Veracities

Unix's PR problem

2012-01-27T12:55:00.000-08:00

(I love Linux, and highly recommend it to anyone, now that it's so trouble-free, so don't interpret this in any way to the contrary :)

A friend of mine said this to me and I died laughing, as did several other people at my book club last night, so I thought the broader world might appreciate it too.

redacted: omg using unix comp [at school] so horrible
Vera: why?
redacted: it popped up command line after i figured out how to log in
redacted: and i had no idea of any commands or how to open the internet to look up commands
redacted: iw as about to text you but we're underground
redacted: so i pulled out my "welcome" packet and ended up typing in man -k internet | less
redacted: and then it scrolled and a weird message appeared and every button i pressed made the computer beep loudly and do nothing
redacted: so in a panic after many minutes i just closed the command window with the little x button
redacted: and then i couldnt figure out how to re-open or even how to log off. so i just stared at this blank screened computer
redacted: you could make a movie out of it

externalities ⊄ market failures

2012-01-25T00:03:00.000-08:00

This non-technical paper has a really great presentation of four ways in which externalities are often corrected without government intervention. (Oftentimes, since externalities mean that the full cost and benefit of a decision is not felt by the decisionmaker, he may make the wrong decision, and that this can lead to market failure, in which society would be better off if in sum if he made a different decision.) Even the jargon is explained along the way, so I highly recommend it to non-economists wanting to understand the topic.* To summarize:

Simple Coasian internalization: Coase's theorem says that if property rights are clearly enough defined, and transaction costs are low enough, externalities will not lead to market failure. That is, if someone wants to do something (like paint their house chartreuse) that has a side-effect on someone else (the homeowners on the block whose property values drop), as long as it's easy enough for homeowners to get together and negotiate, they will either agree to pay off the chartreuse-lover not to paint his home or to pay off the other homeowners to compensate for the loss in property value. Which of these outcomes is chosen is simply which one leads to the greatest total good. It's important to note here that externalities are symmetric: you may be hurt by my smoking, but I would be hurt by your smoking ban. So, whatever the outcome, someone is going to be harmed, and the optimal outcome leads to the person being harmed who least minds it, regardless of how money changes hands in order to get everyone to agree to that outcome (because side payments are zero-sum and therefore irrelevant to the utilitarian policy analyst).
Complex Coasian internalization: But, sometimes it's not so easy for parties to negotiate, or it's not even clear who owns the entities that are being affected by the externality. Lighthouses can't negotiate with passing ships about whether to provide their services, and no one owns coastal safety. Therefore, you might expect a shortage of lighthouses. But, if different groups with different motivations can combine, suddenly it might be privately worthwhile to provide that public good after all because the affected party essentially is the affecting party (and therefore transaction costs don't matter either). For example, if harbor owners also run lighthouses, now they have an incentive to provide the right number of them, because they will be able to charge harbor fees in the amount that reflects how much boats value having a safe place to go.
Informal mechanisms: Basically, even without governments, property rights can be effectively defined and enforced and transactions handled through social institutions and norms. That is, the above conditions for Coase's theorem to hold don't need to come from the government. For example, no one may own the space in a common area, and it may be impossible to negotiate with everyone who uses it, but nonetheless, social norms can dictate that smokers stay in one corner away from the non-smokers, and that trespasses against this norm are punished with evil glares.
The externality just may not exist at the relevant margin: This is a bit of a facetious way to argue that externalities don't always cause market failures, and I almost dismissed it as such, but actually there are plenty of contexts in which its important to remember... Basically, while some actions do cause externalities when those actions are taken at certain levels, that doesn't mean it happens at the relevant levels. It may be true that libraries are things with wonderful positive externalities, but if there were privately run libraries in every city already, it may not be true that the government needs to worry about a library shortage. Additional libraries don't add any extra positive externality on top of what the old libraries already provide. (I think #4 is worth including because of the phenomenon in which voters consider whether things are good at all but not how much of those things are optimal given inevitable tradeoffs...)

*I'm less convinced by the later argument that there doesn't seem to be an unoptimal amount of cybersecurity, and I have more to say about that, but one blog post at a time...

self-fulfilling beliefs

2012-01-20T15:43:00.000-08:00

A particular amusing form of self-fulfilling beliefs. (In China, being born in the year of the dragon is considered good luck, and children born in that year are in fact raised better and turn out better. No such difference exists for these cohorts in the U.S. population of course.)

(Stolen from MR.)

(More on self-fulfilling beliefs.)

privacy and introversion at work

2012-01-18T19:45:00.000-08:00

Read this.

My former job was the worst of both worlds - we worked independently or collaborated over email, but still had to sit in an open-plan office with no privacy (luckily, I was one of two women, so I could hide in the bathroom if I needed to really think...) It drove me so nuts I quit. Apparently this is the case for 70 percent of us now, despite the fact that the internet makes it easier than ever to collaborate without sacrificing privacy. WTF mate?

bite-sized ideas

2012-01-16T16:58:00.000-08:00

Something funny happened recently. Tyler Cowen gave a TED talk on a topic that he also covered in a book from over a year ago, Create Your Own Economy, retitled (aptly) The Age of the Infovore when it was released in paperback. The topic was "stories"; you can see it here or read the transcript here; the punchline is that fitting messy data into stories is a misleading way to interpret the world, and one that we're strongly prone to.

The talk itself doesn't matter; the strange thing is that this talk was taken almost directly from the book, yet received vastly more attention in talk form than when the book came out. This is despite the fact that a large fraction of the talk audience would have already been exposed to it directly by having read the book (which isn't long or inaccessible or anything), and a huge majority of the audience would have been exposed to it indirectly if the idea had been recapped in the blogosphere at the time by anyone who had actually read the book.

(By the way, I'm sure this isn't an uncommon phenomenon, but the chances of me reading the book when it comes out, remembering it when some part of it takes off later, noticing it when it takes off later, and the gap in time being large enough to clearly attribute the attention to the later abridged presentation, is pretty slim for any given instance.)

Why did it happen like that? Why didn't an idea that is appealing enough to be talked about extensively now that it's a TED talk take off in its original book form? Am I misestimating the numbers and probabilities involved? If so, where and how?

I suspect, simply, that ideas presented in bite-sized form are easier to consider in a thorough manner, because we devote less attention per page to books than to blogs, because we expect blogs to present information in a denser manner. And (obviously) ideas taken out of the broader context are easier to consider independently of the broader context. And (obviously) ideas that are already in bite-sized form are easier to re-hash in a medium (blogs) that only allows for bite-sized ideas.

There's some obvious related cost-benefit analysis, but I'll let you fill in the blanks; I just wanted to point it out. If true, I'm surprised that it's so hard for the particularly appealing bite-sized chunks of books to filter out to the blogosphere.

a string of zeroes

2012-01-15T16:07:00.000-08:00

Loss aversion is the aspect of prospect theory that gets the most attention. A kink in the value function produces lots of neatly testable implications, so tons of empirical work studies it. And all of this collected wisdom is summarized as "losses matter a lot, but gains don't matter very much."

Loss aversion is very important: when comparing losses and gains, losses do indeed dominate individuals' decisions. But reference dependence itself is also very important, and overlooked, since an important consequence of it is a negative (lack-of) outcome: our minute-by-minute experiential utility is mostly a long string of zeroes.

We're really good at predicting what will happen to us. We plan and execute, leading to intended predictable results, and we have plenty of experience with random chance and external factors to not be so surprised by those either. How frequently are we significantly surprised? Not often. And that's how often our utility functions differ from zero.

This implies that, actually, both losses and gains are VERY important. That meshes with experience. It's true that, if I am expecting to sit in a middle seat and get moved to the window on a flight, the bump in utility is smaller than if I've been counting on a window seat and get moved to the middle. But either of those experiences has an enormous effect on my short-term happiness*, and either one is much more likely than a direct comparison between losses and gains such as is the focus of the prospect theory literature.

[Let me be more precise. There are two technical details that can interfere with this interpretation. First of all, it matters what the reference point is, and second of all, it matters whether the gain-loss value function is the same thing as the utility function (or is there is a separate standard consumption utility component.)

As to the first question, I'll jump on board with the Koszegi-Rabin version of prospect theory, which endogenizes the reference point as recent expectations. (I suppose that sounds like I'm choosing that variety in order to support my conclusion, but actually the way I'm thinking about it is that the conclusion is self-evident and that this supports their particular reference point theory.)

As to the second question, this is why I qualify the original statement with "minute-by-minute experiential". I'd rather be a millionaire (who earned their wealth in a deliberate, predictable method, never experiencing gain-loss utility in the process) who never wins anything than a homeless person who sometimes surprisedly picks up ten dollar bills on the sidewalk, but the short-term experiential utility of both the millionaire and the homeless person is dictated not by bank account balance but by small surprises.)]

*I recently had a flight in which I was assigned a middle seat, and tried to change it, but was told I couldn't. When the plane had completely finished boarding, the window seat next to me was still open. It made me so happy that I'm still excited to write about it a week later...

trust in government

2012-01-11T12:38:00.000-08:00

Apparently only 10% of Americans trust the federal government to do the right thing most of the time.

David Brooks interprets this as widespread disillusionment with government and claims that this is why the label 'liberal' is broadly shunned. Karl Smith doesn't agree and provides an alternative interpretation, which rings mostly true, but doesn't address why Brooks is wrong, which is what I want to do.*

The conundrum is, why are many liberal concerns and programs are so well-loved, when they depend on big federal government, which isn't trusted?

Americans don't trust the current set of politicians in the federal government to do the right thing most of the time. But they think we just have to elect better people to make better decisions. They look to government as the only entity that has the power to enact the change they desire, and they love that this powerful tool exists. They love having a clear target to look to for help and to blame for problems. Rather than "of the people, by the people, and for the people", they see government as a parental authority who can step in when things are getting chaotic and make things right.

They just think the wrong people are running it.

I, obviously, think they just don't want to face the logical conclusion. Government attracts politicians rather than people who want to do the most good and are most competent at doing so, and then incentivizes those politicians in a plethora of profoundly distorted ways. Sometimes power accomplishes wonderful things, but mostly, it just corrupts. Electing different people won't change that. The only thing to do is to try hard to get the incentives right, be humble about the efficacy of government, be conservative about what we undertake using the tool of government, and try hard to find alternative solutions whenever possible.

*Yeah, you read that right, I definitely disagree on occasion with my favorite journalist...

Occupy AEA

2012-01-10T14:29:00.000-08:00

To my immense amusement, there was an Occupy AEA (American Economic Association, which just had its annual conference in Chicago) protest. It's like watching victims of a plane crash protesting a physicists'convention.

I understand your frustration (sort of), but your anger is profoundly misdirected. There are a hundred better places toplace blame than on the eggheads who are just trying to figure out howthe system works in the first place.

(It's unfortunate that academic economists and policymakers are oneand the same in the public's eye.)

economics journalism

2012-01-08T13:58:00.000-08:00

So true:

“If you laid all the economists in the world end to end, they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion.” This old joke still works because it reflects a common belief that economists can’t agree on anything important. ...

We think there are two main reasons for the distortions. The first is the conventions of journalism itself: Although there are notable exceptions, most journalists have limited training in economics, and those who edit the articles often have even less. Hence, out of an understandable but misguided sense of fair play, there is a bias toward wanting to show both sides of an issue. When, for example, an economist tells a journalist the equivalent of 1+1=2, the writer, in an effort to provide “balance,” will often include a quote from someone who says that 1+1=3.

Second, editorial boards don’t want wishy-washy, hedged opinions. As a result, op-ed pages are more likely to publish someone advocating an unequivocal position than someone who offers a more nuanced argument. This favors fringe views. A position that sounds new, yet is completely untested, is all the more enticing to editors, so long as it appears to challenge mainstream views.

Economics is almost definable as the study of trade-offs, and as a result the conclusions always lie in gray areas. But they lay decidedly in the gray area; there's not some confusion or disagreement about whether it's actually black or white. Insisting on a 'balanced' "some say white, others say black" view is just wrong, and insisting on a clear answer to the question "is it white or black?" is also just wrong.

speaking of gender

2012-01-07T11:24:00.000-08:00

I've noticed, here at the AEA convention, that in the seminars in whichenough women are in attendance to actually ascertain a seatingdistribution, they sit disproportionately towards the back. And,since these are usually the same seminars that are full, this is not the same seating distribution as for men.

I was surprised by this since it countersmy sexist prior that women tend to be more diligent goody-goodies andtherefore more often prefer to sit at the front*. Is this no longer true amongwomen who have selected into the profession of economics? Is it nolonger true after a certain age? Why the switch, rather thansimply a convergence in seating preference across genders? Is it just because they arrived earlier and took the rear seats, preferred byall? (I doubt that, since the emptier seminars I attended were notfuller at the back at all.) Is it just a fluke?

*which contributes to my typically contrary desire to sit at the back (in addition to the much stronger factor of wanting to fly under the radar in general...)

social norms and social image

2012-01-06T19:25:00.000-08:00

(or 'Vera sees a nail and gleefully pulls out her hammer.')

I've never been so happy that feminism exists - the Committee on theStatus of Women in the Economics Profession has the only free dietcoke at this convention. Plus, it's a nice quiet room to sit and workduring this two-hour lunch break.

I just feel bad for the men who furtively pop in and out for coffeewhile the women sit around loungingly.

It's not that you have to be female to use the hospitality room;indeed, signs advertising it as open to all are all over theplace. And it's not that men are sexistly hesitant to associatethemselves with a women's association; several are sitting hereworking or reading (just not drinking the coffee).

But there's an unspoken norm that, when partaking in a serviceprovided by an organization, one should reciprocate at least withinterest in that organization. A man may or may not be interested inpromoting gender equality, but even if he is, he can't signal hisinterest silently (or loudly, very credibly). A woman may or may notbe interested in promoting gender equality, but whether she wants toor not, she signals her likely interest simply by being female.

And so the women stay, comfortable in their plausible deniability ofhaving violated a norm.

"fewer jobs are precisely the point"

2012-01-03T12:21:00.000-08:00

Read these two posts by Alex Tabarrok; the second in particular. With "jobs" so important in national debate right now, it's important to understand this.

A key aspect of economic development is the destruction of jobs: An economy can't produce more and more value per person if everyone continues to do the same jobs; the potential gains in efficiency are very quickly exhausted. True growth comes from transitioning to entirely new modes of production or entirely new industries. In an extremely poor country such as India, fewer jobs in agriculture and small-scale retail and such things is exactly what you'd want if you want to see them transition into a richer modern society.

I caveat that sentence with "In an extremely poor country..." despite the fact that it's true for any country regardless of wealth. I just also think it's reasonable to transition from prioritizing economic development to prioritizing low-risk subsistence for the greatest fraction of the population, once you've grown "enough", whatever you decide enough is (India clearly has not). Economic development means job destruction, and job destruction means that some people lose out hard for the sake of the greater good when their job is suddenly outsourced or automated, and in a country as wealthy as the United States, I'm perfectly fine with providing a basic safety net for those people.

I'm NOT ok with sacrificing growth and economic dynamism in order to artificially preserve those jobs. Provide basic safety nets, but get rid of subsidies and tariffs and stop bailing out dead businesses just because you can't imagine a world without Detroit. The government can temporarily save jobs but only by preventing the market from creating new and better ones. Ultimately, it's a losing battle that they're making only more painful by pretending that they have the power to stop progress and encouraging everyone whose lives are at stake believe it too.*

*The high rate of unemployment now actually makes me optimistic about the eventual recovery of the American economy. It means that the government failed to halt progress and that reemployment will eventually come from true innovation and progress and reallocating labor resources more efficiently among industries. That's a much more solid foundation for the future economy than, say, a bailed-out Detroit...

Psychonomy

2012-01-02T11:37:00.000-08:00

If you don't like "behavioral economist" (and there are good reasons not to; all of economics is a study of behavior after all), be a "psychonomist"!

I don't know why I never thought of this, having thought "psychological economics" would be a lot better than "Psych and Econ" many times. Many thanks to Tim Anderson for setting me straight.

Happy New Year!

optimism update

2011-12-26T16:06:00.000-08:00

I forgot one big item on my optimism list. I'm very optimist about the decline of religion (the rise of secularism, the replacement of evangelical flavors of religion with unitarian flavors of religion, the replacement of mythological flavors of religion with secularly spiritual flavors of religion, e.g. Confucianism or Buddhism although I would like to see other such varieties gain popularity as well, etc.)

Interesting on this topic.

Funny on this topic: How many Unitarian Universalists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Answer: We choose not to make a statement either in favor of or against the need for a light bulb. However, if in your own journey you have found that light bulbs work for you, that is fine. You are invited to write a poem or compose a modern dance about your light bulb. During next Sunday's service, we will explore a number of light bulb traditions, including incandescent, fluorescent, three-way, long-life and tinted; all of which are equally valid paths to luminescence.

(For the record, I love Unitarians. Honestly and unqualifiedly.)

On that note, happy winter holiday of your choosing, so long as you don't try to shame or look down on anyone else for not choosing with you. For those of you looking for a secular occasion to adopt (and why would you abstain from festivities on principle? Make up your own best-of-all-worlds festivities!), ACGPD is an easy way to go, although the lunar eclipse was a good cause as well this year. I don't buy into the winter solstice idea (only the summer solstice - why celebrate the onset of the worst time of year??). I do buy into the back-to-school celebration idea, although that was more pertinent when I actually had classes and actually lived somewhere else for school.

(Edit: as far as decorations go, I'd like to promote the traditional Christmas tree, because they smell nice, topped with a 17-point star, because they're awesome*, and decorated with rainbow lights, because they're... well they're just also awesome. And little plastic balls if you have cats :)

*yes, you have to make it according to Gauss's instructions in order to qualify as awesome. Choose your own skip pattern though.

books

2011-12-25T14:58:00.000-08:00

Norwegian Wood, by Haruki Murakami - Best book I've read in a long, long, long time. Every time I set it down I was left in a Murakami trance for hours. I can't even pinpoint what was so good about it. The writing style is simple yet beautiful, sparse yet vivid; the plot is mundane yet riveting; the characters are ordinary yet compelling; and most amazingly, a book that exclusively examines relationships doesn't end up in naval-gazing tedium, but rather draws you so deeply into their situation that you can listen to it on your kindle and not even notice the robotic text-to-voice imperfections or that you've been stuck in rush hour traffic for half an hour or that you somehow just ran errands all over town purely on muscle memory, and then you get home and turn it off and sit dazed at your desk for who knows how long trying to remember who you are or what you're supposed to be doing or why you were supposed to care.

Are you there vodka? It's me Chelsea, by Chelsea Handler - It was laying around and the title made me curious. About as mildly amusing as you would expect from a book you only read because it was laying around.

The Undercover Economist, by Tim Harford - Economists will find this boring, but I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't learned economic theory. It's a very well done qualitative/popsci presentation. Especially those who like to argue about politics without understanding incentives or markets...

Norway the near-miss-Persian-Gulf-state

2011-12-18T00:37:00.000-08:00

Matt Yglesias* has an interesting column.

He shares my concern with a purely open-borders free-trade stance by risk-averse concerns about what happens when a nation puts all its economic eggs in one industry's basket (although he speaks mostly about Dutch Disease, which doesn't strictly have anything to do with that risk particular risk, but with currency valuation and its consequences for domestic industry competitiveness). And it's impossible to disagree with the conclusion that Norway has been very successful at avoiding becoming "yet another Saudi-style oil monoculture".

But, let's review. Dutch disease occurs when a large exporting commodity industry brings a lot of money suddenly into the country which drives up the value of the currency, making foreign goods cheap to export, which reduces the competitiveness of other domestic industries, which leaves the country dependent on this one industry for most of its income. There are a few ways to avoid this outcome. You can artificially reduce the competitiveness of foreign industries through protectionist policies like tariffs and subsidies. You can boost the competitiveness of domestic industries by investing in human capital, research and development, infrastructure, etc. Or you can stop the currency shock by setting aside commodity income as some form of savings.

These measures are not equally good. The last one allows the country to smooth the commodity income over time, reducing the impact of booms and busts in that particular commodity market on national income, and allows the benefits of the commodity income to be spread out over generations in whatever way desired. Investing in education/R&D/infrastructure is great for obvious reasons. Artificially changing the competitive balance via subsidies and tariffs, though, distorts incentives in a cherry-picked set of industries chosen via political whim, which can lead to major inefficiencies as soon as the situation changes at all (such as, for example, the current comical butter shortage that motivated Yglesias's post.) Beyond that, it can actually worsen the currency situation, since tariffs on imported goods reduces demand for foreign currency, driving the value of the domestic currency even higher.

With this in mind, Yglesias is first of all clearly much too quick to lump together Norway with those Saudi states. Ceteris not at all paribus. The culture and institutions and fiscal choices are radically different in many ways; the protectionist policies of the Norwegians likely explain a tiny fraction of the difference in overall outcomes. In particular, I'm guessing (by which I mean I'm pretty sure but don't want to compile proof just for a blog post...) they have a much stronger and longer-term commitment to investment, both for its own sake and as the 2nd Dutch Disease mitigation method I mentioned above, than most Saudi-style oil states.

Second of all, he glosses over the differences between those mitigation methods. Since the combination employed by Norway has been successful overall, he claims that the particular protectionist tactic is vindicated. That's obviously not a valid argument. (In fact, he mentions that the national savings fund is a much more important aspect of their efforts to avoid Dutch Disease, but then glosses over the differences between the methods again.)

All in all, though, it's nice to hear support for protectionism being motivated by rational long-sighted economic logic, rather than the short-sighted knee-jerk yet ubiquitous "stop the mean foreigners from stealing our jobs" rhetoric. I'm so happy about that I almost don't want to bother nitpicking with the details. In fact, I'd call this more of a clarification than a counterargument, since his ultimate point is just that avoiding Dutch Disease is a good goal and the Norwegians should be admired for trying, even if it leads to silly butter shortages.

*It's nice to see him writing longer form stuff now that he's at Slate. (At least, I think it's a higher percentage of his posts, at quick glance...)

self-fulfilling beliefs

2011-12-16T12:21:00.000-08:00

A much more humorous examination :)

(I don't know why he felt the need to invent another word for it though, especially with as awkward a definition as that. Oh well.)

college as signaling/education/life-coaching

2011-12-12T11:59:00.001-08:00

I wouldn't go as far as Bryan, but I agree with his general point that college is often more of a signaling device (I went to college, therefore I am the type of person who gets into and finishes college, therefore I'm a good hire) than an actual educational system in which you acquire the skills you need to excel at your career.

I do, though, think that part of the reason is that college is designed to be good at one kind of education, and that kind of education isn't very general, and out of some combination of inertia and a concern about maintaining credibility and the fact that the pure signaling mechanism already works pretty well at motivating enrollment, that hasn't changed very much over time as college becomes more universal. For example, a traditional college could emulate music conservatories more closely, for music majors, or a trade school education, for people intending to go into those careers. Or they could simply offer more classes that could replace/accelerate/enhance on-the-job training in a variety of careers.

But, despite the fact that I admit that part of the reason college is oversold for a large fraction of students is an avoidable consequence of its current design, and that a major, or even primary, function of it is to be a signaling mechanism, I also wouldn't go nearly as far as Seth Roberts:

At Berkeley (where Bryan went and I taught) and universities generally, the highest praise is brilliant. Professor X is brilliant. Or: Brilliant piece of work. People can do great things in dozens of ways, but somehow student work is almost never judged by how beautiful, courageous, practical, good-tasting, astonishing, vivid, funny, moving, comfortable, and so on it is. Because that’s not what professors are good at.

Um, what? Academics are trained to be brilliant and judged by their brilliance. That's what academia is, a brilliance factory. When you enter academia as a student, of course this is also the standard you will be judged by.

Even if college adopted a more flexible educational paradigm that actually prepared people for careers in the real world (or the arts, I guess, since the standards Seth is describing seem to be relevant mostly to those), it's ridiculous that college would be the place for learning those things. Certain skills are better learned, or must be learned, in the course of life, not in a structured learning environment. Inspiration, passion, courage, etc. cannot be taught because they come from within, emerging organically and unforcibly through the course of life's varied experiences.

I for one would be damn pissed off if I was paying for an education and got a life coach instead.

lunar eclipse

2011-12-10T23:35:00.001-08:00

I finally saw (most of) a total lunar eclipse last night. Got up at 4:30am after a two-hour nap on an office couch, grumbled a lot about how if my parents hadn't sent me to bed before totality during the eclipse in junior high or OSSM had let us stay outside for the one in high school and if it hadn't been cloudy during the last three I tried to see I wouldn't have to settle for this one starting in the middle of the freaking night instead of comfortably in the evening hours, got the scope and binoculars set up on the roof of a building in Alameda, and was blown away for the next two hours.

About halfway through the partial eclipse, through the eyepiece of my telescope

Partial eclipse over San Francisco and the Bay Bridge

Totality

Peak Totality

totality over bay bridge; starting to get light out

And then it started to get light out. It was never unhazy, and the marine layer really started coming in towards the end, so we lost the moon entirely around 6:45. Totality ended at 6:56 and the sunrise was at 7:18, so we didn't see it emerge from totality (or the selenelion). The haze was unfortunately too thick to get a clearish picture through the telescope during totality, and you can see that even these are pretty fuzzy.

I was amazed how dark it got. Typical sequences of images of lunar eclipses vary the exposure length so that the overall brightness isn't too drastically different from the beginning to the middle of the sequence. This is of course necessary - any exposure long enough to capture the moon at peak totality would be horrendously overexposed if used to image the moon normally. Despite knowing this, I was surprised how dim the eclipsed moon was in reality.

Thoroughly awesome. As was going to sleep at 7:30 afterwards...

social norms, morality, and psychology

2011-12-08T14:22:00.001-08:00

Social norms are fundamentally multiple-equilibrium outcomes. In a given context, some outcome (how much to give to charity, what the housework/schoolwork balance for kids should be, what age defines adulthood, how to treat animals, rules for dating, rules for hygiene, rules for hospitality, the list is endless) somehow is chosen as the equilibrium norm, through some process that is not well understood. Then through some other process that is only becoming well-understood currently, this norm is enforced and perpetuated organically.

The best candidate for that process is, essentially, social- and self- image. We obey norms because we want to be seen, and see ourselves, as good people who obey norms, or to avoid the punishment that comes from breaking them.

But, inevitably, the line between "good" and "conformist" and between "caring about being good" and "caring about being seen as good" is blurred. This is partially because there are certain situations in which we think there is something like an absolute morality. In these contexts (random cold-blooded murder, for example), every society has the same equilibrium norm. Then there are other situations where there's near consensus, like monogamy, or rape, or violence towards women, etc. And other situations where there's a little less consensus, like marital fidelity or child labor. And this continuum of consensus continues all the way to the opposite end of the spectrum where norms of formal dress or small talk lie.

Within this smooth continuum, it's hard to tell exactly how much of a social norm is an arbitrary equilibrium choice and how much is a result of absolute morality. Even on the far end of the spectrum, we can plausibly say that it's morally wrong to ignore arbitrary norms of dress, because of the destructive disruption it can cause, or some such explanation.

In addition to this fundamental ambiguity that leads people to forget about the arbitrary aspect of norms, the moral motivation for adhering to any norm is often reinforced since the easiest way to keep the masses in line is to keep them from thinking too much about the rightness or wrongness of an action and simply prescribe a code of behavior as morally absolute. Sure, religion and other ethical codes don't usually dictate behavior in the realm of workplace attire, but they reinforce the moral interpretation of norms overall. Soon, the arbitrariness is forgotten (or never realized to begin with, after enough the moral rhetoric prevails for enough generations.)

This may keep society functioning in an orderly manner, but the sword cuts both ways. The more we motivate our actions by telling ourselves that it's the right thing to do, the more we interpret others actions likewise. Thus, a friend's gaffe is interpreted (usually not illegitimately - I'm describing a rational expectations equilibrium here) as a lack of concern about being a good person, rather than simply lack of concern for social signaling, or a reasoned objection to the governing norm, or a reasoned situational deviation from that norm.

In a society where we are already so overly preoccupied with self-analysis and psychology and we overthink every action and reaction in our friendships and relationships, we don't need to feed the naval-gazing by making it even harder to remember not to jump to conclusions of malice. Remember that norms are flexible and definitely not always agreed on. Clarify expectations when that potential disagreement might lead to misunderstanding and hurt. Clarify intentions after the fact. Give the benefit of a doubt.

Well, that was a long way around to that point :)

books

2011-12-03T12:34:00.000-08:00

The Wasp Factory, by Iain Banks - Interesting, weird, darkly humorous, engrossing at the time but ultimately not my favorite kind of book. And the ending really didn't tie up enough loose ends in my opinion.

The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon - Unsettlingly engrossing; take a break periodically to reassure yourself that only the character, not you, is toying with sanity. That caution, however, was not meant to contradict or caveat an enthusiastic recommendation. Pynchon disparages this book which makes me want to read his others even more.

The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien - I apparently don't like war stories very much. They were ok in a small dose, but I really don't care for having the ficton of a story shoved in my face constantly. Why would you do that? Tell a story, sell a story, insist on its truth, even if it's obviously not.

repackaged loans

2011-12-01T11:14:00.000-08:00

A tiny attempt to clarify one common source of confusion / ignorance: what are repackaged loans (e.g. mortgage-backed securities) and why were they created?

Say there are two types of people in the world, those with high and low credit worthiness. If you loan a high type money, he will always pay you back. If you loan a low type money, he will pay you back only 90% the time.

Banks might be willing to give a high type a $100 loan with a 5% interest rate, knowing that they will definitely get back $105. In order to be willing to loan money to a low type, the interest rate has to be higher to compensate for the risk: loaning $100 to a low type with an interest rate of 17% will on average get back the same $105 as loaning it to a high type (10% of the time you get nothing back, 90% of the time you get $117 back).

This $105 quantity, in either case, is the expected value of the loan. That is, this is the average amount of money you can expect to get back in payments for the loan.

Despite the fact that the expected value of each loan is the same, banks would obviously rather make the loan to the high type, since there is no risk involved. So, if banks for some reason can't charge a high enough interest rate to compensate for the risk of lending to low types (for legal reasons, or because no one wants to take the loan on those terms, or whatever other reason), there are people or businesses out there who are on average good loan prospects who can't get loans. This is a bad thing because if someone can turn $100 cash into $105 of expected value, society in sum is better off if they can get the financing to do that.

This is where securitization (repackaging the loans) comes in. If a hundred banks make a hundred loans to low types, and then split up the repayments equally, no single bank will be burdened by a defaulted loan and each will have the same amount of money on the line as if they each made a single loan as usual. The risk is disappears (in the limit), and any loan with a positive expected profit can be financed.

A mortgage-backed security is a slice of this big pie of loans. It gives you the right to keep a certain fraction of the payments made by a whole bunch of people who took out mortgages. You get back, with a very small amount of risk compared to the riskiness of the underlying loans, the expected value of the loan.

This is a great idea. Risk sharing allows society to undertake worthwhile things that are too risky for individuals to finance on their own, be it home ownership or startup tech firms or pharmaceutical research. And since there is money to be made once the risk is taken care of, this can simply happen through the market. Wins all around.

The problem, as with so many things, isn't with the thing itself, it's with the stupid use of it. Seatbelts and antibiotics are clearly wonderful inventions. But people who drive recklessly or contribute to the evolution of resistant superbugs, thereby hurting themselves and others, need to be held accountable. Likewise, people who blindly purchased mortgage backed securities, thinking they were riskless investments, and then lost a lot of money when it turned out that the expected profit was actually negative, can't blame the securitization process itself. They can only blame themselves for not doing due diligence (which, yes, is very hard when you're dealing with huge pools of loans, and with contracts that are, in actuality, extremely complicated).

(It goes without saying that deliberate misinformation is another matter. But still not something you can get upset at the loan packaging mechanism about.)

Death Valley

2011-11-29T16:02:00.000-08:00

What to do when you have a four-day weekend but the Sierras are snowed under? Backpacking in Death Valley! Where the weather is sunny and beautiful exactly when everything else isn't, and the landscape hides a cornucopia of treasures to satisfy the most voracious wilderness junkie.

First you can go for a hike on some sand dunes:

Then, the badlands:

And an enormous plain of salt boulders:

And canyonlands:

And even some snow-capped mountaintops, towering twice the height of the grand canyon above the valley below:

It doesn't get better than that. And did I mention you can camp anywhere, for free, without a permit, as long as you're at least 2 miles from the paved road? And that the park is huge?

perilously, empiricism verges on magic

2011-11-28T14:16:00.000-08:00

In my awesome junior high gifted-ed class we studied the Kennedy assassination, and I've had a residual fascination with that universe of conspiracy theories since then. Turns out one of my favorite writers, John Updike, had something to say about it in the New Yorker in 1967. My friend Dan kindly provided me the text, which is (bittersweetly) short enough to quote here:

We used to think that only the vagueness and enchantment of distance could create mythical figures; now, after reading Josiah Thompson's "micro-study" of the Kennedy assassination, entitled "Six Seconds in Dallas," we conclude that closeness of scrutiny is also mythopoeic. For example, "the umbrella man": though the day was clear and blowy, he can be detected, in photographs, standing on the curh just about where the assassination would in a few seconds occur, holding a black umbrella above him; seconds later he is again photographed, walking away, gazing tranquilly at the scramble of horrified spectators. His umbrella is now furled. Who was he? Where is he now? And would any crowd, caught in the matrix of interlocking photographs taken in those few momentous seconds in Dealey Plaza, yield a figure or two equally anomalous and ominous? Hedangles around history's neck like a fetish. And what of the other substanceless figures sifted from the clouds of witnesses: "the tan-coated man," seen now running away from the Texas School Book Depository Building, now riding in a gray Rambler drivenby a Negro; and "the Secret Service agent," who identified himself to Patrolman Smith hehind the stockade fence, though all Secret Service men had gone to Parkland Hospital; and eeriest of all-the blurry figure visible, in some frames of Robert Hughes'8-mm. movie film, in the window beside the pair of windows from which the shots, or some of the shots, were fired? We wonder whether a genuine mystery is being concealed here or whether any similar scrutiny of a minute oection of time and space would yield similar strangenesses-gaps, inconsistencies, warps, and bubbles in the surface of circumstance. Perhaps, as with the elements of matter, investigation passes a threshold of common sense and enters a sub-atomic realm where laws are mocked, where persons have the life-span of beta particles and the transparency of neutrinos, and where a rough kind of averaging out must substitute for the absolute truth. The truth about those seconds in Dallas is especially elusive; the search for it seems todemonstrate how perilously empiricism verges on magic.

Isn't that wonderful, both in content and conveyance? That's Updike for you.

Updike was the master of the microstudy in the fictional realm; I wish somehow the story of those six seconds could be told via his voice. But possibly even better than that, it turns out that one of my favorite film directors, Errol Morris*, has done just that, in his new six-minute documentary "The Umbrella Man", with the author of Six Seconds in Dallas referenced above. (Psst, the umbrella man himself shows up.) Fantastic. Go watch.

*you MUST see Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control if you have any interest at all in the defining boundaries and limitations of our humanity. Or just really great cinematography (so great that even I can identify it...)

behavioral economics in action

2011-11-23T01:50:00.001-08:00

The New Yorker says "Buy access to the article you're looking for and you'll receive the entire December 9, 1967 issue".

Instead of "In order to access the article you're looking for, you have to pay for the entire issue."

(For 5.99 for one year of access... You don't need reference dependence or loss aversion to explain that one, i.e. the price differential between buying the magazine now and buying a single article from half a century ago, but I suspect they play real roles there too.)

(I swear I have other tools than prospect theory. There just really are so many nails.)

grammar of think different

2011-11-15T14:48:00.001-08:00

Jeff at cheap talk says

Here’s how Steve Jobs explains “Think Different” as quoted in Walter Isaacson’s biography (thanks to Mallesh Pai for the pointer.)
We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It’s grammatical, if you think about what we’re trying to say. It’s not think the same, it’s think different. Think a little different, think a lot different, think different. ”Think differently” wouldn’t hit the same meaning for me.
I may have been taken in by the GDF but after thinking about this for a day or so I am convinced that I understand what he means, even if he didn’t explain it very well. Constructions like “think X” are used all the time where X is a noun and what the writer really means is “think about X” or “consider X” and especially “join the X movement.” (Think “Think Green”, a familiar slogan that is saying “be enviornmentally conscious.” )“Eat Local” has a different interpretation than “Eat Locally” which would not make sense in its stead. For that matter, “Think Locally, Act Globally” suffers from excessive adherence to grammatical rules.What “Think Different” was supposed to convey is essentially “be a member of Team Different.” But I am sure that was lost on most people and has nothing to do with why it was a successful campaign.

Why is this so complicated?? "Think different" uses "different" as a noun (and maybe silently implies some punctuation that would clarify that). That's all.Like many people, I love grammar (I'm even particularly particular about adverbs!), but it's much more fun to play with (even abuse) its flexibility than to pounce on alleged mistakes and then triumphantly award yourself a gold star.

nonetheless

2011-11-13T18:23:00.001-08:00

As much as I am bored by and lack respect for Occupy*, I much much more strongly oppose any intervention in the right to peaceably assemble (or peaceably do anything else for that matter.)

And I really REALLY oppose cops on power trips (is that redundant?) who think they have (or worse, have) the power to use unnecessary physical force to maintain the peace.

Students linking arms isn't an excuse to use force, and I don't want to pay taxes that go towards tear-gassing my friends on their bike rides home from work. So I signed this.

Law enforcement is so disturbingly corrupt and abusive in urban America. I wish there was a petition that would fix that (rather than just the university administration reaction to it...)

protests

2011-11-10T12:56:00.001-08:00

Set aside** for the moment the merits of the arguments/complaints made by Occupy*.

Like many campus protests, this is fundamentally a movement of bored (unemployed) people desperately looking for anything to blame their frustrations on and get angry about in a somewhat active way. Even if they have to invent problems to get riled up about, they're bored enough to do so. And so, like this ridiculous rioting over the firing of a football coach, these stories fill me with leaden ennui.

I just don't get it. What do Berkeley students hope to accomplish by forming a mob for a few hours? By intentionally stirring up trouble, looking for ways to get maced and arrested? Being able to tell heroic-sounding stories about standing up to the Man? Do they hope that from a distance it's less obvious what's really going on, that it appears sincerely desperate? Because from downtown Oakland and the campus of U.C. Berkeley, I can tell you it sure doesn't. Do they hope that by acting out the story, history will make it real?

*Haha did you think that was a footnote marker? .... er wait.

**Sure, it's impossible to entirely disentangle my interpretation of the sociological phenomenon from my interpretation of their complaints. I can't get riled up about a few people getting rich in small part because some systemic issue amplifies the returns to their hard work in some way that other people call unfair. I just don't care that some people who are enormously rich by worldwide standards are upset that a few others are even richer. Maybe that colors my interpretation of anyone who does.

mind your p's and q's (still more on self-fulfilling beliefs)

2011-11-08T17:12:00.000-08:00

If you believe you've failed, you have.

I don't think I can put it more simply than that. So remember that.

In substance, this doesn't add anything to what I've previously harped on. And yet I'm so continually shocked to see so much self-fulfilled failure that I keep wanting to harp more.

I think part of the problem is that the inverse statement is decidedly false, and a little crazy-wishful-thinking-hippie sounding (i.e., "If you believe you can succeed, you will."). And, since we are not very good at automatically recognizing that contrapositives, not inverses or converses, are the truths that are equivalent to any if-then statement, we are too quick to dismiss the crucial inverse of the crazy hippie poster slogan.

Yet another reason to replace the relatively useless bits of high school curricula with logic, probability and statistics, and economics...

For the record, if p implies q, then not-q implies not-p. But q does not imply p, nor does not-p imply not-q. Within this example, if you believe you have failed, you have. Therefore, if you haven't failed, you must still believe you can succeed - the contrapositive. But, if you fail, it doesn't mean that you just stopped believing in yourself - the converse. And it doesn't mean that if you believe in yourself, you will succeed - the inverse. Don't be embarrassed if you were never taught this; you're in the vast majority. Just get it straight now and please spread the sanity.

octupuses

2011-11-05T17:06:00.000-07:00

I love octupuses. Great story*.

"octopuses even learned to open the childproof caps on Extra Strength Tylenol pill bottles—a feat that eludes many humans with university degrees."

" The four-hundred-gallon tank was divided into separate compartments for each animal. But even though students hammered in dividers, the octopuses found ways to dig beneath them—and eat each other. Or they’d mate, which is equally lethal. Octopuses die after mating and laying eggs, but first they go senile, acting like a person with dementia. “They swim loop-the-loop in the tank, they look all googly-eyed, they won’t look you in the eye or attack prey,” Warburton said. One senile octopus crawled out of the tank, squeezed into a crack in the wall, dried up, and died."

"Some would let themselves be captured, only to use the net as a trampoline. They’d leap off the mesh and onto the floor—and then run for it. Yes, run. “You’d chase them under the tank, back and forth, like you were chasing a cat,” "

"Octopuses in captivity actually escape their watery enclosures with alarming frequency. While on the move, they have been discovered on carpets, along bookshelves, in a teapot, and inside the aquarium tanks of other fish—upon whom they have usually been dining."

*overanthropomorphized, but I'm kind of ok with that. Little else is so effective at getting the human race to care about the rest of the natural world...

college is oversold

2011-11-03T15:20:00.000-07:00

This is a truly striking chart:

Read the whole excellent post, by Alex Tabarrok of MR.

comparative advantage

2011-11-02T18:34:00.000-07:00

Someone dared me to write a limerick about comparative advantage, since I said too close together that 1) I'd take suggestions for entertaining limerick topics, and 2) that economics is a tragically unfunny subject. Months later while trying to fall asleep*, this is what I came up with...**

There once was a locavore named Hugh
who learned in an Eskimo igloo:
an advantage comparative
is an advantage imperative
when you only have ice for your stew.

Other suggestions/requests?***

*or rather, the day after while roughly reconstructing what occurred to me while trying to fall asleep... never believe yourself that you'll remember in the morning.

**this doesn't illustrate the most important / misunderstood aspects of comparative advantage, but give me a break, it's a limerick...

***I already did "Darwin's barnacles" but I can't post that one online. Ask me in person ;)

too good

2011-10-31T14:08:00.000-07:00

Zach Weiner is a genius.

Except that his frequently-expressed hostility towards economists needs to be rephrased as towards businessmen/financiers/etc because he's perpetuating our undeserved bad name, and that's what he really means anyway :)

"Quietly and untelegenically,

2011-10-18T17:00:00.000-07:00

Americans are trying to repair their economic values."

I like that sentence. That's David Brooks, saying that the occupy wall street protests (and etc) are less representative or important than their media coverage would lead you to believe, whereas the silent moderate majority is making the common-sense choices and changes to get back on the right track.

I sure hope he's right. Imagining that he is always makes me feel better about the world.

without loss of generality

2011-10-13T12:00:00.000-07:00

Every time I read "assuming x rather than y drastically simplifies the analysis and doesn't substantively alter our results" in a theory paper, I wonder how how conclusively the authors really know that. Is it just intuitive, or did they really do all that `drastically harder' extra work and leave it out of the paper..?

Dear science journalists,

2011-10-11T21:09:00.000-07:00

Last week, three physicists were awarded the Nobel prize for discovering that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate.

That's all I know about it. I don't even know their names. But I do know that when you drop the last four words off of a sentence, its meaning often changes.

We've known the universe is expanding for a very long time, since Edwin Hubble, in the 1920s and 1930s, observed that galaxies that are farther away appear to be moving away from us at a faster rate than nearby galaxies. (Think about it for a second: If you draw dots on a balloon and imagine yourself living on one particular dot, this is what the other dots would appear to do when you blow the balloon up, thereby expanding the ballooniverse.)

In 1998, three physicists discovered that this rate of expansion is increasing. If you need to abbreviate to fit that in a headline, say the prize was awarded for the accelerating universe theory.

I wish I'd bought the [relatively reputable] newspaper I saw at the corner store so I could quote verbatim and confirm which paper it was exactly, but it was essentially "Berkeley physicists wins Nobel Prize for discovering universe still expanding." I'm utterly baffled as to how the `still' got in there, on top of omitting the relevant information.

Really. I know science is hard*, but how hard is it to read and quote the already-dumbed-down blurb released by the Swedes? I sure feel bad for the scientists whose discoveries aren't so incredibly easy to describe. They must come through the media-filter as utter nonsense.

*I'd say `harder than journalism' but that's just too snarky even for me :)

self-fulfilling beliefs

2011-10-09T20:49:00.000-07:00

Again and again, it appears that success is strongly determined by self-fulfilling beliefs. Belief in unlimited willpower causes willpower to materialize. Belief in self-determinism leads to self-determinism. These things are so powerful and yet so underestimated.

The latest awesome demonstration of this (stolen from Wired via Farnam Street) shows that belief in unlimited capacity for developing new skills causes higher capacity for skills, through more efficient learning. Skip the details and concerns about the paper; this interpretation is the point and I'm confident in its truth without seeing any evidence at all:

"While people with a fixed mindset see mistakes as a dismal failure — a sign that we aren’t talented enough for the task in question — those with a growth mindset see mistakes as an essential precursor of knowledge, the engine of education."

Nuff said. Obvious, but so often forgotten.

communism's greatest triumph

2011-10-07T22:04:00.000-07:00

[Stolen from MR] Neil Stephenson says "A grizzled NASA veteran once told me that the Apollo Moon landings were communism’s greatest achievement."

Well that's amusing, but the rest of Stephenson's essay is what I actually wanted to talk about. He lament's that Big Things aren't getting done anymore, advocating for large centrally-planned projects such as the Apollo missions, but then uses a very bizarre(-ly misguided) metaphor with island evolution to place the blame for this on the modern ease of information access:

In his recent book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, Tim Harford outlines Charles Darwin’s discovery of a vast array of distinct species in the Galapagos Islands—a state of affairs that contrasts with the picture seen on large continents, where evolutionary experiments tend to get pulled back toward a sort of ecological consensus by interbreeding. “Galapagan isolation” vs. the “nervous corporate hierarchy” is the contrast staked out by Harford in assessing the ability of an organization to innovate.
Most people who work in corporations or academia have witnessed something like the following: A number of engineers are sitting together in a room, bouncing ideas off each other. Out of the discussion emerges a new concept that seems promising. Then some laptop-wielding person in the corner, having performed a quick Google search, announces that this “new” idea is, in fact, an old one—or at least vaguely similar—and has already been tried. Either it failed, or it succeeded. If it failed, then no manager who wants to keep his or her job will approve spending money trying to revive it. If it succeeded, then it’s patented and entry to the market is presumed to be unattainable, since the first people who thought of it will have “first-mover advantage” and will have created “barriers to entry.” The number of seemingly promising ideas that have been crushed in this way must number in the millions.
What if that person in the corner hadn’t been able to do a Google search? It might have required weeks of library research to uncover evidence that the idea wasn’t entirely new—and after a long and toilsome slog through many books, tracking down many references, some relevant, some not. When the precedent was finally unearthed, it might not have seemed like such a direct precedent after all. There might be reasons why it would be worth taking a second crack at the idea, perhaps hybridizing it with innovations from other fields. Hence the virtues of Galapagan isolation.

There are so many things wrong with this...

First of all, the process he describes can only lead to innovation stagnation if the story ends where he stops telling it. In reality, while it may be true that innovators who don't do due diligence may write off good ideas too quickly when they see something similar has already been tried, they write them off and (eventually) proceed to something else even more novel.

Secondly, if there is a downside to innovation from easy information, I would bet it's the opposite of the phenomenon described by Stephenson: if anything, easy information will trap minds within boxes that have already been exhausted, not cause minds to write off profitable boxes that weren't fully exploited.

Thirdly, the metaphor itself is fundamentally flawed. Galapagan isolation leads to amazing biodiversity because isolated populations diverge genetically and each face dissimilar sets of predators/environmental challenges that natural selection has to overcome. Many many different equilibria, consisting of different sets of species coexisting in their own unique ecosystems, develop on each island. There is no process even vaguely similar to the business meeting described above; ecosystems don't set out with the goal of coming up with a new, better solutions to life, take a look around to see if anyone has done something similar, and then write off trying out a leopard when they see there's already a cheetah.

This isn't a superficial flaw either; a truer metaphor would point against the thing Stephenson advocates for: large, centrally planned Big Things. Continental evolution doesn't produce the same variety of solutions because every `idea' is filtered through the same, huge elimination system. Island settings allow for a decentralized, diversified approach to evolution, like a hundred start-up aerospace companies instead of one big NASA.

Maybe I'm overly optimistic, but I'd rather live in a politically-impotent world with a thousand struggling startups than the cold war. I'll put my money with the crazy think-different geniuses before government bureaucracy any day.

blogging

2011-10-03T18:31:00.000-07:00

So there's this great new paper on the impact of economic blogs (confirming the things you would expect, but which are sort of hard to confirm.) The introduction talks about some of the perceptions of blogs and two things really jumped out at me:

"Bell (2006, p.75) summarizes another common perception of blogs, as '…a largely harmless outlet for extroverted cranks and cheap entertainment for procrastinating office workers.'" [Note, this comment is made about blogs generally.] ...Extroverted? Really? I am pretty confident that your average blogger is substantially less extroverted than average. Certainly one of the reasons I like blogging is because I like talking about these things... but not so much in person. Surely this must be the case for people more generally: after hashing something out or sharing whatever it is with whomever you run into at the water cooler, surely the impulse to write it down is lessened. Introverted people just don't like hanging out at the water cooler as much.
"...the freedom to write about topics outside their area of expertise (what Jacob T. Levy called `public-intellectualitis' in his blog)". Well, clearly this happens, but I would say it's mostly a disease in interpretation rather than a disease in blogging. Sure, `blogger' columnists for the New York Times and other reputable institutions need to stick to their areas of expertise, and there are many ways of subtly asserting authority that anyone who says anything publicly should pay attention to, but on a normal blog that covers anything more than the tiny sliver of knowledge that the author happens to be an expert in (which I'm convinced can never sustain an interesting blog for more than a short time, despite many such attempts) I'd say the first interpretation should be to give the author the benefit of a doubt. Especially if their motivations are in line with what I described above, simply to have a casual interesting conversation in a public setting, or to work through thoughts in writing, or anything similar, then even if the post defends a particular view or claim, this type of writing is very different from providing an authoritative view on something. As with all things, a good rule of thumb for getting the most possible value from something is to be logically skeptical and sympathetic to the intentions of the writer.

optimism list

2011-09-24T11:35:00.000-07:00

I'm a sucker for memes and Tyler Cowen started another good one: the optimism list.

I'm optimistic that information technology and sheer density of humanity will make it very hard to maintain walls. I'm optimistic about patent/copyright law and therefore innovation, immigration, the demise of dictatorships, information censorship, a decrease in war, etc. [Conversely, I'm pessimistic about mob mentality, the political culture, epidemics, and other well-known downsides to density...]
Similarly, I'm optimistic that with increasing wealth and widespread English literacy will come increasing international mobility, and that with increasing mobility will come increasing competition between national governments, and that with this comes better policy. So long as no one has any more bright Eurozone++ meganational ideas...
I'm optimistic that crazy and/or rich people will continue to do wonderful things even if governments do their best to disincentivize them and even if it becomes difficult to enforce property rights in a way that incentivizes them. You only need one person to be convinced of the profitability of exploring Mars to get humans to Mars; you also only need one eccentric billionaire with an interest in Mars to get humans to Mars. [Conversely...well you can imagine.]
I'm optimistic that there will be more and more rich (in money OR time) people doing wonderful things just because they want to and can (and because among 7 billion people, a tiny percentage goes a long way). I'm optimistic about economic growth and the developing world in general.
I'm optimistic about the scarce resources that we depend on. The world isn't going to end when we deplete our oil reserves or the easily-accessible fresh water. Prices will adjust and innovation will occur. Likewise, I'm (less so, but more so than most...) optimistic about climate change, pollution, overpopulation, etc. [But, I'm very pessimistic about scarce resources that are considered by most to be expendable, or that have clear but indirect and uncapturable value, and that won't recur or be fixable once we realize what we've done. Save our national parks; protect biodiversity.]
I'm pessimistic about mental health and the general adjustment to a modern lifestyle that is very foreign to our evolutionary roots. We will make ourselves crazy and miserable continuing to live in cubicles and sit at keyboards a majority of our waking hours, but the immediate incentives never lead away from this. I'm pessimistic that the long-term accepted solution is going to be pharmacological, in an inevitably flawed attempt to change human nature rather than our environment.
I'm pessimistic about human nature and our mental limitations encountering a world that operates with many cognitive prerequisites, but optimistic about our ability to work around those limitations. (I'm also quite optimistic about the increasing level of self-knowledge, both as individuals and as a species, but pessimistic that even on its best day, self-knowledge can't trump self.)
I'm pessimistic that, in a world run by the extroverted ~~mafia~~ majority, the transition away from [work-on-site / perpetual meetings and real-time collaboration / verbal, in-person communication / etc] workplace norms, as facilitated by information technology, will be slowed enough that my own career options will remain severely limited by an extreme aversion to these things...
I'm optimistic that, as bad as things might get, there will still be rainbows, kittens and LaTeX.

waste, more generally speaking

2011-09-22T12:57:00.000-07:00

...than just politics or advertising in particular. I meant to link to this article yesterday when I stole a wording from it, but it's worth it's own post anyhow. Go read.

(Ignore the "Darwin vs. Adam Smith" thing - the phenomenon in discussion is of course well-known, and in more general terms than to biologists I suspect, to economists. The phenomenon itself and the analogy between how it plays out in the ecosystem and the market is what is interesting.)

(Also, I would strongly disagree with the following claim about modern liberals, aside from that tragically small subset of liberals, or conservatives for that matter, who actually understand markets...: "Like modern liberals, [Smith] saw market failure as rooted in insufficient competition.")

Anyway, enough asides. The point is, if individual competitive interests diverge from the common interest, this can* lead to waste, such as 40-pound antlers or billions of dollars spent on advertising.

(And then he talks about consumption taxes, which is interesting - and nice to see; consumption taxes are left out of the tax policy discussion despite being a great idea...- but I think more than an essay is needed to link that discussion to the earlier one robustly.)

*emphasis on can. The author claims will.**

**Now how is that for a blog post consisting entirely of asides and footnotes?

advertising

2011-09-21T10:43:00.000-07:00

Politics leads to waste as each side tries to out-shout the other with progressively louder commercials. I suggested that there is a way to divert most of this wasteful spending in a way that preserves the competitive impact of the foregone campaign donation. Unfortunately, this doesn't work in advertising, since individuals don't pay for it.

Advertising is just like politics in the sense that individual firm interests (to sell more Dr. Rootsicola brand liquid sugar) diverge from public interests (to have access to, and be aware of, the highest quality-for-the-price liquid sugar) in such a way that leads to massive wasteful expenditures by Dr. Rootsicola as they try to stomp out their possibly superior, but underfunded, competitor. In the process, we get bombarded by a thousand times more advertising than we want or need for informational purposes and have to pay higher prices for the privilege of funding this war. Unfortunately, the war is indeed successful at planting certain brands in our brains; otherwise it would be a viable strategy to spend just enough on ads to inform the public of the superiority of an alternate, and charge less for it.

Other than sparking a cultural tideshift that makes advertising repugnant (New, all natural low-fat low-sugar low-ad water!™) I don't see a way to a effect change actively. But yet I'm not pessimistic. Two trends are shifting the advertising industry into a value-creator:

The internet. We're all familiar by now with how advertising supports an economy of free things that are valuable but nearly impossible to make money off of directly as a result of being non-concrete/zero-marginal-cost and imitable/piratable. I like this symbiosis.
Groupon et al. It's not yet clear how short-lived this fad will be, but deep-discount coupon sites are popping up faster than wackamoles. I suspect there's going to be a substantial backlash / redesign for awhile as people learn how bad they are at remembering to use coupons they've already paid for, and businesses figure out how to design the best offers in a given context, but I don't think they're disappearing. Last week one afternoon I had a free smoothie, ice cream sandwich, falafels, and deep-fried oreos. Now I know how good those smoothies and falafels and sandwiches are (...and not to ever eat deep-fried candy again if I want to avoid a mid-motorcycle-commute heart attack.) Instead of strapping me to a chair and forcing me to watch a video spot they spend thousands of dollars to create, they fed me and informed me, and I'll be going back. Everyone wins. I don't know how the cost-benefit comparison* works out, but I have an inkling: I can't name a single n-dozen-times repeated hulu commercial at the moment, but I know exactly where to go for good falafel.

*Yeah, it completely depends on the context. A multinational automobile firm advertises differently than the local ice cream shop. Still...

breathe

2011-09-19T15:53:00.000-07:00

Civilization is a mild torture mechanism, a Harrison Bergeron-style device constantly preventing us from fully experiencing moments like the moments we were evolved to thrive in. We become so accustomed to this subtle soul-upsetting buzz that we embrace it as the new normal; until, when an unexpected reprieve grants us the time to float back to equilibrium, we fleetingly glimpse how much energy we've been expending just to tread the water of our day to day lives.

In Golden Gate park is a particular tree. In the middle of millions of people you can reclaim a piece of your peace of mind, by only climbing sixty feet or so above the hobos and traffic and power suits and jogging ipods. Leave behind the torture device, lay out on the branches, and listen to the wind gradually drown out the bustle below.

This is what it's supposed to feel like to breathe.

It's an imperfect fix, and far too short of a break, but any opportunity to set foot on solid ground, for however long, is a valuable relief. And when it's over, carry with you that reminder of what is really important. You'll know which one I'm talking about.

best. distraction. ever.

2011-09-14T20:41:00.000-07:00

...for cartophiles, anyway: http://www.bigmapblog.com/

(thank you Gautam!)

intervening in suicide

2011-09-13T11:26:00.000-07:00

Freakonomics mentions suicide; specifically asking the question, would you stop someone from committing suicide? This was motivated by an anecdote told by a taxi driver who picked up a passenger who said he wanted to be taken to the Golden Gate bridge so he could jump off of it. The taxi driver didn't object, so the passenger said "you're not going to stop me?" and the driver said "No, why should I?" It's a free country after all.

Two things:

1. It's a very bizarre line of argument to invoke our `free country' in a discussion about interactions between individuals. Yes, it's a free country, and the government should butt it's big head out of our decisions about when and how to end life, or any other victimless action. But also, it's a free country, and if someone I care about is suicidal, I damn well am going to try to talk them out of it or intervene in more direct ways and get them help. If they want to kill themselves so bad, being stopped one time by trying it within my sphere of influence is a minor setback.

2. This is a strategic interaction, not a one-sided decision to interfere. The taxi driver didn't magically come across information about this guy's intentions; that guy told him outright. That itself was a strategic decision:

On that Freakonomics post, they also have a poll asking if you would intervene. Predictably, a vast majority of people say they would, at least in certain circumstances. I'm not the least bit surprised by this, and I'm sure the taxi passenger was also aware that most people would react in that way (as evidenced by his surprise at the driver's reaction...) When he made the decision to state his intentions, therefore, he expected to be interfered with. To me, it sounds like he was looking for the universe to provide any sign of unambivalence, and the taxi driver cruelly didn't provide it.

social security is a Ponzi scheme

2011-09-10T13:25:00.000-07:00

(Well I just posted something an hour ago but this'll probably be old news by tomorrow...)

Matt Yglesias gets it wrong; Alex Tabarrok refutes him, but not very clearly, mostly by appealing to authority. Judging from the comments, no one seems to know what a Ponzi scheme IS, just that some bad guy got caught running a big one two years ago so it must be bad.

Let's get this straight. In a typical investment vehicle, like a mutual fund or a 401k plan or the stock market or whatever, you put money in, that money is transferred to people who are using it to build more wealth through their business, and that growing pile of wealth is shared with the investors, who thus end up withdrawing more than they put in.

In a Ponzi scheme, some number of people originally invest in it, the guy running it takes their money, and then finds more people to join, using their money to pay back the original investors with some attractive rate of return. Eventually, he fails to find enough new investors to keep paying back his old investors, and the scheme goes bust with lots of people losing everything they put in. No wealth is created in this process.

Social security is a Ponzi scheme, at least partially. The current young pay for the current retirees, with the first generation of covered retirees getting a free ride. Social security doesn't collapse because there are always more young people to join, and the government has the power to force them to.

Whatever is paid into the system that isn't immediately distributed is invested, and yes, this is not part of the definition of a Ponzi scheme. But, just because a Ponzi scheme uses investment as a side tool doesn't make it not fundamentally a Ponzi scheme.

I'm not sure how this is even a controversial statement. It wouldn't be, if Rick Perry hadn't said it, and if the terms 'Ponzi scheme' and 'social security' didn't translate immediately to 'bad' and 'good' for most people, and if those who don't like Rick Perry didn't reinforce the confusion for political purposes. Did I mention I hate politics?

science is compensation for smallness

2011-09-10T12:27:00.000-07:00

The same essay I was just talking about also has this great paragraph stuck in towards the end, fairly separate from the rest of it:

Indeed, one could define science as reason’s attempt to compensate for our inability to perceive big numbers. If we could run at 280,000,000 meters per second, there’d be no need for a special theory of relativity: it’d be obvious to everyone that the faster we go, the heavier and squatter we get, and the faster time elapses in the rest of the world. If we could live for 70,000,000 years, there’d be no theory of evolution, and certainly no creationism: we could watch speciation and adaptation with our eyes, instead of painstakingly reconstructing events from fossils and DNA. If we could bake bread at 20,000,000 degrees Kelvin, nuclear fusion would be not the esoteric domain of physicists but ordinary household knowledge. But we can’t do any of these things, and so we have science, to deduce about the gargantuan what we, with our infinitesimal faculties, will never sense. If people fear big numbers, is it any wonder that they fear science as well and turn for solace to the comforting smallness of mysticism?

Isn't that great? The same thing applies in the social sciences, even though these by definition study things that are on human scales. If we could live for millennia and hold terabytes of information in our minds easily, we could simply see the phenomena we hope to deduce through the social scientific method. Just like we don't need studies to tell us that smiling at people makes them happy, or paying more on rent than you earn will land you broke, we wouldn't need studies or statistics to sort out the subtle interactions between education and social norms and property rights and social preferences (to take a random example...)

Although, I think it'd be a stretch to describe mathematics or engineering in this way. Mathematics doesn't concretely exist in the world; we invent or choose axioms and then discover what truths they imply, and those truths frequently tell us something about the real world, but they don't exist to be observed until after they're created/discovered by mathematicians. Likewise, engineering. When I say engineering I don't mean studying the world with the aim of using that knowledge to build things (that's just science, and the above applies), but building things and studying what we build. Then, once again, the object of study doesn't exist until we create it (whether it's the effect of nuclear waste disposal or of the design of government institutions) and we can't, with large enough brains and enough time, just look at the world and know the answers.

Science vs. anthroposcience? Science vs. quantitative 'art'? I'm not sure how to define that latter category exactly. But you see what I mean.

computability and big numbers

2011-09-06T14:57:00.001-07:00

I recently realized (through finding a computer version of trivial pursuit, which provides player statistics) that I'm a little less terrible at the geography category than the science category. The resulting minor identity crisis put me on a bit of a science kick, which included reading this great essay a friend of mine sent me (thank you Kenny!) that I can't believe I've never seen before. Read the whole thing if you like numbers or computation in the least. In particular, the relation between computability and big numbers is fun. The idea goes like this:

Consider a computer and all the possible programs we could write for this computer (intuitively, don't think of interactive software programs, think of a program you start running, and then you wait, and then it eventually gives you an `answer'. Like a calculator.) Specifically, consider a Turing machine.
Computer programs can be written to compute whatever you want them to. The problem is, it's hard to know if it will finish computing that thing in finite time. It might get stuck in an infinite loop, counting all the way to infinity looking for something that doesn't exist. The halting problem is: can I examine an arbitrary program and decide whether or not it will terminate in finite time?
It turns out that it is not possible to write a computer program that solves the halting problem. The proof is great but repeating it would take too much length and specificity, so just read at that link.
- But since I can't resist, it basically goes: Say h(i,j) is an algorithm that returns 1 if program i terminates on input j, 0 otherwise. Then define g(i) to be 0 if h(i,i) is 0, and to loop forever if h(i,i)=1. But then either g(g)=h(g,g)=0, or g(g) doesn't terminate and h(g,g)=1. Either way, you have a contradiction with the definition of h. As Aaronson puts it, "Like a hound that finally catches its tail and devours itself, the mythical machine vanishes in a fury of contradiction. (That’s the sort of thing you don’t say in a research paper.)" *grin*
Any program is defined with a certain exact number of rules. Think about all the possible programs that contain exactly N rules. There are only finitely many of these programs, since N is finite and there are only finitely many possible types of rules, so we can hypothetically make a list of all of these programs.
Now consider what happens when you run each of these programs. Some might terminate and some might loop forever, but among the ones that terminate, one of them takes the longest. So, you can define BB(N) to be the length of time that the longest-running program with N rules takes (that is, the Nth Busy Beaver number.)
Can a Turing machine compute these numbers? If it could, it could solve the halting problem by simply watching a program with N rules run for BB(N) steps, and if it hasn't finished by then, by definition of BB(N), it never will. Therefore, the BB number sequence grows too fast to be computable, because we already know that the halting problem isn't computable.
Even more striking, BB(N) grows faster than any computable sequence: Say there is some number sequence that is always greater than BB, D(N)>BB(N). Then if we can compute D(N), we can automatically compute BB(N), because we just run every N-rule program, and among those that stop within D steps, the longest-running one takes BB(N) steps. Therefore D doesn't exist.

One minor addendum to that: even if we don't know that D is greater than BB, or even if it was somehow not possible to know for sure, having computational access to D allows us to unknowingly calculate BB, which is in principle not possible.)

So in summary: the BB number sequence is really, really big. So big, no computer can possibly keep up when trying to calculate them. And this connection between computability theory and big numbers is cool :)

A side note about amateur interests: isn't it nice learning this stuff in bite-sized chunks instead of in five-minute flurries in math classes that are so dense with mulling-requiring ideas that you can never catch up enough to enjoy how beautiful it is? Sure, at this rate I couldn't never learn enough to be a theoretical computer scientist, but what's the point if it's not enjoyable? Not to say it's not possible to learn enough or work hard enough where that pace would be enjoyable, but I already picked a different niche specialize in, and I don't want to completely lose touch with science just because I can't devote so much time to it.

winners and losers

2011-09-01T18:32:00.000-07:00

Colloquially thinking, history favors the righteous. Good triumphs over evil and the moral compass of the collective world because more finely tuned as deviating groups get weeded out.

It would be implausibly coincidental if the morally righteous (in the absolute sense of the phrase; let's not worry about whether there is such a thing for the moment) side of all of these historical struggles just happened to be the more powerful, and thus victorious, side. So how to explain the colloquial thinking?

Is is that the ones who won pass on their own definition of morality, which we forget was not unambiguously true? Or similarly, do we simply prefer to adopt the morality of victors, as though their victory is evidence of the absolute goodness of it, or because we initially just fear crossing them and later generations forget that our stated beliefs were disingenuous?*

Is it that we simply selectively remember the incidents in history in which good triumphed over evil, because we are ashamed of our history as an imperfect people?**

Or is it that true morality is defined by the system that works, in the sense that it survives and perpetuates itself among the greatest number of people? And that therefore, the righteous must eventually be triumphant?***

I really believe each of those three explanations are in operation, and yet two of them imply that conventional wisdom is misguided and the third implies that it's dead on. Which one wins out, most of the time?

~~~

*see: missionaries. maybe replace 'fear' with 'bribe'. it's amazing how much more receptive people are to Gods Word when lip-service to such a thing comes with a livelihood. and amazing how deeply entrenched Christianity is in Africa and such missionary-drenched places after so short a time.

**see: public school lessons on the holocaust vs. the trail of tears.

***see: the cold war. no need for a war against communism; just sit back and watch it implode.

unfunded mandates

2011-08-31T16:08:00.000-07:00

(Not endorsing unfunded mandates, but promoting a less discriminatory scrutiny of ALL mandates...)

The difference between a funded mandate and unfunded mandate in the private sector is, for example, the difference between requiring your kids to go to private school or requiring your kids to pay for their own private school.

The difference between a funded and unfunded mandate in the public sector is, for example, the difference between the federal government taxing citizens and giving that money to the state to implement some educational reform, or the federal government telling the state it has to do the taxing itself. Either way, the people have to pay for the reform.

Sure, this ignores redistribution amongst the states. Zero-sum game => I don't care. On the contrary, most of the time I'd rather the burden of a project be squarely on the shoulders of the ones benefiting from it. People make more careful choices when they have to pay the consequences.

I don't understand social networking

2011-08-30T16:50:00.000-07:00

Does anyone actually use twitter for news, rather than to promote twitter and/or themselves as a platform for news?

And does anyone actually use quora to find answers to questions, rather than to promote themselves as answerers of questions?

And does anyone actually use linkedin to find jobs or contacts, rather than as a personal advertisement / to demonstrate your linked-in-ness? Are those things one and the same?

These are supposed to be such Big Things that demonstrate the importance of social networking (twitter especially) but I don't really see them being used except for the sake of using them... (unlike facebook, blogs, etc.)

Am I misguided in thinking the userbase is the correct measure of importance? Maybe it's the ubiquity of those little sidebar boxes with tweets pertaining to the subject of the page / tv newscast / etc.? (Am I in the minority in finding those not much less irritating than youtube comments?) Or the availability of answers in google, or the availability of contact information for industry professionals?

The Commuter's Lament

2011-08-26T19:12:00.000-07:00

The ceiling of the Times Square subway station has poetry in its ~~bones~~ support beams.

Don't worry, bitter New Yorkers. You, too, can quit your soul crushing job and go to grad school!

Brain and spirit crushing, after all, don't have nearly the same long-term side effects as soul crushing.

(P.S. I'm no photographer or anything but dotcha love my accidental blurred-masses effect of using a long exposure setting? It's simultaneously the same selective-focus effect from a small F-stop AND it's subject-appropriate... *grin*)

(Subway artwork by Norman B. Colp. Pretty entertaining departure from all of the rest of the metro transit artwork, which is cheerful and colorful and uplifting and clearly designed to get people out of this particular mindset...)

misc things about Gabon

2011-08-25T08:41:00.000-07:00

I completely forgot I wrote this stuff down when I was on the train back to Libreville. So I guess this is Gabon part 4. At least two more coming, at some unknown distant point in the future when I get around to writing about that train trip and about the visa saga.

1. Car horns have an entirely different purpose here. Instead of being an emergency device to call attention to someone about to run into you, it serves a multitude of common practical purposes which are surprisingly fairly clearly differentiated merely by context:

1. Don’t move, I’m about to pass you.
2. Move, I’m about to merge.
3. Hi I’m a taxi; do you need one?
4. Hi little village, look at the car passing through!
5. Get out of the road.
6. Look out whoever is around this blind corner, I’m coming around full speed.
7. I accept your price, get in the taxi.
8. Which way are you trying to go?

2. I would love to live in Africa for awhile (although in a more pleasant climate…) but I would dearly miss the variety of fruits and vegetables that are always available in California. You would think that in a tropical country there would be tons of fresh produce around, but that’s definitely not the case. Avocados and African oranges (which you half-peel and squeeze for juice instead of eating like a real fruit), apples (which I can’t eat because foreigners are supposed to avoid uncooked produce unless it has a thick peel that you can peel yourself), and plantains are the only ubiquitous things. I’ve also seen some watermelons which are insanely expensive (about a dollar a pound… I don’t buy them in the U.S. until they hit around 29 cents) and a very few unripe mangoes in Libreville, but not the rest of the country where I’ve been for all but 3 days. Canned fruit is almost impossible to find and about $3.50 per can. I’ve been craving fruit since I got here.

The food is actually kinda weird more generally speaking than the produce. Most of the African food I’ve had in the U.S. is from east sub-Saharan Africa, which is mostly delicious (kinda sorta a bad approximation of Indian food… but nothing competes with Indian food so that’s still a compliment) or Ethiopian (which is it’s own very delicious thing) except for one Ghanian food festival I stumbled into in Chicago which was also very good, but obviously food festivals are a little bit of a biased take on things. But here, while some of it is very very good (chicken and beef kabobs, roasted chicken, plantains) despite the big globs of mayonnaise that they put on everything, some other stuff smells unbelievably vile, like something I would never dream was food unless I was watching it being prepared. And it’s not just unclean cooking environments – one dish at the fancy dinner I went to at Jake’s conference also seemed to be intentionally prepared with that particular vile essence. It’s really bizarre, and I really can’t figure out what it is.

Then eating with these Wildlife Conservation Society scientists at their camp in the Bateke forest, a few more strange things have popped up. For one, the salt fish, which I’ve seen everywhere but not tried (at Jake’s advice). They ship whole fish from the ocean around the country, preserved like jerky with lots of salt and by smoking it. Most of them are little perch-type fish, but you also see giant slabs of other kinds of fish preserved this way. The WCS guys cooked up some of this stuff in some other kind of sauce, and even with the sauce, it was like eating partially decomposed very fishy meat with ten times more salt than is tolerable. And also some of a local vegetable, asperge, which is so bitter my whole mouth involuntarily puckered upon tasting it. I totally understand eating these things if there’s nothing else available or affordable, but that’s definitely not the case at a fancy-pants conference.

It must be an acquired taste but even that’s hard to comprehend. I’m not particularly fond of the staple carbohydrate (‘manioc’, which is made from cassava root, is the texture of rubber, and tastes weirdly sour, kind of like raw sourdough) but I can see how you’d like it if you grew up with it, and the locals indeed love it. Same for the ubiquitous “piment” sauce, which is so hot that three drops of the oil in a whole pot of rice makes me sweat, and after I cut up a couple of the peppers it’s made of, my hands for two days felt like I’d put them on a hot frying pan and literally blistered. I suppose you could grow up liking salt fish too, I guess, but it’s obviously something people do out of necessity for preservation, so I’m not sure why you’d eat it when you’ve got a riverful of fresh fish ten yards away. But that unknown vile essence is so profoundly awful it provokes a visceral “this is not edible! Run away from the toxic waste center!” reaction.

(Then again, coffee does the same thing to me... maybe it's cappuccino salt fish :)

3. The French here sounds less awful than in France but still not a beautiful language. Better than German, though, which I’ve discovered still resides in my subconscious, in a surprisingly large vocabulary, but only peaks out when I’m trying to think of a word in French. What’s worse though is that since Spanish and French are so similar, French has completely crowded out the Spanish that I’ve been studying. Hopefully an hour of rosetta stone back at home will rectify that. I don’t WANT to learn French, grr…

Turns out grammar is highly overrated as well. I don’t know anything about French grammar and stumble along with isolated words plucked from my vocabulary of about 50, strung together in things that represent sentences well enough to be understood about three quarters of the time, correctly about half the time. The English equivalent is probably something like ‘Us comes here more late at five o’clock’ or ‘you know where possible buy what is this?’ But hey it gets the point across. Pronunciation, however, is critical, and I am not physically capable of talking with my sinus cavity in the way required to mash all these syllables together like they do. Or to grunt instead of pronouncing “un” like in Spanish.

4. The language pride is a strange carryover from French culture. Somehow despite the fact that French colonialists forced their language on the country that still speaks 500 regional tribal languages relatively recently, many Gabonese are incredibly disdainful of anyone who doesn’t speak French. We got a lot of “Why can you not speak French! Here in Gabon we speak French.” While I of course think it is important to be able to take care of yourself and not get in trouble or offend the locals when traveling, and that requires some degree of language ability or at least a good phrasebook, who in their right mind expects Americans to learn every language of every country they visit? Get off your high horses Francophones!

On the opposite extreme, since very few people in Gabon speak English, when we met someone who did they were overjoyed to be able to use it with us. We walked into a cafeteria-in-a-tent restaurant type place and met a man who pilots shipping ships between several Gabonese ports who spoke English, and he was so happy to talk to us he insisted on buying our meals. Amazingly friendly guy. The next day we went to a bookstore and met someone from Cameroon who spoke English (parts of Cameroon speak more English than French) and he told us all about his business and translation service that he was starting and got our contact information and told us to call him if we were ever in Cameroon. He emailed us later that night too to say once again that he was happy to meet us and that if I knew anyone who was visiting Cameroon, we should give them his number. Another time we met a kid from Nigeria who spoke English and he also insisted on trading contact information and telling us to call him if we were ever there. And another time in Libreville a student talked to us for about 15 minutes about his youth organization and got our facebook information, not to get money from us (which is almost always the case…) but just to practice his English.

It’s a really weird dichotomy between quite disdainful, unhelpful and unfriendly French people and exuberantly friendly English-speakers.

get the money out of politics

2011-08-24T13:52:00.000-07:00

I hate politics. And I especially hate so many valuable monetary resources being wasted on two-year long commercials for all the slimy weasels in politics. But, I understand the impulse to contribute to those campaigns, since, after all, politicians do have a lot of power to affect the world and everyone wants to make sure their right guy has that power.

So if someone is waiting around for a lucrative non-profit idea, how about: set up a website where people can make political donations, but if that donation can be matched with an offsetting donation to the other side, both donations go to some nonpartisan charity of your choice (e.g. the Red Cross or the Humane Society or Nature Conservancy.) That way all those billions of dollars normally spent on winning the campaign volume war will STILL have that effect (by damping the other side rather than ramping your own), but will have two wonderful additional side effects: widespread weasel muzzling, and good deeds done.

You could even expand it in complexity to cater to specific preferences: say someone wants to donate $20 to the Mitt Romney for president campaign. They could specify that if a matching donation to any of a number of organizations (the Obama campaign, the Michele Bachmann campaign, or the ACLU, for example) is found within a certain number of days, that matched amount will be diverted to a specified service-based organization like those mentioned above, and the remainder, if any, will be donated to Mitt Romney at that time. Either way, a receipt for relevant tax deductions is provided at that time as well.

Has anyone done this? If so, why have I not heard about it? Are there some weird non-profit legal issues that make it difficult to implement? Is there some fundamental flaw in the concept that I'm missing? I know I'm not the only one cynical about all the money in politics and sick of hearing the commercials and really sick of all the phone calls from campaigns who aren't restricted by the Do Not Call list...

Vera Lynn

2011-08-18T15:33:00.001-07:00

When I first saw this on my facebook news feed, I thought it was personalized advertising, and I laughed at the fact that my name itself was enough of a reason to target me with this (as though I could possibly have gone a month, let alone 25 years*, without having the conversation 'Hi I'm Vera' 'Oh like the Pink Floyd song!'**, rendering this infomercial unnecessary).

Then I realized that it's just a coincidental post by a page I apparently 'liked', and I laughed at how cynical the modern ad-driven world has made me that I assume everything I see has been specially selected with the intention of selling me something.

*Doesn't it annoy the crap out of you when people switch the order of things in a `let alone' statement? like that awful song that was on the radio all the time when I was in high school with the line `let's go and see the stars, the milky way, or even mars', as though, after travelling hundreds of thousands of light-years around the galaxy, the one last barely-attainable goal is to stop next door on a red pebble. I've finally come around to accepting that the `could care less' thing could be a vestige of sarcasm, but I can't understand the `let alone' thing except as product of ignorance or verbal carelessness.

**or `hey that's my grandma's name!' Or, in certain circles that I rarely frequent, `like Vera Wang!' I've sadly never gotten a `like Vera Rubin!'***

***This blog post has clearly ceased to have a clear purpose, if it ever had one to begin with.

books

2011-08-17T07:01:00.000-07:00

I forgot to write these down awhile ago since I stopped reading for a few months when preparing for oral exams... except for hundreds of papers, of course.

Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn - Lest you be deceived by such a great title, this "geek" refers to the original meaning of the word: "a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake." Continuing in that spirit, this book was apparently written with the sole purpose of coming up with as much disturbing material as possible and throwing it together in a single story that could've been really good, if done in in moderation, and if any of the characters were lovable or worth rooting for. (Ok, Chick, the telekinetic angelic youngest child who bears the burden of all the world's pain, is a little lovable, but he's a side character.)

My Family and Other Animals, by Gerald Durrell - If you loved the James Herriot books, as I did, you'll love this. Gerald is a passionate naturalist who grew up on the Greek island of Corfu and wrote this (and two sequels) about his rather unique and creature-filled childhood. Very sweet. Lacking in overall plot, but who cares?

Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, by Jared Diamond - Good, and Jared Diamond is undeniably brilliant, but I much prefer the writing of Dawkins and Pinker and many others. This felt too much like a collection of miscellaneous essays that he wanted to make a book out of and came up with an overall theme of ... "all of human history". I guess that's fine but I would've liked it more if I'd been expecting that.

Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming - I love Bond movies, but had never read any of the books, so I figured I'd give it a try. Far cry from the movies.

inventing hypotheses

2011-08-10T14:04:00.000-07:00

Humans are amazingly good at rationalizing things. If you ever wanted striking proof of this, and to be convinced of the importance of falsifiability and testability of theories, browse through correlated.org and count how many correlations between really random human traits immediately make you think "well of course that's true, because...[insert convoluted story here]." Like, of course extroverted people are disproportionately fond of corn off the cob (as opposed to on the cob), because they tend to be more externally focused and less contemplative, so why eat a form of something that'll distract you from the dinner conversation?

Who wants to write me a widget that'll take a correlation from correlated.org and black out the numbers, until you click 'reveal'? That way you could guess which way direction the correlation goes before 'testing' your theory of the human brain by revealing the truth. They should turn it into a game...

meta-(behavioral economics)

2011-08-09T13:35:00.001-07:00

I'm not fond of the idea of libertarian paternalism.

Part of the reason why is that I'm partially just a stubborn classical economist who believes nearly dogmatically that people should be left alone to do what they want to do because they know best what is best for them, and the whole concept of sneakily coercing people into making different choices that they might not want to make is creepy.

And part of the reason is that I personally really want to be left alone to do what I want to do, and I really don't want to be sneakily manipulated into doing things I might not want to do.

And probably most of the reason is a purely irrational gut negative reaction to the word `paternalism' which I and most other economists are firmly opposed to for a host of perfectly reasonable reasons and some personal preferences too of course; and another negative reaction to terminology that taints such a wonderfully optimistic and freeing philosophy of libertarianism with such an ugly, pessimistic, patronizing thing as paternalism.

But beyond all that is another, very significant, reason. That is that people have consistent types of irrational behavior that will likely lead to abuse of libertarian paternalism as soon as it's accepted as an option. I worry that behavioral economists who propose behavioral solutions to behavioral problems are forgetting how other behavioral problems will lead those solutions to be counterproductive.

We're overconfident about what we believe to be true: when we pick up on some reason that people might make irrational decisions, we're then convinced that we know what's better for them.
We project our own preferences and values on others: if we see someone doing something that we wouldn't do, we overestimate the likelihood that they are mis-optimizing their own utility via some kind of irrationality. When a smoker starts begging me to tax him so they'll have an easier time quitting, I'll listen, but until then I'm inclined to trust their revealed preferences more than my own guess of their preferences.
We have delusions of control: we think we're capable of tweaking the world for the better without having to deal with endless fallout that often outweighs any benefit of the tweak.
We hate being passive: give us an option, any option, to actively do something to address an imperfection in the world, and we'll take it, whether or not we know how to do it well or what the side-effects might be or who might get hurt in the process.
And we pay more attention to salient information: it's easy to see that a default savings program helps many people increase their savings, but it's not obvious how many people are coerced through that program to save more than they should in their personal circumstances; a policy maker who isn't as used to searching for those hidden effects as economists who invent the policies are are going to be too keen on the policy. Not to mention, `small' costs or reductions in freedom are too easily written off as `no' costs. I for one really don't want to have to actively opt out of every silly nanny state policy the government wants to coerce me into. Government bureaucracy is never a trivial detail.

Obviously libertarian paternalism is a step in the right direction from paternalism. But that's only true when comparing two alternate policies of each type. But people react much more negatively to paternalistic policies, so it's hard to get them passed in the first place. Libertarian paternalistic policies are less damaging but also much easier to implement because moral libertarians can't really object and the downsides are much less obvious. So I worry that shifting towards this type of solution upsets the balance of volume in favor of the nanny state champions that I really don't want running the country.

type II supernovae

2011-07-23T14:09:00.000-07:00

A couple weekends ago at the Golden State Star Party I saw a really cool thing in my telescope that exemplifies one particular aspect of amateur astronomy that is very hard to share with passers-by. It's great to look at the Hercules cluster or Whirlpool Galaxy or Veil nebula but those kind of truly stunning photo-quality views are rare. Much of the fascination comes from the mindbogglingness of it all. It's frankly mindboggling how endlessly mindboggling the universe is.

Normally, every single dot of light that you see in the sky, even through a telescope, is a single star within our own galaxy. Other galaxies are so far away we didn't even realize they were there until the 20th century. The only extragalactic object you can see naked-eye is a faint fuzzy patch in Andromeda, the great Andromeda galaxy, a huge and very close neighbor to the Milky Way (about 2.5 million light years away).

With a telescope, you see many more of these fuzzy patches, but the smallest detail you can ever just barely see (still only in the large and very close examples) are globular clusters, which are themselves huge balls of millions of stars that couldn't quite make it as dwarf galaxies on their own.

So to see a single star within a galaxy 23 million light years away is downright insane. But that's what happens when a type II supernova occurs in the Whirlpool galaxy. An exploding giant star is the most powerful event in the known universe, so that a single star out of hundreds of billions of stars in a single galaxy millions of light years away can actually outshine the entire rest of the host galaxy.

My telescope is just big enough to clearly see this particular supernova. Two clear dots of light lay on the left side of the galaxy, one of which is a star on any map, and the other is an ephemeral glimmer of such a rare type that only a tiny fraction of humans have been able to see or understand it. To think, we humans go to New York City and are astonished by the amount of energy required to produce such a vibrant organism, and yet with a tiny seismic blip the Earth by itself could snuff this pinnacle of human civilization out. And a single tiny collision between orbiting pebbles could instantly erase out our entire Earthly existence. And a single tiny galactic blip could delete our entire solar system, the farthest limits of our feeble human reach and the source of all energy behind all phenomena we can experience tangibly, extinguished in a cosmic second like a cheap tea-light.

What other barely-distinguishable signal to a minuscule clump of rod cells can lead to such an existential experience of triviality?

metaknowledge

2011-07-20T23:41:00.000-07:00

With all of the hype about `interdisciplinary' research, you'd think there would be more people around with lots of knowledge about lots of things. Who else are the interdisciplinaries? But what it really means is that specialization has gone so far that every tiny little point on the gray continuum between one field and another has been staked and claimed. Whoever claimed it knows that little point incredibly thoroughly but has just as limited a view of the big picture as everyone else.

I don't think we need more so-called interdisciplinaries (at least any more than we need regular old physicists and sociologists), I think we need people who learn primarily the big-picture framework of ideas. When searching for a solution to some technological problem in today's ultra-fragmented and specialized world, each person working on the problem will start with what they know and go in the most promising direction from there. Eventually they come to some conclusion, using the knowledge in the local neighborhood of their own specialty. People are amazingly resourceful, so a little bit of localized knowledge is enough to hack together some solution.

Starting a search from a random point will only lead you to a local maximum. Sure, if you start the search from a whole bunch of random points (like hundreds of researchers in different fields working on the same problem) you'll find a global maximum eventually, but that's not always possible, and it's never efficient. If there were people who were trained to know just what knowledge exists rather than all the details and methods of applying it, they could point in the right direction to start with.

Even group work doesn't replace this kind of skill. The only specialized scientists who can speak with each other are in close enough disciplines to share a jargon. That's hardly a broader view of the world of science.

In the age of the internet we're becoming familiar with this need even on an individual level. Knowing how to google things is more important than knowing things. Knowing what research exists is just about the most important first step when starting a related research project. There's no longer any point to memorizing details, nor is it even possible to learn as many details about any particular thing as people used to, when the subject goes so much deeper in any direction. It's far more important to learn the epistemological structure of those details in order to build up a greater understanding.

the circus comes to town

2011-07-05T11:39:00.000-07:00

The last two months have been so ridiculously crazy and busy and nonstop in motion that I've barely sat down in front of my computer for any real length of time except to frantically get some work done, and as a result stopped blogging for the longest amount of time in 7 years. And I haven't looked at google reader since May 14. I have no earthly idea what is happening in the world...

Anyway, I finally got around to writing down the third installment in my Gabon travel journal, so here it is.

After Jake finished his conference in Franceville, he had arranged with the Wildlife Conservation Society for logistical support and permitting to collect fishes in the Bateké plateau region, just outside the national park (permits for within the park take many more months to approve…) That itself was a bit of a nightmare of spending hours on end writing emails in French with google translate to communicate with a bunch of separate people who apparently don’t communicate amongst themselves, but one that I thankfully was not involved in. At the last day of the conference Jake was finally able to talk to someone (an English person!) from WCS in person and we got an estimated date of departure of Tuesday the 1st, four days later. It wasn’t until Monday at the very end of business that the details were finalized though, and we found out we were going to have to travel with a local guide and feed him and pay him, etc. However, since we originally were told we might have to travel with a WCS person who doesn’t speak any English and didn’t hit it off all that warmly with Jake at the conference, and pay him $66 per day plus expenses, the much smaller price tag of $22 per day was warmly welcome.

So the next day a guy named Stephen drove us in the WCS landrover from Franceville to Kessala, the small village a couple miles hike from the WCS elephant monitoring camp where we would be staying. That drive was the first time I really felt like we were getting into a remote part of Africa with people who were definitely African: The road, which frequently had rivets and holes and uneven surfaces of several feet vertical differences, was definitely not in the same world as the nice paved highway out of Libreville or the decently usable dirt roads surrounding Franceville. And the driver was utterly unphased by this; he seemed to know every rut and exactly how to hit each one to maximize speed and minimize throwing the luggage in the back on top of the passengers. The reality of the situation seemed so unlikely it felt like I was watching a video game.

We arrived in Kessala, which was also of course a completely different world from the two big cities of Libreville and Franceville. It’s tiny, with probably a few dozen residents, and very poor, with all of the buildings except the church made from scrap metal and local wood planks and reeds. Chickens and stray dogs roam around freely, and while no one was obviously going hungry, they also clearly had only a couple very old items of clothing each.

The arrival of the landrover was a town event, with all of the important men of the town descending on the scene to decide exactly what to do with us, and another crowd of spectators milling around nearby. Stephen’s job was to take us to Kessala, introduce us to various people like the town chief and the guy who would guide us in the woods, and instruct that guy on his job description, which was to guide us around to streams and rivers where we could collect fish for about $22 per day plus food. I’m not sure Stephen successfully communicated any of this besides our names before a group of men took over, chattering in very fast Teké, to decide who would accompany us, who would be our porters, and whether I could go at all. (I’m still not clear what the issue was there… but I’m female, and was wearing shorts since it was at least a 100 degrees in Franceville that day and I hadn’t had a chance to change into jeans yet in Kessala, and they clearly thought I was ill-equipped to walk into the forest if I thought that was a sensible thing to wear. But whatever the issue was, it disappeared from discussion as mysteriously as it arose, with not a single question asked of me directly, and I sure wasn’t going to inquire about it further as long as they weren’t sending me back to Franceville.)

When they had decided our fate, at least 45 minutes later, they led us to the home of the man who would guide us and showed us where we could set up camp for the night. Stephen allegedly sorted out the details of what was happening with them, since they didn’t speak a single word of English, and told us when we were supposed to be packed up the next morning and who would carry what for us into the camp for what amount of money. So we ended up with two porters, and Papa, the old man who was our guide for 9 days.

Stephen left us to our devices, and we hurriedly set up the tent to try to get a short reprieve from the madness. The crowd of milling onlookers had followed us to the lawn where we were setting up camp, and three or four boys insisted on curiously helping me assemble the tent (a magical house-in-a-bag) while many others watched Jake rearrange other camping and scientific equipment while pointing and discussing everything in great depth amongst themselves in Teké (mostly speculating about the purpose of the many mysterious items, it seemed) and investigating in as much detail as Jake would let them get away with. We escaped into the tent for a few minutes to change and hide, but then had to come back out to cook some ramen since we were both ravenously hungry and wanted to sleep as soon as possible (Jake operating on only a short catnap and me on about three hours of fitful sleep; see the previous post for that saga…) Dinner, prepared on our REI camp stove with petrol fuel can, was a whole new episode of the three ring circus, but we wolfed down the food and said goodnight quickly enough to avoid going crazy from all the attention.

In the morning the same crowd showed up to watch us pack up our gear and to decide as a town committee how to pack the remaining gear into two porter baskets and a third for our guide, and then to wave goodbye and watch the crazy white people march into the forest. Two elderly women and a younger girl with her infant son walked all the way to the entrance to the forest to wave au revoir and wish us good luck.

The walk to the camp was fairly uneventful; we couldn’t understand a word of the Teké that the three men spoke in, of course, and only bits and pieces of the French when they deigned to speak in the language that we at least had a fighting chance to decipher. When we got there we weren’t sure what to do with the porters so I handed them cash (which they looked confused about, oddly enough) and eventually left. The rest of that day we stayed around camp because Jake was still a little bit ill and there was a river right there to do some fishing in. Around 5pm, three WCS scientists showed up, who I didn’t know would be there at all, and seemed confused by our presence as well, although perfectly friendly I suppose. Papa ate with them and talked late into the evening so it was nice to have him preoccupied by something else for awhile.

The next day Jake and I packed up to hike down to the elephant platform to do some collecting there, since we’d been told by WCS that we could use that platform freely (and sleep there if we wanted to, which Olivia, the woman from WCS who spoke English that Jake had been communicating with, highly encouraged because it’s such a beautiful spot along the Mpassa. We headed out of camp and Jake indicated to Papa that we were going to the platform so Papa started walking with us, but then the communication broke down. I still don’t know exactly what he was trying to tell us but there was something about seeing elephants and taking photos of them and paying 20K CFAs (about $45) for the privilege. Jake said no no no, we are paying you 10K CFA per day to guide us through the forest to rivers where we can collect fish. But things were never really cleared up and we just pushed on ahead with Papa rambling on and on in Teké about god knows what, but it basically sounded like a never-ending rant about what we were doing and what we should be doing instead and what he didn’t want to be doing and what we had to pay him. Of course, neither of us spoke any Teké, and he rarely switched to French, but Jake was much more adept at hanging back and ignoring him than I had the stones to be, so I was stuck listening to this monologue and trying to answer “yes ok” or “I don’t understand” periodically.

(This, by the way, is the same day I wrote about previously with the rain storm, and I can’t remember what all I said, so there might be some redundancy.)

When we ran into the elephant, the communication issue became more relevant, because Papa was telling us to back up and put the camera away, which Jake was still convinced was because he was trying to get us to pay him 20K to photograph elephants, but there was obviously an element of safety concern in there too, as much as I’m sure the extortion element was there on some level. He finally succeeded in shooing us back towards a clearly off the elephant path and scouted ahead before taking us on to the platform.

The three scientists at the platform once again looked puzzled by what we were doing there, and Papa talked to them a long time, probably complaining about having to bring us down there despite the elephants etc etc etc. But Jake took some time to write down in French his field work plans for that afternoon and asked where we could work that would not disturb their research, and that seemed to break the ice drastically. One guy in particular was very helpful and nice and said he was there to help us all week and followed us to the streams instead of staying at the platform all afternoon. It seemed like we would be ok as far as communication went as long as this guy was there and on our side.

Unfortunately that didn’t last long… the next day the forest was drowned by the storm the day before so no one went anywhere. The day after that, the three WCS guys walked off in the opposite direction from the platform, and Papa told us we couldn’t go to the platform that day, which we didn’t really understand but figured it was still because of the forest being flooded, so we went to another stream in the other direction instead.

And every day after that, every single morning, we talked to Papa and he tried to explain to us why we couldn’t go to the platform that day, and said yes we will go tomorrow.

As for sleeping at the platform, that we couldn’t even communicate to the WCS guys, who seemed to think that was a crazy idea. Sure, there are elephants, and it’s dangerous to be out in the forest at night if there are elephants around, but the whole point of an elephant platform is they can’t get up it. Staying on the platform at any time is perfectly safe.

This guy, who was hired to guide us to where we needed to go, instead decided he was an authority on where we could go when and that taking us anywhere was a favor he would only occasionally deign to provide. And the elephant platform area (where we wanted to work because, well, there are elephants around, duh! Who doesn’t want to see elephants…) He wasn’t working for us, he was the de facto king of the forest that we were required to follow if we wanted to go in at all.

I cannot tell you how infuriating it is working with someone like this. Every day the same story. “Tomorrow we will go.”

On the 6th of 9 days, time was running out, and we sat down with Papa to very clearly lay out the plan for the rest of the time. I wrote down a calendar, in French of course, with mornings and afternoons and nights clearly demarcated, and we agreed that that night we would fish at beach 2, and that the next morning we would hike to the platform, collect fish there during the day, sleep there over night, continue collecting the next morning, and then hike back to the WCS camp for the last night before hiking back to Kessala. Everything was written down clearly, he repeated it back to us clearly, and we thought we finally would make some headway.

Next morning? Of course, no we can’t go to the platform today. We will go tomorrow.

By this point Jake had started musing out loud things like “Wow, this forest is so dense and remote. It would be so easy to murder someone here and no one would ever have an inkling of what happened...” Ahh, a day without Papa… how nice that would be indeed. Obsessed with this idea, Jake concocted a plan to get rid of him for an afternoon. He sent him with his camera back to Kessala to charge the battery on the solar charger. This conveniently solved a very real power problem and gave us a solid five hours of quiet and freedom. 20 minute in, it was abundantly clear to me that my grumpy, stressed out mood from the last couple days had been solely a result of having to deal with this guy.

The next day, after giving up on the idea of camping at the platform, once again, Papa says we cannot go to the platform today. And at this point the list of reasons he was giving was flat out comical. It is dangerous because of the elephants. I can go fishing with you, Jake, but the lady must stay here (Now THAT pissed me off. He knew I was assisting with research, and I know there have been other female scientists at the WCS camp…). We must stay away from the platform because it will scare the elephants away and the scientists must count them. We must stay away from the platform because it will scare the elephants away and tomorrow many people are coming to photograph them. It was completely ludicrous.

Up until then I’d pretty much left all the negotiating up to Jake since it was his field expedition and they obviously looked at him as the guy in charge (or, The Man, which is just as good) so why get involved. Especially since my French was not nearly as good as Jake’s. But by this point, on the very last day we were there and still being denied to go work where we were told we could work or camp freely by the organization in charge of all six of us there, I was so annoyed that I joined in the hour long discussion with Papa arguing about where we could go. We got as far as agreeing to go in the direction of the platform and fish in a couple of the smaller streams on the way, but not all the way there.

So off we went. After passing by the first two small streams, Papa started in on his perpetual irritated ranting (in French, at least, by this point) about what we were doing. At the third stream, when we knew we were pretty close to the platform, Jake sat down with Papa and said, Look, I know you don’t want to take us to the platform. We will fish here. But you need to take this message to the other people at the platform with my camera, because I need two photographs of the two locations where we fished earlier. Give them this message, and they can take them for us.

So after at least half an hour of trying to get this message across (Papa is NOT the brightest crayon in the box… and only semi-literate. Sure, we couldn’t speak French, but we had no problem at all communicating with the other three guys. Papa was obviously both genuinely slow and deliberately playing dumb because he didn’t want to cooperate.) he finally set off towards the platform with the map and instructions I had drawn, and the camera. We did a little bit of fishing, and Papa returned, bearing the blissful news that we could continue on to the platform. Jake’s manipulative plan to get the message to the WCS guys that we were there and wanted to be at the platform, had exactly the desired effect.

Once at the platform, Jake did his best to make sure that no bridges had been burned and that everyone was clear about what was happening. He wants to work with WCS again, so he was willing to basically be slapped around by these idiots and bureaucracy for the sake of staying on good terms with everyone involved, and since we were not 100% sure that none of the difficulty of going to the platform was coming from the WCS guys via Papa instead of just from Papa’s obstinance directly, he wanted to make sure everything was smoothed over with them when we showed up. He told the scientists that Olivia at WCS had told us that we could work there but that we didn’t know that it might interfere with their work, and that WCS had not given him a formal outline of his research orders, which would have clarified to them what we were supposed to be doing and what they should let us do, and that Papa very clearly had not been instructed properly about his role as a guide rather than a royal pain in the butt, and that all around there had not been good communication and that it was very hard to make that right once we were there since neither of us could speak French. He asked if it would be ok to fish in one location in particular and take a photo in another location, and they were very nice and helpful and told us exactly where we could fish without being in the way of their research and that we could certainly take one photo at the other location. And once again, the friendly WCS guy came along and showed Jake all around and was quite helpful.

The next morning we hiked out, with one of the WCS guys working as a porter for us, since they all had to hike out then too to get more supplies. We took a group photo at the camp, and everyone was very friendly and nice, so at least it seems that they were not unhappy with us.

And we finally paid Papa his 80K CFAs and said goodbye. Hopefully forever. The consulate at the Gabon Embassy in Washington D.C. definitely takes home the award for most awful Gabonese person (or just most awful person…) that I’ve had to deal with. But Papa put up a great fight and gets a very honorable mention.

When we arrived back at the village, once again we were greeted like the circus come to town. The same old lady, young mom, and her young son met us right at the entrance to the forest to welcome us back and tell us good job for making it. We sat down in the yard where we had camped the first night, and about a dozen people pulled up chairs and gathered around to hear Papa’s long tale of the week before. Oh what crazy things these white people want to do!

And you should have seen it when we got out the last few fish samples to process. Why would be want fish so tiny? And how do we put them in magical water that makes them die instantly? And why do we staple little pieces of paper to them, and carefully cut off their back fin with surgical tools and latex gloves, and take hundreds of photographs of them, and wrap them up carefully in formal after putting the fin clippings in tiny tubes of alcohol? And then we burn the surgical tools for some crazy reason before moving on to the next one. Utter mystery. Every step of the way, they wanted to see exactly what we were doing, and listen to Papa’s mystified explanation of it. Even the old old woman who could barely stand up, and who has surely seen plenty of much crazier things in her 80 or so years, stayed put through the entire saga and story.

Finally, at last, the circus shifted focus from us to the truck that showed up freshly laden with supplies for the WCS camp. Suddenly every town resident was there helping unload the boxes of baguettes and manioc and cans of vegetables and salt fish and powdered milk and cookies and more food than occurs in one place than probably any other time. Little kids took pieces of the baguettes and walked around chewing on them slowly and happily. The crowd didn’t dissipate until the WCS guys had all of it packed into their backpacks and the truck drove off with us in it on the way back to Franceville.

I always suspected, but am now definitely sure, that the last thing I want in life is fame and recognition. It is nice to be left alone, and blissful to be ignored.

the tropics

2011-06-13T17:00:00.002-07:00

[Part 2 of Gabon trip journaling. Again, not edited...]

Yesterday [June 2, 2011] was a truly tropical experience.

Backing up a bit: for ten days, Jake and I are camping in a tropical forest in a remote corner of Gabon in order to collect fishes* in the previously-unsurveyed Bateké region. Two days ago we caught a ride in a Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) landrover to the small village of Kessala, about 90 minutes drive (30 km or so) south of Franceville. I’ll write about that journey separately actually, so suffice it to say that we are now camping with three WCS elephant researchers and our guide, an old guy called Papa from Kessala, at the WCS camp located in a rare clearing in this incredibly dense tropical forest. This is not a place you want to break a limb or fall ill with African sleeping sickness.

We got up with the sun at 6:30 and packed up the fishing gear to take down to the Mpassa river, the larger river a mile or so away running next to the WCS elephant observation platform. Papa guided us through the forest, cutting away vines as we went with his machete that seems to be a non-negotiable tool for anyone venturing into the trees, and blabbering a constant stream of Teké and French which, as best as I could tell, was intended to make us aware of each root we might trip on, branches we might hit our heads on, thorny branches not to grab, sturdy branches we should hold on to, and muddy sinkholes to step carefully around. It slowly became clear that this constant stream of words (sorely lacking in clarifying hand gestures) also contained bits of information about the forest itself. That vine over there is good to eat; this pile of dung is from a duiker; these tracks are from elephants this morning; these paths are all made by elephants; chimpanzees and gorillas live here.

As we got closer to the Mpassa we got deeper into the territory that the elephants had been through just that morning, and Papa was clearly very concerned that they hadn’t left yet. Every 15 steps or so he stopped and hushed us to step lightly, paused his Teké narration, and listened very carefully for the sounds of elephants munching their way through the trees. When satisfied that they must be far enough away not to be bothered by our presence, we proceeded another 20 yards or so.

Elephants do not immediately evoke the impression of vicious attack animals, but in fact they are the 2nd most deadly large animal in the world behind tigers.** Much of that is simply due to size and numbers though. God forbid you should pitch your tent on the wrong river bank or you’ll be trampled to death in your sleep before you even know what’s happening.

In case you’re wondering, by the way, if you should ever encounter an elephant in the woods and startle it into an attack, you should hide behind a very large tree and let it chase you in circles around it until it loses interest. I don’t know what you’re supposed to do if you encounter two elephants.

The sheer power of these enormous beasts is immensely obvious when you find a clearing that has recently served as an elephant buffet. In a forest so thick that sun doesn’t directly hit the ground, this is the only place to see blue sky. Most plants develop defense mechanisms against the smaller wildlife that might eat their foliage, with bristles on the lower levels or no vegetation at all except very out of reach. Elephants have solved this problem by simply felling any tree that looks tasty by smashing their heads into the trunk until it topples. They’re also one of the only animals that can eat wood directly so they aren’t scared away by a few bristly leaves. The wake of a hungry elephant is sheer destruction, just like a miniature tornado toppling and stripping everything in its path. As Papa pointed and chattered in one of these clearings, I immediately learned the words `elefant’ ‘mange’ ‘ici’.

We had approached within a couple hundred yard of the observation platform before we were finally truly delayed. We stopped so Papa could listen carefully, and about fifty yards away through the foliage we could just make out some movement. Staring longer, we eventually could see the huge ears flapping at the insects and the trunk picking through the foliage for the tastiest bits. Each time it took a step forward or yanked down a branch, the crack thundered back to Papa and he waved us to back up. At this point our communication with Papa about the purpose of our visit and his job description were very rudimentary and Jake was convinced that he only wanted to charge us to photograph the elephants, but after more frustrated gesturing and forceful whispers, Papa shooed us back to a large tree a little off the path and continued forward without us to scope out the situation. 20 minutes later, during which time we preoccupied ourselves by photographing the various colorful forms of fungus in the area, Papa returned and led us towards the river, pointing out where the elephants were moving and stopping every minute or so to verify his calculations. The coast was clear, though, all the way to the Mpassa.

Phase 1: reach the Mpassa, complete. Papa climbed up the observation tower to chat with the three WCS scientists, probably complaining about what annoying white people we were, while we sat at the base of the tree sifting through the phrasebook and dictionary to figure out how to explain our plan. Jake wrote down some approximation of “We need a place where we can fish, in slow water, that won’t disturb your research”, “We would like to find earthworms”, “is it ok to set the fish trap up here”, etc. The WCS guys, who initially seemed very perplexed by our presence and unaware of our purpose, were suddenly quite friendly and helpful. One guy, a particularly friendly man whose name I still haven’t figured out, led us to a small stream nearby and helped us dig around in the mud for worms. I was quite enthusiastic about this barefoot squelching in the satisfyingly smooth, sandy mud, but was sadly inept at actually finding worms, so his assistance with slicing away huge chunks of earth with his machete was very beneficial. Soon we had a dozen or so collected and moved onto the next small tributary to the Mpassa, where we could see a dozen or so small fish in a pool. This is where I learned how frustratingly intelligent fish can be.

We blocked off the stream below the pool with one net, buried under the sand under the water, and blocked it off above the pool with the other net. Our plan to shoo them out of the pool into the net, however, was entirely ineffective. They simply hid deep under an overhang on the bank. The handnets were not even conceivably a more productive tactic. We finally gave up and decided that the best bet was to let the dust settle until they ventured back out, and lift up the net when they swam over it unsuspectingly. This plan, more by complete accident than any actual skill on our part, eventually yielded half a dozen fish, including one small catfish that Jake was particularly excited about for reasons lost on me, and the fish trap attracted a couple more tiny ones.

At this point we had to hurriedly pack up because WCS Guy said it was about to rain. No clouds were visible, but through some sort of hooting communication with the 2 guys still at the platform, he had established that a big storm was coming. We rushed out, made it about 100 yards to another little beach on the bank of the Mpassa, and WCS Guy said ok it won’t rain until later, so you can do some cast-netting here.

As it turned out, Jake needed to process the fish we’d just caught quickly, so he showed WCS Guy how to use the cast net, and Papa did some hook-and-line fishing, while we sat on a log a little ways back from the river to anesthetize, tag, photograph, store in Formal, and take tissue samples from the fresh catch.

After skirting around the elephants, this was the 2nd time that day I was keenly aware of being in the tropics.

Gabon is a relatively wealthy country, with GDP-per-capita some four times higher than other sub-Saharan countries. It’s located on the equatorial west coast of Africa, in the heart of the African rainforest. For the last decade or so, former president Omar Bongo and current president Ali Bongo (son of Omar) have been trying to position the country as the Costa Riva of sub-Saharan Africa; that is, as an ecotourism hub. Omar Bongo established a network of 13 national parks to that effect (only one of which, Lopé, is remotely ready for tourism, but hey gotta start somewhere). Prior to visiting, Jake read a report done on the issues involved in developing the ecotourism industry in Gabon. One this noted: “There are a few black flies.”

When we landed in Libreville and took the train to Lopé and spent a week in Franceville with no insect issues except the unavoidable mosquitoes, Jake wrote off this warning as nitpicky hypersensitive worrying targeted at hyperrich royal visitors who prefer to be carried around in air-conditioned, mosquitoe-netted carriages while being fed grapes and ice water. While sitting on this log attempting to process the fish, he was forced to reassess, as, I quote, “Some people might find this unbearable.” Translation: “This is unbearable.”

We slathered ourselves in 34% deet cream to no avail. I wore a mosquito head-net to no avail. These flies, which look like smallish versions of standard house flies, are harmless in the sense of not biting or stinging, but I have never been ambushed by so many bugs simultaneously in my life. And to make up for their non-biting nature, a handful of Tsetse flies joined in the mix and ate Jake alive, deet and all, causing him to yelp in pain every fifteen seconds or so. (In cosmic compensation for having a bloodstream the equivalent of caviar and fine wine to mosquitoes, the Tsetse flies largely left me alone, or at least didn’t hurt much when they bit me.)

Photographing each fish took several tries, since we had to snap the shutter at just the right instant after brushing away the giant black ants and shooing the flies. I never succeeded in getting a tissue sample into a vial of alcohol without drowning a fly or ant or two along with it. My many mosquito bite scabs, accumulated over the last 2 weeks, were each home to an ant trying to bite away some dead skin and some flies trying to drink my blood. I stopped talking after too many flew down my throat, but then they decided to explore my sinuses instead. Breathing between my teeth worked ok, so long as I stopped to pick them out of my teeth and gums every couple minutes.

They were also strangely attracted to my glasses. So many of them coated both sides of both lenses that I could barely see and had to take them off every couple minutes to dig out a few dozen from the back side of each lens where they immune to my constant swatting. In between these massacres, six casualties occurred when they crawled directly into my eyes and were blinked to death.

Lest you think we were stupidly setting up shop directly on their home, no, the entire usable radius at this beach was uniformly infested.

Needless to say, this impediment rather slowed down the fish processing job, so Papa and WCS Guy were left entirely on their own and caught about a dozen more fish for us. When we finally had the last fish in Formal, WCS Guy said he had to go back to the platform, so we waved goodbye and started to pack up at a more leisurely pace.

Unfortunately, part of the relevant message was lost in translation, and I believe the intended statement was closer to “you need to hurry back to the platform and meet me there so we can get back to camp before the storm.” Papa, with his nonstop gestureless chattering that we’d slowly come to ignore, was no more successful in getting that point across.

We eventually got back to the platform, which the other 2 scientists had already left, and WCS guy hurried down and led us down the path home at as close to a running pace as you can get in the thickly-vined woods. About 50 yards into the 1 mile walk, the clouds opened up.

This was the third time that day I was keenly aware of being in the tropics.

It’s not that I’ve never experience a downpour so thoroughly drenching. I grew up in Oklahoma, where the warm spring thunderstorms are equally violent and densely drenching, but it’s a different sort of experience in a tropical forest than on a wide open plain. Especially when trying to get back to camp as fast as possible.

First my glasses completely fogged up with the humidity so that I had to take them off and stumble blurrily closely behind WCS guy, who presumably would warn me by vanishing if I were about to step off a cliff or into a quicksand sinkhole. Within about 15 seconds I was as wet as if I had jumped in a river, most noticeably evident by the pint of water squelching around in my high-top GoreTex hiking boots (which are fantastic for keeping water out, but, it turns out, equally fantastic at keeping it in.) That was all fine though, and actually enjoyable as a welcome cool shower for a hot sweaty sandy body and clothes, but I couldn’t do more than cross my fingers and hold a platic ziplock bag over my pack and hope that the camera, kindle, binoculars, notebooks, phrasebook, etc inside were ok.

Really this talk about the immediate physical consequences of being drenched is beside the point. The truly amazing thing is what the rain did to the forest. By the time the water gets to the ground it is pouring in rivers off of the plant life more than it is dripping from the sky. And such a wet environment to start with hardly has the capacity to deal with a sudden new enormous onslaught of liquid: The rivers rose, the small streams turned into rivers, and the elephant trails we walked along turned into streams up to a foot deep with who knows hoe much mud under that. (The next two days, in fact, the trails were still so full of water that the WCS scientists couldn’t go to the observation station at all.)

The smells of all the diverse forms of plant life melting into the downpour was the other truly amazing thing. I was prepared for the different types of plant life in tropical forests compared to temperate American forests (although its somehow always still stunning to see these things in real life that you only recognize from photographs) but not for the mindboggling, visually obvious, variety of plant life. Looking up almost every tree I can see is distinct, and each gap-in-the-trees is home to countless other species of vines, shrubs, ferns, fungi, mosses, lichens, grasses, and things I can’t even place in any particular category. And they all have their unique refreshing small totally unlike what is found in the Northwestern and Western American forests that I’m most familiar with. My favorite pine and eucalyptus scents are absent of course, but not missed amid the plethora of new equally wonderful odors.

Towards the end of the hike when we had all entirely given up on keeping anything in our possession dry or “beating” any aspect of the storm back to camp, Jake engaged WCS Guy, who is a botanist, to tell us about some of the plants and trees. In particular, he taught us about a tree family (genus? I don’t know…) that have bark that smells very good and very strong. As we passed the different species he macheted off bits of them for us to pass around and sniff and tried to explain how the very slight differences in scent and color identified the different species, but that was pretty much lost on me. All I can remember is that one is called an Okume, which has very nice hard wood and is endemic to Gabon.

We finally stumbled into camp, pouring out our shoes, wrung out and hung up our sopping clothes, put on a dry change, and as soon as we sat down under the big canopy, the rain stopped. All in all, though, I’m very glad we dawdled too long at the Mpassa because the water was incredibly refreshing and I don’t think I’ll see something like that drowned forest again for a long time.

*`fishes’ is the plural of a species of fish, while `fish’ is the plural of an individual fish. Cool huh. It makes ichthyologists sound like they’re this many years old (hold up three fingers) when they’re talking about their work.

**I learned this fact from trivial pursuit so don’t quote me… I might not remember all the caveats from the question and I don’t have internet to check it right now.

perils of international travel

2011-06-12T04:11:00.001-07:00

So Jake and I have been traveling in Gabon for the last month. He went to a biology conference for a week in Franceville and then did field work in the Bateke plateau region, and since I am always looking for an excuse for an adventure, I went along just for fun and to be his 'field assistant' (in order to get on the field work permit..:) So now we're back in Libreville for two days before flying back to the states and I've been writing some stuff down, but not in chronological order, hence the introductory explanation.

So here's the first chunk, which I wrote on the train and is too long to bother editing, so pardon any resulting nonsense:

This is probably a familiar story to anyone who has travelled in the developing world. But I’m going to tell it anyway because if I can’t at least turn it into an amusing story, there’s no upside at all…

Jake and I were in Franceville, the 2nd or 3rd largest city in Gabon with about 30,000 people in the southeast corner of the country. That’s a far cry from the half million in Libreville 12 hours away by train (if running smoothly, which is frankly never the case), but since the president of the country is from Franceville, it enjoys a great deal of special treatment that makes it seem at least as modernized and wealthy as the capitol. One detail in particular is that the Universite des Sciences et Techniques de Masuku, the premeire technical institution of Gabon, is located there, which is how we came to visit for Jake’s conference on fostering international collaboration in research on Central African biodiversity.

The conference has just ended and we moved to a slightly cheaper hotel to stay for a couple of nights while arranging the final details of the field work trip we were taking to the Bateké plateau. This basically entailed four days of running around like chickens with our heads cut off assembling expedition equipment, finalizing permits and paperwork, working with several undergraduate students from USTM (Jake wanted to teach them as much as possible about field work while he’s here, since they don’t get that kind of practical research experience as part of their education) to build a fish photography aquarium and do some collecting in a river in Moanda about 20 km away.

On Friday I spent the day packing up all of our stuff and doing laundry by hand and lugging it to another hotel, because the list of people staying to do field work and staying in the hotel an extra day got lost in transaction somewhere between the organizer in Libreville and the reception desk of Hotel Poubara. Hotel Poubara claimed they had a big foreign delegation coming in that night and that we absolutely had to leave, so I had to deal with the fallout. (That afternoon they said they actually did have rooms but by then we were all so frustrated by their disorganized anti-service that we left out of spite anyway…) I went to Potos (the downtown market area) to get food but couldn’t find any street vendors selling sandwiches made out of anything but liver so I ate an ice cream cone and figured we get a big dinner anyway.

Unfortunately, by the time we got everything together and spent the evening with another woman who was leaving to do field work the next day, trading tissue tubes and currency and logistical information, there was nowhere with food open near the new hotel and we didn’t want to take a taxi all the way into downtown so we just shared some overpriced hotel French fries and went to sleep.

By lunchtime the next day I was so ravenously hungry we went to our favorite little restaurant in town, a local establishment that was a little too cheap and fast and delicious for the conference to ever have deigned to go there, and inhaled a plate of roasted chicken and French fries and baguette all drowned in oil and fried onions (and of course topped with a big glop of mayonnaise, which seems to be the source of about a third of Gabonese people’s calories). Every artery in my body was instantly slogged down in oily muck but it was oh so worth it.

That night we worked with three of the undergraduates building the fish photography aquarium and then all watched the soccer final championship game between Barcelona and Manchester United. It was a whole lot of fun hanging out with these super-friendly guys (who despite being undergraduates were my age or older – the education system is a little different here) who were extremely excited about this game. Enthusiasm is contagious and makes any activity enjoyable.

We were a little stranger to them than they were to us though, I think: girls in Gabon don’t drink alcohol so they were endlessly amused and not quite sure what to think when I drank a Castel while Jake and the three students ordered cokes. Then the subject of religion came up and it took them a few minutes to regroup and decide they could still associate with us… so long as they spent the rest of the week praying for our souls of course. If I’d been wearing shorts at the time it might’ve been a little to much to handle at once. Judging by the dresses and bathing suits and skirts the girls wear, it’s definitely not a matter of modesty, but there’s a much clearer gender divide here, and shorts on a girl is about the equivalent of a guy in a dress in the U.S.

There’s something to be said for the cultural diversity of the U.S. Other countries are still vastly different of course, but no one from America goes abroad and has their worldview, and their assumption of absolute correctness of their own cultural practices, shattered.

Anyway, it was a very fun evening. We went to bed happy, feeling like we’d accomplished something useful with the aquarium, and on track to have everything in place for the expedition in two days.

That didn’t last long. I feel asleep very puzzled as to how two beers could make me feel so nauseous, and when I woke up an hour later and vomited, my only thought was good grief is my liver on vacation? 24 ounces of 4.5% beer should only act as a mild sleeping aid. When I woke up again half an hour later, and then spent the next five hours laying on the bathroom tile in a delirious half-asleep state for three minutes at a time between intestinal mutinies, I kinda figured something else was going on.

All the next day I groaned in bed with a fever and aches that kept me from staying in one position for more than a few minutes. Jake kindly brought me ginger juice and sherbet, which was the only thing I could think of that didn’t immediately make me nauseous at the mental image, and while he went to collect fish with the students most of the day my great triumph was successfully consuming two ibuprofen and about three bites of sherbet.

By the next day I could at least move around normally, and by stopping to whimper pathetically and regather some strength for a few minutes after ringing out each item of clothing, I even managed to do some laundry while Jake ran errands. But eating was still not really an option. To make matters worse (injuring my dignity more than anything else, but still…) while Jake was working on the aquarium more with one of the students, I walked up to the gazebo where they were stationed two times in a row and smashed my head on the rim that was exactly at my height and exactly above the peripheral vision of my glasses. This was after the night before when all three students had been there when I stood up from a low brick wall where I’d been photographing the oncoming thunderstorm, and somehow managed to trip backwards and land back on the wall at a rather awkward and painful angle. Based on their hour of interaction with me, they must think I belong performing these clumsy feats in a more professional, circus setting.

Then I walked out a third time without my flashlight, carefully stepping down the stairs to the lawn, but couldn’t tell that the last ‘step’ was actually a two-feet-deep stone-lined hole. They weren’t aware that I was there until the crash and yell, and found me holding onto my hand in agony while blood slowly oozed from a deep hole punctured in my knee-cap. After the initial shock, though, I realized I was incredibly lucky, and only had a jammed finger and dented knee. I limped around for a day and then the knee was fine, and while 12 days later the finger is still sore and swollen up so that I can’t get my class ring off, functional ring fingers apparently aren’t necessary for any everyday tasks so I’ve barely even noticed.

Having established that no bones were fractured, I limped to the gazebo to lick my wounds, and promptly smashed my head on the roof.

I insisted I was fine, but Lionel insisted on guiding me up each step with a flashlight and thereafter yelling ‘attention!’ and pointing wildly at the roof anytime I approached the gazebo. Now I know what being a character in a bad sit-com must feel like.

Jake and I then had dinner with the director of the conference at a wonderful restaurant, and I slowly chewed about half a cup of plain rice, and then immediately collapsed in bed back at the hotel. We were finally definitely scheduled to leave for the field at 10:30 the next morning, and Jake was planning to get up at the crack of dawn to buy 10 days worth of food for three people and run around town with one of the students buying some additional supplies like material to make hand nets, several kinds of bait, and some things for our guide which we had just found out we needed to feed and house as well. I mumbled to Jake to wake me up in time to send a couple important emails and thanked my lucky stars that he would be able to take care of all that craziness while I got a much needed solid nine hours of sleep.

Two hours later, Jake was on the bathroom tiles and I was typing a pleading email to the Wildlife Conservation Society woman asking if we could possibly leave a day later. For the next five hours or so, I half-dozed in between being woken up by the chaos of gastrointestinal turmoil and trying to be comforting, and just as I had finally gotten into a REM state at around 6:30 a.m., after telling Jake that there was no possible way we could make it by 10:30 and that he needed to be more assertive about the need to reschedule our ride into the wilderness, the WCS woman woke up and answered his email and yanked me back into harsh reality saying ‘it’s today or never.’

I’m still not quite sure how I managed to get into town and find a long list of obscure items in a foreign city in a foreign language in about eight separate shops and then buy about 70 pounds of groceries, stuff them into my backpacking backpack, sit down on the floor to stick my arms through the straps, roll onto my front, get my legs under my center of gravity, stumble very very carefully so as not to lose my balance out to the roundabout where all the taxis are, squeeze the backpack into the front seat of the car with myself still attached, squeeze myself into the footwell of the front seat with the remaining handheld bags on the dashboard, roll out of the car in the hotel parking lot, retrieve the cab fare from my pocket, and stumble back to the room where I nearly passed out from doing all that without eating for the last three days and consuming approximately negative net calories over the last five. And still feeling pretty darn queezy and not quite in touch with the ground.

I’m even less sure how Jake managed to drag himself out of bed, at 8 in the morning on zero sleep and just past the peak of illness, go to the university with the conference director to pick up a fish net, vomit in the university bathroom, drag himself back to the hotel room, and deliriously roll around in bed in between groaning at me on the phone “I don’t know I can’t talk about it I have to go back to bed bye *click*” when I tried to find out how many pairs of latex gloves and syringes he needed for processing fish specimens. And even less sure how he managed to get out of bed, stuff the last things that I couldn’t pack myself into his luggage, carry it out to a taxi, and drag it all into the yard of the WCS office.

If we hadn’t had the miraculous help of Lionel, who was originally going to take Jake into town to find all that random collecting gear that there’s no possible way either of us could have located or communicated in French, but who ended it up doing it by himself as our hired help and bringing a taxi to pick us up and directing it to the WCS office, we would never have even made it 90 minutes late like we did.

We stumbled into the yard of the office like the living dead. Jake immediately laid down on the ground to sleep until the truck, mercifully running late, arrived to pick us up, and I miraculously was able to use their wireless internet (first and only wifi we’ve seen anywhere in Gabon) to send a couple emails that absolutely had to go out before disappearing into the field and which I had originally planned on spending the whole morning on.

Jake says when he saw me fall in the brick hole, he was sure I’d broken some fingers or an arm, and said a fast plea to whatever god might be hiding out in the universe that he wouldn’t have to evacuate me instead of going into the field. And that whoever was listening said “Ok, but then you have to get sick instead. Heh heh heh.” Luckily the universe’s cynical sense of humor ended with the WCS office where we had two crucial hours of napping and internet in a fan-cooled hallway before the landrover arrived.

The slow drive to the village of Kessala was so beautiful that it was actually enjoyable despite my lightheaded vertigo combined with carsickness and Jake’s huddling in the backseat half conscious and the fact that the ~30 km drive took about 90 minutes since the ‘road’ is contoured more similarly to a dry creek bed. In Kessala, we luckily had no obstacle to changing plans from hiking into the camp that afternoon to camping in the village and hiking the next day, since the truck was so late we wouldn’t have been able to make it before dusk anyway. And also luckily, Jake bounced back from the worst of the illness fairly quickly, was able to eat that night (as was I, finally), and didn’t collapse during the circus that ensued when we arrived and the villagers decided what to do with us.

But that’s the beginning of a different story for a different time.

recently relevant

2011-06-10T05:54:00.000-07:00

(As I get around to writing down some things about my trip to Gabon in the next few days, this is going to temporarily turn into a yet another boring old personal travel blog... but hey I don't go exciting foreign places very often so live with it :P In the meantime, I already had this ready to post when I lost my connection the last time I had a connection ten days ago.)

The recent tornadoes near my home in Oklahoma remind me of this great interactive graphic from the NYTimes. In particular, the map of tornado risk:

And if you look at the overall natural disaster risk map, it's pretty obvious that tornadoes dominate everything else. I find that a little surprising but if NYT says so it must be true. Under some unknown metric.

My parents have been really lucky actually; I think the only storm damage they've had was roof damage from hail, which my dad repaired on his own so he could use the insurance check to buy a computer. I think he would probably take that deal any day.* But I saw several of them as a kid coming towards us and hid in the closet or storm shelters who knows how many times. The worst storm, on May 3 1999, which saw 61 tornadoes touch down in the state on a single day, beating the previous record of 60 in a month, took place when I was living in Germany and the worst thing that happened to us was a lot of stress waiting to hear from people that everything in Stillwater was ok.

But recently my cousins' condo was hit by a tornado, and a dozen houses or so were damaged in Stillwater, and when that happens, the numbness towards tornado risk that you build up over dozens of eventless sirens takes a hit.

And then, apparently, you blog about it.

*Yeah this is probably where I get my tendency to refuse to call a tow truck after totaling my car and spend a couple hundred hours repairing it myself with salvage yard parts and Wal-mart spray paint for under $300...

Priorities

2011-05-31T06:17:00.000-07:00

It's strange how things are prioritized differently in different cultures.

Things that medium-fancy hotels in Gabon have: beautiful new tile floors, a swimming pool or pristine beach, a really overpriced restaurant, air conditioning, gorgeous landscaping, extremely diligent-to-the-point-of-annoying and thorough room-cleaners.

Things they don't have: rooms without fleas and ant colonies, hot water, towels that wouldn't be rejected from Goodwill, shower curtains, "do not disturb" signs.

Things trains have in Gabon: a well-stocked bar, overpriced restaurant, flushing toilets, soft benches to lay down on.

Things they don't have: cockroach-free compartments, running water, any indication whatsoever of the stops or schedule.

Etc for restaurants.

I'm not complaining; on the contrary I find it refreshing that silly things like nice towels and a few cockroaches aren't the end of the world. People freak out about the tiniest things in the U.S. Everyone should try backpacking for at least a week, or long enough to wear the same set of clothes so many times that rinsing them off in the river with a little 18-in-1 soap no longer helps the smell, various insects have gotten into all your food bags, everything in your backpack is molding because of the damp tent from last night's rain, you're drinking water filtered from a stagnant algae-covered pond, you have duct tape on your toe to prevent worsening blisters, and you've eaten mashed-as-small-as-possible-for-transport bread, just-add-water hummus, beef jerky and dried fruit for the last 10 meals. You don't even notice those things when the clear sky and fresh pine air and wildlife-only soundscape is so exhilarating.

Those are the important things, the things that make you feel maximally alive.

connected

2011-05-25T05:39:00.000-07:00

Tips for the internet-dependent in developing countries:

Buy a kindle. Free internet everywhere! Well not everywhere, check the coverage map, but I've found that the map is actually conservative about where you can connect.

For the times you need to upload or download something and the cybercafe is closed, bring an unlocked international smart phone to tether from.

And when the cellphone tethering is inevitably too slow too load gmail, ssh to a unix server and use lynx. Whoddathunk that the text-only browser still had a purpose or even worked with gmail, but it does!

happiness

2011-05-22T10:00:00.000-07:00

I love Africa. I know I've only been here for 5 days and I know Africa is an enormous and diverse place, but whatever the common denominator is, I love it.

And there is a common denominator. On a continent so large, I would expect that music from Mali and Zimbabwe, Congo and Tanzania, would be completely different. But it's not. Listen to Afel Boucoum and Habib Koite from Mali and Oliver Mtukudzi from Zimbabwe and Congolese dance music and sure there are differences but the fundamental je ne sais quoi is the same, and wonderful. Even comparing traditional African music to the more contemporary stuff that is playing everywhere in the streets, it all has the same exuberant rhythmic base.

Somewhere along the line there is a break from African music to African American music, progressively morphing into hip hop, and the transformation from exuberance to anger absolutely kills it for me. That seems to be a more general distinguishing attribute between Africa and the West, actually. When you look around New York City, how many people look utterly content with the world, thrilled to be alive in that particular moment? No one, that's who. The dogs in the park, or kids on the playground not old enough to have learned to be miserable, maybe. Yet in a country with one tenth the income per capita, 90% of the people in the street are laughing or dancing or playing around with friends and family and look as though they haven't a worry in the world. When did we in the West lose this contentedness, and why do we think it is a sign of progress? Sure, I would not want to give up air conditioning or the freedom to travel or advanced health care, but at some point the tradeoff between moment-to-moment stress and unhappiness for bigger horizons and a longer lifespan is certainly no longer worth it.

It's hard to draw the line though. The unhappiness results from putting so much pressure on ourselves to be at the frontier of production, lifestyle, and influence, but that's a good thing to an extent too. I am bound and determined to be an academic economist who comes up with at least a few insights that improve our understanding of humanity, and I'm determined to be financially successful enough to have the air conditioning and health care and worldwide freedom of movement. I don't want to settle for less even if it means reducing my stress levels by 90% and sacrificing many many hours to unpleasant obligations. But at the same time, I don't care about having the big house in ths suburbs and private-school kids and a brand new car every few years and groceries from Whole Foods. I find the idea of sacrificing so many individual joyous moments for such marginal and dubious improvements in life satisfication revolting, in fact.

We are so strongly driven to be as successful as our most successful peers. When a subset of society is obsessed with success, it is contagious to their friends who judge themselves by their peers' standards. Soon the epidemic has spread to the entire society, and you a country of miserable workaholics.

And yet, I love New York City! Nowhere has this been taken to such an extreme as Manhattan, and the air is electric with energy pushed to a frenetic density. Everything is bigger and better and more competitive, and being constantly bombarded by the pinnacle of human achievement is inspiring and exciting. Every moment is an extreme version of that thing, designed to stimulate the relevant neurons in the most efficient way possible, and of course that is intoxicating. How can a single person love New York City but be happiest on an empty field in Nevada with only a tent, motorcycle, and camp stove? How can one unambiguously value both simplicity and contentedness, and vigorous competition and ambition?

Maybe the key is to be inspired by human achievement without one's happiness being dependent on relative success. Then to the extent that we are caught in the rat race, it's because it's what we genuinely want to do, and what genuinely maximizes our long-run happiness, independent of everyone else. Then NYC is a place of concentrated inspiration, rather than a pressure-cooker to measure up. And then to the extent that we also choose to live in converted shipping containers in abandoned hills in southwest Texas, it's not because we're stuck there with no other options, or because we are settling for mediocrity. It's, again, our genuine ideal.

Don't be afraid to do what truly makes you happy. I'm not sure there exists a simpler life philosophy than that. But who really follows it?

what taxis and feral dogs have in common

2011-05-18T03:56:00.000-07:00

I can't believe I never mentally articulated the following isomorphism, between two areas of science I find immensely fascinating and devote a great deal of attention to (I am, after all, an economist, and my boyfriend is conveniently an evolutionary biologist...):

free market efficiency via the 'invisible hand' <-> evolution via natural selection.

In the free market (biosphere), slight deviations in trade agreements (mutation) lead to heterogeneity (biodiversity). Only the most efficient (fittest) of these survive. The result is a highly efficient marketplace (ecosystem) in which every sector (species) thrives in its niche, arising seemingly from magic. The only difference is that markets converge much more quickly than life because mutations are chosen by people to be most likely to work, rather than randomly by DNA processes, and the time span between mutation adoption isn't bounded below by lifespan.

Yesterday in Libreville I encountered beautiful examples of each of these processes that are absent in the United States due to various types of central planning: taxis and dogs.

The taxis in Libreville are ubiquitous and cheap. I'm pretty sure it's cheaper to take cabs everywhere than to own a car, because the taxis take advantage of two economies of scale not possible with individual cars that allow the marginal profit margins to be tiny enough that hardly anyone would want to buy and maintain a vehicle to avoid them: First of all, the taxis are shared vehicles so marginal costs are divided between up to four passengers. The taxi can stop anywhere along the route to pick up additional people, as it desires, and can reject anyone who is not traveling along the same route. Second of all, taxis of course drive around for many hours every day, spreading out maintenance costs between many more people than an individual's car.

On every trip, the passenger proposes a price and the driver can accept or negotiate freely. As a result, supply and demand are always in sync. During busier times of the day, more taxis are on the road, and they can charge more because customers are competing for service. At slow times of day, fewer taxis are out, and three people can get where they want to go for less than a dollar altogether. (In fact, even at rush hour we only paid $2 for three people to travel approximately five miles. The supply of cabs efficiently responds to varying demand throughout the day to keep the price fairly level. I've seen neither empty taxis driving around nor passengers unsuccessfully trying to hail one. This morning the person we travelled with who speaks French rejected three cabs who wanted more than $2 for the three of us, and we still got in the fourth within a minute of trying to hail the first one. This system is WAY better than public transit!)

In the U.S., this situation is impossible for many reasons: fixed fares, legal requirements to accept any customer any time, and ride shares arranged exclusively on the demand end, to start with. (Note that even though cabs are shared in Libreville, I'm sure passengers could negotiate a higher price to avoid picking up other people if they so desired. The shared arrangement is a strict improvement.) Central planning of supply via licensing regulations, and labor unions that drag the equilibrium point kicking and screaming in a direction that directs a higher percentage of social surplus to them; the list goes on.

When I got back from spending about 75 cents to get ten miles back to my hotel, I walked onto the beach to watch sunset and attracted two feral dogs looking for handouts. These dogs were gorgeous, sweet, personable, healthy (except for some fleas of course), and acted like they had been diligently very well-trained since puppies. They licked my hands (and gave my back a thorough bath when I let them. Sweat and DEET is a delicious combination you know...) and wagged and let me scratch their heads all I wanted, and then when I sat down to eat, they nuzzled me a bit trying to get to the food but after I gently waved them away they laid down quietly a couple feet away and merely looked at me imploringly. I gave them bits of things periodically, and every time they went right back to sitting there politely. I've never met a domesticated, trained dog in the United States that is as well-behaved as these two were. (And gorgeous! If they went to a pound in the U.S. they would be adopted immediately.)

It seems that when "survival of the fittest" means "best-liked and fed by humans", dogs naturally evolve to be ideal pets. No selective breeding required.

America is a country of overconfident control freaks (myself included =). We need to remember that frequently the best outcomes arise precisely when nature is allowed to take its course.

Morocco

2011-05-16T06:24:00.000-07:00

does not seem especially different from Europe. Although Jake says he's surprised how different than Europe it seems, so apparently these impressions are determined by expectations.

The landscape reminds me of Oklahoma; the palm tree-lined streets remind me of California; the weather reminds me of Seattle; the Arabic signage and ubiquitous hijab reminds me of al Jazeera or similar middle east newscasts; and French everywhere reminds me of Europe. My brain is doing a continuous multi-take.

Could be because of the sleepless nights + timewarp + compensatory red bull though.

Moroccan food is unique. Was that the least informatory sentence you've read today? Not if you've seen a Geico commercial too. "15 minutes could save you 15% or more". Wow I'm impressed! But not by the savings.

...as I mentioned, sleeptimecaffeine delirium. It induces rambling. Goodbye for now.

Gabon!!!

2011-05-14T11:38:00.000-07:00

I'm about to go to Gabon for a month. Jake is an ichthyologist and is going for a conference on fostering international collaboration in Central African biodiversity research, and to do some collecting in the Bateke region, and since the most exotic place I've gone since I was 12 is Banff, I'm going too.

When it's a little less fresh and a little more of a funny story, I will relate the six week visa saga. Let's just say that it's not so much of a mystery why some of these otherwise stable and potential-ful countries can't quite get things together. The reason they're having trouble attracting tourists isn't just the lack of modern hotels, it's the fact that they require an inordinate amount of documentation and fees to get a tourist visa, which you can't get at the border or in the airport, and even then regularly deny them on a whim. Firing the consulate at the D.C. Embassy is probably the number one best thing they could do for their tourist industry. I have never in my life had to deal with such a witch of a woman.

(Luckily, her incompetence stretches so far as to be uninformed, or more likely just spitefully deceptive, about the other possibilities for obtaining a visa. ONLY deal with the New York consular general...)

Anyway. See you in a month! Hopefully with some photographs of low-land gorillas or elephants. Unfortunately we won't be in the part of the country with the pygmies...

education reform

2011-05-11T14:56:00.000-07:00

Fantastic and interesting article on education reform by Joel Klein, former chancellor of the NYC school system. Read the whole thing.

cat incentives

2011-05-04T15:21:00.000-07:00

Well I would certainly be motivated to behave well in prison by the prospect of a pet cat, but I don't know about most violent criminals!

James also posits a way to reform prisons, which he dubs “violentocracies.” His proposal: smaller facilities that house no more than 24 inmates and are part of a larger, incentives-based system. At a Level 1 prison, for example, you get a lawyer, a Bible, and around-the-clock supervision; at Level 5, a cat and a coffee machine. At Level 10, you can earn a living and come and go with relative ease. The idea, James says, is not only to reduce the paranoia-fueled violence in large prisons but to encourage prisoners to work their way up the ladder.

(Article stolen from MR, which Tyler labels 'interesting', but is really not surprising in the least if your impression of law enforcement is more shaped by real life than by crime-busting TV shows. Bad incentives and lackadaisical/incompetent investigations/trials? Well, of course.)

wow

2011-05-02T15:58:00.001-07:00

I've never seen the internet so unanimously preoccupied with a single story. When before have a billion people all been talking about the exact same thing? When else can someone tweet "'I loosened it.' -Bush" with no other context needed?

Probably 9/11, except the internet didn't really exist in the same form back then...

the Inada cafe

2011-04-27T16:23:00.000-07:00

This year's 1st year (Berkeley Econ PhD students) skit is hilarious... I didn't catch half the good lines the first time I saw it.

"The Inada Cafe: The less you eat the better it tastes."

Where'd you get that chloroform? It worked really well.

Berkeley Bowl. It's organic!

[laptop turns into notepad] What was that?

A negative technology shock!

[Berkeley t-shirt turns into Stanford t-shirt]

What's a Babbling equilibrium?
It's when I talk nonsense because I know you won't believe me and you don't believe me because I talk nonsense.
Oh, like macro.

happy things

2011-04-26T18:40:00.000-07:00

You know you're a little bit of a nerd when your list of things that always make you smile goes:

1. My kitten waking up and stretching

2. Rainbows

3. Typesetting math in LaTeX

the brazilian Real

2011-04-25T18:28:00.000-07:00

I had no idea about the origin of their current currency. Psych and econ FTW =)

sociology, cont.

2011-04-23T15:15:00.000-07:00

As I was saying...

"Sociology has had a substantial period of time within which to develop as a separate discipline, so one might expect a coherent sociological analysis of social interactions to have developed by now. Not so. Examination of recent sociological research does not reveal a shared, discipline-wide perspective. Some sociologists describe interactions in language that suggests economic thinking. Others give prominence to concepts that play little or no role in modern economics: class, community, culture, influence, status, gender roles, and so on. Indeed, an economist reading sociological research is struck by the sheer number of concepts that sociologists employ. Economics has sufficed with a remarkably small set of basic concepts: preferences, expectations, constraints and equilibrium. Why does sociology require so many more concepts? I believe that the abundance of concepts in sociology is connected closely to the dearth of formal analysis in the discipline. Whereas the typical research article in economic theory uses mathematical language to define concepts and then goes on to state and prove propositions, most articles in sociological theory begin and remain verbal throughout."

-Charles F. Manski, 2000, "Economic Analysis of Social Interactions"

conformity

2011-04-22T15:17:00.001-07:00

This is the most bizarre paper I've read in a long time. As an economist I am usually really disturbingly good at inventing stories to justify observations, and in this case I have no earthly idea what is going on.

This is the experiment: There are two jars of marbles. One contains mostly red balls and a few blue balls, and the other is the opposite. One jar is chosen. Each person has to guess which of the two jars it is and they get paid if they guess right. The first three people have to guess without any information. They can see what the people before them guessed, but none of them get to draw a ball from the jar. After that, each person can either draw a ball or they can see what other people have guessed who didn't draw a ball. In other words, they can either get useful information or completely useless information about what their peers did.

No one in their right mind should choose to see what their peers did. Yet 34% do.

It gets even weirder when people aren't paid individually based on whether they guessed right, but instead everyone in the group gets paid the same amount if the majority guesses right, and nothing otherwise. In that case there is a danger that uninformed people will dominate the voting, so if you don't draw a ball, you should definitely vote against the uninformed people you find out about. Yet even more people (50%) choose not to draw a ball, and 60-70% of those vote with the crowd.

I would chalk it up to confusion but the authors make a pretty good effort to rule that out as the sole cause.

I can understand wanting to fit in when there's some social reason to, or no other reason not to, and of course I understand following the leader when you just don't want to bother thinking for yourself and that's a way to delegate logic. But these people are giving up significant amounts of money to follow random people they don't know who explicitly have no information!

I don't get it. I so thoroughly don't get it it's like an earthquake in the foundation of my understanding of psychology. Am I missing something obvious in my exhausted delirium right now?

I want the authors to run it again but explicitly ask people, afterwards, why they did what they did.

piracy as yield management

2011-04-21T17:12:00.000-07:00

It seems more and more likely to me that corporations are intentionally allowing their digital products to be pirated with some amount of effort, as a form of yield management.

Yield management (often referred to as price discrimination, but that phrase has a bad and inaccurate connotation) is the idea that businesses would like to charge different prices to different groups of people. The classic example is airline pricing. If airlines didn't have first class prices, they would have a hard time making enough money to fly the plane at all. And if they didn't have coach pricess, they wouldn't attract enough passengers. Having multiple price classes is extremely helpful in this case and everyone benefits.

The problem of yield management is that a business can't ask a person "how much are you willing to pay?" and then charge them that. They have to use some observable characteristic of their customer (that isn't illegal to use to determine prices, like race or religion...) to guess at their willingness to pay. For airlines, they use the time of purchase. People who purchase in advance tend to be planning vacations and are price sensitive, so tickets cost less then. At the last minute, most people booking flights are business executives charging the company credit card. So prices are higher then.

And there are tons of other examples that more obviously use the customer's characteristics to decide how much to charge them. Students and seniors get discounts all over the place. Some utilities goes straight to the source and give discounts if your tax returns reveal low enough income.

Anyway, back to software piracy. Obviously, if software companies gave their products away, they wouldn't be able to stay in business. But almost as obviously, if they charged the corporate price for their product to every person who used it (and piracy was impossible) they would have hardly any customers. Very few people would use Photoshop; they'd get by with open-source Gimp instead. Djvu might've become the standard over Adobe's pdf. Grad students would certainly never pay full price for Matlab or Stata; they'd be using R as much as possible.

That's a pretty crippling loss of market share. Those companies would probably rather charge a low price to people who can't afford it so that they get used to using it and pay full price years down the line when they can pay. Instead they seem to be making piracy just barely possible enough to keep that market share without losing their revenue from corporations and old rich people who don't know how to use bittorrent. Those "leaks" of new, pre-validated operating systems seem suspiciously intentional to me. The "register manually without using the internet" option in some software packages is just so convenient for hackers. And those little utilities that have dozens of free competitors are as easy to pirate as googling "[product name] serial".*

*So I hear. I would never try these things myself of course...

sociology

2011-04-19T16:27:00.000-07:00

Reading sociology papers gives me one of two feelings.

Either economists are clearly superior academics because we use math to clearly define our ideas, to force us to infer results carefully and accurately, to find results that we wouldn't normally see without the equations, and to clarify the relationships between many concepts in a clear and simple manner.

Or, sociologists are clearly superior because they have so many concepts popping up everywhere and give a new name to each new idea and they can apparently keep these things straight in their heads without equations...

A single equation makes my brain hurt a lot less than a list of 8 concept definitions and pages of discussion on how they relate.

polite society

2011-04-18T23:39:00.001-07:00

David Brooks says:

It is obligatory these days in a polite society to have a complicated attitude toward success. If you attend a prestigious college or professional school, you are supposed to struggle tirelessly for success while denying that you have much interest in it. If you do achieve it, you are expected to shroud your wealth in locally grown produce, understated luxury cars and nubby fabrics.

I thought Berkeley was an extreme in this spectrum, but maybe it was partially that I moved here at the same time I became aware of what polite successful society consists of. Are the upper middle class really like this everywhere...?

euro zone

2011-04-17T16:44:00.000-07:00

Very good article.

"[T]he euro, in retrospect, appears to have been a misguided attempt to equalize the values for some very unequal assets, namely the bank deposits of strong countries and those of weak countries."

In retrospect, it seems pretty obvious that unity in monetary policy also requires a degree of unity in fiscal policy. But then, since the United States is a collection of partially fiscally separated states as well, this makes me wonder how important psychology is in the equation.

The possibility of separate monetary policies among the states is completely off of anyone's radar in the U.S. But that was the norm until 1999 in Europe, so regardless of the political and legal feasibility of eurozone separation, it's most certainly not off the radar. A situation that makes the benefits of separation clear is an alarm bell in Europe. A bankrupt state of California would also love to inflate it's way to lower debt I'm sure, but no one is worrying about that possibility and moving their bank accounts to North Dakota.

Sure, the legal ties between the states are much stronger than between the countries of Europe, but legality is ultimately just a commitment to a common psychology. And legality, as made very clear by the European situation right now, can't trump reality, including contradictory psychology, forever. And it's also true that the federal budget dwarfs any differences in fiscal policy between the states, but this only reduces the magnitude of the issue, it doesn't negate it.

Maybe the eurozone is fragile because people expect it to be fragile. And the U.S. is strongly unified only because we expect it to be unified.

bring back prop 19

2011-04-14T22:47:00.000-07:00

Yet another reason to want to legalize marijuana.

New Department of Energy study finds that indoor marijuana growing accounts for a full 1 percent of the nation's electricity use, and a staggering 8% of household electricity use in the state of California.

Unfortunately I suspect most of the environmentalists who care about those numbers in California were already in favor of Prop 19 so I doubt that would be a deciding factor.

stolen from twitter

2011-04-12T13:41:00.000-07:00

A German, a Greek, a Portuguese, and an Irishman walk into a bar. The German pays.

morality myth

2011-04-05T08:58:00.000-07:00

Every single article on government debt laments the lack of courageous politicians willing to fight for unpopular reforms that are crucial in the long run. If only we could elect some politicians with integrity...

Blame the system, not the participants. The nature of public office is that it attracts those who want to hold public office, not necessarily those who want to save the country from fiscal ruin. And the nature of legislation is that even the politicians who truly want to do the right thing are immediately crucified and silenced, even when nearly everyone agrees that a particular action is required. And the nature of legislation is also that no matter how much agreement there is on the overarching issues, the hashing out details will divide and encourage finger-pointing and sabotage the larger goal. And the nature of government is that the short-term is more relevant, in terms of visibility and accountability and enforceability and CBO analysis and legislative commitment devices* and anything else you can think of pretty much, than the long term.

To reiterate an overused point as an analogy, soviet Russia did not fail because the wrong people were in charge and the wrong people participated. Politicians will always respond to political incentives: that power structure will always attract those who are most likely to abuse power and will systematically bring out the worst in the best of them. And citizens will always respond to economic incentives: communism will always lead to a collapse in production. Pining for more integrity is utterly beside the point.

Of course, I have no idea how to change the system to improve the incentives. But that's what we should be worrying about! Not the lack of political integrity.

*That is, why deal with a longterm problem when any agreement will be reneged by the next Congress? This destroys both political will (why kill myself for a futile cause) and feasibility (it might be politically much easier to legislate reform that takes effect tomorrow, which is what I mean by a commitment device, but it'll just be delayed again when we get there.)

literacy and reasoning skills

2011-04-04T18:57:00.000-07:00

If you feel that your faith in humanity has reached unjustifiable heights and you need a way to let a little hot air out of your balloon, I have a simple suggestion. Go to target and engage the checkout girl in a discussion about coupon terms and conditions. Works wonders!

Me, upon approaching the checkout counter: "Hi, I have this coupon and I just wanted to make sure that I can use it to buy four of the item. It doesn't say 'limit 1 per customer' so I assume that is the case."

Checkout girl: Yeah that's fine. [She scans the items and the coupon]

Me: It looks like it only applied the discount to one item.

Checkout girl: Yeah that's because you can only use the coupon once.

Me: It doesn't say that though.

Checkout girl: "Yeah, see it says 'limit one coupon and one manufacturer's coupon per item".

Me: Yeah, but that means you can't use multiple discounts on the same item, not that you can't use the same coupon for multiple items.

Checkout girl, utterly baffled: Let me call the manager...

[Repeat exact same conversation with the manager]

Manager: I'm sorry, it says one coupon per item and I can't use it for all four, the computer won't let me.

Me: But one coupon per item isn't the same thing as one item per coupon.

[Repeat last two statements four or five more times.]

Manager, exasperated: Ok let's pull up your purchases again and try scanning the coupon three more times.

Me: See, it works! Thanks for your help and sorry to be a pain about it, it just doesn't say 'limit 1' anywhere on the coupon.

Manager [puzzled, and giving me a well-you-got-lucky-there's-a-computer-glitch-but-I'll-let-it-slide-to-get-rid-of-you look]: Glad we could work it out.

I really have no idea how you can be hired at Target before understanding the difference between the universal "limit one per customer" and "not valid with any other offers" terminologies on coupons...

Of course, my smugness about my basic literacy and reasoning skills was instantly diminished when I got to the parking lot and realized I'd gone grocery shopping before putting the saddle bags back on my motorcycle after changing the spark plugs and rear blinker. That was a ~~precarious~~ fun ride home...

billboard

2011-04-03T18:14:00.000-07:00

"Bank of America: ATMs where you need them. Parking spaces... not so much."

Only in Berkeley is it an advertisable asset to refuse to cater to automobile users...

Dear Wal-mart,

2011-03-27T20:07:00.000-07:00

I love you, usually. I regularly defend your honor against crazy economically illiterate Berkeleyans who don't realize that you've done more for the American poor and lower-middle class than any liberal government initiative. I love that you've used your market power for good in many ways, and I have full faith that you'll soon get over your stubbornness with regard to endangered fish as well.

With every subpar stop at Safeway or Target or any shopping need past 10pm, I bitterly mourn the fact that the nearest 24-hour Supercenter is an hour away in Napa. You were an integral part of my childhood, as the teenage hangout in small-town Oklahoma, the truly one-stop shopping center for everyone (regardless of class), and after many weekend field trips from OSSM to your blessedly off-campus utopia, your reliably cheerful blue billboards even became a true symbol of freedom [so long as we were back at the van in exactly 55 minutes.]

But for someone who has turned the business of giving consumers exactly what they want at prices that can't be beat into an exact science, you have an astonishing misconception compromising your women's clothes department: not everyone who likes to shop with you is either a skanky teenager or an overweight adult.

All of your women's shorts are too big on me, and all of your junior's sized shorts barely cover my crotch. Seriously. And I am perfectly averagely sized, except being a little on the tall side, but that doesn't matter with shorts.

I understand that your target demographic tends to be a little bit heavier than average, since nowadays poverty is perversely correlated with obesity, so fine, stock a disproportionate number of size 13's. But really, if you are serious about working your way into skinny-obsessed New York City, you could do better than to completely ignore their clothing needs.

Please rectify this situation so that I may sing your praises without caveat!

Sincerely,

Vera

open-access citations

2011-03-25T11:33:00.000-07:00

Duh =)

I mean, this must be obvious to anyone who actually cites things. It may not be the ideal scholarly practice, but if I read a paper that cites multiple papers to make one point, and I want to make a similar point, so I look up those papers and only one is open-access, that's the one I cite. The trip to the library, the copy-card refiller station, and figuring out how to use those damn copiers to get a readable page once again and spending four times the advertised amount per page, is just not worth the added smidge of integrity of potentially discovering something unique about that one paper...

This is actually the ONE upside to the insanely long publication delays in economics, on the order of multiple years on average. By the time it actually comes out in print, the working paper version has been circulating the internet for years, copyright free. This of course means there's an added problem of citing specific dated versions of working papers that change over time... but that's ok. Rarely do you need to cite something so incredibly specific that it's only in one of the versions and not the published (peer-reviewed) one.

Edit: actually, by "open-access" above, I don't actually mean "open", I mean "open to the Berkeley network". But you get the idea. That rules out all those annoying journals that only put volumes on JSTOR on a timelag basis.

wealth vs income

2011-03-23T16:46:00.000-07:00

"The richest 400 Americans are richer than the bottom 150 million combined." I've heard this statistic half a dozen times in the last few weeks. In case you weren't tipped off by the fact that Michael Moore is one of the louder voices spreading it, you should take it with a spoonful of salt.

Wealth is not the same as income. The poorer half of America has almost no wealth because it doesn't save very much. They choose some small level of savings as an emergency buffer and spend the rest of their paycheck month to month. Some of these households are making six figures but choose to send their kids to private school instead of investing. That's their choice, and quite possibly the right one for their circumstances and values. Doesn't mean that wealthier investors owe them anything for it.

If I lived in a communist society where wealth was perfectly redistributed and everyone had exactly the same income, but one out of a million citizens lived in a cheaper home and didn't go on vacation and managed to save a buck a result, that one person would have more savings than everyone else in the country combined. I don't think that's a sign of grotesque income inequality. In fact that one person could even have a lower income and higher savings rate and still be "richer" than everyone else combined.

The U.S. isn't like that hypothetical country, but the mathematical point is what matters. That statistic doesn't tell you anything useful. I want to know what the number is for income.

the executive branch

2011-03-21T18:35:00.000-07:00

Given what a scandal the Iraq war turned into, and what outrage there was over Bush-Cheney's unilateral decision to commit the country to more than a decade of violence, and given how forcefully Obama personally was against the Iraq war, it is fairly stunning and extremely disheartening that he would allow the same kind of unilateral decision making with regard to Libya.

It's also perpetually disheartening that the civil rights abuses (privacy and due process) induced by the Patriot Act have continued unabated since Obama took office, and yet the left has mysteriously shut up about it. This was something they were absolutely right to get up in arms about under Bush, and they should absolutely still be up in arms about it now. Not to mention the right, who claim to want the government off their backs, but somehow didn't see a problem with this totalitarian move in the first place.

Did I mention I hate partisan politics? So many people say they hate partisan politics, but those who are in one of the two relevant parties have very different revealed preferences.

spring break

2011-03-21T15:04:00.000-07:00

Spring break: a hiatus from those pesky seminars and classes and meetings so you can really focus and get some real work done.

I swear to god this is the last year I'll forget multiple times that it's spring break at all, after not even knowing it was this week until last Tuesday. I am not a workaholic...

school standards

2011-03-18T15:05:00.001-07:00

Gautam Rao, on the demise of standards in New Delhi private schools: "Unlike when I was growing up where these fancy schools beat you and tested you all the time, now they hardly ever beat you and almost never test you."

See, economics seminars can be very entertaining!

bleeding heart libertarians

2011-03-17T17:26:00.001-07:00

In case you missed it on MR and various other places, this new blog is great. It's always nice to hear from libertarians who don't deny that the world doesn't always reflect an idealized theoretical model and who don't exclusively rely on moralistic reasoning (from a property-rights-above-all-else foundation) in their political philosophy.

Most libertarian discussion falls into one of two categories: either it takes place in a heterogenous population and quickly devolves into a bitter debate about fundamental values and assumptions, or it takes place in a exclusively libertarian crowd and quickly devolves into a ludicrously extreme set of normative proclamations that much of the world would use as reductio ad absurdum arguments against classical liberalism.

A middle ground where libertarian values are taken for granted as the starting point but that acknowledges the subtlety and complexity of real-world issues is a breath of fresh air.

calculating optimal date nights

2011-03-17T01:32:00.000-07:00

This is what happens when I have a few hours off one evening after several weeks of nonstop staring at a computer screen or notebook and generally stressing myself into premature greying.

Or rather, this is what happens when that coincides with the day of having lunch with my friend Mike, who is the first person in my own generation that I've met who is as enthusiastic, if not more so, about amateur astronomy as I am.

First I go rockclimbing since I haven't had any exercise whatsoever in a week.

Then I splurge on tuk tuk thai takeout for dinner.

And then I spend over an hour calculating the required azimuth of the sun at sunset, and the dates when it falls in that range, to see the sun set over the water from the Eastbay, as it slithers just between the city and Marin county and under the Golden Gate bridge.

Backing up. The graduate student lounge in the Berkeley department of economics (known as the P-room) has an unbelievably gorgeous view from the 6th floor of a building at the top of the hill, looking out over the entire bay. The main upside to spending evening after evening banging my head against problem sets as a first year student was seeing sunset and twilight progressively fill this room. For some reason, I always only saw it set over Marin county and didn't think twice before writing off the possibility of sunset over the water.

(Backing up further: I've somehow only seen sunset over the water four times in 7 years of residence in California. In LA, the coast faces south, and here, the eastbay is hugged inland by Marin and the peninsula. The first time I saw it completely unintentionally while on a motorcycle trip up highway 1, and it so shocked me with how beautiful it was compared to the normal thing, which is already pretty dang great, that I've been somewhat obsessed with the phenomenon ever since. Plus, every time is both beautiful and comes with a ticket to the green flash lottery, which I've yet to win. But it IS real.)

I guess I got too accustomed to the beautiful bay area scenery, because it took until a couple months ago to come back to this question. That was when I was fishing on the Berkeley pier at sunset and lamenting the fact that it sets behind the city. (I'm really unbelievably obtuse sometimes; even then I didn't remember well enough or think about it enough to realize that that means that sometime during the year it must go from the north peninsula to the south with a window of opportunity in between.)

But today at lunch, Mike and I got on the subject of Cassini and Saturn fly-bys, astronomy videography, clear sky prospects, and the upcoming showing of Mercury a full ten degrees above the horizon half an hour after sunset next week. And then onto sunsets. And only then, when Mike told me flat out that it's definitely possible, did I realize I had never figured this out.

An itch like that can't go unscratched, even if it means that you find yourself playing with mathematica at 1:30 in the morning, while studying tables of sunset azimuths by gps coordinates and going absolutely giddy over the scrumptious trove of practical geekiness that is this website.

So to get to the punchline: we just missed it, unfortunately. The south end of the golden gate bridge is at about 250.4 degrees azimuth, and the north end at 254.6. There's also the obstacle of the southern suspension tower at 251.7. The sun itself is right around half a degree wide, which gives you probably one day unobstructed under the southern portion, and 9 or so days under the main body of the bridge. That was from approximately February 4-14. (No, I'm not going to try to be more exact than that... there's all kinds of other factors to take into account, such as elevation above the horizon and atmospheric refraction, but the fact of the matter is that the table of sunset azimuths has three significant digits so that's the limiting bottleneck.) The next run will be from October 27-November 5 (with a gap day or two on the back end from the suspension tower).

BUT, you still have a day or two to catch it from treasure island. If the turnoff from the highway that I'm thinking of is where I think it is on google maps, this is about the ideal time to watch the sunset directly under the bridge from there, which has the added benefit that you're half as far away and on level with the water, so the gap between bridge and horizon is much larger.

That's where I'll be tomorrow at 7:18 pm.

brainstorming

2011-03-14T21:05:00.000-07:00

Help me out here. Think of a situation where you are completely anonymously interacting with another person. You have the option to behave fairly towards them, or to screw them over for your own gain.

In one type of situation, where the other person won't find out that you screwed them over, you are more likely to do so. In another situation, where the outcome is exactly the same but the other person will find out, you are more likely to behave fairly. (Think about if you and someone else won a prize and you have to give them their half of the money. You might act differently if they know how much you won.)

Why is that? This is a completely anonymous situation, so you don't have to worry about vengeance, and no one but yourself can judge you for your decision. But of course the decision is the same in both cases, so your own self-judgment can't be the reason.

The obvious explanation is that you don't want to make other people feel as if they're being screwed over. But somehow I can't make myself believe that that's all that's going on. That doesn't feel like what is going on, if I imagine myself in that position.

I mean, if that were the reason, people should interfere with random strangers screwing people over. We should tip for other people when we see them eating and running. We definitely don't.

Ok, maybe this is it. We don't like feeling responsible for other people's hurt feelings. How does that sound? Guilt applies both to material outcomes and emotional outcomes.

shameless hero-worship

2011-03-12T17:11:00.000-08:00

David Brooks has a blog again!

I think if I didn't have to work for money, I would spend my time attempting to be David Brooks. With a little more math, for fun. And on a ranch in southwest Texas instead of D.C.

important skills

2011-03-09T16:33:00.000-08:00

No time to blog but always time to quote David Brooks:

Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.

Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.

Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.

Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.

Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others.

income inequality

2011-02-26T18:54:00.000-08:00

I don't understand all the fuss about income inequality.

For one thing, I don't see it happening. From my perspective, nearly everyone I meet is middle class; no way is the middle class shrinking. I figure if you have a decent place to live and food on the table without having to work 80 hour weeks in terrible conditions, you're middle class, unless you don't have to work at all, in which case you're rich. It may be true that income growth has stagnated for all except the superrich, but that just makes them richer, it doesn't make the rest of us poorer.

This graph sort of says what I mean:

The poorest people in the U.S. are still richer than the richest in India. I'd say that pretty much makes them middle class, or at the very least pushes the status of the American middle class wayyyyyy way down on my list of world priorities. Isn't it more important that everyone has enough to survive than that everyone survives at the same level?

It seems like most of the concern about income inequality comes from resentment towards the superrich. I could care less if there are twice as many Bill Gates's running around than ten years ago. Even if they don't "deserve" all of their wealth, whatever the heck that means, they're not stealing anything from me, so who cares? Most of the superrich create a lot of value for the world. How that value should be split up between them personally and everyone else just doesn't seem like a big deal to me. As long as it's not a transfer of wealth from the masses to the superrich, we're still better off for their existence, and there are more important things to worry about...

I guess you could say I have a very "American" view of poverty, as Daniel Hamermesh succinctly describes it. In the European measure of poverty, the bottom X percent of people are always defined as poor. In the U.S., you're not counted as poor unless you can't afford a basic subsistence existence. That makes so much more sense to me that I can't even imagine how the alternate definition would take hold.

Playing the devil's advocate though, I know that happiness does depend somewhat on relative standing. In particular, we prefer to be friends with people at the same socioeconomic level. It's hard to hang out together when one person can barely afford McDonalds and the other wants to get bottle service at a ritzy Manhattan nightclub. If income inequality were so suddenly distorted that social groups are ripped apart, that would be unfortunate. (Slow changes are an inevitable part of life that aren't worth fighting.) But that certainly is not the case right now.

Additionally, simple jealousy of others, regardless of whether they are close friends, is also a tangible influence on happiness. Part of me wants to say to that, get over it. Focus on yourself and appreciate what you have. More importantly, these subjective, unverifiable, and unnecessary, components of utility can almost never be a basis of policy because tangible physical harm must be done to someone else to avoid them, and tangible physical harm always trumps hurt feelings. (That seems obvious but there are so many instances where that principle is rejected, because the people with hurt feelings fight hard for their side, usually with moralizing logic that defies the reality that they just don't want their sensibilities offended.)

On the other hand, these subjective emotional components of utility are real even if they're hard to quantify and not inevitable, and therefore they have real consequences. If society consists of starving masses and a few elites, even if the elites aren't actively repressing the masses, that can induce enough resentment to spur unrest or uprising. This is also a situation so completely different from America today that it's not a cause for concern. No one is being held back by the superrich in this country. Many are being given jobs and opportunities much better than they could hope for if the superrich all left the country or lost their fortunes. Even poor Americans have too much to lose to take a gamble on a revolution. In that situation, any residual jealousy is just not enough to motivate a radical change in policy that might rectify the ginni coefficient in exchange for all the collateral damage those policies would inflict.

Much better to advocate for a culture that is less obsessed with comparing numbers on paychecks, to kill the jealousy at the source with no collateral damage at all.

Go Beavers!

2011-02-23T20:05:00.000-08:00

Caltech just ended it's 26-year, 310 game men's basketball conference losing streak, beating Occidental 55-54.

Since winning their last conference game against LaVerne in 1985, Caltech faculty and alumni have won nine nobel prizes.

In 2007, they broke their 12 year, 207 game NCAA losing streak. That year they had more high school valedictorians (8) on their team than former high school basketball players (6), which was actually a big improvement from 2. In 2006, the documentary Quantum Hoops was made about their epic streak. If you love nerds (or laughing at nerds...), go download that movie from your favorite torent site now.

The women's basketball team ended their season 0-25, but it looks like women's volleyball got one win in their season. I've been nostalgically rooting for them since my single college sports experience of attending a women's volleyball game that the university had bribed the student body to attend with a huge free barbecue outside the gym, since they thought they might have a chance with enough crowd support. They lost, but it was delicious, and the stands were probably almost half full. I think we even had a mascot and some cheerleaders. Male ones, of course.