London, part 2

1. You get what you pay for; therefore, a default expectation of free things is potentially damaging. I'd much rather pay 50p for a public restroom that is open and operational, and in fact not horrifically disgusting, than wander miles to sneak into coffee shops in San Francisco because all the public restrooms are shut down and terrifying.

2. The mathematics exhibit at the Science museum is AMAZING! I always expected math museums would be trivial and dull, but noooooo. If the new national museum of math in NYC is anything like this, I am much more excited to go see it now (and very bummed out I'm not going to make it in May after all...)

3. Specifically, the crazy mechanical contraptions people came up with to draw various types of curves, copy and scale images, integrate arbitrary surface areas, and even compute fourier transforms, before computers existed, are freaking mind-blowingly awesome. Does anyone know of a good book about these kinds of things that explain in detail how they work? I was baffled by most of them. And extremely thrilled at the ingenious simplicity when I did understand them.

4. I also unexpectedly got to see the Phillips machine! I've been wanting to ever since I heard of it. (Is there a version somewhere you can play with? Or a simulation?)

5. Dear London: there does not exist a beer that improves with temperature, above a little over freezing. Sincerely, the rest of the world.

6. Who knew I knew so many people in London? Great time with Iva and Pavel, Henry, Matt[3], James and Susanna, Simon, Ed, and Alyssa and Dan. And of course all the other people I met from LBS and TADC.

7. The upside to perpetual cold dreary drizzle and 90% humidity is that Oxford (presumably non-Urban Britain in general but that was as far as I went) is beautifully lusciously green and blooming.

8. Matt and I spent literally half an hour doing nothing but giggling at place names on the tube map (actually a lot more cumulatively...)

9. The GPS prime meridian is a couple hundred feet off from the actual prime meridian, as settled by international agreement to coincide with the meridian of William Hershel's telescope at the Royal observatory at Greenwich, which itself is a dozen yards from various other meridians used by former astronomers with different telescopes. For some reason I was amused by this pragmatism. Almost every other standard is fundamentally tied to some astronomical phenomenon, but longitude is so arbitrary each astronomer just picked their own.

10. It's also amazing to think that only a century or so ago, people were dying by the thousands due to our inability to measure universal time or longitude accurately.

11. Jetlag this direction is awesome. Never have I gotten so much done before 6:30am. (I anticipate a change of heart around 8pm.)

12. Oh right, the real reason I went to Britain... The doctoral conference was pretty fantastic actually. Nice not to be at the bottom of the totem pole and to talk to lots of very smart new people.

13. Ok, no more having fun until I get a job. (Although it's surprising how much work you can get done en route and while waiting and when your boyfriend is asleep, etc, when you bring your laptop with you everywhere you go and are in a constant motivational panic about how much you need to be doing...)

London, so far

1. Urban youth acting like punks with British accents are hilarious.

2. London is amazingly global. A tiny fraction of the people/languages/accents I've encountered have been British. Slight selection bias admitted.

3. Nonetheless, some foreign students I was talking to last night confirm my suspicion that foreigners in London feel more permanently like foreigners than in, say, New York. The American identity is based on diversity and everyone being an immigrant. Anyone can be American, but not anyone can be British.

4. If I pay 10 pounds per night to stay in a dormitory hostel room, do you really think I'm going to pay a pound per hour to connect to wifi? Price discrimination fail. (Phone tethering setup complete.)

5. Upon visiting Westerminster Abbey, I'm reminded (since living in Germany in middle school) how strangely integrated religion is in official business in Europe. Then I realize that by global standards, I'm actually the weird one for taking separation of church and state for granted. Then I experience a wave of patriotism.

6. We say that celebrities are American royalty. That's not true. Royalty exist on a higher plane who are supposed to deserve their status due to some endowed intrinsic quality, perhaps literally by God, whereas we fundamentally realize that celebrities are normal people who earned or stumbled into their position. We ultimately recognize the perverse fetishism that perpetuates celebrity, but no such undercurrent applies to royalty.

7. Again, it's strange to think that I'm globally the weird one for so thoroughly internalizing the mantra that all men are created equal.

8. Norms and expectations matter far more than legality. (Well ok, duh, but all the subtle differences remind me, and it's a point worth remaking indefinitely.) How on earth else could this modern, peaceful, inclusive society have evolved from such a weird mix of government, the royal family, and state religion? While meanwhile elsewhere, all the proper legalese and institutional setup in the world can't end long-brewing religious wars?

9. The best and worst thing about being a social scientist is that it's so hard to focus on the experience rather than the meta-experience.

10. The best thing about going to church (I went to Westminster Abbey's Evensong, for the sake of the nice choir music, despite feeling approximately like how I imagine a sheltered religious boy must feel in the Castro for the first time: very out of place and a little dirty, and afraid to attract attention) is the funny outdated words. "Holpen" = "helped". "Abode" is in fact the past tense of "abide". "Endue" is another form of "endow". If I'd had a smartphone to look this stuff up on on the fly as a kid I probably would've been much more interested in the Bible.

11. The Indian food here really does taste different. I don't know whether I like it better or worse; it was excellent, but distinctly different. (Further experimentation necessary :)

12. The world is small. Had dinner with a friend who randomly saw my facebook post about going to London, where she lives. Turns out she goes to the school that is hosting my conference. Went to a party with a bunch of people who will be there next week.

13. Why haven't döner kebabs caught on in the U.S.?

sinking in

Grad students are supposed to talk to lots of professors to get constructive feedback on their work. On the surface, this is useful because you get ideas and suggestions from people who are much more experienced in the field, and the more people you talk to, the more variety in suggestions you get from different angles.

True, but also, if you're as dense and stubborn as I am, it's helpful because you hear the same things from many people. And eventually the message hits a weak point in your skull and you actually hear it.

Funny how information aggregates. A dozen similar conversations with no noticeable Eureka moment, but after it's all said and done I'm not where I started anymore.

efficiency versus innovation

Matt Yglesias has an interesting post on San Francisco, which despite obvious terrible public policies resulting in awful inefficiencies, is a hotbed for innovation.

I take his point that economists focus too much on promoting efficiency and not enough on promoting innovation. We definitely understand how to do the former much better.

But, they aren't alternatives. And if we don't know very well how to recreate the magic formula that led to the startup culture in San Francisco, we might as well fight to rectify the inefficiencies. The examples of urban density and building regulations he cites in particular, if fixed, would make room for more participants in that innovation culture. If you don't know how to create innovation, might as well expand it by improving efficiency.

this is not welfare increasing

You know what's ludicrous? I've had to go through over 3 months of back and forth with the human subjects committee because I want to pay people on MTurk a few cents for accurate answers on a 5 minute survey. (If it was a simple unincentivized survey, it would be exempt from needing human subjects approval. Although I would still have to go back and forth with CPHS to prove it was exempt...)

I don't know how these people live with themselves. Bureaucracy, especially at a giant public university, is always cumbersome, but this is taking it to a new level.

race and the welfare state

I mentioned previously that Alesina and Glaeser's book had a convincing argument that race plays an important role in the difference between attitudes towards redistribution in the U.S. and Europe. In particular, the racial diversity in the U.S., and strong correlation between poverty and race, causes the median American to be less in favor of redistribution than the median European because they see poverty as an out-group problem. If they identified more closely with those in poverty, they would have a hard time being so against welfare programs. I buy their argument.

But their book also documents striking differences in beliefs and attitudes. Americans, in short, are much more likely to believe that poverty can be escaped with hard work. Can't this also be explained by racial diversity in the U.S.?

What I'm getting at, is that not only is poverty correlated with race, so is economic mobility. For one example, poor Asian immigrants are currently doing much better than poor African Americans, for some reason. We infer that cultural values (like studying hard, strict childrearing, pinching pennies to save for the future) that correlate with race must (overall) have something to do with economic mobility. Therefore, even though we observe about the same average level of economic mobility as Europeans do, we are more confident attributing that mobility to personal choices, rather than luck. If, like in Europe, there were not such a clearly visible proxy variable for those cultural traits, it would appear to be a lot more random who was able to escape from poverty and who wasn't. Europeans don't have the same experiential basis for saying "if group X can consistently pull themselves up by their bootstraps, why can't group Y?"

Alesina and Glaeser show that income mobility is similar between the U.S. and Europe, and yet beliefs and attitudes are consistently different. Despite their honorable attempts to keep normative judgments out of their positive assessment, they betray an unfounded interpretation in which this disparity is evidence of crazy American beliefs, rather than crazy European beliefs. Their evidence proves that beliefs are different, but not which ones are correct.

Up Goer Five style thesis

My behavioral economics theory thesis using only the ten hundred most common words (inspired by XKCD, who else?). This was surprisingly easy to do, I suppose since economics studies what people do and the most common things we talk about are also what people do... Nonetheless, circumlocutions abound. (By the way, after typing in babyspeak for awhile, it is dangerously satisfying to type 'circumlocutions abound'...) I suspect it'd actually be much easier to understand if I could just say "social image".

We humans do things that we don't want to do sometimes. Often this is because everyone agrees that we should act in one way in a given situation, even when we might want to act another way. We agree that doing the wrong thing is bad, so we feel bad inside if we do it. Also, we don't want other people to look down on us for doing a bad thing. If a lot of people can see what we're doing, we especially don't want to do something bad, because we don't want everyone to look down on us. Because of this, one way to make people do the right thing is to make sure that everyone else is carefully watching what they do and looking down on them when they do something bad. 

But sometimes people don't agree on what is the right thing to do. Some people will think that one thing is right, and other people will think that another thing is right. Then what are we supposed to do to avoid having other people look down on us? It isn't clear whether having people look down on someone will still work to make them stick to what they really believe is the right thing when people don't agree on what the right thing is. That is the question I am answering. 

I found out that if we want to be seen as always sticking to what we believe is right, even if everyone else thinks something else is right, we will more often do what we think is right when we are being watched by other people. But, if we want other people to agree that what we are doing is right, we will more often follow the crowd. Sometimes the crowd believes in something that is good for the world, so this is good. But sometimes the crowd believes in something that isn't always good, so we might do bad things in order to avoid being looked down on. 

I also found out that sometimes we might do bad things even if we only want to be seen as always sticking to what we believe in. This can happen if there is a group of people who are very good at always sticking to what they believe in and they all agree on what is right. Then, even if most people don't agree with them, we can be seen as sticking to what we believe if we follow them. If they happen to believe in something that is bad for the world, we might do something bad by following them. But, not very many people will do this. If too many people did this, then everyone would know that they were pretending to believe in the same thing as that group, so people would look down on them again. 

I also found out that if we want to be seen as sticking to what we believe in, we can't agree on a middle ground very well. But if we only want other people to think that we are doing the right thing, even if we have to break our own ideas of what is right in order to do what everyone else thinks is right, then we can agree on a middle ground. If one group would look down on us a lot if we did what another group thinks is right, and that other group would look down on us a lot if we did what the first group thinks is right, then we might want to follow the middle ground instead of either of doing something that anyone thinks is right. 

I also found out that if people have to decide ahead of time what they think is right, then people will always agree on what is right. Sometimes, they might agree on something that is bad for the world, though. One way to make sure this doesn't happen is to make sure that we won't be looked down on too much for doing something else. 

All in all, I found that people don't act the same when they are afraid of being looked down on. But the thing they are looked down on for matters. If we want people to do the right thing and for people to agree on things that are good for the world, we have to figure out which way people want to be seen in the real world.

cross-cultural economics

In the summer of 2003, I was a pre-freshman research assistant at Caltech when Jean Ensminger gave a lecture to summer students on her research collaboration that was studying how notions of fairness vary around the globe. Her claim was that societies with more market integration have more strongly developed notions of 50-50-split type fairness norms. I was so fascinated by her talk that I immediately decided to double major in economics, having no idea what economics was other than this very behavioral/anthropological project. (It worked out ok though :) Ten years later, the influence of that talk is still obvious; I've studied social norms and fairness all through grad school.

Now, there's a nice journalistic treatment of (part of) this research program. Very good to see!

...

(Although, it's pretty annoying when journalists inject so much of their own rumination and mold facts onto a more grandiose scaffolding. Nope, I just couldn't let it go without a token amount of whining about science journalism...)

books

Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference, by Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser: Interesting breakdown of the reasons why Europe and the U.S. have found themselves in two different equilibria w.r.t. redistribution policies and attitudes toward the welfare state. I think they wrote off social norms much too quickly (arguing that norms differ because of a top-down process initiated by institutions which are the main cause.) I was very interested and convinced by their argument that race plays a role by allowing the median American to see poverty as an outgroup problem. (But more on that later.)

A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution, by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis: Good book about the evolutionary aspects of social preferences, which is a different angle than the one I research but one that I find recreationally interesting. I wish I knew more about the historical debate/controversy w.r.t. group-level selection. It seems entirely non-problematic to me. I had to rush through this too fast because someone put a library hold on it, so maybe I missed some of those subtleties.

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, by David Brooks: I don't think it's possible to improve on this in the popular-social-science category. My hero-worship of David Brooks continues unabated if not strengthened. (I've also never been so unable to keep from laughing out loud on the BART when listening to text-to-speech on headphones... I got a lot of weird looks from other passengers during his hysterical descriptions of the "Composure Class"...) Anyway, the book weaves together personal narratives of the individuals from two generations with mounds and mounds of research pertaining to every stage of their lives in a way that makes it very hard to stop reading and impossible not to see the relevance of that research. I am too prone to writing off minor cute experimental/empirical results so being forced to read an integrated literature review that ties it all together for me is really nice.

dan savage is a great feminist

Dan Savage is one of my favorite people (and is even better speaking than writing, if you can imagine...), and his most recent letter is a perfect example of why.

Q: What are the effects of perpetuating the myth that gay men should all be tanned and chiseled Adonises? Because that is all one sees. -Not All Adonises

A: ... [T]hose images of tanned and chiseled Adonises can do harm. But if all one sees are images of tanned and chiseled Adonises, NAA, then that’s all one is looking for. Yes, the media—gay and straight—focuses too much on the young and the hot. But if you’re not seeing gay men of all ages, sizes, shapes, and colors, NAA, it’s because you’re choosing not to see them. Open your eyes.

Wow, can you imagine if this was the standard rhetoric of the shrill vocal minority of feminists who love to blow societal factors out of proportion and to fixate on trivial details that 90% of the time have nothing to do with gender in the first place, thereby undermining the credibility of valid complaints that really do deserve attention? I swear to you, as a female in a long diverse string of male-dominated cliques who has never faced a personal reason to give a single thought to gender issues and would never have thought about gender discrimination at all had it not been stuffed down my throat by a string of reactionary feminists, all that fixation is more damaging to your own cause than the original issue...

economists are cute

I love this footnote (number 6 in the pdf):

"That is to say that they do seem to have wide validity as normative criteria (for me, as well as for Savage); they are probably\footnote{I bet.} roughly accurate in predicting certain aspects of actual choice behavior in many situations and better yet in predicting reflective behavior in those situations."

I translate that as "As a careful scientist, I must point out that this statement is technically an opinion. Yet since I am willing to bet on its truth, you should rationally update your beliefs in the direction of accepting the statement as likely fact." All captured with a two-word footnote, and as if any of that were necessary to elaborate in the first place :)

when intentions, rather than competence, rule

I'm frequently on the right-wing end of the spectrum in bay area social groups (mostly because I have the gall to believe in gains from trade and respect for individual choice.) Many people seem shocked that I'm almost as hostile to the extreme political atmosphere here as I was to the extreme political atmosphere in Oklahoma (where I was invariably on the far left-wing end of the spectrum...) How could you possibly even compare the hostility of social conservatives to the bumbling head-in-the-clouds misguidedness of many bay area progressives? they say. One leads to unconscionable persecution of minority groups; the other leads to inefficiencies in government. And yes, obviously I'd trade the former for the latter*.

But it's sentences like these...

Grant seekers were told that in the next funding cycle, they would be required — for the first time — to provide quantifiable proof their programs were accomplishing something. The room exploded with outrage. This wasn't fair. ... [A nonprofit CEO] suggested the city's funding process should actually penalize nonprofits able to measure results, so as to put everyone on an even footing. Heads nodded: This was a popular idea.

Sigh.

*on the relevant margin.

economics of happiness

I can't decide whether I hate or love this article more. Her criticisms are related to valid criticisms of happiness research, but she infuriatingly portrays happiness researchers as guileless soothsayers earnestly extrapolating from their immature results. (She is herself an economist, for the record, so I'm at least tempted to forgive the exaggeration as well-founded professional-insider criticism.)

It's true that the 1-2-3 happiness scale is widely used, but not because anyone honestly believes it captures happiness. It's an easily measured proxy variable for something related to happiness (we're not exactly sure what yet). Studies keep using the same proxy variables across many studies not because they have concluded that it is in fact the best measure or that it measures what they actually want to measure, but because this allows you to merge and compare studies coherently. Many other such proxy variables are used in tandem. Happiness research is currently on a simultaneous quest to understand what, exactly, these things measure, and how to measure more relevant things better, and to learn about happiness itself.

But it's definitely true that statements such as "happiness has not risen since the ’50s in the U.S. or Britain or (over a shorter period) in western Germany" make happiness researchers sound like idiots and mislead layreaders. Measurements of some happiness-related proxy variable that we don't fully understand may have not risen over that time, yet I doubt many people would choose to live in those earlier times, so you just can't make that statement with a straight face, caveat emptor. The oft-mentioned finding that "having children makes you less happy" is equally ridiculous for obvious reasons: that billions of people want children, enjoy having children, and don't regret having children, either at the time or especially after raising them, is overwhelming evidence that these results say more about the metric than the thing we hope it proxies for.

the beauty of economics

Apparently it takes a rabbi to express the beauty of economics! This is completely wonderful:


Economics writers would do well to become less like dismal scientists and more like this guy. Almost no one emphasizes that economists are just as much seeking to maximize human well-being as anyone else, but the methods that they know will work are frustratingly passive and often counterintuitive.

(The skill of making economics inspirational is also one of the reasons I love David Brooks. Milton Friedman was also often excellent at it.)

[Stolen from MR]

books

Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut - I could not put this book down. And I never say that about fiction. It flies by in a whirlwind of gripping, thought-provoking, never-mundane action. Several of Vonnegut's (excellent) tips for writing fiction have to do with conciseness, and he executes fantastically.

The Honest Truth About Dishonesty, by Dan Ariely - I've read too many books that pertain to this subject lately so I can't give a fresh opinion. Not bad. But it felt too much like a conglomeration of studies and observations wrapped in a book cover, rather than a cohesive argument. I liked Liars and Outliers better - it's thinner on content, but he beats you over the head with a well-formed point.

What the Dog Saw, by Malcolm Gladwell - Finally read some Gladwell. This book was more thought-provoking than anything else I've read in awhile, but in the unintentional way, where the existence of the book itself and the industry and society that led to it being a bestseller was the train of thought, rather than any of his theses. But, if I start ranting about it, I'll never stop. Another day, another post. Punchline (and I know I'm not the first to say so): he's an amazing writer. Don't trust anything he says.

...

(In the last six months or so, I've been commuting to San Francisco by BART several times a week, which provides time when the only thing I can do without getting carsick is listen to my kindle with text-to-speech. Heavy nonfiction is hard to listen to because the stubbornly non-telepathic device refuses to pause when I stop to ponder a sentence. Fiction that is engrossing enough to listen to is exceedingly rare. Hence, a deluge of light pop-social-sci...)

placebo effect

Very cool article on research on the placebo effect itself as a treatment.* (Via Kottke)

It makes me wonder two things in particular. (But read the article; most of it is about other things :)

First, what have drug companies already worked out about the procedural aspects of the placebo effect, in the course of designing RCTs in a way to maximize the chance of an outcome favorable to the drug?** This may not have been considered knowledge of direct interest in the past, but now it clearly is, and I bet they have a wealth of data/local knowledge of value. The article inadvertently makes it clear what great interest they have in placebo effects:

That study ... showed that patients with a certain variation of a gene linked to the release of dopamine were more likely to respond to sham acupuncture than patients with a different variation—findings that could change the way pharmaceutical companies conduct drug trials...Companies spend millions of dollars and often decades testing drugs; every drug must outperform placebos if it is to be marketed. "If we can identify people who have a low predisposition for placebo response, drug companies can preselect for them," says Winkler. "This could seriously reduce the size, cost, and duration of clinical trials…bringing cheaper drugs to the market years earlier than before."

Second, have they looked at Hawthorne / experimenter demand effects? Patients' reports of their symptoms and side effects are quite likely biased, and if they've been told that they should expect something, their reports are likely biased to pay more attention / exaggerate those things. What if they are told (at the time of the report) that they should be as objective and comprehensive as possible in their reports, for the sake of science, because they may or may not have been given the real drug and the doctors need accurate assessments for evaluation? Are reports standardized in such a way to maximize objectivity and comprehensiveness? Are multiple reports made over time to control for individual variation (as the article notes that one of these placebo studies was unique in doing)? Are all reports accompanied by objective physiological measures? The article suggests these things are important, but then implies that the cause is a discrepancy between subjective and objective experience, rather than false subjective reports. Both possibilities should be investigated.***

The researchers had hoped to find improved lung function with both the real and sham treatments; what they found instead was that only the real treatment yielded results—the others showed no significant improvement. Yet when Kaptchuk’s team measured patients’ own assessments of improvement, the researchers found no difference reported between the real and sham treatments: the patients’subjective responses directly contradicted their own objective physical measures...This discrepancy between objective and subjective results is precisely where the danger lies. "Asthma can be fatal. If the patient’s lung function is getting worse but a placebo makes them feel better, they might delay treatment until it is too late."

*I've idly wondered about this previously, but this article suggests that maybe honest expectations, created by directly lying to the patient, are not even necessary to trigger a placebo response after all, contrary to my intuition. Pretty cool.

**Not to necessarily accuse drug companies of anything unethical; you could just as easily describe that as "what situational knowledge, derived from years of experience, have drug companies acquired on how to keep doctor interactions / medical procedures as neutral as possible in order to get the cleanest measure of the impact of a drug"...

***Of course, I'm sure they have been to some degree; I'm commenting on a journalistic treatment, and we all know how reliable/thorough those tend to be...

Happy birthday to Bayes' rule

On the 250th anniversary of the posthumous publication of Bayes' rule, this is appropriate. Good introduction to the frequentist/Bayesian debate.

I've been pretty confused by that debate - what exactly is the controversy, as parodied by e.g. xkcd - so this was nice to read since it put methods I'm familiar with in the context of the debate and doesn't focus on settings in which one side or the other is a straw man. Having read this, I still can't say I see what the big deal is. Obviously if you have a reasonable prior, you should use it, and obviously if you don't, some additional assumptions will be required to draw any kind of useful conclusion, and whatever kinds of assumptions you allow yourself will make a difference... both camps make assumptions about forms of distributions, models, etc, so I think the author is overly sympathetic to the frequentists when he says they claim for themselves the 'high ground of scientific objectivity'.

missing pieces

After you stop taking classes, you learn things in a much less systematic fashion, reading papers as you come across them, looking up papers or topics in books as they become relevant to your work, and so on. So every once in awhile (too frequently, it seems) I come across a paper that is so cool and feels like something I definitely should have known about years and years ago.

It's not too hard to stay in touch with what is currently going on in your field of interest, by looking at new journals and working papers regularly. But there are still decades of old research, and areas of research that used to be active that you don't hear much about anymore, or that you don't notice because you don't know anything about it to start with, etc, and there's not a good way to systematically make sure you at least know the most important bits of that enormous mass of knowledge.

So, in the process of pseudo-random search, I sometimes come across things like this, and get all excited about them, but in order to share them, I have to write a long blog post about how I'm not really dumb and out of touch, I'm just a normal grad student that missed a cool paper from 17 years ago...

(Now, if anyone has suggestions on how to avoid, or avoid paranoia about, stumbling upon and revealing such holes in your knowledge during job interviews, I would appreciate hearing them...)

over-sentimentality

This is an excellent article, stolen from David Brook's 2012 Sydney Awards list.

(Read the whole thing; it's much shorter than most of the long-form articles that make the list. But the super long ones, in particular this and this, are also fantastic and worth the time.)

there is an upside

(to the flyover states.)

Today I took a direct (¡I didn't know those existed!) flight to Oklahoma City from San Francisco. Everyone waiting at the gate was noticeably friendlier, chattier, dressed in cheesier Christmas garb, and more pleasantly accented, than the rest of the airport. When's the last time you heard Californians or New Yorkers laugh jollily at their shared conundrum of having their Christmas day flight delayed almost three hours, thereby missing out on late dinners with family, for inexplicable reasons? That level of good-naturedness just doesn't exist on the coasts...

As always, I got off the plane, and grinned upon seeing (I somehow always forget) the bathrooms labelled "tornado shelters" and ubiquitous cowboy hats. Ok, that much is my own personal nostalgia... but surely friendly agreeableness is universally considered a positive attribute.

And now back to a bitchy coastal tone of speech that I have to adopt to finish this post. (It's become too ingrained; sorry...)

I am so sick of hearing people who have never spent any time in the midwest/south, born-and-bred northeasterners mostly, say, with crinkled noses, "I can't stand that southern accent... I just can't take anyone seriously who talks that way. I hear a drawl and I automatically think you're stupid." Is there any other cultural marker in the world about which such a statement is considered acceptable? I can't think of one.

Behavioral macroeconomics

From Tyler Cowen:

Given the slow economy, it is undesirable to reverse all or even most of the Bush tax cuts. A small but publicly trumpeted clawback of some of the cuts would send the right message to voters, while minimizing the macroeconomic fallout. The nice thing about symbols — single shots across the bow — is that they often can suffice. 

If people already rationally expect these tax increases, this signal would do neither good nor harm, but perhaps such an approach would nudge political expectations closer to reality without draining the economy.

Interesting. A way to pander to misguided good intentions while the substantive policy does the right thing?

I'm not whether I like where this leads, but it's interesting...

I do like this, for sure:

In our country, the typical approach to fiscal deadlines is to kick the can down the road. But that assumes we are kicking a can, not a grenade. It’s time for at least one party — and why not the electoral loser? — to do something just a little shocking. It can give in on much of the negotiations, but insist that both sides start stressing the fiscal truth.

intentional legal arbitariness and motivated reasoning

I think you could write a nearly identical article to this one, replacing "terrorism" with "hate crimes".

But there's a lot more sympathy from lefties towards hate crime legislation introducing intentional arbitrariness into law so that rulings can be flexibly harsh when motivations are of a certain kind, than there is towards legislation that introduces similar arbitrariness when motivations can be labelled with terrorism.

Intentions alone shouldn't drive policy or interpretation of policy.

(And, given certain intentions, coming up with or discarding logical objective reasoning that services those intentions is very easy...)

(I mean, it's easily to justify something you want to believe. Instinctive belief comes first, logical justification comes second.)

books

Pnin, by Vladimir Nabokov - So good! (As of course it must be, given the author.) Hilarious, and every page contains a sentence that makes you stop and gleefully re-read it four times because no one ever has or ever will again describe something more perfectly. It's only 184 pages but I savored it as long as a normal length novel. The story barely even has a plot (it's basically a long character sketch) and it doesn't even matter. And as a bonus, the character, an endearingly socially oblivious academic, is wonderfully lovable and relatable to... people like me.

Liars and Outliers, by Bruce Schneier - He intended to write a book about cybersecurity, but instead wrote a book about behavioral economics, because, well, behavioral economics is the actual driving force in most things :) It seems to be neglected by economists, since it wasn't written by an economist, but it was good (a little light on content, but very well organized/written), and I found it really entertaining to read a book on behavioral economics written by a computer scientist who stumbled on behavioral economics and felt the need to write a book about it. Somehow it's more credible that these things are really important when written about by someone other than the primary researchers.

The Lives of Christopher Chant, by Diana Wynne Jones - Dumb kids book I read for book club. Maybe I would've liked it as a little kid. As an adult, the operations of the fantasy world and magic were irritating and the book got worse and worse as it went on. Prying your way through "strands" of magic spells? Really..?

marriage equality

This election cycle made me depressed every time I encountered evidence of its existence, so I pretty much avoided any contact with it until election night, but was then wonderfully surprised that marriage equality passed in all four states in which it was a ballot measure, after thirty losses in a row until now.

Social conservatism is rapidly becoming obsolete. I am only curious to see whether the Republicans realize this and morph into a true fiscally conservative/socially liberal party before Democrats are forced to confront the economic reality of their spending desires* and morph into that party themselves.**

Anyway, fiscal policy isn't what I intended to rant about. Back to marriage equality.

When Obama came out in favor of marriage equality, I was dismayed by his reasoning. He has been phenomenally terrible for civil rights***, and that was a perfect opportunity to show that he hadn't forgotten about them. But no. Rather than "This country was founded on the principle of an equal right to the pursuit of happiness for all citizens, whether we agree with those decisions or not. It is constitutionally unAmerican to silence those who outrage us; it is equally unAmerican to deny civil rights to those whose preferences we don't understand. I know wonderful homosexual parents of my daughters' friends. But whether or not they are wonderful is entirely irrelevant to whether or not they should have the same rights as the rest of us." we got "Now that I've gotten to know some homosexual people and observed that my daughter's don't think it's strange at all that their friends have two moms or two dads, I've come around to the idea of marriage equality." How pansy-ass is that??

(Is it possible that he's just hesitant to make such an argument because he's black and doesn't want to identify too closely with the black civil rights movement? I would hope to god that it goes the other way. I optimistically cling to the hope that he was in favor of marriage equality all along but took the politically cowardly safe road, and had to come up with a coherent narrative to justify the switch. He obviously couldn't say he suddenly realized the logic of civil rights two years ago...)

Anyway. I've been very optimistic for a long time that the country is past the point of return on gay rights, and that it's just a waiting game, so when I heard those comments, I was more annoyed by the logic than hopeful about the impact it would have. But if that logic, however flawed, somehow served to sway voters in the four states who Tuesday affirmed their respect for all partnerships, then that is wonderful, and it's worth it for the thousands of lives that are drastically improved as a result.

Congratulations to Maine, Maryland, Washington, and (any day now...) Minnesota.

*Not that the Republicans are much better at facing economic reality. But at least they give it more lip service..?

**As unlikely as the former sounds, I think the latter is actually less likely, simply because Democrats will solve the fiscal issue by morphing into an astronomical tax rate, European style welfare state, rather than to scale back their entitlement fantasies or learn how to make tough, cost-effective choices...

***and even worse, while Bush got the whole civil-rights-trampling bandwagon rolling in the first place, at least liberals spent 8 years of his presidency in outrage over it. Who's yelling now?

personal equilibrium?

"Unexpected pleasures are the best part of life. Why not drive one every day?"

From the Buick Verano commercial.

[Explaining the joke: if you drive one every day, it's not unexpected. You can't fool yourself into being pleasantly surprised all the time.]

matching markets

Speaking of matching markets, it's pretty strange that the economics job market, which is so nicely streamlined and centralized, doesn't use a stable matching mechanism. In terms of the original Gale-Shapley algorithm, it's missing the feature in which women can call of whatever engagement they've previously accepted if a better man asks in the next round of offers. In other words, once you accept a job, you can't really get out of it to accept a better one. That's a problem because offers aren't made at the same time by all universities.

This causes a lot of stress for job market candidates, and I'm sure for universities too, who play a convoluted timing game to try to get their most preferred candidate. Would it really be so hard for universities to agree to a set time period in which offers can be made and accepted and then reneged if something better comes along? I'm not sure who stands to lose, and I'm pretty sure the gains must outweigh whatever losses there are.

virtuosity

I grew up listening to a lot of classical music, especially for violin. As I got older and started listening to music of other genres, a particular aspect of classical music started to really bug me: there is such emphasis on virtuosity, above and beyond the emotional/aesthetic impact of the music.

Virtuosity should be only a tool to enhance that impact, not an end in itself. Cadenzas, the solo interludes in concertos in which the performer gets to show off his own skills and strengths and style, should fit with the rest of the music, should be beautiful, and shouldn't sound forced.

Compare: Itzhak Perlman's cadenza in the Beethoven violin concerto, probably my all time favorite. Beautiful, effortless. On the other hand, the Paganini caprices. Aesthetically borderline offensive, blatantly designed just to show off one skill after another, painfully forced. Impressive, most definitely. But who cares? It's not a competition. Or if it is, technical skill isn't the relevant aspect.

I was reminded of this last night by an amazing concert by Kelly Joe Phelps, an acoustic/slide guitarist who is the pinnacle of effortless understated virtuosity. His musical genius is undeniable but it only serves to make the music more beautiful. Listen (main song starts at 1:30. I like the vocals on the album version a little better but I'm too lazy to upload it. I've never heard him play the same song the same way twice; more proof of the genius...)

Al Roth matched correctly

One of my favorite economists won the Nobel Prize today. Al Roth (along with Lloyd Shapley) won for his incredibly cool work on matching and mechanism design. If you've read about school choice in New York City, matching medical school graduates with residencies, or chains of kidney donations up to 60 donors long that overcome the problem in which willing donors (friends and relatives of the recipient, usually) aren't a match, you've read about his work. Heroically awesome applications of game theory, is how you might summarize it. (Take that, Ariel.)

Plus, he's a really nice guy. And he writes an excellent blog.

Shapley is also obviously a fantastic choice; he's already an icon of the profession. I blogged about the Gale-Shapley algorithm previously (which forms the foundation of many mechanisms designed by Roth.)

prerequisites and performance statistics

To answer my own question, I think we need to see more clearly differentiated tracks for classes and more clearly defined prerequisite structures.

The online class model is a significant improvement over 'learning things on the internet with disjointed articles, videos, and wikipedia' because the duration is long enough to build up from simple first principles to more complicated ideas. Now they need to improve a step further with clearer prerequisites. Rather than teaching a quantum mechanics class where "you don't need to know calculus! We will present the material in the most accessible way possible", they can teach a quantum mechanics with a calculus prerequisite (...and here's a link to the calculus class you should take first; you can sign up without it of course, but we will explicitly assume that knowledge.)

And/or, different tracks of classes should be more clearly defined. Already many classes have 'optional' assignments and supplementary material for more advanced students, and their certificate of completion sometimes says something about that. Why not make it more explicit? Every certificate of completion should say which track out of which options it's for, what the prerequisites were, and what your score was compared to the average among people who completed all coursework.

I don't think these things are directly beneficial to the "maximize audience in the short run" objective of course offerers, in play at this early point in time. But I also don't think it's contrary to that objective, and could be done in a clearly beneficial way. It could maintain current interest but also attract additional interest and conglomerate statistics of "number of people who took any track of this class or initiated this course sequence" are just as impressive as "60,000 people signed up for this course".

But more importantly, I think these changes are vital for long-run success of online education. People won't chase meaningless certificates if they want credentials, and they won't chase empty dumbed-down curricula if they want real education and employers won't give a crap about certificates that don't have a clear meaning. It's great for those who want a cursory introduction, for fun or curiosity or a jumping off point for more serious independent learning, but that's nothing that's going to ever be able to compete or seriously supplement traditional education. It's something worthwhile in its own right, but it's not "online education".

online education

Online classes are better subject to forces of competition (no one is required to take them, and there are more options both within and between subjects.) Therefore the following forces operate:

For a given quality/rigor of curriculum, improving teaching methods will increase the number of people who want to take an online class.

For a given curriculum, lowering the rigor will increase the number of people who want to take an online class.

The former effect is limited: no matter how good the teaching is, work is required to understand and master complex subjects.

The latter may also be limited: reducing rigor loses a few people at the top end who want a very thorough understanding of a subject and picks up a lot more (because the distribution is skewed) on the lower end who want a simple introduction. But, at some point even the lower end isn't tempted by a class that can be completed by 7 year olds.

I think that on the current margin, the latter is more effective at increasing audience. At least, it seems to be the tactic overtly chosen by many classes.

Loosely speaking, the former effect is welfare-improving, while the latter is welfare-reducing, but both are potential avenues for an online course offerer whose objective is to maximize its audience. (At this point in time, at the dawn of online education, I think that is indeed the main objective.)

How do we set up the system so that the former is the more tempting option?