The UN and Famine

Check out this amazing anecdote, from one of John Derbyshire's readers:

A little acknowledged fact is that there was no famine in Somalia prior to the U.N.’s arrival. To be sure, there were localized food shortages and hunger, but no widespread famine.

The famine began when the U.N. arrived and began giving away food. With free food available, farmers cold not sell their crops and so they stopped farming; the U.N. became the major source of food.

Once U.N. aid convoys were the only viable source of food, it was easy for the warlords to seize the unarmed convoys and food warehouses and monopolize the food supply. Presto, instant famine.

This sounds exactly right to me (and not just because of my strong presumption about the UN's tendency to increase corruption and misery). One of the surprising parts of Amartya Sen's research into famines was that, contrary to what everyone presumed, many famines had little to do with underlying shortages of food. Instead they arise from complex interactions to do with price. The Bengal famine of 1943 happened (as Sen showed) during the middle of an economic boom. As Jeffrey Sachs explains:

"Sen demonstrated that the Bengal famine was caused by an urban economic boom that raised food prices, thereby causing millions of rural workers to starve to death when their wages did not keep up.

And why didn't the government react by dispensing emergency food relief? Sen's answer was enlightening. Because colonial India was not a democracy, he said, the British rulers had little interest in listening to the poor, even in the midst of famine.

This political observation gave rise to what might be called Sen's Law: shortfalls in food supply do not cause widespread deaths in a democracy because vote-seeking politicians will undertake relief efforts; but even modest food shortfalls can create deadly famines in authoritarian societies."

So it seems the Somalian famine wasn't the classic Sen case of rising food prices causing people to not be able to afford food. But it still demonstrates the centrality of prices in understanding famines, and how lowering the price of food to zero is a great way to eliminate all food production. It fits in with Sen's idea broader of the 'failure of exchange entitlements' - the disruption in prices undermines the normal ways that people exchange services (farmers stop farming because the disruption causes them to be uncertain of whether their crops will be worth anything, even though they were eventually highly sought after). It's also consistent with the ultimate Sen punchline that modern famines almost always occur in part due to authoritarian governments.

Via Ace of Spades

The Veneer of Civilisation

From Theodore Dalymple, in the WSJ

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

It is indeed.

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

British Tax Dollars At Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Classy!

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Market for Picking Up Women

Check out this awesome site:

http://www.weeplaces.com/ratiofinder/

It displays and ranks vanues according to their ratio of women and men present (sadly only for NY and SF), based on check-ins at foursquare.

I was interested in this, because it provides a decent test of a hypothesis I'd had for a while. Which is this:

In equilibrium, the probability of being able to pick up a chick will be the same at all bars in a city.

The bare bones sketch of a model is as follows (you can add complexity as you like):

-Assume that all men and women are identical

-Assume that guys want to maximise their chances of picking up a woman

-Assume that each woman will only go home with at most one guy

-Take as given the distribution of women in the city.

Guys know that they will crowd each other out, and so bars with lots of women are like underpriced assets - they offer higher pickup probabilities, and so men will flock to them. The men will begin to crowd each other out, lowering their probability of success. This will continue until the probability of pickup is the same at all bars (the market returns to equilibrium).

You can add more realistic assumptions (distributions of quality, some women want to pick up guys and some don't, women don't want to be hit on by sleazebags) and got from partial equilbrium to general equilibrium.

But the punch line is the same - the probability of pickup should be the same at all places, as long as information and movement are free.

So you should suspicious of statements of the form 'Oh man, we should go to bar X, we're going to score there for sure!', for any value of X - gay bar, college bar, sports bar, it doesn't matter. For it to be true, it requires that there's either incomplete information (guys don't know without costly search which bars have women) or there's not free movement (some bars are exclusive and don't let you in).

So the ratiofinder predicts that the percentage* of men and women should be the same everywhere. Ratiofinder scales points by the number of total visitors, which is a shame - if they scaled point size by the percentage excess of men/women, the size of the points would be a quick comparison.

One thing that does scream out arbitrage, however, is the choice of venue - the vast majority of 'Nightlife' venues have more men than women, while 'Shops' and 'Parks' have more women. This suggests the importance of 'day game'.

I would hope that tools like this should help the market clear, and more guys get laid - seek alpha, be alpha!

*Depending on the form of the model, it might be either percentage of women or excess number of women - the punch line that the probability of pickup is the same should be robust either way.

24 Carat Gold

From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:

Pandora

I recently went back to using Pandora, the internet radio station that selects songs based on your musical preferences. I tried it a few years ago and got a few interesting suggestions, but it was pretty hit and miss.

After a gap of two years or so of not using it, it's gotten way better in the interim. I think it's to do with the way they predict which songs you'd like. Originally, they had a bunch of guys who assigned attributes to the songs (acoustic guitar, major chord instrumentation, 'wispy male vocals' (really) etc.) and these were prominently featured ('this song came up because you seem to like [attribute X]). Coding up vague song descriptions struck me at the time as an incredibly labour-intensive way of doing it, but they seemed to be giving it a go, so good for them.The Pandora About Page still describes this process.

While this is just a hunch, what I suspect they actually do now is use the much richer data set that their users provide when they select which songs they like and dislike, and which songs they skip. This is outsourced to thousands of people, not fifty, and reveals actual likes and dislikes (not just a presumed love of all 'wispy male vocals', however defined).

I suspect this is the case, because:

a) songs that come up feature less musical overlap than before on song type, and more on taste - Owl City came up on my station for Jack's Mannequin the other day. Musically, they're quite different. Demographically, they're both near the centre of the bullseye of Stuff White People Like.

b) The 'Why did this song come up?' tab has now gone, as it has to when the answer to every question is 'because that's what happened when we inverted the giant matrix and extracted the principle components'

and

c) It's gotten a lot better, as it does when you start using really huge datasets with really good information extraction mechanisms. The Jack's Mannequin station is almost a pitch perfect playlist for SM's music tastes.

And I suspect this was the plan all along - the whole Music Genome thing is mainly a seeding mechanism (and for new songs, which don't yet have any likes or dislikes), and the real information was always in user choices. At a minimum, if these guys aren't using this information, they're crazy.

Put it this way - the algorithm is now good enough that I listened long enough for the frequent ads to bug me, and actually paid for the upgrade (perhaps the first 'freemium' product where I bought the extra part). Proof that good matrix decomposition can really add value!

Signs you may be watching the wrong show

When an ad for yeast infection medication comes on, after being talked into watching an episode of 'Bones' on Hulu. I note in passing that such ads don't feature during House, The Simpsons or Southpark. Maybe those marketers are on to something after all.

From the Sublime to the Ridiculous

Still on the topic of war, here is some military insight mixed with gentlemanly erudition and politeness of the highest degree. From A. E. Housman:

Here dead lie we because we did not choose
  To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
  But young men think it is, and we were young.
If there's a poem with more wisdom condensed into four lines, I have yet to read it.

From the Vault

I was thinking about Gary Brecher ("The War Nerd") after reading this Newsweek piece  about how rebel groups use the Toyota Hilux as a military vehicle. The whole column is basically cribbed from old War Nerd articles from a few years back, but I couldn't find them when I searched.

Anyway, the search caused me to read through some of his old classic columns, and came across this awesome (and clearsighted) piece about how you can win an insurgency. None of the options are pretty, but wars never are. In the end, you're better off being honest about the crappy options available than pretending there are better ones that just haven't been tried enough (more diplomacy! Increase poverty relief!)

I particularly loved this paragraph about the possibility of creating a civil war by playing factions off against each other:

Not even those old-school Brits could do it now, in Iraq. Because whereas the 1920-vintage IRA had a fairly disciplined leadership to play games with, we've got -- who? -- to talk to in Iraq. You'd be better off trying to divide and conquer the roaches in your kitchen. Nobody runs the insurgency, and nobody really runs the Shia militias either, not at national level. Sadr? He's their poster boy as long as he mouths off the way the hardliners want, but he'll go the way of Sistani if he tries to curb the boys' enthusiasm. They don't need help. They're having the time of their lives. It's not so much fun for the other focus groups, like women and men over 25 but for Iraqi boys from 15-25, these are the Wonder Years.

If ever there was a master of combining gallows humour with brilliant military insight, Gary Brecher is it.

Thoughts on The Social Network and The Olympic Games

I watched 'The Social Network' this evening, and found it excellent. I think Scott Adams got it right when he said that (regarding the portrayal of Zuckerberg) the movie was "massive respect from a genius in one field (Sorkin) to a genius in another". The guys who should be really cut are the Winklevoss twins, mercilessly portrayed as pampered stuck-up rich kids without enough talent to start a real company.

Anyway, the movie left me with a feeling I can best describe as 'life choice envy' for Silicon Valley types starting their own companies and attempting to change the world. Actually, 'envy' isn't quite the right word, as there wasn't any sense of resentment of their success.It was more a feeling of being impressed by people who really are trying to do something big with their lives, and a slight hollow sense that one's own aims and achievements are insufficiently ambitious.

I originally encountered a similar sensation when watching the Olympics as a teenager. There was a dawning sense that a) this was something that I'd abstractly wanted to do when I was a child, and b) I wasn't ever going to get there. There are two potential ways of interpreting this. The first is that one should have tried harder, as in aiming for world-beating success in some endeavour, and that one's own decisions were too slack and unambitious. This was always the initial feeling I got when watching the Games. The second interpretation (which usually came after a day or two's reflection) is that one is simply envying an outcome, not a decision - what you really want is the feeling of great success and winning a gold medal, not the whole package of the gold medal plus what's required to actually get it. 

Once I learned enough economics to think about the problem in econ terms, for the Olympics specifically it became apparent that it was probably a very poor thing to aim at. The Olympics is a classic tournament, and people tend to be overconfident when estimating their chances of winning, and hence overinvest in tournaments. The other big-time mistake is that people screw up the expected benefit by focusing on the highly salient outcome of the gold medal, and not the many, many non-salient parts, including:

a) The guys who came 2-8th in the final and always wondered 'what if I tried a bit harder?'

b) The guys who didn't make the final at all, and felt like complete failures

c) Everyone, winners and losers, spending years and years denying themselves tons of pleasures to do nothing but train, a cost that is spent before you have any idea whether you'll succeed at all, and

d) The winners themselves after their sports career is over, feeling hollow and aimless as the rest of their life will always pale into comparison with that one high point, drifting ever further into the past

Salient, but not frequent

Frequent, but not salient

So the Olympics itself is mainly option b) - you're really envying a feeling, not a decision. I personally think that the Olympics bet has a negative ex ante expected value for the vast majority of people actually competing, let alone for guys like me who started without an amazing natural ability. (I'm athletic, but well aware of where I fit in the distribution).

Which brings me back to The Social Network. For me, computer science was in many ways the Road Not Taken. I'm happy with the road of finance and economics, but my pursuits are mainly academic. It's hard not to feel a sense of being impressed by guys who actually start tech companies, employ people, struggle to meet payroll every month and eat ramen instead of pulling several hundred K salaries, all because they're aiming at creating a world-changing company. I remember thinking this when meeting for the first time a friend of a friend who is my age, and is out in Silicon Valley doing just that. Starting a tech company, in other words, was the Olympics that I might have actually had a chance in. 

All in all, I don't think I would want it, for similar reasons I don't want to enter the Olympics - starting up a business isn't actually a tournament, but it does have highly skewed payoffs, and tends to attract overconfident people who underestimate their probability of failure. 

But I did leave with the feeling that I used to be more ambitious in the tasks I am doing. And that I should aim higher, and be willing to fail. Risk and Reward are generally correlated, in life as in finance. That is the correct lesson, I think - focus on picking bets with good expected payoffs ex-ante, but don't be afraid of working hard and betting big if the price is right.

As Daniel Burnham put it:

“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will themselves not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die.”

Preach it, Mr Burnham! Onward!

Prison - Worse, Better and Different Than What You Might Imagine

At least according to this guy, who Marginal Revolution linked. Like I'd have any clue!

(be warned, some of it is pretty gruesome, but all of it is interesting)

Some samples of bits that surprised me:

An old timer told me that when he first went inside, in the 80s, prison was all about cliques. There were different gangs, people stuck together because of ethnicity, even religion. Back then there were Irish Catholic cliques, Nation of Islam cliques - even white collar guys started cliques to avoid getting stepped on. 

One thing the boss' do very well is create an atmosphere of constant paranoia. If you get shaken down and you get contraband found on you, they'll stick you in solitary and finger your best friend for setting you up. If you come inside with a pre-existing gang affiliation, like a lot of black guys do, they start by stepping on your friends straight away and blaming you for it until you're a pariah. Forget about the yard being full of big groups of guys chilling together. No one hangs with anymore than three people for a stretch. If you're seen with a big group, you'll be targeted by the screws. Mostly, people do their time alone. Pacing the yard, or even just ignoring their cell mates completely. 

That gets to you more than anything. The constant suspicion, and knowing you're alone.

This is a minor relief, as I'd always imagined that if I ever found myself in prison, I wouldn't be good at fitting into any kind of gang (other than the 'skinny white guys' gang, which is to say, the easy targets). I'm getting my @$$ beat either way, but at least they'll be coming in smaller groups.

What did you miss most about sex while inside? Just the sex itself or the intimacy? I know there are cliches on both sides about that so I was wondering what your thoughts were.

You know how a lot of people that hang around these boards will say how they're desensitised to sexuality? How years of the most twisted porn the Internet's underbelly can offer has made them numb? I guess I was like that going in. If you had have asked me, the day before I went inside, what my ultimate sexual fantasy was I'd have said something stupid like 'Emma Waton, a rubber tube, two mexican fighting fish, a chainsaw and a bucket of grease'. 

Now, I s*** you not, my answer would more likely be 'a beautiful woman that loves me'. 

Every convict has a jack bank. Scraps of magazines, smuggled porn, that kind of thing. I used to keep mine under the inner sole of my sneaker. If you took a survey of what convicts keep in their jack bank, you'd be shocked to learn that mostly, it's women's faces. The single most sought after item in the common area was the TV guide. Because you'd get full page ads for movies and beautiful women.  

Huh. Interesting. Not what I would have imagined, but I'd definitely believe it.


 Read the whole thing. Most fascinating piece I've read in the past month.

Free advice for musicians composing song lyrics

If you're ever tempted to make one of the following crimes against the English language, you should probably shoot yourself in the face. For some reason, a lot of the worst ones relate to the area of love. Behold, The Most Annoying and Clichéd Rhyme Schemes in the Song Lyrics World:

-Rhyming 'Maybe' with 'Baby'. Apparently equivocation is the most common sentiment people feel vis a vis their loved ones.

-Rhyming 'Making Up' with 'Breaking Up'. Oooh, such a clever contrast! When you do this, my hemorrhoids start acheing up.

-Rhyming 'Love' with 'Glove', 'Dove', 'Above' or 'Uv' (Mark Steyn had a great essay about this). For love, you're best off not putting it at the end of a line.

-Rhyming 'Die For you' with 'Lie for you' and/or 'Cry for You'. What kind of loser would want these to be their expressions of love anyway?

-In much the same fashion, rhyming 'Knees' with 'Please' (double points off if you're 'on your knees, begging please'. Get up off your damn knees and show some backbone, man!)

-Rhyming any combination of 'mad', 'bad', 'sad', glad' or 'had'. Honestly, this is so hackneyed, obvious and infuriating

Doing any of these will place you permanently on my $#!7 list - not that this on its own is reason to shoot oneself in the face, but your lack of creativity will be.

Nothing like topical comics

In celebration of wagging work today, here's an awesome cartoon from The Oatmeal.

Topical eczema, on the other hand - that you don't want.

(I don't have it, just happen to remember it listed on this face wash in my bathroom as a kid)

Good Advice

Stop Speaking in Bull$#!*

Make sure you read the hilarious ripping on a Microsoft Press Release:

Let’s turn to the granddaddy of software development:

Windows Phone 7: A Fresh Start for the Smartphone

The Phone Delivers a New User Experience by Integrating the Things Users Really Want to Do, Creating a Balance Between Getting Work Done and Having Fun

That’s a headline and sub-head from a press release. (Thanks, DF)

What the hell does any of it mean? What do users really want to do? Absent Robbie Bach and J. Allard, I don’t trust the word “fun” anywhere in a new product announcement from Microsoft, either. They probably mean an optional Comic Sans UI.

I've often wondered what marketing people are thinking to themselves when they write this kind of rubbish - do they actually imagine someone reading it and thinking "Wow, I've always wanted a phone that could balance my need to get work done and have fun! This is exactly what I've been after!!".

It's one thing to think that people are stupid enough and believe a lot of dumb things (generally true). But it's another thing to think that even dumb people will be motivated by these kinds of empty platitudes. That, I just can't fathom.

Untaxed Externalities

Here's a question I was pondering recently.

What's the biggest negative externality that isn't taxed?

It's not going to be the usual things people think of - pollution, carbon dioxide (!=pollution unless you're the EPA, but that's another story), noise, that kind of thing. Even if the aggregate impact of pollution or CO2 is large, the individual impact of your car is pretty small. And while noise might cause a lot of irritation, it's hard to blast your stereo at a whole city. You could argue for something like dumping botulin in the water supply, but that is taxed - with a prison term.

The key criteria are both the cost to each person and the number of people that you can affect with a single action.

So here's my suggestion: traffic accidents on freeways.

On the freeway the other day (thankfully going in the other direction), I came across a car that had overturned. Traffic was backed up for about 5 miles behind it. Think about that. Even just counting the cars I passed (let alone the ones still to arrive) we had 5 lanes of traffic, 1 car every 15m or so equals 5 *1609 * 5 / 15 ~= 2682 cars. If each person had to wait an extra hour because of the jam and their time is worth, say, $15 an hour, you've just caused $40K worth of loss to the citizens of your city, over and above the cost to any car you hit.* That's not even including the people who missed meetings and dinners that were worth a lot more than $15 an hour to them. And while you'll get a slightly higher insurance premium, you won't pay anything to the people you inconvenience.

Not bad for half a second's carelessness.

*(this is an extremely rough calculation - to do it properly you'd need to consider the rate of cars entering and exiting, and the duration of the blockage, as well as the possibility of the blockage having memory even after it's cleared - my hunch is that the real number is even larger).

Best Correction Ever

When spellcheck isn't enough

"Correction:

This blog post originally stated that one in three black men who have sex with me is HIV positive. In fact, the statistic applies to black men who have sex with men. "

Via Jonah Goldberg's The G-File

High Praise Indeed

Of Sir Thomas More:

The steadfastness and courage with which More held on to his religious convictions in the face of ruin and death and the dignity with which he conducted himself during his imprisonment, trial, and execution, contributed much to More's posthumous reputation, particularly among Catholics. Many historians argue that his conviction for treason was unjust, and even among some Protestants his execution was viewed as heavy-handed. His friend Erasmus defended More's character as "more pure than any snow" and described his genius as "such as England never had and never again will have." When he knew of the execution, Emperor Charles V said: "Had we been master of such a servant, we would rather have lost the best city of our dominions than such a worthy councillor."

More was greatly admired by Anglican writers Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson. Johnson said that ""He was the person of the greatest virtue these islands ever produced".

Winston Churchill wrote about More in the History of the English-Speaking Peoples: "The resistance of More and Fisher to the royal supremacy in Church government was a noble and heroic stand. They realized the defects of the existing Catholic system, but they hated and feared the aggressive nationalism which was destroying the unity of Christendom. [...] More stood as the defender of all that was finest in the medieval outlook. He represents to history its universality, its belief in spiritual values and its instinctive sense of other-worldliness. Henry VIII with cruel axe decapitated not only a wise and gifted counsellor, but a system, which, though it had failed to live up to its ideals in practice, had for long furnished mankind with its brightest dreams."

Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton said that More was the "greatest historical character in English history".

I think it's a good rule of thumb that anyone praised by Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Winston Churchill and G.K. Chesterton is almost certainly a cool dude. I think Churchill well identifies the reservations that a conservative would have felt when presented with Henry VIII setting up the Church of England.

To get but a small flavour of More, consider how he composed himself as he was about to be executed for treason:

When he came to mount the steps to the scaffold, he is widely quoted as saying (to the officials): "I pray you, I pray you, Mr Lieutenant, see me safe up and for my coming down, I can shift for myself"; while on the scaffold he declared that he died "the king's good servant, but God's first."

Is there anything more wonderfully English than making a gentle ironic joke as one is led to the executioner's block? And not only that, can you imagine declaring yourself a good servant of the man who set you up for execution, rather than sending him off with a hearty "@#$% you"? That takes some serious gentleness and restraint.

(Inspired by Popehat)

Huh

My Dad has always been suspicious of dentists overservicing, giving you lots of treatments you didn't actually need. While this didn't seem implausible, I wasn't entirely sold on the (highly ad hoc) way he seemed to arrive at this conclusion.

As evidence on the subject, check out this gem from Dan Ariely, in an interview with NPR:

Professor DAN ARIELY (Behavioral Economist, Duke University): So, you know, you go to a dentist and the dentist - X-ray your teeth, and they try to find cavities. And one of the - question you can ask is, how good are dentists at that, right?

Prof. ARIELY: So imagine: You came to a dentist; you got your X-ray. And then we took your X-ray, and we also gave it to another dentist.

Prof. ARIELY: And we asked both dentists to find cavities. And the question is, what would be the match? How many cavities will they find, both people would find in the same teeth?

SIEGEL: And I'd really hope it would be somewhere up around 95-plus percent.

Prof. ARIELY: That's right. It turns out what Delta Dental tells us is that the probability of this happening is about 50 percent.

SIEGEL: Fifty percent?

Prof. ARIELY: Fifty percent, right. It's really, really low. It's amazingly low. Now, these are not cavities that the dentist finds by poking in and kind of actually measuring one. It's from X-rays. Now, why is it so low? It's not that one dentist find cavities and one doesn't. They both find cavities, just find them in different teeth.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Prof. ARIELY: And here is what happens. Imagine you're a dentist, and you see a patient, and you really want to find a cavity because you get paid more if you find cavities and you can fix them. And the patient is already on the chair. He's already prepped. You might give them the treatment right now, really good marginal income for you. How is this motivation to find cavities - will influence your ability?

Now, you look at an X-ray - which is a little fuzzy and unclear, and there are shadows and all kinds of things are happening. What happens is this unclarity of the X-ray helps, in some sense, the dentist to interpret noise as signals, and find cavities where there aren't really any.

SIEGEL: And fill them?

Prof. ARIELY: And fill them, and drill them, expand them. I don't think they ever tell their patients, hey, I thought it was a cavity but turns out it was just a mistake.

If I had more time and less money, I'd definitely consider taking my x-rays to multiple dentists and only filling the teeth that multiple dentists agreed on. As I don't, I end up following the procedure used in so many cases of big information asymmetries: bend over and take it.

Things that make me dislike Justin Timberlake less

Via Kottke, check out this awesome video of Justin Timberlake and Jimmie Fallon doing a rap performance.

Weight Loss and Agency

I saw this excellent billboard ad today for the lap band. The slogan read as follows:

'Diets Fail! The Lap Band Works!'

I just loved the attribution of agency in the first part. The diet, that inanimate abstract object, is failing. How exactly the diet fails is not clear, but it's certainly not your fault. You have nothing to do with it.

Compare the following alternative formulations:

'You fail at dieting!'

'You fail to lose weight!'

'You fail to stick to your diet!'

These would suggest that:

a) that you need to try harder, although

b) your cause is probably hopeless anyway

neither of which spurs one to buy expensive surgery.

I have a lot of sympathy for overweight people, and I'm far from sold on the 'fatties just need to try harder' school of thought. That said, ignoring any choice component at all is a hilarious stroke of marketing genius.

Gay Marriage

Still on the subject of marriage - I was out at dinner the other night with my friend OH, and two friends of his. I'd known that the two guys we were meeting were a gay couple (one I'd met before). We both found out when we got there that they'd actually gotten married the day before Proposition 8 passed in California. And they were such a great advertisement for the cause of gay marriage - both lovely people, they'd been going out for over 15 years, easily finishing each other's stories and and clearly very happy around each other. It's such a different side of gay culture than the multiple-partner promiscuity that (rightly or wrongly) is often associated with being gay.

The big question to my mind is this. For gay marriage, I can see what's in it for the gay community. I think that their ultimate aim is not marriage per se, but a society where being gay is treated no differently than being heterosexual, and this is a part of that push.

But I can't see what's in it for the individual gay men. At the moment, they're currently getting the following benefits:

-No pressure to pop the question. "Geez Bob, I'd love to get married and guarantee never to be with anyone else, but this damn homophobic society won't let us!'

-No nagging questions about the same from busybody friends and relatives.

-Long-term relationships end in a weekend, not in a harrowing drawn-out years-long court procedure that costs tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and increases acrimony all round.

-Long-term relationships end without you losing half your stuff.

-Long-term relationships end without you having to make ongoing payments, possibly in perpetuity, for the privilege that you used to be married to the person .

And you're trading this for what? The right to pay more taxes, and some reduced hassles in the case of hospital visits and death?

Wise up, gays! You don't realise how good you have it, and you're fighting to throw it away!

Gay Marriage:

Not New (Clearly), But New To Me

The great Hank Williams, singing 'Nobody's Lonesome For Me'. Hank Williams is totally excellent, and his absence was a serious gap in my collection. He manages to make three-chord slide guitar country music sound manly. And when the lyrics are ostensibly self-pitying and you're including yodeling falsetto in there too, that's a pretty mean feat.

It's also amazing to read about how irresponsible alcoholic country stars acted in the 1950s. Some things never change - multiple children to multiple mothers, and unstable relationships characterised by jealousy and turbulence. But what's different is the tendency to get into (and out of) irresponsible marriages, rather than just groupies and baby-mamas. In Hank's case, they also tended to be hot on the heels of previous failed marriages:

On October 18, 1952, Williams married Billie Jean Jones Eshlimar (born 1933) in Minden, Louisiana.It was a second marriage for both (both having been divorced with children). The next day two public ceremonies were also held at the New Orleans Civic Auditorium where 14,000 seats were sold for each ceremony. It has been written that Williams wanted the two public ceremonies in an attempt to spite Audrey who wanted him back and threatened that he would never see his son again. After Williams' death, a judge ruled the wedding was not legal due to the fact that Billie Jean’s divorce did not become final until eleven days after she married Williams.Hank's first wife, Audrey, and his mother, Lillian, were the driving force behind having the marriage declared invalid and pursued the matter for years. Little mention was made that Williams also married Audrey before her divorce was final. He married her on the tenth day of a required 60 day reconciliation period.

Man, those days are gone and not coming back.

Surrender Monkeys

From a conversation with GS, a quote that I thought was awesome:

"Americans are the biggest surrender-monkeys when it comes to defending their own culture."

Ah, so true!

Funny that - the French will furiously defend they culture, but surrender if you hit them with a well-aimed spitball, while the Yanks will pulverise you with a B-2 Bomber, while apologising profusely and agonizing over whether they had a right to impose their imperialist culture on you.

The Price is (Rapidly Becoming More) Right

I recently read this great article on Slate about guys who go through used bookstores with a device that scans the barcode of books, checks what it's selling at on Amazon, and buys it if it can be sold at a profit. Genius! The usual crowd of market-haters don't like it, but markets will clear whether you like it or not, either rapidly by barcode scanner or slower by smart people doing the same task (but wasting lots of their time memorising the same Amazon price information in less accurate form).

If you ever doubted that there is a clear and unambiguous rating of book quality (and that prices reflect this), have you ever seen the standard book collection a the typical 'take a book, leave a book' place? They're truly awful. A whole lot of people seem to be implicitly engaging in the same type of trades as the guy above, swapping out anything of interest with the world's lamest romance novels, junk thrillers, and other literary detritus. I think this is about the worst fate that can befall an author - having your book as a permanent fixture on a TABLAB shelf. It means that if the market is clearing, your book was literally the worst book in the median person's bookshelf.

The existence of devices like this, however, will make it harder to implement one of my previous philanthropy plans for if I'm ever a senile old billionaire with too much time on his hands. My plan was to buy up a huge number of ultra cheap editions of Shakespeare and Dickens, and distribute them to TABLAB places. Not only does it distribute the gains to a whole lot of people who weren't expecting it, but there's two great positive externalities. One, people are reading more great literature. Two, you can take all the terrible chick lit novels you swapped out and put them in landfill, saving anyone in the future from spending valuable hours reading them that they'll never get back.

Tropes that make no sense - the 'I Love You' pickup line

I was watching the first episode from the new season of House the other day, and found myself irritated that they decided to repeat one of Hollywood's most nonsensical staples: characters who declare that they love someone, either immediately after the first kiss, or (even worse) before they've even kissed for the first time.

Honestly, is there anyone who is a) above the age of 13, and b) not a functional retard who has actually done this? Is there anyone, man or woman, who would not frantically start looking for the exits if presented with this pearler of a pickup line?

I suspect part of the reason for this is that scriptwriters need a quick way to create emotional tension. Just putting a margin note to the effect of 'have a bunch of slightly awkward pauses and uninspired sounding conversation as you both look a little too long at each other, then look away pretending it didn't happen' might be a bit hit-and-miss for some actors. But Hugh Laurie? Really?

In the episode, Cuddy remarks that 'I told you I loved you, and you didn't say it back.' House has some throwaway joke to brush it off, which sounded jarring given his character. Surely someone with such a piercing (albeit cynical) understanding of human nature, along with a healthy dose of misogyny, wouldn't just let that slide?

My answer would have been 'No $#!7, eh? That's because we hooked up for the first time less than 24 hours ago, and that's not quite how love works for me.'

Rain and Profligacy

Rain is the great equaliser of cars. If you're a slacker like me, it's 'Nature's Free Car Wash'. If you're diligent in keeping your car clean, it's less of a cause for celebration.

I always found it hilarious that people would get frustrated that they had just washed their car and it was raining. Now, I can relate to the thought process that goes 'Dammit, I could have been sitting on my ass on the couch last Sunday instead'. THAT makes total sense (to the extent that regretting ex-post outcomes ever makes sense).

But the people who are irritated because the rain will ruin their wax job, leaving water streaks? Those folks are truly living on a different planet to me.

Privacy and the Success of Facebook

A long time ago, my good friend AL once observed that the notion that people valued privacy was vastly overstated. As he put it, 'Give people a chance, and they can't wait to tell you everything about themselves.' Amazingly, this holds true for unflattering things too - law enforcement has known for a long time that criminals will confess an enormous amount, if given the right encouragement. The urge to tell people about ourselves is deeply rooted in human nature.

Given all that, what exactly do people mean when they say they want 'privacy'? For most people, it's not that they want to be left alone. Celebrities aside, very few people suffer from having so many damn people wanting to hang out with them that they never get time to themselves. As a wagering man, I'd say most people have too few people calling them to invite them out to do fun stuff, not too many.

What people really mean, I think, is that they want to control the image of themselves that other people have. Often they want different images for different people, but that's part of it too. As long as you can give them that power though, they'll tell you everything. I think that distinction is why privacy advocates never understood how many people signed up. "They're all being fooled! Don't they know that anyone can see this stuff?" Of course they do. But as long as it's flattering stuff, who cares?

The narrative of every photo album is the same:

"Look at me! Here's me out at this rad party that you never heard about! Here's me surrounded by these three hot chicks, and it's implied that I might be sleeping with them, even though I'm not! And you're sitting at home on facebook! Here's me on holiday at this fabulous tropical island, while you're at work trying to waste time without catching the boss's attention!"

The worst offenders were friends who went off to Oxford and Cambridge, and apparently became infected with a burning desire to tell everyone how awesome things were there, in photo form, constantly.

Honestly, with the business plan of 'let's give people the chance to broadcast contrived, idealised versions of themselves to the world, with the explicit aim of making their friends and acquaintances jealous', how could you NOT make money?