disappear, would this include starting a blog about your experiences?". To which, the answer is obviously no.

But from the perspective of human nature, if you were on the run, the urge to do something like start an anonymous blog to describe your experiences would be overwhelming.

In addition, doing it on a blog is likely safer than telling some local person - at least on the blog, even if they know who you are, they don't know where you are.

So consider instead a comparison that I can't believe it took me this long to realise. If one is writing on a pseudonymous blog  questioning why someone would write a story like 'She's a Flight Risk' that might come back to haunt them, on some level this shows an embarrassing lack of self-awareness. Why are you writing stories you clearly don't want attached to your name for all to know?

This blog, unlike 'She's a Flight Risk' is of course located at blogger, and not at a domain registered in Lichtenstein to a specially set-up shell company. This tells you most of the differences between the two of us.

Partly, I have less at stake that needs hiding. But also, unlike Isabella, I know that I would not have the self-control to run everything in the meticulous way needed to completely cover my tracks. This is of course highly related to the fact that I also would not have the nous to run away and cover my tracks physically. I take some precautions, I retain my risks with others, and I tread each day between the Scylla of saying something that might be taken out of context and used against me, and the Charybdis of limiting one's remarks to the banal, the uncontroversial, and the trivial, laced of course with a lingering sense of cowardice.

'She's a Flight Risk' was exciting to read, and the vicarious thrill of throwing away all of one's past and living in exotic parts of the third world has a definite allure.

But at heart, running away is almost always an unhappy story, especially when one is running from something, rather than running to something. Even if we readers never find out the end, I'm glad she's (presumably) no longer on the run. I hope the story turned out well.

Gazing into the Abyss

"During the killings I no longer considered anything in particular in the Tutsi except that the person had to be done away with. I want to make clear that from the first gentleman I killed to the last, I was not sorry about a single one"

-Leopord Twagirayezu, in Machete Season

One and a Half Cheers for MMA

I find myself somewhat conflicted on the subject of mixed martial arts, like the Ultimate Fighting Championships.

Far and away the best thing about them is that they've proven incredibly useful as a vast experiment in the most effective hand-to-hand combat techniques. Previously, all you had was a bunch of different martial arts - boxing, karate, jiu jitsu, what have you - and you'd just pick whatever one seemed cool to you. You'd spend ages developing techniques in that style, and learn how to counter the attacks of someone else coming at you with the same set of moves.

But this left almost completely unanswered the far more important question of what the inherent weaknesses of the style were. In other words, suppose you perfected the techniques of that particular style. What weaknesses would that leave you open to if you were attacked by someone who wasn't limiting themselves to attacking you in the same way that you were planning to attack them?

Hand-to-hand combat instructors, including places like the military, have been interested in this question for ages, and indeed had developed training that was a synthesis of a number of different styles. But UFC really caused this exploration process to explode. By providing a television spectacle and large cash prizes, it gave big incentives for the best fighters in the world to actually explore and come up with different combinations of techniques. The range of styles currently used covers a bunch of principal components (if you will) of martial arts space: ground-and-pound, submission grappling, sprawl-and-brawl (apparently rhyming names have proved popular), etc. These may not have a rich pedigree of historical tradition, but is there really any doubt that learning any one of these would prove vastly more effective than just perfecting a single traditional style?

One of the big lessons that came out of the early UFC rounds is that a lot of traditional martial arts (boxing, karate, muay thai) work great when you're both standing on your feet, but are virtually useless if the guy takes you to the ground. Which, if he's doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, he will. And then your training will have very little to say about what you should do. MMA has injected a lot of life into the intellectual question of fighting styles, and forced a bunch of fossilised martial arts to consider honestly what their strengths and weaknesses are.

So that's cheer #1.

Cheer #2, which is really half a cheer, is related to cheer #1. As MMA has become more popular, people have started to learn MMA directly, rather than studying other fighting styles. To the extent that I think that these MMA synthesis styles are better for self-defense, this is a good thing. If you're going to have to defend yourself in a bar, you want to have the most effective way possible. And giving people knowledge that they think will help them defend themselves can actually make them worse, if it causes them to get in more fights because they think (incorrectly) that they'll win.

Did you ever notice that Bruce Lee isn't often seen fighting his way up from the ground in movies, or dealing with guys holding him in grappling moves? Do you wonder why that is? It's not that it's not possible to keep standing up. It's that you're in a lot of trouble if your fighting style relies on both people standing up and being at a distance from each other, and you don't know how to stop the other guy taking you to the ground or getting you in a clinch hold. You're in even more trouble if you're a guy who's learned karate and gets in a fight without having given this some thought in advance. MMA thus ensures that you know better what you'll actually be up against.

The only slight hitch here is that I think that MMA practitioners don't think fully about the implicit restrictions that MMA places on fights which a bar fight does not. To a lesser extent, this is particular moves like eye gouging, small joint manipulation, groin attacks etc. But the much bigger one is the ability to deal with multiple attackers at once. Skills like taking the other guy to ground in a choke hold are immensely useful in a one-on-one fight. They are disastrous if the guy has three friends around who will kick you in the head as you perform the choke hold on the ground. The more people are attacking you, the more 'stay on your feet at all costs' becomes a crucial principle.

That's okay though. People can figure that out. Overall, I'm a pretty big fan of MMA in the abstract, and am interested in what it reveals about fighting styles. So what's the issue?

The problem is that I just find it rather gross and distasteful to actually watch. Just to check, I went over to the UFC website. The current headline was "Free fight - Shogun stomps his way to a pride title", where the photo showed the guy in question stomping on his opponent, who was on the ground. The bout ended, as it usually does, with one guy on the ground being punched in the face over and over until the referee calls it off. And I just can't help but find this barbarous and unpleasant to look at. Every now and again, one of those guys on the ground is actually being beaten to death. Sure, it's rare, but it's still troubling that during every one of those deaths, the crowd was cheering the guy on doing the beating.

In other words, what I find the most gross about these events is the crowd. I personally don't like watching guys beat the hell out of each other. But lots of other people apparently do. You can dress it up in fancy terms like watching the skill and the spectacle, but at its heart, the appeal is the same as that of the circus maximus, nature documentaries where one animal hunts and kills another, and every other kind of blood porn. People find it exhilarating to watch one creature attack and kill another.

The guys in the ring are professional athletes. They know the risks, and they're paid handsomely for what they do. That's fine. It's their job.

The guys in the audience, on the other hand, are there because they like watching people hurt each other. And try as I might, I can see nothing at all to celebrate in their behaviour. People are of course free to exercise their liberty however they want. But it takes a particularly obtuse sort of libertarian to not consider the possibility that a society where more people exercise their freedom to watch the ballet might have more to recommend than one where people exercise their freedom to watch a boxing match.

This may be human nature, but it's a particularly dark side of human nature, and not one I think ought to be celebrated.

How to save a life

Don Ritchie died today.

Who is Don Ritchie, you may well ask?

A good question.

In Sydney, there is a beautiful stretch of cliffs near the edge of Sydney Harbour called The Gap. Near Vaucluse, the mighty Pacific Ocean rolls in far below, with its turbulence blunted by the sheer distance, it look like a slightly ruffled blue blanket.



It is near this delightful area that some fifty Australians a year, desperate and out of hope, come to throw themselves off the cliffs.

Don Ritchie happened to live near the Gap. His front garden looked directly out on to the spot where people would come to end their lives.

Not exactly a selling point for the real estate brochure. Hang out in your garden long enough, and you'll see people kill themselves.

So what did Don Ritchie do about it?

For 50 years, and with very little fanfare, he talked people down from that terrible ledge.

Over 160 people, in fact. He would speak to them kindly, and invite them into his home for a cup of tea. Sometimes when everything seems hopeless, that's actually all it takes.

He was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia, and named as a Local Hero (a horribly garish title, to be sure, but apt in this case) in the Australian of the Year awards in 2011.  He used the acceptance speech to encourage others to not be afraid to speak to those most in need.

The modern age has resulted in people outsourcing their compassion towards others. When we feel sad about something, we write a cheque to some charity who claim to help the problem. Or in an even more shriveled display of action, we vote every four years for a politician who claims that they'll do something about the problem.

Don Ritchie and his wife Moya, meanwhile, were a two-person suicide prevention program, operating on nothing but a willingness to reach out to those in need.

How many of us will be able to look back on our lives and claim that we made as much difference into the lives of people as Don Ritchie did?

In the end, your morality is only as good as the way you treat the people you meet in life.

Don Ritchie understood that well.

Ave, Atque Vale, Mr Ritchie.

Margins of Error

I'm always impressed with the engineering associated with ATMs. Think about it - they have some of the smallest margins of error of just about anything outside of the aerospace/submarine/firearms industry. Made a mistake counting? Either you're spewing out money, or short-changing people and pissing off customers. (I'm guessing the former keeps bank managers up at night more than the latter does). Sure, the process is simple, but they get the number of bills right an astonishing amount of the time. I'm no engineer, so it's all just black magic to me.

But I do notice that the reliability is good enough that most of the time I don't even bother counting the money that comes out. Think about that - you're putting your faith in both the honesty and crazy technical competency of the bank. That's a crazy level of trust, but then again first world societies often have levels of trust that seem amazing when you think about them.

The Psychology of Infidelity

I've often wondered about the mindset of people who embark on extra-marital affairs.

In particular, I wonder how they feel when they get back to their spouse and see the person being loving and caring. Do they get overwrought with guilt? Probably not, if only by the anthropic principle: the ones that did either confessed, or at a minimum broke off the affair. The ones that maintain it have clearly found some way to deal with it.

One understandable reaction, particularly for those who have started recently, I think would actually be relief and gratitude. I think the threshold for this would be that you would have to feel a bit bad about it, such that you'd been privately bothered before, but not enough to break it off or confess. Then the person being nice would let you fool yourself into thinking that everything is pleasant and happy. You'd wracked yourself a bit over it, and the curse of knowledge means that you're possibly worrying that your wife or husband might know about it. But then you see them, and of course they didn't know - they're glad to see you, and everything is okay. Their happiness would mix with your relief, and my firm guess is that in the short term you'd be nicer to your spouse, partly out of guilt, partly out of misplaced gratitude for temporarily mollifying your reflections. This is worth reflecting on, because I imagine that most people's mental model of 'how would I spot if my significant other were cheating on me' would probably involve them being distant and cold, but I'm not so sure this would always be the case.

I imagine that those that do it for a long time must end up somehow making peace with the cognitive dissonance between
1. I love my wife
2. I enjoy boning my secretary
3. I am not fundamentally a bad person.

Exactly how they do this likely varies from person to person - the mind is very creative in such instances. But the day to day interactions probably become more mercenary - once you've resolved the inner conflict somehow, you'd probably focus more on the question of how to not get caught. Pragmatic precautions, clearing phone records, emails, the necessary fastidiousness of constantly covering your tracks to stave off the inevitable.

I remember once sitting on a place next to some youngish businessman, probably mid 30s. Tech guy, American, reasonably good looking. There was wi-fi on the place, and he was instant messaging someone. While I wasn't going out of my way to spy (certainly not at first, anyway) his conversation was visible to at least me, and the few seats around him. In it, he was talking to some girl, most likely from work I guess. The girl was mentioning a friend of hers, and how this friend might be up for something with the guy. After an extended period of flirting, the girl said something about how it was weird that she'd been with the guy ('been with' was how it was phrased, but 'slept with and clearly still had some feelings for' was silently screamed), and was now setting him up with her friend. The plane got close to landing, and he put away his laptop. When the plane was taxiing towards the runway, he pulled out his phone. It became quite clear from his 'Hi Honey' discussion that he was talking to his wife. He then asked to be put on to his kid, and spoke a bit to some young child.

I remember thinking what a bizarre way this was to live one's life. People are strange, alright.

On Human Adaptability

Every now and again, I find myself rather impressed at just how adaptable the human body is.

A great example of this is jet lag. This is a phenomenon that is essentially unique to the last hundred years of human existence, out of the god knows how long period that we've been evolving. The body's circadian rhythm is designed to work with fairly evenly spaced days. While the period of day and night changes with the seasons, these changes are very smooth.

Hopping on a plane from New York to Brisbane, however, is an incredibly abrupt change that evolution didn't design us for. There's no particular reason to think that this might not result in you taking months to get back to a proper schedule, if ever.

And yet, it takes a couple of days and things are pretty much back to normal. The systems designed to deal with gradual changes to the seasons are able to deal with a random 36 hour day thrown in without skipping much of a beat.

Evolution may be the blind idiot god, but it makes some pretty damn fine optimisation procedures nonetheless.

Conversational Dynamics

One of the things about being an introvert (The Couch*: You're an introvert? And you write a blog? Unheard of!) is that conversation with strangers is not something that comes naturally. Like athletic ability, musical ability, or mathematical ability, conversational ability is a skill that you acquire either through being born with an innate aptitude, or something you need to work to acquire. Or both, in reality.

The difference between conversational ability and the other three is that there is very little formal training for how to make small talk, versus tons of training available for the others.

I tend to describe myself as a 'reformed introvert'. The ability to make small talk is not a natural skill of mine, but one I've worked to improve. It's still not great, but the measure of success is that people are sometimes surprised when I self-identify as an introvert.

But being an analytical type and an introvert (The Couch: Wait, you're socially inept and a wannabe intellectual, and yet you write a blog? No seriously, call the newspapers!), the question of exactly how to make conversation better is something I've had cause to think about. The guys that do it naturally don't need to think about it - it's only the guys who need to learn it who have to back out what exactly the naturals are doing.

As far as I can tell, the central challenge of conversation is how to find a topic that you both (or the group) have interesting things to say about, and then maintain that interesting thread. And when that thread ends, you then need to be able to transition to a new interesting thread.

Now, if you think about all the stuff that you know about, there's surely something  that you and the stranger could have an interesting discussion about - football, politics, military history, food, hip hop, whatever. When conversations fail, it's usually because you weren't able to find that joint interest.

The place where conversations seem to break down the most is at the transition between topics. This includes the opening, which is just the extreme form of the transition, from nothing to the first interesting area.

The people that are good at making conversation are almost always good on the transition part. This involves a number of related skills:
1. Being able to detect when a conversation idea is coming to a natural conclusion, and steering things towards something new before the awkward silence sets in.
2. Being good at identifying a new topic of likely interest, and
3. Being bold and good at changing the topic to unrelated areas without it sounding forced.

Out of the three, I think the last one is probably actually the most underappreciated. If there's one skill that can improve conversation the most, I think it's the ability to be confident to replace a silence with a segue to a new subject smoothly. And usually this is just about the transition, and the willingness to do it.

On a slightly different topic, I was reading this article the other day where...

Random question, what are your favourite restaurants in this town? I always end up going to the same places, and I'm trying to expand my list... 

So the other day, I was at the supermarket line when this guy...

The reason that conversation changes are important is that natural transitions only work well when the original topic was itself interesting. Sometimes you can get stuck on sort-of-boring topics, but the only natural conversational progressions are to other boring topics. A good conversationalist is able to figure out when things need a subject change, and move the topic along without it sounding jarring.

The final skill is having an appreciation of what might make an interesting topic, and boldly searching it out. This sometimes needs changes of course - you think something is interesting, but the audience doesn't. Reacting to these kinds of subtle cues is what stops you becoming a bore.

It sounds strange to break down conversations in this way, and almost painfully obvious. But as far as I can tell, the people who aren't good at making conversation rarely seem to think about it as something they need to explicitly work on. Which is why they don't get much better at it. It's only the weirdos like me who make attempts to actually improve the quality of the conversations they have with strangers, aiming to make them successively longer and more interesting.

If you start out as an introvert, it seems like your choices are to feel like an idiot trying to explicitly learn how to make small talk, or get left behind in a world that values social skills.

Sign me up with the first group.

*I stole the 'The Couch' gag from Jonah Goldberg.

"Do you want Thai, or Italian?"

One of my minor quests in life is to find ways around small inconveniences in life arising from  people asking (and answering) the wrong question. For instance, I've written before that when someone asks what you want to eat for dinner, the answer 'I'm easy' is often profoundly unhelpful.

But there's another case where people answer the wrong question - the 'Do you want Thai or Italian?'. The reason it gets tricky is that it's not clear whether the person is expected to balance the competing interests in their head before giving their estimate of the consensus best choice, or whether they're just meant to state their own preferences directly, with the consensus to be formed later.

In other words, suppose you weakly prefer Thai, but you suspect that your friend would prefer Italian. Do you just answer 'Thai'? Do you answer 'Italian', based on the assumption that you don't mind Italian and your friend wants it?

In my estimation, the most useful answer is to just state your own preferences - once we know how each other feels, it's easy to balance the competing interests. But the second one is fine too, as long as it's understood by both people what's going on. Things get frustrating when your friend doesn't know which answer you're actually giving - do you really want Italian, or do you just think he wants Italian? What if neither of you actually want Italian, but each thinks that the other one does?

Ironically, this problem gets worse when you have more regard for the other person's feelings. People are reluctant to just say the thing they want, because it might sound too demanding, or because it could be interpreted as a lack of concern for what the other person wants.

Thankfully, this is a situation that can also be solved be answering both questions with the appropriate phrasing. These days, I'll go for something like the following:
'If it were just me eating, I'd lean weakly towards Thai. But if you feel more like Italian we should do that, because I'm happy with that too.'

Bam! Problem solved. They now know your true personal preferences, which is the actually useful part. But you've also given your estimation of the estimated compromise decision, without having it confused for your true preferences. Plus you've demonstrated ample concern for their feelings, which means that you don't look like a tool for stating what you personally want.

Let's just say... you're welcome.

Chateau Holmes - helping you navigate potential minor faux pas situations by spotting the potential confusion in the question.  

Hobbes was right

Apparently a fungus infects carpenter ants, feeding on them and turning them into zombies that walk around erratically. The fungus makes the ant walk towards the understory of the forest, where the fungus grows better, then finally spores grow out of the dead ant's head. (Via Radley Balko.)

The universe is not your friend. All of us are mere grist to the mill of evolution - if there is a niche for some creature (virus/fungus/insect/tiger) to use you successfully as a food source, and they happen to be adapted enough for the purpose, they will do so. If you want to know why I celebrate the triumph of man's economic development and its ability to shape the natural environment, this is why. It's easy to think of nature as some gentle and cute-looking endangered species, like the Iberian Lynx. But you would do just as well to also think of the fungus in Thailand slowly devouring carpenter ants. This, my friends, is the world we live in.

The great Robert Frost observed all this a long time ago.

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth --
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth --
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.  

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small. 

Or as Thomas Hobbes put it in Leviathan - the life of man in the natural state is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."