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Fireworks!

2012-01-01T20:58:00.000-05:00

Fireworks!

When I was a teenager, most of my peers were interested in smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol. Neither of those activities appealed to me, but I was fascinated by fireworks.

I was living in Germany, and there, fireworks are legal to sell only twice a year -- for a couple of weeks before New Years, and during Fasching. Fasching is sort of negative Lent. Since people are going to deprive themselves of pleasure during Lent, they have a period before Lent, Fasching, during which they throw wild parties, which sometimes involve fireworks.

Many stores would sell fireworks. Legally, you had to be 18 to buy them, but most stores would bend the rules and sell them to minors.

My parents, especially my mom, didn't want me to have them. She was afraid I would get hurt.

So if you were a kid, you had to A: save up your money before the season during which fireworks were available, B: buy them, and C: hide them from your parents.

Year after year I did this.

I remember, when I was in 5th grade, I did have one explode in my hand. There were 'screamers', which made a lot of noise but were safe to hold in your hand. But they said on them, "Don't hold in your hand", in German. I bought another firework that looked like a screamer, but it was a different color. It said "Don't hold in your hand", but since screamers were safe to hold in your hand, I ignored this. It screamed for awhile, then got quiet. A little flame came out and I wondered what it would do next. Then "BANG" -- I got my answer. It was very small. The explosion was painful, but did not harm my hand. I never told mom about that, of course.

Once I tried to make a hand grenade. I put a very big firecracker in an empty soft drink can. At the time, German soft drink cans were steel, not aluminum. I took it into the forest near where we lived and threw it in into a gully where the shrapnel wouldn't hurt anybody. It was quite a disappointment -- the explosion just blew off the end of the can, the rest of the can was intact -- no shrapnel was formed.

I remember one type of firework I had, it didn't have a conventional fuse. One end was sulfurous, like a match head, and you struck it on a match box and then it would flame like a blow torch for awhile, then the firework would explode. Once I was in the woods and I lit one of those and threw it down a steep hill in a forest. It landed in a tree, 40 feet up. The first 30 feet of the tree didn't have any branches, so there was no hope of climbing the tree. More and more smoke came from the firework and I realized the blow torch was setting the tree on fire. I was worried it was going to start a forest fire and there was nothing I could do to stop it. Then the explosion came, which blew the fire out.
We generally didn't have forest fires in Germany, the place is too wet.

In Germany, I went to an international school, and our school had an American Boy Scout troop. We would go on camp outs with other American troops, virtually all of whom were military kids. Military kids rarely went off base, I don't think most of them had German money in their pockets. So they didn't know they could get fireworks from the Germans. I went around at a camp out selling fireworks to Americans at a hefty profit.
I remember a prospective customer didn't like it that the fireworks didn't have a conventional fuse. I showed him the troop number on the shoulder of my uniform and promised him that if he couldn't get it to light, he could come to my troop and find me and he'd get his money back.
The next day I was walking along and I saw him coming the other way and he had one eye bandaged. He said "The firework blew a hole in a tent.". I was freaking out, thinking he'd injured himself with the firework I'd sold him, but he realized what I was thinking and told me the injury was because of something else.
What had happened is that the guys in his troop were very skeptical that the firework would work, and someone had been sitting in a tent, slowly striking it against a matchbox, then it went into blowtorch mode, so he threw it to the other side of the tent. While still in blowtorch mode, it burned a hole in the tent.

When I was 15, I got word that my family would be moving to Australia in a month. I met some grownups who had lived in Australia, but I couldn't trust them to ask them what the firework situation was there. They would think I was too young to have them and fink on me to my mom.

I had saved up some money from a job I'd had selling refreshments at movies that were shown at my high school, and I spent basically all of it on fireworks. My dad's company was going to ship everything we had to Australia, even the food in the pantry.

I hid the fireworks in a lot of different places. I took a lamp apart and stashed some there. I put some in the pockets of my mom & dad's military uniforms in the attic. We had some American cake mix in the pantry, so I made a cake, filled the box with fireworks, and glued it back shut.

I hid the fireworks in about 8 different places, and wrote a list of those places. When we moved to Australia, it took about 8 weeks for all the stuff to get there by boat, and during that time, I lost the list.

When the stuff arrived, I collected my fireworks as best I could.

In Australia, soft drink cans were aluminum like in the US, so I repeated the hand grenade experiment. Again, no shrapnel, but the bottom of the can was blown out into a half-spherical shape.

A year or two after we arrived in Australia, my mom opened up a box of powdered sugar to find fireworks inside. I'd forgotten about those. By then I was old enough that she was cool with me having them, so she just gave them to me.

A few years later I was in college in California, and wanted to take my fireworks there. Returning from a visit home to Australia, I smuggled some in my suitcase. I knew they did not pose a danger, because I had been experimenting with fireworks for years and knew that if they went off, they wouldn't even blow the suitcase open.
Years after that, I saw a sign at an airport saying the penalty for carrying explosives on an airplane was 5 years in prison and a $25,000 fine. Sobering.

Book Report: The Big Short by Michael Lewis

2011-11-06T14:44:00.001-05:00

This book provides an inside look at the mortgage meltdown, through the eyes of investors.

The mortgage meltdown is something of huge importance and relevance to our times, in that it is responsible for the current recession. It is also not very well understood at all by the lay public.

Many see the problem as "greed", whatever that means.
Leftists see the meltdown (which they didn't predict) as an inevitable consequence (like everything else they don't like in the world) of the Evils of Capitalism.
Democrats were quick to blame it on "deregulation". For awhile they were at a loss to say the removal of which regulation, in particular, was responsible. Eventually some of them said that the 1999 repeal of some provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act was to blame, and the rest of them echoed this sentiment without the foggiest idea of what Glass-Steagall actually was. I have yet to hear a coherent account of how Glass-Steagall would have prevented any bad mortgage loans from being made.
Predictably, Republicans countered the Democrats, blaming the meltdown on too much, rather than too little, government, somehow laying it at the feet of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government agencies set up to facilitate home loans.

Many people say they saw the meltdown coming, and most of them are full of baloney. In The Big Short, the author, Michael Lewis, focuses on the few investors who can credibly make this claim, those who not only saw the meltdown coming, but anticipated it well enough to profit from it.

Three groups are followed, a lone investor in Silicon Valley, a pair of rich hippies in Berkeley who liked making long-odds bets, and some very cynical New York investors who just smelled a rat in the mortgage market from the very beginning.

Michael Burry, the lone investor in Silicon Valley, was a smart fellow with Asperger's Syndrome. Asperger's Syndrome is just a formal way of saying someone is extremely geeky. Such people have great difficulty with interpersonal relationships, but are quite bright and often focus on very narrow areas of interest, becoming experts in their fields. Burry had gotten a medical degree but lost interest, particularly because he didn't like interacting with his patients. He became interested in finance and demonstrated a precocious talent for picking stocks. He eventually found himself running an investment fund worth many millions of dollars of other people's money, and his fund greatly outperformed the rest of the stock market.

At some point he became interested in mortgage bonds, and unlike most other investors, read the fine print. He really didn't like what he saw, some of these home loans being made were so bad that there was a fortune to be made betting against them. He figured out how to make such bets. Unfortunately, it was hard to predict exactly when the loans would go bad and the bets against them would pay off, and he didn't do a very good job of selling his strategy to his investors, most of whom lost faith in him and deserted him. In the end, he and those who stuck with him made a killing.

Jamie Mai and Charley Ledley were a pair of 30 years olds who started investing with $110,000 and a Charles Schwab account in 2003, working from a shed in the back of a friend's house in Berkeley, California. They had an interest in long-odds bets, and some of their early bets paid off, leaving them with many millions of dollars. At some point they became interested in credit default swaps, where, for a small sum of money, you can bet to win a large amount of money if a bond defaults. They decided to bet against mortgage bonds and the rest is history.

Steve Eisman was a New York investor whose bias about the world was that most other investors were crooks for phonies. When he started dealing with the mortgage market, it seemed to confirm his bias, and he ran with it. Unlike Burry, who sat secluded in his office in California reading the fine print of contracts, Eisman went out of his way to seek out all they people he felt were blowing it and confront them with his world view, to confirm whether he or the world was going insane.

The book follows these three characters as they travel through the investment world, and we see all the signs that the subprime mortgage bond market was insane, which looks so obvious in hindsight, while so few people actual paid attention to these signs at the time.

My own take on the mortgage meltdown, which I wrote nearly two years ago, is here. One thing that was really apparent to me before the meltdown was that no one I talked to who was buying real estate seemed to take seriously the idea that there was any possibility whatsoever that home values could sink. This shows up in The Big Short, when Steve Eisman encountered someone who worked for the rating agencies. Eisman had calculated that if real estate prices just stopped rising, there would be massive defaults. Eisman asked the rater if he had run calculations on the prospects for the bonds if real estate values were to decline. The rater replied that the software he used refused to take input predicting a decline in real estate values. But the book doesn't stress this as much as I do, in fact the book does not hold the home buyers accountable at all -- it is mostly focused on the relevant people on Wall Street.

I've heard a lot of talk about the rating agencies being "corrupt" (the media is obsessed with labeling financial activity as criminal or borderline so) in that the agencies were paid by the banks whose bonds they were rating, which undermined their objectivity, but one problem discussed in the book that I hadn't previously been hearing about was with the quality of the people at the rating agencies. The salaries to be had working for a rating agency paled in comparison with what one could make as an investment banker. As one investor put it, "If you couldn't get a job working at an investment bank, you could always go work for the rating agencies". On top of that, the lowest-ranking people in the rating agencies were the ones rating mortgage bonds. As a result, the investors who would put together deals of mortgage loans were much smarter than the people rating the resulting bonds, and learned to game the system and fool the rating agencies into giving the bonds much better ratings than they deserved.

One thing the book talks about is how, after the cataclysm, people on both ends of the deals gone bad wound up rich. The people who had shorted the bond market were obviously rich, and justly so, but the major players who lost their banks billions of dollars by betting on subprime loans wound up out of work, but sitting on tens of millions of dollars they made before losing their jobs in disgrace. I'm not sure what can be done to counter this -- if I were a bank, I would want to provide a disincentive for my employees to lose me billions of dollars, but I'm not sure how I could hold them accountable. The worst thing you can do to an employee who hasn't violated a contract or done anything illegal is fire them in disgrace. If you've been paying them tens of millions of dollars a year up to that time, they wind up unemployed, disgraced, and very rich. I can't think of a solution here. It's a big problem, because it seems plausible to me that an investor might see a 10% chance of a financial meltdown in a few years. If he bets against the meltdown, he has a 90% chance of making a large salary over those few years, and if he gets held accountable for the meltdown, he just takes a very luxurious vacation for a few years afterward. Furthermore, if you make bets alone against the system and you're wrong, everyone thinks you're a fool. If you make bets with everybody else and the whole system fails, you don't get held individually accountable, you were just one of many people wiped out by hard times.

The psychologies of the different characters were very different, in interesting ways. Michael Burry, with his Asperger's, was quite content to sit in his office, read the fine print, and calmly conclude that the world had gone insane and bet millions of dollars on that opinion without further ado. Steve Eisman, a more normal character, wasn't going to make huge bets that the world was going insane unless he met the people involved, publicly called them idiots to their faces, and confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were insane, or at least very stupid. It all makes for fascinating and dramatic reading.

There are some things that are not well explained by this book. For example, the worst mortgages sold were these adjustable-rate mortgages that started out with a small monthly payment being required for a couple of years, then would suddenly reset to much larger monthly payment that the homeowner had no hope of being able to pay. What was going through the heads of the homeowners who signed those mortgages? Did they know about the reset? Were they fooled? And if they were fooled, what were the mortgage originators thinking when they loaned people money that wouldn't possibly be repaid? As it was, these originators were able, for awhile, to fool the homeowners into signing the mortgages and fool the banks into buying the loans, but it must have gone through their heads that this was not a sustainable state of affairs. This isn't mentioned in the book, but I remember the CEO of Countrywide, one of the worst mortgage originators, saying, when confronted with the fact that he had generated a huge number of bad loans, "If these loans were so bad, why were the investors buying them?".

There was a lot of money lost on credit default swaps. A credit default swap is where you buy insurance in case a bond will default. This is fine, but all insurance is based on basically making a bet that something bad will happen -- if the bad thing happens, the insured "wins", and gets money to help him recover from his misfortune, and the insurer loses, paying that money. Well, a lot of people were buying credit default swaps on bonds they didn't own, so it wasn't really "insurance" any more, it was just a bet. A lot of money was obviously lost when homeowners couldn't pay back the money they borrowed, but there was a huge shadow market of credit default swaps, where banks lost a lot of money just betting that the home loans were good, multiplying those losses.

One issue that comes up a lot in the book is that Michael Burry was one of very few people who was actually reading the fine print of these contracts. This highlights one problem our society has -- many people are entering into agreements without reading the contracts, just signing long documents with the belief that since "everybody else is doing it too", so if the deal goes bad, no matter how stupid signing the contract was, the government will come to everyone's rescue. Signing a mortgage is an extremely important contract, probably second only to marriage contracts in importance as the most important contract one signs in one's whole life. If the contract is too long or too boring to read, one should hire a lawyer to at least make sure one understands what one is signing.

There is a push in the current administration to have regulation simplifying mortgage contracts, in such a way that, for instance, people will plainly see what the maximum mortgage payment they will be expected to make will be. In an ideal world, people would just refuse to sign contracts they don't understand and thus force the banks to write simple contracts in plain English, but apparently we don't live in such an ideal world so such regulation is probably a good idea.

One change that I think would be constructive is if the banking system changed the way it handled credit default swaps. I think if I were in the business of selling credit default swaps, I would want to make sure that for every swap I sold, the buyer of the swap actually owned the bond being insured -- so I would know that I was selling to people looking for insurance for what they perceived to be an unlikely event, not making bets against people who knew more than I did. I don't think any government action is necessary to bring this change about, just the sellers of credit default swaps need to wise up.

I think, and this is my own take, it's not stated in the book, that too many people in too many places in the investment system were assuming that, even if their own piece of the system were a weak link, the rest of the system was sound and would make up for that weak link. Thus, the loan originators figured that if the investors bought the loans, they must be good loans. The investors assumed that the ratings were sound, though they should have known better. Everyone assumed that the value of the house would always be at least as much as the outstanding value of the loan, so if the homeowner didn't pay, you could foreclose and get your money back.

A lot of reform has already happened, independent of the government. The bond market now realizes that the ratings are fallible. Everyone now realizes that real estate values can sink. Banks will not recklessly sell credit default swaps on mortgage loans like they used to.

In the afterword, Michael Lewis discusses a lot of conversations he had with politicians and government officials after he published the book. Most of them really hadn't figured out what on Earth had gone wrong, and were trying to get him to explain it to them. After a lot of such conversations, an official who actually was pretty knowledgeable called him and they had a conversation. At the end of the conversation, the official asked him "I understand you've discussed this with a lot of politicians and officials. Was anybody particularly insightful who I might call up and interview?". Lewis explained to him that none of those callers were explaining anything to him, they were all asking him to explain the situation to them. The official laughed, thanked him for his time, and ended the call.

Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-10T22:13:00.000-04:00

I went down to the "Occupy Wall Street" demonstrations a couple of times. I had read hostile reviews from the right-wing press, and the more mainstream press seemed to be saying that the demonstrators generally weren't sure what they wanted.

There were basically no demonstrators at the New York Stock Exchange. They were at Liberty Square, about 6 blocks away. I would estimate there were a couple of thousand of them. Many sleeping bags lay on the ground, so I guess a lot of the people had come a long way.

The demonstration didn't seem to have obtained appropriate permits, so they weren't allowed to use audio amplification. The speaker would yell a sentence, then people 30 feet away would repeat it, then people 30 feet further on would repeat it again. It didn't seem to me to be a good way to come up with nuanced insights into macroeconomic theory sufficient to get us out of the recession and bring the jobs back. The second time I went there they had a video screen where the speaker's words would be typed.

At least 85% of the demonstrators were under 25. Generally, the young people lacked concrete suggestions about specific policy changes, and the few ideas they had were half baked. I went around, generally asking people "What are you demonstrating for? What do you want?". Several people obviously were unprepared for anybody to ask them that and felt a bit put on the spot. People with signs, however, generally had a lot to say.
One kid had a sign saying "Jail guilty bankers". I asked him what laws he felt the bankers had broken. He said that Obama had said that no laws were broken by Wall Street in the mortgage meltdown, and the kid wasn't satisfied with that, he wanted an investigation. I remembered seeing some congressional hearings on TV a couple of years ago, I think investigations did occur. I told the kid I felt a lot of home buyers applying for homes had illegally exaggerated their incomes, pretending to be able to afford houses they couldn't, but that obviously wasn't what he was looking for. I excused myself and moved on.

I tried to seek out people who looked old enough to buy a beer without getting carded and talk to them. They tended to be hippies / radicals, and they tended to interpret the demonstration as being in support of whatever the individual hippie or radical in question wanted.

Of course, people would ask me who I was. I told them I was a computer programmer for Wall Street, that I voted for Obama and intended to vote for him again next year, and give him money. When I engaged with people, I generally took the point of view that the best course of action was to support the Democratic party.

During the 2 hours I was there, there was no friction between the cops and the demonstrators.
I did talk for a long time with one demonstrator, Robert, who was about 50 and had been there for most of the demonstration. He had been arrested while blocking the Brooklyn Bridge. He said the demonstrators had been walking toward the bridge, but the sidewalk crossing it was too narrow for the large crowd, and many of them spilled over onto the roadway. The police warned them that if they continued they would be arrested. Robert wanted to commit an act of civil disobedience and deliberately proceeded forward. The demonstrators reached the middle of the bridge before the police descended on them with nets and arrested several hundred of them. Robert said the first hundred all heard the warning that they would be arrested, but the several hundred following were too far back to know. He felt it was a setup, because when the police finally did arrest them they were ready with nets and vans to cart them away in.
Afterward I thought about it, and I'm not sure it was a setup. With a large crowd consisting of young people and old radical hippies gathering, demonstrating for an unclear purpose, it would have been prudent and appropriate for the cops to have arrest vans in the wings somewhere, and when the demonstrators started crossing the bridge roadway, the vans would have been called, but it would have taken time for them to reach the spot, by which time the demonstrators would have reached the center of the bridge.
Robert said the fine was $100, which he didn't consider to be anything unreasonable.

I talked to one guy who was promoting a "socialist constitution". He said the existing constitution was "based on slavery". I asked him if he wanted to overthrow the existing constitution. He said yes.
I didn't talk to any union people. It was largely random chance I didn't run into any, but I wasn't seeking them out. My own biggest misgiving about supporting the Democratic Party is that they are trying to make it easier to form unions.

They had a 2 page newspaper, "The Occupied Wall Street Journal" that I bought. Robert had told me that some politicians had been volunteering to talk at the demonstration and the organizers had rebuffed them. Unions, however, were welcome aboard, the newspaper contained endorsements from a bunch of them.
The term "99%" was bandied about a lot in the newspaper. Occupy Wall Street is claiming to represent 99% of the population.

I don't think "Occupy Wall Street" will amount to much. There isn't a clear consensus, agenda or party platform. It's mostly a bunch of kids who don't know anything, who are poorly organized and unrealistic. The older radicals aren't offering anything new, just leftist solutions that this society's been rejecting for a long time.

My High School

2011-10-03T22:51:00.002-04:00

This is a description of the high school I went to in Australia, highlighting the differences between American and Australian education styles.

I went to FIS, an international school in Europe that was mostly American, and where the prevailing culture was American, through 10th grade, after which I went to Australia and finished up at Melbourne Church of England Grammar School, one of the best (if not the best) high schools in Australia.

There were no girls at Melbourne Grammar. You wore a uniform (suit and tie), and called the teacher "sir".

The Australian school was mostly along British traditional lines. In Europe I had teachers who were mostly American and English, so I became familiar with the differences between the two styles.

One very big difference between the Australian teachers and American ones is that American teachers feel that a student's grade is a confidential matter, between teacher and student. Generally, in American schools, other students are shielded from a knowledge of how well a student is doing in all classes except gym, where everybody's performance is completely visible to their peers. As a result, American students typically put 10 times more effort into gym than they do into their academic subjects.
From what people who had been at the school a long time told me, Melbourne Grammar had made a cultural shift around 1950, +/- 10 years. Prior to that, the school had been ruled by jocks. I don't know how the school was run prior to that, and I had no friends from other schools, so I have no information about how other Australian schools were run.
Typically, when there were more students studying a subject than could fit into one class, there were naturally several classes taught. But the students were separated into classes by ability. So if there were three classes, there was the top set containing the brightest students, the middle set, and the bottom set, containing the slowest, and everybody knew which was which. On top of that, at the end of every term, a few students were switched between sets depending upon how well they had performed - talk about visibility of performance! I had been an honors student in math and science prior to arriving in Australia, but the school had seen Americans before, and generally they had struggled academically. So to be safe, they put me in bottom set everything. After one term, I was transferred two classes up to top set. It was immediately obvious to me that the top set students were treated with more respect by the faculty.
In American schools, it is really clear - studious students occupy the bottom rung of the social ladder, which is totally dominated by jocks. At Melbourne Grammar, it was a completely different story. Being a smart student carried with it a lot of prestige and recognition from the faculty and from the other students.

Another big difference was democracy. American schools tend to be very democratic. Any student who holds any office or authority got that way by being elected by the other students. At Melbourne Grammar that wasn't the case at all. The administration had the attitude that we were not adults, we were not ready to make these decisions for ourselves, and they would make the important decisions. There were some students who were "prefects", a word that doesn't exist in the American vocabulary. They were students appointed to authority by the administration. They wore different ties, different shirts, and presided over house meetings.
Your "house" corresponded to your dorm. About 20% of the students were boarders and their houses were the dorms they lived in. Everybody else had sort of a virtual house, where we would have weekly meetings. Intramural sports teams were all organized along house lines, each house had its own tie in the school uniform, and a student had a lifelong loyalty to his house. Any student could tell instantly what house any other student belonged to by looking at his tie. So having the prefects preside over house meetings was not an insignificant perk.

Being able to choose prefects gave the administration tremendous leverage over student society. The administration could choose students who they considered the most mature by adult values to be role models for other students. This is very different from American school, where students who would never have been very well liked by adults would often occupy the high rungs of the student social hierarchy.

In Australia, the grades went kindergarten, 1-6th grade, then I-VIth form, where VIth form corresponded to American 12th grade. Students in classes were totally segregated by age. Where in American high school you would often have students of radically different ages in the same class, in Australia there was no mixing of ages in anything but gym, and when there was mixing, older students had authority over the younger.
The school had it down to a science. Students progressed steadily through the years in maturity, and a VIth former was considered a nearly-finished product, very much at the top of the ladder.

One thing the school did to promote intellectualism among its students was the "VIth-form society". At the beginning of VIth form, a list was circulated to all of VIth form naming about 40 of the smartest students in the class, who were invited to attend VIth form society. The society consisted of a dinner every month, with wine, followed by a thought-provoking speaker, who would talk to the society and then have a question and answer session. It was a lot of fun.
The selection of students was not by any blind academic point system, it was a deliberate and arbitrary choice by the administration of which students they wanted to give recognition to, and being seen on that list was quite a distinction. Students who weren't invited were welcome to join, only a few did, and I remember one brilliant student who refused the invitation. I never understood what his problem was.

Grading of exams was done differently than in the US. In the US, 90% is usually an A, 80% is a B, 70% a C, and 60% a D. In Australia, 80% was an A, 70% was a B, 60% was a C, and 50% was D. This meant that an Australian exam would typically contain a lot more questions that really required major insight and imagination on the students part, since the teacher could afford to ask 10% questions that nobody could get and still have a lot of A's.
Teachers would re-normalize their grades. You would get a raw score, and then the teacher would look at the curve and adjust all the scores to fit a fairly standard curve. So if the students generally did pretty well on an exam and you got a raw 92%, the teacher might adjust it to 85% to reflect that it was really just a low A.
Mid-term grades were given as letters in the Greek alphabet instead of the Roman alphabet. I'm not sure what this achieved.

The school was flirting with co-education. It was highly, highly controversial with the parents. The alumni association (known as the "Old Boys") was extremely conservative and against the school changing in any way. But experimentation was starting.
I remember one thing that happened. We were studying Macbeth as part of our curriculum, and we had a filming of Roman Polanksy's Macbeth in our auditorium. They arranged to have some girls from Lauriston, a local girl's school, over to watch it with us. They reserved the front few rows for the girls, had all the boys sit down, then the bus bringing the girls arrived, and they filed in a sat down, and we all watched the movie. Then the girls got up and filed out. The boys all got up and were trying to get out of the auditorium, but the teachers were frantically blocking the doors trying to keep us in. After several minutes we finally did find a way out, to discover that the girls' bus had gotten a flat tire. So the girls wound up taking streetcars home, giving us a chance to actually talk to them. I think the faculty really didn't want that to happen, because they were afraid some unfortunate incident might happen and the whole flirtation with co-education would be pronounced a failure. The teachers, not have been brought up in a co-educational environment, were very nervous about the whole concept, even if they were for it.

My school in Europe had had an honors program where we went through 2 American math classes in one year - in 9th grade I covered geometry and algebra II in a single year, in a single class. This left me at a level where, having just finished half of 10th grade and moving forward a half year to Vth form by crossing the equator, I was just at the right level for the Australian curriculum.
Students in Australia tended to be segregated into technical students vs students in the humanities. If a student, like myself, choose to be a technical tracker, he took, in Vth and VIth form, a load of 2 math classes, physics, and chemistry, plus English, with one additional elective in Vth form. However, the pace of the math classes was much slower, so that we covered about as much material in a year in 2 math classes as we had covered in the same time in a single class in Europe, but in much more depth, where in Europe I had been complaining that the material was going by so fast we were often often on the verge of being reduced to memorizing equations we didn't really understand.

The government had a set of 3 hour exams given at the end of senior year, called Higher School Certificate, or HSC, exams. In most classes, 100% of your grade was determined by this exam. I took the American SAT's and achievement tests as well, but they were trivial compared with the Australian tests. There was no calculus in the American tests, and they were all multiple choice. The American questions were all very straightforward, while the Australian tests, particularly Pure Math and physics, had a lot of very difficult questions requiring major creativity to answer.

A Question on 9/11

2011-09-11T17:36:00.000-04:00

Ten years ago, less than two dozen angry barbarians killed about 3000 unsuspecting innocent Americans. What I find surprising about this is not that it happened, but that this sort of thing hasn't happened more often.

The Islamic world has a strong "victim of the West" narrative. It is deeply upsetting to them that they are not the dominant culture in the world, and they have fabricated a whole alternate reality that preaches that this is not due to any failings in their own culture, but rather a grave injustice inflicted upon them by the West though underhanded means. It is true that the West, through colonialism both subtle and outright, has been meddling in the Islamic countries, so the "victim" narrative is not entirely unjustified.

So, in 2001, a bunch of them got fired up and lashed back, killing as many Americans as they could. Surprise, surprise.

But what about all the other failing cultures in the world? There are many other societies in the world that live in crushing poverty. There must be a lot of rabble-rousers around eager to tell all these people that their problems aren't their own fault, someone else is to blame. And most of these societies have been manhandled by the West at one time or another, so it shouldn't be hard to construe a reasonably credible "victim of the West" narrative in any of those cases and sell it to the masses.

9/11 is not an isolated incident. There have been many other attempts to commit mass murder against the West, but to my knowledge, they have all been perpetrated by militant Islam. What about all the other losers of the world? Why aren't they participating in this game?

Massimo Pigliucci on Evo Psych

2011-08-28T15:43:00.004-04:00

In the 24 pages of chapter 7 of his book "Making Sense of Evolution", Massimo Pigliucci lays out scientific objections he has with the fairly new (since 1975) field of Evolutionary Psychology. In his book "Nonsense on Stilts", there is a small section where he deals with evo psych, but it is basically just a shorter subset of what is discussed in that chapter.

Massimo has been quoted in a Newsweek article as saying that evolutionary psychology is "not good science". I am assuming that it is in these two books where he makes his case for this. The Newsweek article was an appalling piece of journalism -- intellectually dishonest, and resorting to emotional cheap shots. Massimo's chapter, in comparison, is like a breath of fresh air -- he sticks to scientific arguments and refrains from getting personal.

I am not going to defend everything any evolutionary psychologist ever said. I have not read anything by Tooby and Cosmides, and the criticism I have read of evo psych seems to particularly single out their work. Having only heard the criticism, I don't think much of it, and the things they are quoted as saying fail to strike a chord with me like what I've read from other evo psychs such as David Buss or Steven Pinker.
Generally, I am very leery of things said by evolutionary psychologists that are not backed up with psychological experimentation. It is very easy to do a lot of armchair speculation and call it "evo psych", making up evolutionary stories that are based on things that have not been verified about our ancestral environment, and substituting modern social stereotypes for actual psychological data. But if someone carefully studies what is known about prehistoric life, comes up with theories based on that, and tests those theories with psychological experimentation, that should be taken pretty seriously.

We need to make a distinction here between two different concepts: "Evolutionary Psychology", and "Psychological Evolutionary Biology". In evolutionary psychology, we use knowledge about evolution to cast light on psychology. In psychological evolutionary biology, we use knowledge about psychology to cast light on evolutionary biology. As we shall see, Massimo is mostly debunking psychological evolutionary biology, not evolutionary psychology.

In his book, Massimo is constantly comparing evo psych with the study of the evolution of non-human organisms by evolutionary biologists. It should be noted that for evo psych to be useful to humanity, it has to be at least about as good as mainstream psychology. The study of evolutionary biology of non-human organisms is the wrong standard to which to compare it. If both mainstream psychology and evo psych are less scientific than evolutionary biology of non-human species (as is almost certainly the case), that does not in any way establish that mankind would not benefit greatly from studying evo psych.

One objection Massimo makes is that while evolutionary biologists often study species which have many other species closely related to them, comparison and experimentation between these species being very illuminating, homo sapiens has no close living relatives, the most recent common ancestor of ourselves and the great apes having lived some 6 million years ago. This is obviously totally irrelevant to the issue of any comparison between evo psych and mainstream psychology, since it is a problem both of them face.

Throughout his discussion, Massimo is really obsessed with distinguishing whether observed traits of species are adaptations or caused by other evolutionary forces, such as genetic drift. This is a very central issue to an evolutionary biologist, but it's not very interesting to a psychologist. A psychologist is primarily interested in whether a trait exists, not how it came into being. The difference between evolutionary psychology and psychological evolutionary biology is key here. If a species-wide genetic psychological trait is identified and verified to exist, that is progress, regardless of how the trait emerged.

Massimo says that evo psychs sometimes talk about high level, specific behavioral traits when the evidence may not be sufficient to support such conclusions. That may be true sometimes, but you can accuse any field of intellectual inquiry, including mainstream psychology, with excessive speculation beyond what the evidence would support. This may be a relevant objection to bring up with respect to specific conclusions, but it does not mean that evo psych cannot be done well.

Massimo goes into a lot of detail about the fact that humans are very difficult to study because ethical considerations preclude a lot of experimental methods routinely used on other species. Again, this is a problem shared by both evo psych and mainstream psychology, and it says absolutely nothing about how one is better or worse than the other.

Massimo claims little is known about life during the Pleistocene. He says "little", not "nothing", so it's not clear how much he means by that. I maintain we know enough to make progress, and I deal with this issue in my piece Manufacturing an Absence of Evidence.

Done right, evo psych has a lot to offer. Evolutionary psychologists have at their disposal every technique available to a mainstream psychologist, plus they have the evolutionary perspective, much as an anatomist is better off for being aware of the fact that the organisms being studied were being shaped by evolution, and that most of the structures being observed therefore contributed to survival and / or reproduction in some way. Demanding that psychologists ignore the theory of evolution makes about as much sense as demanding that anatomists ignore it as well.

Book Report: Evil Genes by Barbara Oakley

2011-08-27T19:22:00.003-04:00

I met Barbara Oakley when she gave a talk in New York about the book she wrote after this one, "Pathological Altruism". The talk was poorly received because she ran afoul of liberal orthodoxy, but I thought she made some good points and the audience was just being dense. "Pathological Altruism" was not available yet on kindle, but her other book, "Evil Genes", was.

In "Evil Genes", she focuses on the "successfully sinister", people who are profoundly lacking in morals who nonetheless not only stay out of jail, but excel in society. One case she talks about is her morally dysfunctional older sister, who shamelessly used and abused her family at every opportunity.

On the one hand, how objective can we expect anyone to be about their own sister? On the other hand, it makes for entertaining reading. I read Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works", a much more scientific piece, but found I remembered nothing about it. The author's liberal use of anecdotes to describe the dysfunctional people she focuses on bring the issues to life.

She discusses mental illness, especially borderline personality disorder and psychopathy, and how they lead to morally depraved behavior. She uses several examples of tyrants including Serbian president Milosevic, Chairman Mao, Adolf Hitler, and the CEO of Enron to illustrate her points.

At this point, science is at the level where many specific genes associated with mental illness have been located, and Oakley frequently mentions them. I wonder how long it will be before we will have located genes associated with certain types of intelligence, or with altruism? Also, we still have at least fragments of the bodies of many of the tyrants she discusses, it would be interesting to analyze their genomes and see if her analysis of their mental illnesses is very accurate.

Oakley says there are two types of people: those who have encountered the successfully sinister and those who haven't. I count myself in the first category -- I had a close friend a long time ago, who I thought was a wonderful person until I got up close, then she started acting really underhanded and making threats. I got as far away as I could as fast as I could, but she rose to become a successful CEO.

Ideology and Science

2011-07-27T22:12:00.003-04:00

Ideology and Science Don't Mix

In some Scientific American articles I've read over the years, I felt there was considerable liberal bias, but they published a particularly offensive article this month: In Defense of Wishful Thinking, where the writer admits that he lets his liberal ideological bias influence his scientific thinking, and he makes no apologies for it.

It's disgraceful that anyone saying such a thing should be allowed to publish in such a prestigious science magazine. I see any ideological bias in science as a very bad thing.

Ideological Bias in Global Warming Science

I have observed that many Libertarians are global warming skeptics, and I have heard liberals speculate about why this is. Some speculate that they have been bought off by the oil companies, and in fact I have heard my Republican brother say that he feels that most of the resistance from the American political right is due to the influence of the fossil fuels lobby.

I think the fossil fuels lobby is obviously doing its level best to oppose any action to fight global warming, but an important point is that Libertarians don't have to be bought. Their ideology, and their political faith, leads them to believe that anthropogenic global warming theory cannot be scientifically true.

Libertarian ideology holds that most of what our government does is unnecessary, that the level of taxation we suffer from is orders of magnitude more than necessary or desirable, but further, taxation and regulation are not only harmful and unnecessary, but morally wrong.

When posed with the question "What if severe taxation or government regulation really were, in some instance, necessary?", a Libertarian will answer "That is never the case.". And, when the questioner starts airing scenarios, the Libertarian will come up with explanations, in each case, how either A: "That would never happen." or B: "The situation could be dealt with without regulation.".

As I am not an extreme Libertarian, I see a lot of these explanations as rationalizations, and a lot of the Libertarian world is an industry for manufacturing such rationalizations.

But behind the rationalizations is a faith, a desire to believe certain things, a desire to reach certain conclusions. If someone gets swept up in the Libertarian movement, they eventually convince themselves that the principle that massive regulation is never a good thing is one of the central characteristics of the world, like the conservation of energy. They get an almost theistic belief that it is a fundamental quality that a creator endowed the universe with.

If global warming is really a threat, it is virtually impossible to think of a realistic solution to it that can be achieved without massive government intervention. Given the fervent faith of a hard core Libertarian, it just seems impossible to them that the creator would put us in such a situation. It's as unthinkable as agreeing we should eat our young. Given that the science is hard to follow and most of the scientists involved are liberals who tend to feel that regulation is a good thing in and of itself, it is easy for Libertarians to mistrust the scientists and reject the science.

It is a very bad thing when faith gets in the way of science.

Now, my liberal friends (which means nearly all of my friends) will think this is an illustration of why Libertarians are bad, and the moral of this story is we should not listen to Libertarians, but that is not my point. My point is that it is bad when people let their ideology blind them to the facts.

A Scenario Where Liberal Bias Could Be Harmful

Let's create a hypothetical situation where liberal faith might get in the way.

Scientists could do tests on people, like putting them in a MRI scanner and watching their brains while they see videos of suffering, and see how much they are repulsed or turned on, to determine whether they were empathetic, sadistic, or indifferent. And suppose, with such tests on people of all ages from babies to adults, scientists determined that a dominant gene, HYNC3, caused people to be severely sadistic. Only a small proportion of the American population carried it, but it was very common in the prison population.
While very few Americans carried HYNC3, a very poor country on our border, Pralaxia, had a population twice as large as that of the US where 75% of the population carried it. Pralaxia was in a shambles, a horrid, brutal society, and many people there were illegally immigrating to the US.
Conservatives would look at this state of affairs and say that we should go to great lengths to stop illegal immigration from Pralaxia. How would you expect liberals to respond?

I think liberals would deny the science, claiming that the MRI scans were not as meaningful as the scientists claimed them to be, that correlation does not establish causality, they would go on and on. Why would they manufacture all these objections? Because the whole state of affairs would violate several articles of liberal faith:

Genes are not a very important factor in determining human behavior.
Ethnic discrimination is always morally wrong. Nothing good ever comes of it. It is never justified.
We are a "Nation of Immigrants". It is always wrong for anyone descended from immigrants to say we should bar any other immigrant.
There is no such thing as a bad social / ethnic group, other than perhaps white American males.

Given that Pralaxia was much larger than the US, a failure to stop the immigration would quickly put us into a situation where 40% of our population was severely sadistic and probably reduce us to the same sorry state as Pralaxia. We are talking about the total destruction of our country. I think liberals would still deny the science, and resist measures to stem the tide every inch of the way.

Idealistic people are often likable and inspiring. But ideology should be extremely suspect among scientists.

What About a Real Situation????

A liberal might say "Well, that's just a hypothetical, fictitious situation. There are no real situations where liberal bias is causing harmful policy.".

I chose to give a hypothetical situation because I feel the liberal world, like the Libertarian world, is an industry of self-justifying rationalizations, and if I were to talk about any real liberal policy that I see as harmful, it would be ardently defended by liberals who have long ago generated rationalizations for it.

Standardized Tests

2011-07-24T21:58:00.006-04:00

College Tuition Costs and Standardized Tests

One of the biggest problems American society faces is that college tuition has become so high that many people just can't afford college, or if they go, they graduate massively in debt.

There are standardized tests, the SAT and ACT, that are widely used for entrance to college. Colleges put a lot of weight on these, because grades are non-standard and not very meaningful. A good grade could just mean that one had an easy teacher or dumb classmates. The presence of standardized testing for college admissions has been very beneficial, it allows outstanding students at unexceptional schools to get recognition.

We have a standardized tests for graduate school admissions, such as the GRE. However, the service that administers the GRE refuses to make their test scores available to private companies hiring college graduates. Given that grades are an unreliable indicator, this means that all the companies have to go by when considering applicants is the reputation of the school and the student's GPA.

What determines the reputation of a college? The quality of the undergraduate program has little to do with it. The quantity of research being done has a lot more, and it is common for professors at elite schools to neglect their teaching so they can focus on their research. The university administration doesn't get very upset about it, because it is the research and not the quality of instruction that determines the reputation of the school.

There is also a big problem of grade inflation. Many teachers give nearly all of their students good grades, because that discourages students from complaining about poor instruction quality. Rarely do administrators do anything about it.

There is only so much fame to go around. The average hiring manager can only have heard of a certain number of nationally famous schools. The vast majority of people are going to have to go to relatively unknown schools. And it would be nice if someone could go to a cheaper, less famous school, and still be recognized as an outstanding performer. Widely available, standardized tests taken at the end of one's college education would be a great way to achieve this.

Another benefit of widely available, standardized tests taken at the end of one's college education is that one could compare the test scores of students graduating from schools with the SAT scores they got while applying, and see which schools had the most beneficial impact on test scores.

One criticism of testing is that schools will "teach to the test". This certainly happens, but the solution to it is simple: construct an intelligently designed test such that the best strategy for achieving a high score is a mastery of the subject matter. I have heard, mostly from people who are against testing, that the "No Child Left Behind" tests are particularly bad. The solution is to improve the tests, not do away with them.

A big problem liberals have with standardized tests is that different social groups perform differently on them. If these tests were mismeasuring talent due to unfair cultural bias, I would expect there to be groups who are high performing in society who perform poorly on the tests and groups that are low performing in society who are performing well on the tests. This is not the case -- generally, performance of groups on standardized test correlates very highly with the per capita intellectual performance of individuals in those groups in society, even before those tests existed. This is evidence that the tests are not unfairly biased. Given that society stands to benefit so much from the institution of more widespread standardized testing, I think the burden of proof should be on those who maintain that the tests are unfairly biased.

Book Wagging

2011-06-15T22:58:00.003-04:00

I get into a lot of intellectual discussions, on facebook, at meetups. I see a discussion as a collaborative effort to shed light on reality or at least entertain each other. And some tactics are more constructive than others.

Reading books is a good activity, provided you're actually learning anything from them. Obviously, people who read a lot are in a position to contribute more positively to a debate.

If a discussion is going along and you're able to articulate ideas you've gathered from a book to illuminate the discussion, that's great. But there's another tactic which I call "book wagging".

Book wagging is when someone declares someone else in the conversation wrong, but refuses to explain why, claiming it's all in a book they've read. For one thing, it kills the conversation since it cannot now proceed until the "refuted" party goes and reads the book.

Cindy: I think we need to raise taxes.
Carol: That's been completely proven wrong, you need to read "Atlas Shrugged".

Carol now has the upper hand. She has established herself as better read than Cindy, and declared a victory in the debate. Bear in mind "Atlas Shrugged" is about 1000 pages long. The conversation is now dead until Cindy goes and reads all 1000 pages. If she finds that the book was not relevant to the case she was making, or that the arguments contained in it were not very persuasive, the discussion has been over for weeks, Carol is by then long gone and not accountable.

A couple of times people have wagged books at me during the discussion of topics near and dear to me, so much so that I dug up the book and read it, only to find that it had no legitimate bearing on the topic being discussed.

If Carol really had read "Atlas Shrugged" (not really for certain -- people often wag books they haven't actually read) and it really did contain insights that would shed some light on the discussion, Carol probably would have been able to articulate some of them. The fact that she declined to do this and just threw a book at Cindy is a sign that this wasn't the case.

Sometimes a topic is too complex to be dealt with in a certain medium, such as an informal verbal discussion or a facebook discussion, and then it is a valid time to say "I can't explain it to you here, but it's in this book". But much more frequently, books are wagged as a disingenuous tactic of the intellectually bankrupt.

The Conservatives' Deaf Ear on Global Warming

2011-04-25T19:39:00.002-04:00

Many liberals are having trouble understanding why it is conservatives are putting up so much resistance to the concept of global warming. A little history is in order.
Many people become environmentalists because they are technophobes. They hate technology, specifically because they don't understand it. You can't be a very constructive environmentalist unless you have a solid grasp of science. Most of what such people have to say is just plain stupid.
Other people become environmentalists because they are economic leftists. They claim to be concerned about the birds and trees, but really they just want any excuse they can find to give grief to corporations.
Global Warming isn't the first time we've been told that we would have to drastically overhaul our energy infrastructure. There was an oil shock in 1973 and after that we spent most of the 1970's hearing about how we were running out of oil. I remember reading, in the mid-70's, that the world would be out of oil by about 2005, and out of natural gas by about 1995. So for anyone old enough to remember those times, the current alarm about AGW doesn't sound all that new.
Another voice related to the environmental movement is the alternative energy movement. This group has been, ever since the early '70's, promoting severely immature technologies without any regard for whether they were economically feasible.
According to energy prices quoted by Scientific American in 2009, the cost of switching our entire electrical energy production to silicon solar cells would have been, at that time, more money, per year, than all personal federal income taxes combined. Alternative energy enthusiasts talk as if this isn't even a concern.
The alternative energy enthusiasts were promoting solar back in the 1970's, when it was nowhere NEAR as cost-effective as it was by 2009. I remember a professor of mine in college had a political cartoon on his door saying that the only reason that solar energy was deemed economically infeasible in 1979 was because of a conspiracy of the big oil companies.
The consequence of all this is that industrialists have been subjected, for at least as long as anyone below retirement age has been working, to a steady stream of mixed hostility, stupidity, and gratuitous alarmism coming from the environmental and alternative energy movements. It is thus natural for them to perceive these groups to be not only enemies, but also profoundly lacking in scientific and economic competence.
AGW denialism in this country is an unfolding disaster, and something must be done about it, but an understanding of the problem is not complete without an awareness of how the political left bears a great deal of the responsibility for their current credibility problem with the American right.

Book Report: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human

2011-04-02T16:34:00.008-04:00

This book is about the human use of fire during prehistory, and how it shaped us.

My own speculation (as opposed to what is actually in the book) is in brown italics.

Modern Raw Food Faddists

Some modern people choose to attempt a raw food diet, believing that this is how prehistoric people ate, and since we are thus theoretically evolved for it, a raw diet is more "natural" and will lead to greater health.
It should be noted that modern people attempting such a diet have a number of advantages over a prehistoric raw foodist. They have access to very sharp steel knives, blenders, and cuisinarts suitable for preparing food and breaking it down. They have access to supermarkets full of processed, easy to digest food. Furthermore, many people claiming to live on a "raw diet" actually heat some of their food slightly (to about 120 degrees Fahrenheit) which helps break it down a bit.
Nonetheless, people on raw diets observe the following effects

They have trouble maintaining body weight. In our times, this is often seen as a good thing, but in prehistory, it would have been quite a bad thing. It would have been an especially bad thing for a pregnant woman.
There is a drastic reduction in fertility:

Half the women quit menstruating, becoming temporarily sterile. It is probable that those who manage to keep menstruating are experiencing a substantial drop in fertility.
Men become less virile.
Some raw foodists see this drop in fertility as a good thing, feeling that menstruation and ejaculation are ways the body gets rid of "toxins". Less frequent menstruation and ejaculation are thus evidence of less "toxins" in the diet. Look at the bright side of this: Such people are voluntarily removing themselves from the gene pool!

All modern primitive peoples had fire when discovered. I had heard that Tasmanian aborigines didn't have fire, but investigation showed they did, they just didn't know how to start it. If a tribe lost their fire, they borrowed some from a neighboring tribe.
The conclusion from all this is that a prehistoric homo sapiens tribe that lost its fire and couldn't reacquire it would be unable to maintain their fertility very well, would be unable to maintain their health well enough for the physically active prehistoric lifestyle, and would be unable to hold their own in warfare with neighboring tribes. Such a tribe would be doomed.

How Long Have We Been Cooking?

There are a few very ancient fire pits that look like humans started them, but these are extremely few and far between -- hearths are generally nowhere near as well-preserved as fossilized bones.
We do know a lot about the physiology of prehistoric people, however. Notable are three big changes in physiology between apes and homo sapiens:

Our guts are smaller.
Our jaws are considerably smaller. It should be noted that non-human primates often spend hours each day chewing their food.
We don't have opposable toes. We can't climb trees anywhere near as well as our ape cousins. Apes usually sleep in trees. Sleeping on the ground in a jungle or forest is quite dangerous, as you are an easy target for predators. If we had fire, we could keep predators at a safe distance.

These changes were already substantial by the time homo erectus emerged -- about one and a half million years ago. So we would have had to be cooking our fire for a long time before that in order for these drastic changes in physiology to have had time to evolve.

How Did We Tame Fire?

I've wondered a lot about this. This was the main thing I wanted to learn from this book, and the author doesn't gives it as much attention as I would have liked.

Taming fire is difficult. You have to figure out that wood and leaves burn and that rocks, dirt and water don't. You have to figure out that dead wood and leaves burn better than green wood and leaves. You have to figure out that if you hold a branch that is burning at the end with the end pointing down, the fire spreads to the rest of the branch, while if you hold it upright, it doesn't. And you have to not start a forest or bush fire or inflict life-threatening burns on yourself while you figure all this out.

One theory is that a fire might be caused by a lightning strike, and then people would get the fire from that. This just doesn't fly. A human would be lucky to see a single fire from a lightning strike in their lifetime. You couldn't learn how to tame fire well enough to keep it going from that one encounter in your life.
Another theory is that people might get fire from a forest or bush fire. Again, this just doesn't seem workable. This is a rare occasion, and an emergency to boot. If you encounter a forest or bush fire, you are unlikely to survive if your response is anything other than to run at full speed in the opposite direction.

Clearly, to tame fire, we would have had to have regular, non life-threatening access to it over a long period of time. The author's answer is quite convincing: There is a type of rock that is a mixture of iron and sulfur known as pyrite, or "fool's gold". It is not extremely rare, and could be quite in abundance in some places. Banging such rocks together produces really good sparks. This could have been quite entertaining, and if done enough, could lead, over a long time, to learning how to tame fire. Eventually we would learn that food, especially meat, tastes better and is easier to digest if cooked. (When I was in the Boy Scouts, we were taught that one legitimate way to cook a steak was "caveman style", where you just throw it on the burning coals. I never actually tried this myself, though).

How Did Fire Affect Us?

Digesting raw food takes a lot of energy. Cooking food makes digesting easier frees up a lot of energy for other uses, such as larger brains.
Cooking could also help drive the evolution of larger brains. Keeping a fire going and not being injured by it is not easy, especially for a hominid with brains much smaller than ours. It was high tech for the time. Hominids with larger brains would have been more able to pull it off. As has been said, as we evolved more dependency upon fire, losing it would have been a major threat to a tribe's survival.
The author talks about human pair bonding being primarily oriented toward division of labor. A hunter could go out and cover a much larger radius if he could be confident a cooked meal was waiting for him when he got home.
He argues that a human man-wife team was more oriented toward division of labor and having one party be able to stay at the camp and cook while the other hunted, than reproduction. He cites, as evidence, a modern primitive tribe (one tribe) where the wives sleep around with their husbands' knowledge. The husbands don't like this, but put up with it. I really had trouble buying this, and I think it is more easily explained by bad anthropology by whoever studied that one tribe than anything else. He also didn't elaborate on how willing these husbands who had been blatantly cheated on were to make sacrifices for the well-being of the children of such unions.

The Price on Human Life

2011-03-30T06:50:00.012-04:00

Many people feel the price on human life should be infinite. I will examine two statements:

"No one should EVER die because they can't afford medical care" -- a meme that was traveling around facebook around the time Obamacare went through.

"Car companies should NEVER compromise safety to save money" -- I hear this one a lot.

"No one should EVER die because they can't afford medical care"

Many people feel this is the case.

About half the people in the US die in hospitals. That's about a million people a year.

The vast majority of people who die in hospitals could be kept for a few more hours, sometimes weeks, sometimes months, of agonizing pain if, say, we were willing to spend $10 million on each of them. People who die of heart problems could be kept alive, with enough money, for a long time if they were put on the sort of heart / lung machines that are used on people who receive heart transplants. People whose digestive systems are ruined could easily be fed intravenously. Stroke victims whose brains are basically ruined and not sending correct signals to the body could be kept alive by sedating their brains, connecting electrodes to their spinal cord and sending the right signals to keep the body alive.

About a million Americans die in hospitals a year. A million times 10 million is 10 trillion dollars. US GDP is about $15 trillion dollars. Would that be worth it? Basically, the money is just not there.

One problem with the US health care system is that most people have insurance, and they want their insurance to pay ANY PRICE for medical care. A basic principal is you have to be willing to walk away from the deal if the price is too high. If you're not willing to do that, which is usually the case with people who have insurance with a fixed co-pay, medical prices rise and rise and rise, much faster than inflation. It's one of the biggest problems our economy faces.
It should be noted that the price of cosmetic surgery, which most insurance doesn't pay for, has not been even keeping up with inflation. When people are spending their own money, unlike when they have "spare no expense" health insurance, they shop around and get better deals.

"Car companies should NEVER compromise safety to save money"

People often seem to feel that if a car company makes such compromises, criminal charges should be pressed against them.

Let's imagine what a car and roads that make no compromises for safety would be like.

It would have to, I suppose, be able to keep its passengers safe in a head-on collision with an 18 wheel semi. So it would have to be MASSIVELY armored, at least as heavy as an M-1 Abrams tank. Mileage for tanks is usually measured in gallons per mile. So say it gets half a mile per gallon.
It would cost something like a half a million dollars, more than a typical house. To buy one, you would need to take out a 30 year loan. Since it's going to take so long to buy one, and there's no way the average American can afford to buy another one during that 30 years, it has to be well-built enough to last at least 30 years. Add another $200,000 for that increase in quality. Maybe you'll need to take out a 40 / 50 year loan, so it has to last 40 / 50 years. Add another $100,000 for that further increase in quality. So that's $800,000 for a car.

For safety, speed limits should be MUCH slower, about 20 miles an hour, in case you run into a building or a mountain or make a head-on collision with another tank like yours, and to make sure you don't accidentally drive over a cliff. If you live 30 miles from work, nowadays, traveling at 60 mph, you will spend an hour a day commuting. Let's assume you never travel except for work. Obviously, you'll travel more that that, but let's make that optimistic assumption.
If you now travel at 20 mph, it will now take you 3 hours every day to commute. During a career starting at 22 years old and ending at retirement at 67 years old, you commute over 11,000 days in your life. Times 2 hours of lost time per day, that's 22,000 hours. One year is 8766 hours, or about 5844 waking hours per year. So that's about 3 years of your waking life wasted by commuting at 20 mph. It's pretty doubtful whether all these safety-improving measures will increase your life expectancy by that much.

And all that traveling at 2 gallons per mile, with gasoline at AT LEAST $2.50 a gallon, for 22,000 working days times 60 miles, is 60 * 250 * 2.5 is over $37,000 a year spent on gasoline, just for commuting. And if everybody was driving these gas-guzzling cars, it would drive the price of oil up astronomically. Actually, the US would basically be consuming more gasoline than current world production.
And the increase in global warming could cause catastrophic climate change sooner, with huge crop failures, thus massive death by starvation.
One could live closer to work. Since that means you would have less choice of jobs, you would have to work at a crummier job for lower pay. Good luck paying for that $800,000 car and huge amount of money worth of gas.

Let's face it, the price on human life is finite.

The King

2011-03-13T20:42:00.013-04:00

This really happened to me. I don't think I ever told anyone about it.

It was early spring, 2002. I was living in Silicon Valley, had been unemployed for 5 or 6 months, my social life was abysmal, and, desperate to improve my mood, took a trip up to Lake Tahoe, 4 hours away, to go snowboarding.

After the snowboarding, I went down to Reno, Nevada, close by. I'd heard you could shoot a machine gun at gunnery ranges in Nevada. I looked one up, went there, and it was true. I fired an Uzi at a paper target with a human form on it. This being 6 months after 9/11, you could get targets with cartoon pictures of Osama Bin Laden on them, but for some reason I didn't.

Normally, when you go shooting pistols at a range, if you're shooting a .22, you can shoot all day and it hardly costs anything. If you're shooting a .45, it adds up, you can go through 30-40 bucks worth of ammo in a half hour. Shooting a fully automatic weapon, it turns out, is really expensive, you can go through $100 worth of ammunition in a few seconds.

It was a long, boring drive home by myself. I was pulling out of a gas station, and saw a hitchhiker on the on-ramp. I could really use the company, so I pulled over. I hadn't taken a very good look at him.

When he stepped in, he was wearing a lot of denim, looking like sort of a country-boy, long haired, heavy-metal type. We introduced ourselves and discussed our destinations. As I pulled onto the freeway, I noticed he smelled, well, pretty bad.

He asked what I do. When he learned I was a computer programmer, he became animated and said he used to work with computers in Washington DC. He mentioned a bunch of acronyms, I think they related to one of the old brands of computers that hardly anyone uses anymore, Honeywell, or someone like that. We really couldn't talk shop.

He had been working for a traveling carnival. He said he was "The King" there, in charge of the whole crew responsible for assembling and disassembling the rides.

He had left his job as the foreman, and was hitchhiking his way back to the Bay Area, where he had a job as a garbage collector lined up. There was obviously a missing piece of information here -- why would someone abandon a job as "The King" to go be a garbage collector? He said "I couldn't take it any more. I had the power of life and death." and would get all silent and spooky.

The crew had been mostly drug addicts, it sounded like hard drugs, and the top management of the carnival had no idea about it. "The King" had taken it upon himself, among his responsibilities, to cover up for people who, for example, were incapacitated because they had taken sub-standard drugs. He said the management were totally clean-cut, non-drug people. If they were to learn about all the drugs, they would replace the whole crew. He felt, as "King", he was protector of the crew, and it was among his responsibilities to keep management in the dark.

We talked some more about other things, talked about me for awhile, we bonded a bit.

He started talking about a problem they had. One of the crew was a pedophile. "The King" had reliable evidence, from 3 sources, that this guy was molesting kids at the carnival. It was clear that if the child molester were reported to the authorities, he would fink out everybody about the drugs and they would all get fired.

He took his job as "King" seriously, and he felt one of his responsibilities was to protect the public, to keep the carnival a safe place for people, including children, to come. He kept stressing that he had reliable information from 3 sources that this guy was a molester.

Eventually it came out that he'd hired organized crime to off the pedophile. The mob had then chopped up the body and disposed of the pieces it in 14 dumpsters. The "King" totally couldn't live with it. Completely freaked out, he left the carnival to hitchhike across the country back to the town he'd grown up in to be a garbage collector.

Maybe he was just telling me a story. Maybe he'd never been "King", maybe this was all made up. But I totally believed the whole thing.

I dropped him off at the place he wanted me to, he told me he could get back home from there on his own. He bade each other a cheerful goodbye and he showed me a tattoo on his chest before he closed the door.

Should I have turned him in? It would have been easy -- I knew exactly where he was going, and his first name.
If his story was true, he was sorry as hell. He was completely torn up about it (and was probably going to spill his guts about it to more people). He wasn't a dumb guy, but it was really stupid to tell me, someone who didn't owe him squat, about it. That shows how much agony his conscience was putting him through.
I don't believe in punishing people who are already sorry. He was never going to do anything like that again. From the looks of it, he was making sure he was never going to be in a position to do anything like that again. I let it go. I wasn't going to take it on myself to pass judgment. I'm sure the child molester's ghost is damning me to hell for that decision, but that's his problem.

Manufacturing an Absence of Evidence

2011-03-05T22:38:00.026-05:00

When discussing an issue with someone, one does, of course, have to keep in mind what the other person believes. But it is at least as important to keep in mind what they want to believe. Most of us have reluctantly accepted bitter truths, but secretly we're harboring hopes that these bitter truths are inaccurate.
And then there are a few intrepid individuals who will throw reason to the wind and embrace what they want to believe in spite of overwhelming evidence.

Many want to believe AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) is a hoax. It would be very nice if they are right -- curbing our CO2 emissions, if it is ever done, will result in a drop in the standard of living in every nation in the world. Only a few people see AGW as a good thing: Luddites, technophobes, and starry-eyed alternative energy proponents who haven't done their economics homework. To everybody else, it's bad news.
Some are spearheading a very formidable resistance to doing anything about it, well-funded by the fossil fuels lobby. The evidence for AGW is pretty strong: CO2 levels have been rising significantly (everybody agrees on that), the arctic ice cap is thinner than it used to be, and the most recent decade has been the hottest on record.
The counter-evidence the AGW denialists cite is they point at every snowstorm that occurs as evidence of cooling. This is idiotic and easily deflected: there has been at most 1 degree Fahrenheit of warming so far, and nobody with an IQ over 70 believes that 1 degree of warming will mean there will be no more snowstorms.
Then they get more creative. "Most of the recorded temperature data from the 20th century is flawed!" they say. Their solution for this: "We have to start all over. Ignore the data from the 20th century, start again from scratch, and collect data for at least several decades if not another century.".
Unfortunately, before enough warming (How much? 5 degrees?) occurs to convince these "skeptics", warming will cause the thawing of permafrost and the massive release of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere potentially causing a catastrophic, irreversible, runaway warming effect.
They also say "Climate models are really complex -- those climate scientists don't really know what they're talking about!". Again, the solution is "Let's wait until it's too late.".
Note the pattern here: they aren't really producing evidence, they're trying to dismiss the overwhelming evidence that is there. That's what I call "manufacturing an absence of evidence".

Liberals are not without guilt here, too. During the '70's and '80's, they were dead against the notion that ANY human behavioral trait, including (and especially), intelligence, was influenced by normal variation in the human genome. (Except for homosexuality, they said. That one, they knew for sure, they said, was 100% determined at birth!). The evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin wrote a whole book, Not in Our Genes, (which I have not read) denying the influence of normal genetics on human behavior, in 1984.
People who did twin studies were vilified as Nazi eugenicists, it was really hard to make any progress for awhile. Eventually, some brave souls put up with all the ad-hominem attacks and did the twin studies, and the evidence came back that nature was a far stronger influence on the human mind than any well-understood factor in nurture. Scientific American did an article on the topic in the '90's. Title: "Eugenics Revisited", satisfying Godwin's law. You know that a debate is getting heated when Scientific American sinks to the same level as Creationists who claim that belief in evolution leads to genocide!
The nature denialists put up a good fight: "Identical twins have an identical experience in the womb!" was one claim. But the observed dissimilarities between fraternal twins refuted that. "Identical twins adopted at birth are both placed by the same adoption agency, so they wind up in similar homes!". Studies were done that tracked the standard of living of the respective homes. Sorry, in spite of these attempts to manufacture an absence of evidence, the verdict was still overwhelmingly nature. The real smoking gun was that unrelated people adopted into the same family aren't much more similar than if they had been raised in different families. Identical twins separated at birth taking IQ tests separately have scores nearly as similar to each other's as one person taking two tests on different days.
In spite of the liberal attempts to manufacture an absence of evidence, the notion that we enter this world as a "blank slate" is dead to any reasonable person.
See my other blog entry which reviewed the book The Genius in All of Us. The author, David Shenk, was trying, even in 2010, to resurrect the "blank slate". He even admitted, in his book, that "The blank slate is dead.", and then spent every other sentence in the book trying to bring it back to life. In his desperate quest to manufacture an absence of evidence, he even tried to pooh-pooh the whole concept of statistical evidence!

Another area is the lives of primitive humans. A few hundred years ago, primitive people were seen as depraved, brutal "savages" to be either religiously converted or enslaved by their more enlightened brothers.
The political left condemned this exploitation, interference and victimization, and rightly so. But they went too far. Marx had the belief, based on no evidence at all, that during prehistory, humans lived in an idyllic, egalitarian, altruistic society, and it was only the modern class-oriented, market-driven society that had brought man down to a lower, more selfish, state.
In the early 20th century, left-leaning anthropologists like Margaret Mead were so beholden to this vision that they painted the lives of primitives they observed as sexually liberated and wonderful. Later anthropologists observing the same culture found that just the opposite was true.
But as the 20th century wore on, more people spent time with primitives, and it became more and more evident that preliterates were brutal, selfish, and even worse, quite gender-stereotypical, to put it mildly.
The liberals have huge problems with this: they hate social stereotypes, including gender stereotypes, however true, with a passion. Given that the evidence is overwhelming, their strategy is, again, to manufacture an absence of evidence. "Those tribes don't count because they don't live on the African savanna!", they say. "All modern primitives are uncharacteristic of prehistoric life because they've all been influenced by modern civilization at this point.", they say. Some go so far as to say "We know nothing about the lives of pre-historic people!".
That's ridiculous. We know a lot of things for certain about prehistoric people:

They didn't have access to refined sugar.
They didn't have access to hard liquor. Alcohol available to them, if any, was extremely weak, and probably tasted terrible.
Life expectancy was a lot shorter than it is now.
Because human babies are so helpless and burdensome, and life expectancy was short enough that the presence of grandparents couldn't be relied upon, if a female wanted to pass on her genes, she was going to be much more able to do it if she had someone committed to helping her raise the kid.
A female knew for certain that any baby that emerged from her body was her own child. Infidelity by her husband, or his taking multiple wives, had no possibility of undermining that.
If a male wanted to pass on his genes, he had to avoid being cuckolded. Potential infidelity by his wife was a very serious threat to his passing on his genes.
Males were, on average, bigger and stronger than females.
A male had the physical potential to create a lot more offspring than a female could.
Due to our digestive system being less ample than that of apes (smaller abdomen, smaller and less strong mouth for chewing), and due to what we know from observing modern people who attempt raw diets, a tribe was dependent upon cooking to be healthy and fertile enough to maintain their numbers. If a tribe lost their fire and didn't know how to restart it, they would probably dwindle out within several generations.
Humans without tools or fire were easy prey for predators, due to their not being able to run very fast, and their lack of claws or formidable mouth and teeth.
A small tribe that didn't swap mates with other tribes over many generations was subject to severe health problems due to inbreeding.
The children of incest were most often unhealthy.
In the tropics, resistance to disease was more important than it was for those from colder climates.
Sunburn was a more serious problem in the tropics.
People wanted the best for their children.
Healthy people had more children.
If a war occurred between tribes, the tribe that was healthier, more numerous, and whose individuals were smarter and physically stronger was more likely to win.
The average person was smaller than the average person is today.

And those are just some of the things we know for certain, it only took me about a half hour to cough those up. If we allow information we have gleaned from observations of modern primitive people, we know a lot more than that.
It should also be noted that liberals were completely comfortable with talking about observations about modern primitive peoples in the days of Margaret Mead when they still thought that such evidence was in their favor. It was only after they learned that the evidence was overwhelmingly against them that they started trying to declare it inadmissible.

One sure sign that you are dealing with someone who is manufacturing an absence of evidence is, when they claim we "can't know" something, if you suggest an experiment that would shed light on the subject, they get angry.

There is a basic drive in human nature to believe what we want to believe. When we hear evidence to believe something we don't like, we try to find evidence to support our position. Failing that, the next step is to try to find excuses to dismiss the evidence we don't like. To be an honest intellectual, one must resist this temptation.

The Key to Will Power

2011-03-03T21:22:00.002-05:00

Most of us know what we should do, but don't do it. We should diet, we should exercise.

One problem I used to have was it was hard to get out of bed in the morning. one thing I used to do when I had flextime was usually show up at work between 11am and noon, and work until 8 or 10pm.

The consequence of this was that my social life from Monday to Friday was horrible. I basically never did much after work.

Then I got a job where I *HAD* to show up at 9am. I thought I was going to die. But I adjusted, and I found that I could leave work at 6pm with a clean conscience and suddenly, I had a vastly improved social life.

Then I moved to the job I have now where, if I show up before 10;30am, no one is going to complain. Nonetheless, it remained in my interest to be at work around 9am.

Unfortunately, it was hard to translate this long range desire for a healthier social life into the will power to propel me out of bed.

So I adopted a rule for myself. If I get off the subway in Manhattan before 9am, I get to buy a ham and egg sandwich, which I really like, from a street vendor on my way to work. If I'm later, I have to settle for cereal at work, which I don't like anywhere near as much. Now, when I'm in bed and not feeling like getting up, I think of the sandwich. A tangible reward like that within an hour or so of the desired activity gets me to do it.

Once I got off the subway and I was 2 and a half seconds late. I didn't get the sandwich. It would've been a completely hollow victory if I cheated.

Similarly, I walk up 19 flights of stairs twice a day in the skyscraper I work in. The goal, of course is to be in good shape. Of course, it's a very long-term goal, and sometimes it's very tempting to skip the exercise. So if I make it up the stairs a second time, I reward myself with a large glass of diet sprite. Similarly, that helps get the job done.

So I think I've stumbled onto something here. The brain is too impatient to think in terms of long-term goals, so substitute short-term rewards for long-term ones.

The Worst First Date I Ever Had

2011-02-20T20:48:00.017-05:00

A couple of years ago, I signed up for the Brainiac Dating site on the internet. It wasn't a particularly great site, but it was free. I didn't do much with it. Eventually they started charging for it. I never paid them anything, but they didn't take down my profile. The result was people could pick me, but I couldn't pick anyone else, which was fine with me.

Brainiac Dating isn't like Mensa -- you don't have to pass any test to get in, you just have to think you're smart.

A couple of weeks ago, a girl picked me. Let's call her Sandra. She had a lot of pictures up, and they looked fine. She said reasonable things on her profile. She had gone to Johns Hopkins and had two master's degrees, one of them an MBA.

I was about to leave town on a snowboarding trip, so I asked her on a date a couple of weeks in advance. I suggested an Ethiopian restaurant that I liked. I don't take all my first dates to Ethiopian food, but if I date someone several times, we usually make it there. I really like the cuisine, but also, it's a good date because most people have never tried it and nearly everybody who does likes it -- so at that point I've introduced them to something they like, which gets things off to a good start. I emailed her a link to the menu.

While I was in Aspen, I checked my email. She had looked up the building the restaurant was in on bedbugrgistry.com, and someone had had a bedbug problem two years ago in an apartment several floors above the restaurant. I don't see how you're going to get bedbugs from visiting a restaurant. Maybe if you're sitting in upholstered seats, but this restaurant, like most restaurants, just had wooden chairs.

She said "I don't know much about Ethiopian food. I'd like to go to one of these three restaurants", and she named 3 French restaurants.

I don't like French food. They smother everything in mushrooms, and I despise mushrooms. It's so pervasive they sometimes put mushrooms in a dish without even mentioning it on the menu. And everything's got thick creams that don't taste particularly good. And nothing's spicy, and I love spicy food.

I googled the three restaurants to look at the menus and see if any of them had anything I'd be willing to eat. None of them had a full menu on the internet -- they only listed about 5 dishes each, and they didn't list prices.

One of them was right near work. I've been walking past that restaurant for 5 years and never gone in. That's partly because it was French, but I try to keep an open mind. There must've been some other reason, but I didn't remember what it is. Anyway, I picked that restaurant.

I checked her profile again, and she had changed it. She complained that most men wanted to take her to ethnic food or cheap hole-in-the-wall places, and she named the three restaurants she preferred. It didn't seem to occur to her that French food is ethnic.

When I got back to work, I checked the restaurant. It was exorbitant. She had said how much she liked wine, so I figured she would probably order a bottle, and not of something cheap. I estimated $250 for dinner for the two of us with a bottle of wine. I sent her an email telling her she was too high-maintenance for me and canceled the date.

I was surprised to hear back from her. She apologized, and said she had been planning to pay for her half (a likely story -- what's more, that's still $125 out of my pocket for a first date eating food I don't particularly like). She said I could name the restaurant.

I had gone to a French restaurant with a friend about a year before, and had enjoyed the place reasonably well. I asked that friend for the name of the restaurant. She couldn't remember where we had gone, but she recommended 3 French places. I looked up her favorite and it was fine. I estimated it would cost $80 for the two of us. The building didn't have any bedbugs reported.

I suggested that restaurant to Sandra and it was fine with her.

For some reason she sent me an email telling me she frequently went to the opera, the ballet, the symphony, and chamber music. I replied, telling her I didn't go to live music very much, the only band I saw in 2010 was ZZ Top.

She had also mentioned she liked museums. I told her that I am a card-carrying, contributing member of the American Museum of Natural History, and hate MOMA and the Guggenheim. She replied that she had never been to AMNH.

For some reason, neither of us canceled the date. It was really clear at this point that we were not at all compatible, but she had thrown so many curve balls by this point I was morbidly curious about what she would be like in person. So I continued with this hopeless date, expecting it to have some entertainment value.

On Saturday night, I showed up at the restaurant. She was sitting at the bar. She looked reasonably like she did in her pictures.

We conversed. Then I found out what her voice was like. It was by far the worst voice of anybody I've ever dated. High pitched and squeaky and garbled, almost difficult to understand. "Speech impediment" doesn't begin to cover it. I wondered if she was deaf and thus hadn't learned to speak properly. She had talked about listening to music, but her tastes were so pretentious that I wouldn't put it past her to go to symphonies she couldn't hear.

Further conversation revealed she didn't even live in NYC. She lived 4 hours (and about $100 one-way) away by train in Washington DC. She said she came to New York about once a month and stayed with her sister in Brooklyn.

She worked in IT. I'm a computer programmer, so we talked shop. It turned out she knew nothing but Microsoft. I deal with Microsoft a bit, but I'm a Unix/Linux bigot who feels Microsoft is evil.

I ordered a glass of wine. I would've preferred a beer, but I knew she wouldn't like that.

I'm not a total ignoramus on wine. I don't like red wine, partly because I don't like warm drinks, partly because I don't like the taste, but mostly because it leaves a really bad stain when you spill it. I know that among white wines, you're supposed to like dry wines, but I don't. I like sweet, fruity wines. Those also happen to be cheap, but I would be willing to pay a premium to get them. I also know that, according to the ads, I'm supposed to like Pepsi more than Coke. Screw that -- I will drink either, but given a choice I will drink Coke. What everybody else likes is one thing, what I like is another. So I ordered my favorite wine, which is White Zinfandel (which is also one of the cheapest wines you can get). I'm sure that cost me some points. The restaurant was too snooty to carry it. I run into that a lot. I didn't even ask for Chablis, because restaurants that don't carry White Zin usually don't carry Chablis either. Hardly any place carries Chablis. I settled for Chardonnay.

A few years ago, I did a taste test of six wines that were lying around my house. Two Buck Chuck did pretty well, but my very favorite was this really cheap stuff that came in one gallon bottles. I figure I could take a course in wine and learn what I am supposed to like, but liking what I'm supposed to like is so not me. Furthermore, I had nothing to gain from such a class. A cheap taste is a blessing. If I learned to like other, more expensive wines, I would just be harder to please. What good is that?

Soon afterward she said she wanted to pay for her tea. I told the bartender to put my drink on the table tab and he was fine with that.

Once she had paid, she got up, scooped up her coat, turned to me and said "Bye" and slipped out the door.

I am grateful to her for abandoning me before I had spent any money on her.

I paid for my wine, left the restaurant, and finished the evening with a nice dinner and a Coors Lite at an Irish pub.

Employee-Owned Companies

2011-01-17T11:30:00.029-05:00

I recently went to a lecture where someone suggested that one beneficial change our system can make is to shift from its present form toward employee-owned companies. Thus, the "evil", "greedy", "exploitive" capitalist would be removed from the equation and the company would be run according to the interest of the employees.

There are no legal barriers to doing this: employee-owned companies do exist, but they're rare.

Quantity of Capital

The first problem with it is: do the employees have enough money to own their companies? The total value of all companies in the US that are traded on the stock market is $14 trillion. Say that's 2/3 of the economy, so extrapolating, the total value of all the companies in the country is $21 trillion. The total number of workers in the US is 154 million. That means that the average worker would have to cough up $136,000 to own their share of the company.

The average worker does not have that sort of money sitting around. Typically they want to own their homes, and if they do that nearly all of their money is going in that direction. They also want to save for retirement. One could argue that when they retire, they can sell their stake in the company and use that for retirement. I will show why that is a bad idea later.

Also, should such a company hire someone who is broke, like a young person entering the workforce? How would that be arranged? How would those people get jobs?

The Dubious Wisdom of Investing in One's Employer

A big problem with the whole idea is that it presents extremely poor risk diversification. An important principle of investing is that you don't want all of your investment in one place, you really don't want more than 20% of your net worth in any one investment. That way, if any one of your investments goes sour, you still maintain 80% of your net worth.
From a viewpoint of risk diversification, you are already over invested in your employer just by working there. If your company does badly, especially badly enough to lay you off or go out of business, the consequences for you are catastrophic. If all you own is stock in the company, your stock has depressed, maybe even zero, value at exactly the same time as you lose your income, making it difficult to survive long enough to get a new job, or move to a new job, or retrain for another profession.

Many companies offer stock options to their employees, and stock-purchase plans, where employees are given the chance to buy company stock at a discount as part of their compensation. It makes sense to do this, because it is in the interest of the company to have its employees' self-interest tied to the firm. The fact that it's a good thing for the company doesn't mean it's the best thing for the employees.

Many people feel that because they work at a company, they have an intimate knowledge of how well it is performing and how well it will do in the future. This is not accurate. Studies show that employees really don't have an accurate estimation of their companies. All you know firsthand is how well your part of the company is doing. Most of what you hear is one-sided propaganda from management, spun to put the best possible face on everything. It's common for layoffs to be preceded by an announcement to the effect of "We're facing a tough stretch ahead, but no matter what, we won't lay anybody off!". Furthermore, what you hear from your peers in the workplace is skewed. People know that expressing negative opinions about their employer is not a good career move, so you won't get an honest assessment from most of your co-workers. Furthermore, employees who do have insights that the company is going to do badly find other jobs and quit, at which point they are usually dismissed by the remaining employees as malcontents. So employees usually have a very distorted, rosy view of the prospects of their companies. Not a good position for an investor to be in.

Several times I have worked for companies where company stock has come into my possession through stock options or stock-purchase plans. I have always sold it immediately and invested it in something else, to diversify my position.

Similarly, using stock in your employer as a retirement investment is a terrible idea. What if the company goes bankrupt two years before you plan to retire? Hope you enjoy the taste of dog food!

Quality of Management

Another question is: Would the company be well-run? An employee-owned company would be like a union-run company. Unions are usually the mortal enemies of employee accountability and meritocracy.

When a normal company has a union, there is management independent of the union to represent the interests of the stockholders and customers, to balance out the voice of the union.

Would an employee-run company ever decide to buy new automation so that they can get more done with fewer employees? That is something that must be done periodically to keep the company efficient and competitive. If business is dwindling, would an employee-owned company lay off employees, or would they just sink deeper and deeper into debt until they go bankrupt altogether?

A Balanced Solution: Addressing These Concerns

Suppose we moderate the idea to address some of these concerns. Suppose we have part of the company owned by the employees, and let investors other than employees also buy stock so there is enough money altogether to own the company. The management of the company would be chosen by all the investors, not just the employee investors. New employees, if they don't have enough cash to buy their share of the company, can be hired and have part of their savings go to buying its stock. If the employee would rather buy a house, save for retirement, or just spend their money rather than investing or saving it, they would be free to do that. Management would be not only answerable to the employees, but also to the non-employee investors. Such an arrangement would be completely legal under existing laws. It would be very easy to implement. In fact, it is exactly the arrangement we currently have!

Giving Up on the Bible

2011-01-02T14:57:00.014-05:00

I have given up on my attempt to read the Bible cover to cover. It is such crap, and I keep thinking of all the great books I could be reading, and I'm reading this tripe.

Some parts are vaguely interesting because they are so repulsive. There is a lot of genocide that believers don't like to talk about, particularly in, but not limited to, the book of Joshua. I can't believe Jews and Christians still name their kids “Joshua” anymore. At least Germans don't name their kids “Adolf” nowadays, but most Jews and Christians are so oblivious to what that book actually contains. You'd think if a couple was planning to give their kid a Biblical name, they would pick up a Bible and see what the bastard actually did! But no, they have no clue!

Here's a quote from Moses, telling the Jews what they are to do when they enter Palestine: Deut 20:16-18:

16But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth:

17But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee:

18That they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods; so should ye sin against the LORD your God.

So Moses was worried his people might learn something from these foreigners. Great reason to commit genocide, isn't it?

Most people, both believers and the religiously indifferent, believe that Biblical figures represent noble, wonderful people. This is wrong: many of them, including the really famous ones (not to mention the diety himself), were horrible people!

The idea of writing the Bible, of having a tribe keep its history in writing rather than just passing it down verbally (though most of it was written generations after the events, so much so that many of the events probably never actually occurred) was a great step forward for its time, great progress. But to hold these savages, real or fictitious, up as role models for modern people is just not healthy.

One bit that was interesting was in 1 Samuel 27:5-12:

5 Then David said to Achish, “If I have found favor in your eyes, let a place be assigned to me in one of the country towns, that I may live there. Why should your servant live in the royal city with you?”

6 So on that day Achish gave him Ziklag, and it has belonged to the kings of Judah ever since. 7 David lived in Philistine territory a year and four months.

8 Now David and his men went up and raided the Geshurites, the Girzites and the Amalekites. (From ancient times these peoples had lived in the land extending to Shur and Egypt.) 9 Whenever David attacked an area, he did not leave a man or woman alive, but took sheep and cattle, donkeys and camels, and clothes. Then he returned to Achish.

10 When Achish asked, “Where did you go raiding today?” David would say, “Against the Negev of Judah” or “Against the Negev of Jerahmeel” or “Against the Negev of the Kenites.” 11 He did not leave a man or woman alive to be brought to Gath, for he thought, “They might inform on us and say, ‘This is what David did.’” And such was his practice as long as he lived in Philistine territory. 12 Achish trusted David and said to himself, “He has become so obnoxious to his people, the Israelites, that he will be my servant for life.”

So David lied to his friend king Achish, and David killed innocent Gentile women and children. Note that for the rest of David's life, there was never any repentance for these atrocities, and the god never got upset about them.

And later, in 1 Kings 15:5, it says

5 For David had done what was right in the eyes of the LORD and had not failed to keep any of the LORD’s commands all the days of his life—except in the case of Uriah the Hittite.

(the case of Uriah the Hitttite was completely separate from this).

So, according to the Old Testament, it is not in any way sinful for a Jew to lie to a Gentile, even a friend, and it is not in any way sinful for a Jew to kill Gentiles, even innocent women and children. Interesting.

Note that this is not a cherry-picked, atypical set of quotes. Contempt for, and hatred of, Gentiles is one of the strongest themes pervading the Old Testament.

1^st & 2^nd Kings wasn't particularly horrible, just boring. It listed a long sequence of kings, and kept track of how pious or impious each one was, and according to the priests who wrote Kings, the pious kings (surprise!) met with better fortune than the impious ones. Then you get to Chronicles, which comes right after, and you find out they're going to repeat what was in Kings all over again.

I gave up halfway through the book of Psalms. Such repetitive drivel! My summary of Psalms, for those of you who don't want to read the whole thing, follows:

The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!
The Lord rewards the faithful and punishes the ungodly.
Please, Lord, lay waste to my enemies!

Book Report: The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else

2010-06-05T08:20:00.003-04:00

De Soto explains that there is a lot of property in the 3rd world that economist's don't normally count. It is all the unofficial, or "extralegal" property. Many of the people, for example, are squatters living in shanties they have built in slums, working at unofficial businesses. The value of their land, buildings, and businesses is often a majority of the total property of a 3rd world country.

People choose to keep their property outside the law because complying with the law and making their property holdings and businesses legal is prohibitively difficult, taking many months or years of work, with hundreds of bureaucratic steps involved.

All this informal property is very hard to deal with -- you cannot use it as collateral for a loan, for example. Building a shanty in a slum is very inefficient, you have to be living in it the whole time to enforce your stake in it, building with what materials become available. If the land had been formally purchased, one could take out a loan against it to fund the construction. Because the state doesn't recognize your property, you often turn to gangsters and the like to guarantee your property rights.

De Soto, a Peruvian, provides many examples from Peru and other 3rd world countries. He spends a lot of time discussing American history -- in much of the nineteenth century, many American settlers and miners had extremely dubious claims to the land they settled and worked, and he discusses how this property eventually evolved into formal, legally recognized property.

Then the author discusses how this process could be brought about in the modern third world. The barriers are formidable, as many of the elite classes and particularly the lawyers are quite unsympathetic to the plight of those who own unofficial property.

De Soto makes a convincing case for a process that is central to spreading prosperity to the third world. The book has many endorsements from prominent people and prestigious economic publications.

The main problem with this book is that it repeats itself too much. It could have been about 1/4 as long as its length of 246 pages.

Book Report: Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia

2010-05-18T22:41:00.003-04:00

Fascinating book, a history of Afghanistan and Pakistan since September 11th. The book shows how Musharraf, then dictator of Pakistan, and the Pakistani intelligence service (ISS) extensively fooled the US for years, pretending to be fighting Islamic extremism while actually supporting it.

The book extensively criticizes the Bush administration for 2 things -- its failure to do major nation-building in Afghanistan, and its willingness to leave power in Afghanistan in the hands of warlords. I'm no fan of Bush, but I don't think these criticisms are entirely justified.

Firstly, it would have been nice of us to spend a fortune doing nation building in Afghanistan, but then, why not do nation building in Botswana? At least Botwana had never hosted a terrorist organization that killed thousands of Americans. It would be nice of us to spend more money on foreign aid, but does it make sense to focus that money on countries where the people particularly hate us?

Secondly, I have read (but it was not mentioned in this book), that Pashtuns, if not all Afghans, are notoriously xenophobic. If we had chosen not to leave power in the hands of native warlords, it would have involved a much greater presence of foreign troops in Afghanistan, triggering a xenophobic backlash. Working through the warlords, however backward and unjust they might be, was a shrewd strategy.

Book Review: "The Conscience of a Liberal" by Paul Krugman

2010-04-25T13:58:00.010-04:00

This book wasn't really what I expected. I expected Krugman to be trying to persuade me to become a liberal, while in fact he tends to assume I already am one and is mostly talking about tactics to achieve liberal goals. I also expected a lot of talk about poverty, and about liberal social issues. In fact neither of those things were discussed very much at all. What was discussed was mostly "inequality".

Apparently, while per-capita GDP has risen considerably since 1980, the median income, adjusted for inflation, has stayed roughly constant. The increase in wealth has been mostly concentrated among the rich. This offends Krugman, and most of the book is spent focusing on reducing "inequality".

On the topic of the median income not having risen, has the skill level of the median person increased? Krugman gives no information on this, and I am skeptical about whether it has. In my opinion, one of the biggest problems the economy faces is that so many people are arriving in the workforce without skills. Even people born with a silver spoon in their mouths and their college education paid for by their parents often major in something of no economic value, economically castrating themselves, and spend the rest of their lives complaining about how "unfair" capitalism is because they aren't paid better. People make these unfortunate choices partly because they often find economically rewarding topics less interesting or more difficult, and partly because we have an extremely popular counterculture that is doing everything it can to discourage economically rewarding activity, at least of the legal variety.

One point Krugman makes many times is that the Republicans benefited tremendously from race as an issue, and that race was the main reason Ronald Reagan got elected. I disagree that Republicans gained so much from race, it generally is a topic they're sick of hearing about, while liberals always want to go on and on about it. He makes no mention of a couple of issues Reagan benefited from: Carter's impotence in dealing with the Iranian hostage crisis, and the widespread perception that the UAW had destroyed the Michigan work ethic, and with it, the competitiveness of the US auto industry.

Another point Krugman made, briefly, is that the influx of unskilled illegal immigrants only decreases unskilled wages in the US by about 5%, which I find extremely difficult to believe.

So if we give Krugman what he wants, and divvy up the pie more in favor of those without skills, we will reduce the incentives to get skills and thus have fewer skilled people contributing to the economy, and lower productivity as a result. But Krugman, in the whole book, which was almost entirely about economics, never expresses any concern about productivity. In his mind, wealth is not something you create, it's something you take from the rich.

I am no fan of the Republican party, but Krugman really despises and vilifies them to an extreme level.

Krugman gives a history of the 20th century, slanted from his own point of view, but interesting, nonetheless. He mentions that while the top bracket marginal tax rate is currently about 40%, after WWII it was about 70% and in the fifties it was about 90%. I don't personally understand why so many Americans are so upset about how high taxes currently are. About the only major policy position McCain was offering during his bid for the presidency was a tax cut for the rich, and until the financial crisis, he was neck and neck with Obama, though Obama was better financed.

It's not surprising that Krugman is a fan of labor unions, but it's interesting that one of the reasons he supports them so much is that they provide an opportunity to indoctrinate workers to vote for liberal politics. Of course, as I've said, their negative impact on productivity doesn't bother him a bit. Krugman is convinced that only CEO's and the rich are against unions, he seems totally unaware of the fact that they are unpopular with many common people as well. He bitterly mentions Reagan's firing of the illegally striking air traffic controllers in 1981, but fails to mention the fact that it was met with widespread public approval.

There is a chapter about health care reform, which is quite sensible.

Krugman never mentions religion as a political issue, nor does he mention social issues the Republicans have gained from, such as fighting abortion and banning gay marriage. Thomas Frank, who I think is more liberal than Krugman, in his "What's the Matter with Kansas?", discusses how these issues took the spotlight away from the economic issues that he, like Krugman, would like people to focus on.

Book Review: The Genius in All of Us, by David Shenk

2010-04-14T22:12:00.017-04:00

The following post was published on The Gotham Skeptic on April 7, 2010.

On Saturday, March 13, David Shenk, the author if "The Genius in All of Us" delivered a lecture to the New York City Skeptics. The book's press release promised a lot, saying Shenk would give us reason to "Forget everything you think you know about genes, talent, and intelligence.". Shenk said there was a "mountain of evidence" for a level of "talent abundance" that we had previously not known about. The talk totally failed to deliver on these promises, as did his book.

I am reminded of the claim that "we all use only 10% of our brains" that was discussed in the latest issue of "Skeptic" magazine, the implication being being that there should be some way to tap into that other 90%. How does one confirm or refute such a claim? But the burden of proof is on Shenk, since he did promised us a "mountain of evidence". Shenk mentions one experiment with a sample size of one, where a college student with average IQ was taught, over the course of a year, to memorize sequences several dozen digits long, but it is questionable whether this is a useful skill, let alone a meaningful increase in "intelligence". Shenk never gives clear evidence that the average human can be made into a genius, in fact the general thrust of his book is to dismiss evidence rather than provide any, unless you're willing to be persuaded by anecdotes, which a skeptic shouldn't be.

To begin with, what, precisely, is the thesis of the book? Shenk gives (mostly anecdotal) evidence, 99% of the time, for the idea that talent and intelligence have nothing to do with genes. He does discuss a concept that intelligence is not a matter of "G + E" (genes plus environment), as many experimenters have analyzed it, but rather "GxE", or a complex interaction of genes and environment (though in his prose, Shenk interprets this as mostly environment). But where is he taking us with this? Is he providing us with another function that fits the experimental data better? No, he just says "it's complex", doing everything he can to render the problem intractable, manufacturing an absence of evidence that will leave him free to draw any conclusion he wants, supported by anecdotal evidence alone. However, he realizes there is strong scientific evidence in favor of a substantial genetic influence, so he occasionally covers himself with statements like "The blank slate is dead. Genetic differences do matter" that contradict what he's saying most of the time. So, in a nutshell, his point is "Genes don't matter! Genes don't matter! Genes don't matter! (Except they do.)". This double talk, this not really admitting what he's obviously out to prove, is shifty and infuriating.

I don't think this "GxE" business comes as news to genetics researchers. Everyone has known all along that the interaction between genes and environment is complex. But when you're doing research and taking measurements, you have to start somewhere, make approximations, and fit data to simple curves. Shenk wants none of that, data and statistics are his enemies, he wants to live in the world of the purely anecdotal, because you can support pretty much any conclusion you want that way.
More from Shenk on statistics: "knowing the average lifespan doesn't tell me how long my life will be". Of course it doesn't tell me exactly how long my life will be, but that doesn't mean it's a useless bit of information. If I am trying to assess how long I will live, say in order to plan for retirement, the average life expectancy for someone of my age and gender is one of the first things I will look at. What is Shenk offering us as a replacement for the evils of statistics? One anecdote after another -- hardly an improvement.

Shenk spends only 10 pages discussing twin studies, which is way too little given that twin and adoption studies provide most of the evidence he wants to refute. Much of these 10 pages are wasted on anecdotes. He does, accurately, report that twin studies have determined the heritability of 60% of IQ, 60% of personality, 40-66% of motor skills, and 21% of creativity.
He then launches into a diatribe about how he doesn't like the term "heritable", pointing out that height is 90% heritable but that doesn't mean that "90% of my height comes from my genes and 10% from my food", which I agree with, but where is he taking us with this? He does not enlighten us with another, more meaningful way to interpret the word, rather his motivation is to give us an excuse to ignore it altogether. The fact that the IQ of adults is at least 40% heritable given a wide range of environments tells us a lot. It is a very meaningful fact.
Shenk attributes some of the observed similarities of identical twins reared apart to "hidden dissimilarities", that is, researchers reporting coincidental similarities while not recording all the dissimilarities, and "coordination and exaggeration", where twins who were raised apart but had met prior to the study would coordinate their scores on tests to be similar. Most twins reared apart and studied as adults had met each other years before being studied.
Regarding the "hidden dissimilarities" I agree that may be a point, and my response to it is to ignore all the stupid anecdotal coincidences that most sources (including Shenk) bring up when discussing twin studies. Regarding the "coordination and exaggeration", let me describe the methodology of the study where Thomas Bouchard at the University of Minnesota studied over 100 pairs of twins reared apart:

"Participants complete approximately 50 hours of medical and psychological assessment. Two or more test instruments are used in each major domain of psychological assessment to ensure adequate coverage (for example, four personality trait inventories, three occupational interest inventories, and two mental ability batteries). ... Separate examiners administer the IQ test, life history interview, psychiatric interview, and sexual life history interview. ... The twins also complete questionnaires independently, under the constant supervision of a staff member."

For twins to "coordinate" scores on IQ tests that they take independently and under supervision would be quite difficult. They would have to somehow assess not only which of the two of them was smarter, but also how much smarter, and have that person deliberately do more poorly than they could have on the test, but not so poorly that they do worse than their twin. A substantial fraction of the test sample would have to be doing this, the whole effort never being discovered by the researchers. This is so farfetched that it's just not a credible explanation for the high correlation of twin IQ test scores, across multiple studies.
Another argument Shenk makes is that early environment, both pre-natal and after birth prior to separation, is shared by twins, so that the similarity observed by twin studies may be caused by environment rather than genes. This would easily be examined by comparing the similarity of fraternal twins versus the similarity of non-twin siblings, I don't know of any studies that did this, nor does Shenk bring any up. I'll bet it has been done.
Another study mentioned by Shenk was in The Skeptical Inquirer; it tested the similarity of identical twins versus the similarity of strangers. The study found, not surprisingly, that when they assembled 25 pairs of same-sex, roughly same age strangers on a college campus, along with 13 pairs of identical twins, they found that some of the strangers had "uncanny" anecdotal similarities to rival those of the twins. Since I try to ignore anecdotes anyway, this doesn't have much impact on me. What Shenk didn't mention was that when the study subjected everybody to systematic, independently taken personality tests, they found the pairs of identical twins were more similar to each other than the pairs of strangers were, despite the small sample size.
Shenk points out one study by Turkheimer (more on it later, and see link at end of article), that studied children raised at or near the poverty line, and which found the genetic influence on IQ was near zero, which shows that a really bad environment can make a big difference, overwhelming the genetic influence.
For all of Shenk's criticism of twin studies, he doesn't suggest how a better study would be done. He is interested in dismissing evidence, not in exploring evidence that could either support or undermine his position.

There is a lot of evidence that Shenk does not discuss. The evidence for genetic heritability of IQ is not limited to studies of identical twins reared apart, there are also studies which compare the IQ of adopted non-twins to (a) the parents who raised them and (b) their biological parents. There are studies that compare correlations between identical twins (0.86), between non-twin siblings (0.47), between half siblings (0.31), between cousins (0.15), and so forth. Shenk never mentions that these studies exist, except that he mentions Turkheimer's study (which he thinks supports his thesis) without explaining that it did not involve adoption. A couple of things that arise from all these studies, neither of which Shenk ever mentions, are that

as the child gets older, the genetic influence on IQ increases rather than decreases, which surprised everybody.
the correlation of adult IQ between two people raised in the same family is very small, in some studies no more than two equally-related people raised in different families. The total non-genetic effect on IQ is pretty large, but the majority of this variation still seems random to researchers. Factors that would go along with the adoptive family, such as school quality, IQ of parents in the home, parenting style, and quantity and quality of books in the home, seem to have little influence.

The tendency of the effects of genetics to increase, rather than decrease, with age is explained by some by the fact that, as people create their environments as they get older, the genetic influence makes itself felt in their choice of environments. I am reminded of something Eddie Van Halen said: "If you want to be a great guitarist, you've got to like playing the guitar.". Similarly, if you want to be a genius, you've got to like thinking. And whether you like thinking may be genetic. Most people aren't that crazy about thinking, as a glance at the reading material near the checkout counter of any supermarket will tell you. So the people with genes that make them like to think will exercise and develop their minds more than would other people. Young children are in school whether they like it or not, being forced to think whether they like it or not, so the genetic influence on IQ at those ages is less.

One weakness of adoption studies is that poor people are ineligible to adopt, so that few adoptive households are really bad. Turkheimer's study got around this and measured poor children by studying children with varying degrees of genetic commonality raised by biological relatives. Adoptive families range from solid working class to extreme upper class, and over this range, adoptive homes are observed to make little difference. The feeling is that while a really bad environment can make a big difference, any environment at or above what we would consider "adequate" (the bar being pretty low) will make little difference. Note that Turkheimer's study only measured children at age 7, when the genetic influence is known to be weaker.

One interesting study discussed by Shenk involved rats running mazes. In 1958, Rod Cooper and John Zubek deliberately bred one group of rats to be smart at running mazes, and another group to be dumb at it. With time, they were able to observe a large genetic difference in performance between the two strains. Then they tried raising both the smart and dumb strains in a very unstimulating, limited environment. Like the humans in the Turkheimer study, the rats all did poorly and almost no difference in performance was seen. Then they tried raising both smart and dumb rats in an especially enriched and stimulating environment. Now the dumb rats were doing almost as well as the smart rats, again the difference in performance due to genetics was greatly diminished.
It should be noted that the data was shown in a plot. But it wasn't a plot of the actual data -- it was an artist's depiction of the data. I've seen research papers where they give actual data and artists depictions, and the depictions are usually wildly skewed in favor of the point the paper is trying to make.
I would have liked to read more detail about the study, but I couldn't find it on the web. The ramifications for humans raised in poverty were clear and not very surprising given the other studies we've looked at. But what about the "enriched" environment? Twin and adoption studies include children adopted into wealthy homes, and the effect of those homes is observed to be small. Could there be some way of "enriching" our environments to radically improve most people's intellects, like those of the mice? Thousands of educators, some of them very well-funded at the best schools, have been trying for a long time. Some major breakthrough may be possible, you never know. We should certainly keep trying, for the same reason we should keep doing nuclear fusion research -- though the odds are long, the potential payoff is huge.

All this talk about IQ leads me to ask the question, what about other outcomes? What about annual income, marital status, number of divorces, and number of offspring? It is possible that IQ tests have succeeded in measuring a largely genetic quality, but other outcomes might be more affected by adoptive parents. For example, one twin might major in art and wind up being a waiter at $20K per year, while the other twin's adoptive parents might refuse to pay their college tuition unless they do something more practical, so that they wind up being an accountant at $120K per year. Neither Shenk nor anything else that I read on twin studies discusses this.

Genetics denialism has been with us for a long time. During the sixties the consensus was that genes were pretty unimportant, but studies kept showing otherwise. There are a few reasons people want to deny the influence of genes on the human mind:

Fear of Eugenics: Memories of the excesses of the Eugenics movement in the early 20th century, and the horrors of the Nazis, lead many people to fear that misapplication of genetic theories could be a Very Bad Thing.
Social Plans: Many people have plans for the betterment of human society that rely on society's under performers being capable of better things under more favorable circumstances, and when science casts doubt on these pet plans, these people attack the science.
Mysticism: People want to believe there is something "magic" about the human mind, and breaking down the influences on it to things as vulgar as neurotransmitters and genes is just so -- unflattering. For the same reason that many resist the belief that humans are descended from apes, many who accept the evolution of our bodies try to assert that it "stops at the neck", and our intellect is somehow above all that sordid business.

None of these are legitimate reasons to ignore or suppress the truth. As for the first: if you don't want to commit atrocities, then don't commit atrocities. It is my instinct that people in denial are more likely to do horrible things than people who aren't. Regarding the second, social plans that rely on flawed science in order to work aren't going to work -- time to develop new social plans. And the third reason is just inexcusable mush-mindedness.

There is much in the book I haven't covered here, some of it quite interesting, but this review is pretty long as it is. I have focused on the evidence that Shenk has to refute to make his point, and it is there that Shenk is at his worst. I have been a bit vehement, because of Shenk's taste for lengthy anecdotes, his attempts to not admit what his thesis really is, and his dismissal of the whole concept of statistical evidence.

If you want to read a book promoting genetics denialism, there is another, better book I recommend: "Intelligence and How to Get It" by Richard Nisbett. Nisbett claims to prove that normal variation in human genetics has little to do with intelligence. I wasn't persuaded by his arguments, and, like Shenk, he doesn't bring up all the evidence against him, but at least there isn't the double talk, the obsession with anecdotes, and the disdain for statistical evidence in general.

Sources:

Book: "The Genius in All of Us" -- David Shenk
One of dozens of papers on Bouchard's Minnesota Twin Study: here
Book: "Born That Way - Genes, Behavior, Personality" -- William Wright
Book: "Intelligence and How to Get It" -- Richard Nisbett
"The Search For Intelligence" - Carl Zimmer, Scientific American, October, 2008
"Trends in Behavioral Genetics: Eugenics Revisited" - John Horgan, Scientific American, June 1993
Book: "The Blank Slate" -- Steven Pinker
"Natural Levels of Similarities Between Identical Twins and Between Unrelated People" - Joseph Wyatt, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol 9, Fall 1984
Turkheimer's Study on Socioeconomic Status Affecting the Heritability of IQ: here
Statement by 52 scholars on intelligence published in "The Wall Street Journal", December, 1994: here
Longer statement by 11 scholars on intelligence published in "American Psychologist" in February, 1996: here
Wikipedia on Heritability of IQ: here
Wikipedia on Heritability of Personality: here

What Are We To Make of the Tea Party?

2010-03-07T21:50:00.010-05:00

I've been trying to understand the Tea Party Movement, and feel I've figured out a few things.

The Tea Party Movement is not a political party, it has no clear leaders, it is an amorphous grass-roots movement without a clear platform. The people in the movement dislike politics as usual and don't want there to be leaders or a platform. A few issues are central

Fear that Obama, with the filibuster-proof majority he had (note past tense) in the senate, was going to take the country wildly toward the political left.
Objection, in principle, to the bailouts, particularly of Wall Street firms.
Concern about increased taxation and the growth of the federal government.

Because the movement has no leaders, it has no official platform. Because there is no official platform, there is no one to define what the Tea Party Movement is about and what it is not. Thus, many extreme right wing causes are trying to identify with the Tea Party, and there is no authority to refuse their entry into it. This makes the Tea Party look particularly frightening to outsiders. Side movements trying to capitalize on the movement include

The Libertarian Party. The Libertarian Party is not entirely a side issue, in that it agrees with all 3 of what I have listed as the central concerns of the Tea Party. Most people in the Tea Party, however, would probably not agree with the Libertarians' advocacy of the legalization of prostitution, all drugs, and gambling.
The John Birch Society, which espouses theories about communist conspiracies.
Various efforts to end the Federal Reserve, or undermine the independence of its monetary policy.
Advocates against illegal immigration. For 8 years, the Bush administration failed to take any serious measures on this issue, and some people are hoping the new movement will embrace it.

Fear and anger are key emotions driving the movement. Fear:

The fear is generated by people seeing the values of their 401k's and their homes drop radically, at the same time, in 2008. This fear is compounded by the fact that few people understand the economics of what happened. Also there are many casualties who have lost their jobs and/or their homes.
Fear of a new black president who had the most liberal voting record in the senate.

Anger:

There is great anger over the bailouts. Senator Diane Feinstein, for example, said that 90% of the phone calls and emails her office was receiving about the bailout were against it, yet she voted for it. The bailout of Wall Street was one of the most unpopular things the government has ever done. The fact that many Republicans, including Bush and McCain, supported the bailout, left many conservatives feeling betrayed.
Anger at the Democratic decision to stimulate the economy with increased government spending rather than via a tax cut.

Regarding issue #1, the desire to obstruct Obama in anything he was going to do, the Tea Party has had some success -- it helped elect a Republican to fill the position vacated by Edward Kennedy, ending Obama's filibuster-proof majority in the senate. But this could have been accomplished by just helping the Republican Party.
Regarding issue #2, anger over the bailouts, the Tea Party can do nothing. The bailouts are in the past. They can try to prevent more bailouts from happening, but that's about it.
Regarding issue #3, desire to shrink the government, the Tea Party can accomplish nothing. Republicans have a record, under Reagan and W, of cutting taxes without commensurate spending cuts. This was irresponsible and caused huge deficits. At some point, if this effort is to be successful, there needs to an agreement on what services will be cut and then a bill needs to get through congress. That's really hard, and to do it, you need to have an organization that can hammer out a specific platform -- there's no way that sort of difficult consensus can be formed by a leaderless, platformless, amorphous mob.

http://tr.im/nytimesteaparty
http://tr.im/R0ZJ

Real Estate: Evils of the Owner-Occupied Paradigm

2010-02-21T19:02:00.015-05:00

For many years, it has been the conventional wisdom in the United States that home ownership was the best investment strategy for the average person. Since 2006, we have seen real estate prices drop 32% nationwide and more severely than that in some areas, and along with that, we have seen a rash of foreclosures. The time is ripe to be rethinking our investment strategies.

US Home Prices Nationwide: 1994 - mid 2009

Reasons Why Buying the House You Live In Is Not a Good Idea

Diversification: One of the most important factors in an investment strategy should be diversification. You want a lot of little investments, of different types, so that if one investment goes sour, it doesn't wipe out your whole portfolio. You can't get much less diversified than a house -- not only is it a single investment, but if you start out with a 10% down payment, that house is 1000% of your portfolio! So if the house declines in value by 10%, you lose 100% of your initial investment.

Potential Debt: The traditional way to buy a house is on credit. You are investing with money that is not yours. That means that a small increase in the house's value will result in a large payoff for your initial investment. Many people experienced this prior to 2006, seeing huge increases in their net worth as their homes appreciated. It also means that a small decrease can leave you with negative net worth. In my book, having negative net worth is many times more bad than being rich is good. I prefer not to invest money I don't have, and follow an investment strategy where the worst case outcome is flat broke.

Pre-Bubble Mentality: Prior to 2005, most people buying real estate believed it was a fundamental law of physics that real estate prices would always rise. When most people are thinking that way, it is called a bubble. It was a matter of time until the bubble burst.

Planning For Hard Times: It really is a good idea to have sufficient savings to carry you through a couple of years of unemployment. Relying on credit to get you through tough times is risky -- banks respond to tough times by restricting credit. Furthermore, a computer glitch or identity theft can destroy your credit rating at any time. Generally, a mortgage payment is much higher than a rent payment for the same sized dwelling. And if you become unemployed for an extended period of time, you'll have no income to write off the mortgage interest against during that time.
When the economy goes badly, the banks are reluctant to extend credit, and are raising interest rates and lowering credit limits. If you rent your dwelling, then when hard times hit, you can easily move into more modest accomodations. If you own your dwelling, you probably can't move out of it and into a cheaper place without selling the old one -- a major hassle and a disaster in a down real estate market.

Industry Diversification: If you work in an area dominated by a single industry, like Silicon Valley or Detroit or Manhattan, and you work in that single industry, real estate values in that area will fluctuate along with that industry. This means that if your industry takes a beating, you are liable to wind up long-term unemployed and needing money for relocation or retraining at the same time as the net equity in your house goes negative. Not a good position to be in.

Moving Becomes More of a Hassle: When you move to a new place, many errands have to be taken care of, learn your way around the new city, find schools for your kids. Buying a house adds a huge decision with potentially disastrous consequences to the list of errands to be made when moving.

Too Many Constraints on a Single Decision: A house you own has to satisfy too many requirements at once. It has to be appropriately located, the house itself has to be the kind of place you want to live in, and it has to be a very good investment. It is unlikely that you'll find a house that really meets all these requirements very well.

Prior to the Bubble Bursting

The government had an attitude that the more Americans owned their homes, the better. I remember in Bill Clinton's autobiography he spoke with pride about how the rate of home ownership increased during his presidency. This attitude is flawed -- many people are not cut out to be responsible home owners. And we have a great system for identifying who those people are, it's called the FICO credit score. People with lousy credit scores should not be given home loans, they are not responsible enough to handle it.

Another way to see if someone is going to be able to pay a mortgage is to demand a substantial down payment. If they can handle their money well enough to save up a down payment, that does a lot to demonstrate that they'll be responsible about paying back the mortgage. In addition, it provides a cushion, so that if the value of the house sinks by less than the down payment, the home owner still has positive equity in the house and is less likely to walk away from it or declare bankruptcy. But prior to the bubble bursting, many loans were being made with no down payment required.

Reasons For the Financial Crisis

Many people attribute the financial crisis to "too much greed". Baloney. A bank that isn't greedy is not a good bank. Greed is what drives the system.

The biggest issue that drove the financial crisis was that too many people, both home buyers and Wall Street investors, thought it was a fundamental law of physics that real estate prices would always rise forever. Home buyers took out many interest-only loans, a practice that makes no sense if you believe that real estate prices might fall. The financial system made loans to many people with poor credit or who otherwise showed signs of being likely to fail paying them back. The reason the financial system was willing to make these loans is that they felt it was guaranteed the value of the house would be greater than the outstanding value of the loan, even if no down payment was made, so that worst case, the value of the loan could always be recovered by foreclosure.
When real estate prices fell, all these deals fell apart. In some states, the homeowner was legally allowed to abandon their home loan if they let the bank take the house. As a result, when home prices fell, many homeowners whose houses were worth less than the outstanding loan walked away, a tactic called "rational foreclosure". With so many loans failing without sufficient collateral to cover the cost of the loan, the banks lost so much money that it caused a crisis.

The biggest mystery of this, to me, is why the people on Wall Street were so stupid. I can understand the homeowners being stupid, the guys on Wall Street had high IQ's and MBA's, and they just should have known better. One guess I have is that many of them did know better, but they were not investing their own money. The worst thing that could happen to them if there was a meltdown is they would lose their jobs in a down market. If this happened, they wouldn't be individually disgraced, since the industry as a whole went bad. And at the rate these guys were paid when times were good, they had plenty of resources with which to weather hard times.

What's Next?

Looking forward, I think people will not, within a generation, assume that owning the dwelling they live in is a sure-fire ticket to easy prosperity. Now that people know that real estate prices can go down, and down a lot, people will be much more careful about buying houses. People will buy houses because they really want to live in them for decades, and if their planning horizon is much shorter than that, they'll rent.
It could be a generation before real estate prices, in real terms, reach the highs of the summer of 2006. Several factors, which will not be repeated soon, contributed to housing values reaching those heights:

* People had not, within living memory, seen housing prices decline significantly on a nationwide basis.
* People were taking out interest-only loans, and loans with negative amortization.
* Mortgages were being extended to uncreditworthy people.
* Home loans were being made without requiring a down payment.

since none of these conditions are going to be repeated for decades, I anticipate that we will not see real estate prices reaching their 2006 peak again for decades.

How are we to invest for retirement from here on out? That's a good question. In the meltdown, all major asset classes -- real estate, stocks, bonds -- took a nosedive. People aren't going to feel safe investing in anything that's likely to deliver a good return. Hopefully people will at least diversify.

A mixture of stocks and bonds is naturally easier to diversify that a house. Even better, mutual funds -- equity (stock) mutual funds, and bond funds. Since each mutual fund spreads the money over a variety of investments, your portfolio is effectively even more diversified. Use equity funds for growth, and the bond funds for safety. And you don't have to go into debt to buy mutual funds. Yes, if there's a recession, your bond funds will lose some (but probably not a lot of) value, and your equity funds will lose a lot of value, but your nest egg will always have positive worth.

One way to invest in real estate and avoid the problem of under diversification is to buy stock in a company that invests in real estate. This also avoids the hassle of having to maintain it.

Another reason people should be encouraged to invest in stocks and bonds rather than real estate is that investments in stocks and bonds help fund companies, which employ people and make stuff. Investment in real estate, for the most part, achieves no social good but rather just chases up the price of land.
I've heard the argument wrong made that a purchase of stock only helps industry if you bought the stock directly in the IPO. This is wrong. As long as you own stock in a company, you have a relationship with that company. The shareholders can, at any time, choose to dissolve the company, sell the assetts of the company such as equipment, and return that money to the shareholders. Until they do that, they are continuing to invest in the company and their money is at work doing what the company does.

Movie Review: The Secret

2010-02-10T22:44:00.002-05:00

This movie discusses the "Law of Attraction", supposedly a secret that will unlock untold and unlimited human potential.

This movie reminded me a lot of when I took "The Forum" (descended from EST), which is typical of the self-help genre, which tends to have the following characteristics:

Hardly any of the presentation is spent discussing the specific techniques that are supposedly going to improve your life.
Most of the presentation is spent vaguely praising itself. There is a lot of dramatic imagery involved.
A very strong pitch is made that you have the ability to completely control your life, the implication being that if you adopt the (barely discussed) techniques, everything in your life will improve.
The actual wisdom being imparted is actually very simple, not really enough to justify a whole movie or book, the rest is just window dressing to make it appear to be the core issue of the universe.

The "Law of Attraction" states that the universe delivers to you whatever you think about. It doesn't distinguish between good and bad. If you focus on the bad things, they will inevitably come to you. The way to make good things happen is by focusing just on those good things. That's it. That's the whole secret.
I think there is value to this. If you are focused solely on those bad things, without having positive thoughts about a way out, that's not a very constructive approach.
But I have also seen a couple of the most catastrophically failed people I've ever met who were totally following this philosophy.

One was a drug dealer who I knew in college. He was totally focused on how he was going to build his drug dealing business into a billion dollar corporation, and ignored the risks involved - this risks to his health caused by all the drugs he was taking, and the risks posed by the dangerous criminals he was associating with. He lost his sanity because of drug use and never really recovered.
Another was a guy who read some books about instant millionaires on Wall Street, who borrowed tens of thousands of dollars on credit cards to play the stock market. He did not think about the risks he was taking, and would not listen to my advice that these books he was reading were not economically sound, but just focused on the great wealth he was going to be enjoying, He had no health insurance, he drove without auto insurance. He lost his shirt in the market (by short-selling a high-tech startup, which makes absolutely no sense to any investor who takes risk into account), and last I heard was being sued by multiple banks while unemployed.

Fear is in many ways a very healthy instinct, keeping us from doing a lot of stupid things. It is a highly underrated emotion. Thinking about risks, avoiding them, and making preparations for the unavoidable ones, is very sound practice.

Another drawback of positive thinking comes to mind. I remember one time the state lottery jackpot was up to 100 million dollars. Normally I don't buy lottery tickets, but that week I bought one.
The whole week I spent a lot of time thinking about all the magnificent things I would do with 100 million dollars. At the end of the week (surprise!) I didn't win. I realized I had made a mistake in buying the ticket. The $2 lost was insignificant to me, but the wasted brain time, which could have been devoted to actually improving my life, which was instead devoted to stupid daydreams about what I would do with the money, was unacceptable. I've never bought a lottery ticket since. The human mind cannot accurately comprehend a one in a million probability, and does not allocate its time well.

There is a lot of talk about visualizing what you want, but that really is no "secret" to athletes. I remember being told in football practice to visualize myself doing the proper technique, and it is definitely a useful tactic.

But the movie makes claims that the supernatural is behind this principal. One guy in the movie claimed to "create" parking spaces for himself by visualizing them ahead of time. If "the secret" really works, I'd want a lot more than parking spaces from it -- I'm reminded of the time Homer Simpson got any wish he wanted and he asked for a really nice sandwich.

The movie talks a lot about sickness. There are always miracle cures occurring - a certain fraction of cancers just go away by themselves, and sometimes people heal when the doctors gave them no hope. For this movie, they dug up some of these people who then claim it was all done with the power of their minds.
I am reminded of a study discussed in a psychology class I took in college. Periodically, wildfires approach suburbs in Southern California, and sometimes they burn down some of the houses. People take numerous measures to save their houses - they stand on the roof with water hoses putting out burning embers than land on them, they run around the yard stomping out the flames. So for this study, they went around the neighborhood taking a survey of what measures were taken to save houses, then studied the correlation between measures taken and house survival. They found no correlation. What people did to save their houses made no difference. In the survey, they also asked people if the measures taken influenced saving their houses. The people whose houses survived tended to think their measures helped. The people whose houses burned down felt there was nothing that could have been done.
I am reminded of hearing about how people would be told in EST seminars that they are responsible for having gotten cancer, and this movie is doing exactly that. If the sick person actually listens to this drivel, their suffering is compounded by feeling guilty for having brought this upon themselves.
Furthermore, people may shun surgery and medication and try to just think themselves healthy. Interestingly, the movie offers no actual studies of survival rates of people who turn to modern medicine as compared to those who adopt a program of positive thinking according to the dictates of the Law of Attraction. But this movie isn't really addressed to the type of people who ask for statistics. Like most quack medicine, the focus is all on testimonials rather than studies.

They claim that The Secret has been passed down through the ages, in secret. What is not made clear is If this were true, Why was it kept secret? The movie specifically states there would be no ill effects if everyone embraced The Secret, there is enough abundance to go around. So the more people knew this, the better. There would be no reason for a few giants to hoard this wisdom and shut out the majority of the human race. There is also no specifics of the history of this secret through the ages, no specific examples of anyone trying to suppress anything.

Book Report: "Infidel" by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

2010-01-17T20:59:00.001-05:00

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia, from an assertive (for a Muslim) mother and a progressive, but largely absent, father. Her father had been educated at Columbia University in NYC.

Her father's political activism against the Somali government made it necessary for the family to leave the country, first traveling to Saudi Arabia, where blacks are referred to as "slaves" by their classmates and teachers, then briefly to Ethiopia, then to Kenya.

As a teenager and young adult, Ayaan sought Islamic teaching, eager to get to the "core of Islam" and reach the point where it would begin to make sense, but she generally found the answers she was receiving to be unsatisfying. Since most of her education occurred in Kenya, she spoke English very well, and read many western books.

By Somali custom, all marriages are arranged, and one day her father returned home to happily announce that he had found a great husband for Ayaan, a Somali man who lived in Canada. When the suitor came by and visited Ayaan and her siblings, they found out that not only were his Somali language skills deficient, but he didn't speak English all that well either! Further conversation showed that he was an idiot. Ayaan pleaded with her father to be released from this arrangement, but he turned a deaf ear to her. The wedding ceremony happened with no women, not even Ayaan, present.

Ayaan was shipped to a relative in Germany, where she was to spend a few weeks before proceeding to Canada. Determined to run the first chance she got, she told her uncle she was going on a brief trip to Holland to visit a friend, and once there, applied for asylum status, and was shocked at how generously the Dutch welcomed her into their welfare state. Her clan and her father disowned her.

European society seemed better in every way than the one she came from. It was more prosperous, less violent, the people were kind, and civil servants were cordial and uninterested in bribes. Lessons in Dutch were available, and she acquired it quickly and was able to earn a comfortable living as a Dutch-Somali translator. In her translation work, she was constantly exposed to the dysfunctional nature of her native culture, in contrast to the more advanced Dutch culture around her. She attended a university, and, determined to understand how such a great society could be created and why the other societies she was familiar with were doing so badly in comparison, majored in political science. She moved in with a white boyfriend, living with him for several years.

She kept asking herself, if Islam was the one true religion and Allah the one true God, why were these societies of infidels doing so much better than the Islamic societies? And as, in her studies, she read the history of Europe, it seemed to be the history of the Catholic church losing more and more of its power, and of the secularization of governments.

Very slowly, she became not only an unbeliever, but developed a strong belief that, for progress to occur in the Islamic world, someone had to criticize Islam, as Christianity had been criticized in Europe, and bring about the secularization of those countries. But who was to criticize Islam? Any white European who did it would be dismissed as a "racist". Anyone who did it in Somalia would quickly be killed. She had studied the Koran extensively, and understood well what she was rejecting and why. Ayaan did what she felt was right and began to make her voice heard.

As she spoke out, she began to receive death threats from Muslims. She switched political parties as her own Labor Party was too politically correct to be comfortable with her views and won a seat in Dutch parliament with the more conservative Liberal Party.

She continued to speak out, and it became clear to everyone that she was a full-fledged infidel. According to Mohamed, any Muslim who renounces their faith is to be killed. Her life changed radically, as she found herself surrounded by burly bodyguards, her whereabouts a secret.

Still determined to speak, she wrote the script for a 10 minute movie about the oppression of women by Islam which was directed by Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh. Van Gogh was murdered in the street by a radical Muslim, who left a note on the body saying that Ayaan was the next target.

Holland erupted in rioting -- Mosques and Islamic schools were burned down, and in retaliation, Christian churches were burnt.

The book ends with Ayaan moving to the US to work for the American Enterprise Institute.

It should be made clear that Islam did not oppress Ayaan particularly badly for a Somali girl. The female circumcision and arranged marriage were strictly normal for that society, and she received a pretty good education. Her father did not beat her mother. The family was quite progressive for that country, and would have been more so had her father been around more (the circumcision of his children occurred in his absence and against his express wishes).

It is important to understand the courage it must have taken for Ayaan to criticize the religion she had been raised to believe had a monopoly on goodness. As Richard Dawkins says, this woman is a hero. (show less)

Book Report: Systems of Survival

2009-12-28T16:36:00.001-05:00

Systems of Survival, by Jane Jacobs

The most fascinating book about anthropology and politics I've ever read. I kept seeing things in it that I had thought of before, but never heard from anyone else.

The idea is the observation that nomadic societies are very different in their values systems than are agricultural ones. One example is given of a nomadic tribe in Africa that was told by a government to settle down and become farmers. They were provided with adequate land, equipment and training. They hated it, the whole experiment just didn't work. To apply themselves to an agricultural lifestyle would have required a big values shift. This is one of the most difficult transitions for a society to make. It means acts which used to be morally contemptible are now acceptable, and some acts previously considered commendable are no longer tolerated.

The book describes these two values systems in detail, goes through various examples of these two systems, and we see how capitalists are in the agricultural values system, and communists in the nomadic values system. Very much so. This means that the formerly communist countries that are trying to develop a working capitalism are dealing with a major values shift, and that's hard, and difficult, and takes time. Not only do they have to change the laws, they have to adjust to entirely new concepts of right and wrong.

It is interesting that the Cherokee Indians, who did the best among all the tribes I've heard of at coping with the injustice of the white onslaught, were an agricultural society before we showed up.

Most of the book is discussing the values systems of different societies around the world. This is very valuable, since values of different societies are one of the key issues determining the success of these societies.

It always struck me how those who condemn capitalism would have this overwhelming disgust at actions that I felt were completely acceptable trading practices. The values systems.differed, and it is the norm for people with different values systems to condemn each other. After all, it is easier to condemn someone as having no values than to understand how his values might in some ways be superior to your own.

For most of my life, especially during the cold war, politics were dominated by the conflict between capitalism and communism. Most people, even the capitalists, felt the communist system was "more moral" and defended capitalism on strictly pragmatic grounds. The Libertarians tend to defend capitalism and denounce communism on moral grounds, but they are so few in number that theirs is a viewpoint that is rarely heard.

The book describes the values systems as "Guardian" (communist or government) syndrome, and "Commercial" (capitalist, business) syndrome.

Guardian rules:

Shun trading
Exert prowess
Be obedient and disciplined
Adhere to tradition
Respect hierarchy
Be loyal
Take vengeance
Deceive for the sake of the task
Make rich use of leisure
Be ostentatious
Dispense largess
Be exclusive
Show fortitude
Be fatalistic
Treasure honor

Commercial rules:

Shun force
Come to voluntary agreements
Be honest
Collaborate easily with strangers and aliens
Compete
Respect contracts
Use initiative and enterprise
Be open to inventiveness and novelty
Be efficient
Promote comfort and convenience
Dissent for the sake of the task
Invest for productive purposes
Be industrious
Be thrifty
Be optimistic

This book does, in my opinion, have a capitalist bias.
For example, they feel that honesty is value cherished primarily by the commercial syndrome but not the Guardian syndrome. But in the US military, which is about as heavily in the Guardian syndrome as you can get, it is considered a very serious offense for one officer to lie to another -- people are subject to severe discipline at West Point for telling even the most harmless lie.
The book says the scientific world is heavily in the commercial syndrome, which is not really true, most of the most important scientific work is funded by philanthropists and government, and the scientists just give away the fruit of their labor for free.
The rules say ostentation is a quality of the Guardian syndrome, but many businessmen, especially sales types, feel it is very important to have luxuries to impress clients.

Book Report: "The Selfish Gene" and "The Blank Slate"

2009-12-28T16:21:00.002-05:00

The Selfish Gene - by Richard Dawkins
The Blank Slate - by Steven Pinker

The Selfish Gene, written in the mid-70's, is a detailed essay by a biologist about evolution, particularly discussing animal behavior. Dawkins' writing comes across as very intelligent while at the same time very accessible. I have believed in evolution since I was old enough to understand it, and the analysis made felt like second nature to me, except that Dawkins, being a biologist, can discuss the matter in much more detail. Dawkins talks at length about how altruism and kindness can be evolved traits. The whole book is a delight.
But at the end of the book, I was left asking myself why Dawkins didn't make the next step and start talking about how genetic incentives influence human behavior. When I read The Blank Slate I found out the answer.

Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate, is enthusiastic about the field of Evolutionary Psychology, formerly known as Sociobiology, and he is furious about the political lynching the socio biologists received at the hands of the academic left in the '70's. In this book he talks primarily about two false dogmas that dominated academia during the 20th century: the myth of the noble savage, and the dogma that all human behavior is culturally, and not genetically, determined. Dawkins was right at the boundaries of sociobiology, and he caught some of the flak, but had he talked much about evolution and human behavior, he would have paid dearly.

To change gears a little, I never really understood why the Catholic church was so threatened by Galileo's assertion that the Earth traveled around the Sun. Pinker gives us some context. For one thing, there were some literal statements in the Bible, like Joshua ordering the sun to stand still (but that could just mean Joshua successfully stopped the Earth's rotation). But Pinker clarifies:
"According to the theory, developed in medieval times, the sphere of the moon divided the universe into an unchanging perfection in the heavens above and a corrupt degeneration in the Earth below... Surrounding the moon were spheres for the inner planets, the sun, the outer planets, and the fixed stars, each cranked by a higher angel. And surrounding them all were the heavens, home to God. Contained with the sphere of the moon, and thus a little lower than the angels, were human souls, and then, in descending order, human bodies, animals..., and then plants, minerals, the inanimate elements, nine layers of devils, and finally, at the center of the Earth, Lucifer in hell. The universe was thus arranged in a hierarchy, a great chain of being.
The Great Chain was thick with moral implications".
I wondered why the church made up all this crap when they had no idea what they were talking about. The answer is obvious -- religions have been doing that since day one. The telescope had not been invented, it did not occur to these people that their assertions could be tested and even discredited. Furthermore, the church controlled intellectual life, so they could oppress anyone who challenged their assertions, which is exactly what they wound up doing to Galileo.
The moral dimension is central here. When you're making a theme of the cosmos to sell to the masses, it is easy to fall into the temptation of making sure the story has a moral ending, a conclusion that will lead people to live moral lives. And once such a dogma is in place, anyone like Galileo who wants to challenge it is no longer just talking about the trajectories of big rocks, he's undermining the moral foundations of society and must be attacked, discredited, and oppressed by any means available.
Similarly, the political left in academia made up a bunch of dogmas about genetics and human nature out of thin air -- they did not research the matter carefully, but asserted their dogmas as a matter of political fashion, and based a whole set of moral conclusions and planned social policies upon them. Once these ideas were established, they defended them by vicious personal attacks on anyone who actually did some research into what the truth was.

Pinker is a major intellectual giant, he has read many of the great thinkers through the centuries, he takes us on a whirlwind tour of anthropology and psychology through recent centuries, and the things he comes up with are impressive:

On Noble Savages

"The begin with, the stories of tribes out there somewhere who have never heard of violence turn out to be urban legends. Margaret Mead's descriptions of peace-loving New Guineans and sexually nonchalant Samoans were based on perfunctory research and turned out to be almost perversely wrong. As the anthropologist Derek Freeman later documented, Samoans may beat or kill their daughters if they are not virgins on the wedding night, a young man who cannot woo a virgin may rape one to extort her into eloping, and the family of a cuckolded husband may attack and kill the adulterer. The !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert had been described by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas as "the harmless people" in a book with that title. But as soon as anthropologists camped out long enough to accumulate data, they discovered that the !Kung San have a murder rate higher than that of American inner cities. They learned as well that the San had recently avenged a murder by sneaking into the killer's group and executing every man, woman, and child as they slept. But at least the !Kung San exist. In the early 1970's The New York Times Magazine reported the discovery of the "gentle Tasaday" of the Philippine rain forest, a people with no words for conflict, violence, or weapons. The Tasaday turned out to be local farmers dressed in leaves for a photo opportunity so that cronies of Ferdinand Marcos could set aside their "homeland" as a preserve and enjoy exclusive mineral and logging rights.
Anthropologists and historians have also been counting bodies. Many intellectuals tout the small numbers of battlefield casualties in pre-state societies as evidence that primitive warfare is largely ritualistic. They do not notice that two deaths in a band of fifty people is the equivalent of ten million deaths in a country the size of the US."
Pinker then shows a chart of various primitive societies and the rates of male deaths caused by war, and notes that while in the US and Europe in the 20th century, including deaths in WWI and WWII, the deaths are about 2%, while deaths in the tribes listed ranged from 10-60%, with an average of about 30%. In addition, Pinker adds
"Moreover, Keeley and others have noted that native peoples are dead serious when they carry out warfare. Many of them make weapons as damaging as their technology permits, exterminate their enemies when they can get away with it, and enhance the experience by torturing captives, cutting off trophies, and feasting on enemy flesh."
Pinker mentions that Edward Wilson, the author of Sociobiology, remarked that tribal warfare was common in human prehistory, and was criticized for this when the "against-socio biologists declared that this had been 'strongly rebutted on the basis of historical and anthropological studies'" - Pinker looked up these "studies" and found "the reviews contained virtually no data about tribal warfare".
Steven Jay Gould, the great evolutionist, came out against the socio biologists, and was hostile to any attempt to analyze warfare in terms of evolutionary motives because, as he said "each case of genocide can be matched with numerous incidents of social beneficence, each murderous band can be paired with a pacific clan.". Pinker answers "once again, a ratio has been conjured out of the blue; the data reviewed in chapter 3 show that 'pacific clans' either do not exist or are considerably outnumbered by the 'murderous bands.'"

On The Blank Slate

Pinker discusses the studies that can be done and that have been done, keeping track of identical twins raised together, identical twins raised apart, siblings raised together, siblings raised apart, unrelated adopted siblings raised together, and unrelated individuals raised separately, and with these studies, one can get a very good idea of the contribution that genetics and family will make on intelligence and personality. Family environment can affect intelligence measured when a child is young, but the influence decreases. I had heard the same thing elsewhere, that the intelligence of a young child will tend toward that of its adopted family, but as it nears adulthood, its intelligence converges on that of its biological parents.
Pinker says "The three laws of behavioral genetics may be the most important discoveries in the history of psychology.... Here are the three laws:

The First Law: All human behavioral traits are heritable.
The Second Law: The effect of being raised in the same family is smaller than the effect of the genes.
The Third Law: A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families."

Pinker goes on to tell us it is really amazing how little impact the family has on the child. He estimates the genetic contribution being 40-50%, the family contribution 0-10%, and the random, or at least so far unexplained, contribution is about 50%.
There are many, many studies that show correlations between how children are raised and how they turn out, but it turns out that most of these researchers were so certain of the dogma of The Blank Slate that they only studied children being raised by their biological parents, so all they were really observing was the genetic component!
Pinker goes on"The First Law is a pain in the neck for radical scientists, who have tried unsuccessfully to discredit it. In 1974, Leon Kamin wrote that 'there exist no data which should lead a prudent man to accept the hypothesis that IQ test scores are in any degree heritable', a conclusion he reiterated with Lewontin and Rose a decade later. Even in the 1970's the argument was tortuous, but by the 1980's it was desperate and today it is a historical curiosity. As usual, the attacks have not always come in dispassionate scholarly analyzes. Thomas Bouchard, who directed the first large-scale study of twins reared apart, is one of the pioneers of the genetics of personality. Campus activists at the University of Minnesota distributed handouts calling him a racist and linking him to 'German Fascism,' spray-painted slogans calling him a Nazi, and demanded that he be fired. The psychologist Barry Mehler accused him of 'rehabilitating' the work of Josef Mengele, the doctor who tormented twins in the Nazi death camps under the guise of research. As usual, the charges were unfair not just intellectually but personally: far from being a fascist, Bouchard was a participant in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the 1960's, was briefly jailed for his activism, and says he would do it again today.
These attacks are transparently political and easy to discount. More pernicious is the way the First Law is commonly interpreted: 'So you're saying it's all in the genes," or, more angrily, "Genetic determinism!" I have already commented on this odd reflex in modern intellectual life: when it comes to genes, people suddenly lose their ability to distinguish between 50% and 100%, 'some' from 'all', 'affects' from 'determines'. The diagnosis for this intellectual crippling is clear: if the effects of the genes must, on theological grounds, be zero, then all nonzero values are heretical."

Other Dogmas

Pinker really despises the political movement called "Post modernism", which is a very politically correct belief system. His first chapter discussing this belief system is titled "In Touch with Reality". He says
"With some important exceptions, stereotypes are in fact not inaccurate when assessed against objective benchmarks such as census figures or the reports of the stereotyped people themselves. People who believe that African Americans are more likely to be on welfare than whites, that Jews have higher average income than WASPs, that business students are more conservative than students in the arts, that women are more likely than men to want to lose weight, and that men are more likely than women to swat a fly with their bare hands, are not being irrational or bigoted. Those beliefs are correct. People's stereotypes are generally consistent with the statistics, and in many cases their bias is to underestimate the real differences between sexes or ethnic groups."
Regarding the passion that the politically correct have for arbitrarily changing the vocabulary we're allowed to use (without the general population being given a chance to vote on the matter), he comments on how "Even the word minority -- the most neutral label conceivable, referring only to relative numbers -- was banned in 2001 by the San Diego City Council (and nearly banned by the Boston City Council) because it was deemed disparaging to nonwhites. 'No matter how you slice it, minority means less than,' said a semantically challenged official at Boston College, where the preferred term is AHANA (an acronym for African-American, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American)."

Politics

There is a whole chapter about politics that is fascinating. Identical twins separated at birth have a tendency to have similar political views.
Pinker describes two fundamental views of human beings, the "Tragic Vision" and the "Utopian vision". In the tragic vision, people are seen not as bad, but as inherently selfish, and also quite corruptible. In the Utopian Vision, humans are a blank slate that society can mold into any form necessary. Given either of these two assumptions, a whole set of political positions follows, and the chapter sheds plenty of light on many issues.

There is so much great stuff in this book I can hardly cover it all, but it is basically a summary of how academic progress in anthropology, psychology, and even the fine arts in the 20th century was stifled by the political left.

The priests of different religious sects ... dread the advancement of science as witches do the approach of daylight, and scowl upon the fatal harbinger announcing the subdivision of the duperies on which they live.

Thomas Jefferson, quoted by
Richard Dawkins

The aftermath of the Galileo episode is still with us, and the consequence is that many clergy have learned that it's not their place to tell scientists what is true and what is not. The debacle with the Post Modernists is still going on, but I predict that in the end they, too, will learn that political ideologues also have no legitimate role in deciding which scientific statements are valid and which are not.

Tips For Job Searchers

2009-12-28T16:17:00.008-05:00

I put this list of tips together a few years ago after a quite successful job search.

Resume

Don't use a functional resume if you can possibly avoid it. Everyone wants chronological.
If you want to change fields, try to avoid too much detail about the field you're trying to get out of. My resume was previously going on and on about EDA CAD, saying things that were incomprehensible to anyone outside of that field (including the headhunters) resulting in my getting hardly anything but EDA CAD interviews.
Keep your resume down to 2 pages
State employment offices often have free classes in how to write a good resume, and coaches who you can show your resume to for advice. This can make a big difference.
Things are substantially complicated by the use of Word to do resumes, and the fact that Word is an ugly, unreliable and shifting standard controlled by an evil empire, and Word resumes will look different when viewed on a variety of different platforms. But Microsoft Word is the gold standard in resumes. It's what the headhunters want to deal with. Some people like to publish their resume as a pdf, rtf file or other format, headhunters don't like that. Many headhunters want to edit / reformat your resume, at least to remove contact information, and they can't do that with any format other than Word or text. I've often showed up for interviews and found the manager was reading a substantially reformatted version of my resume. I never saw one that the headhunter had actually improved, but I figure let the headhunter do it, a happy headhunter is a headhunter who is more likely to find me a job. Also, the internet job boards are usually only able to cope with text or Word formats, most of them deal primarily with text format, so you have to have your resume available both as a text and Word document. If you send multiple formats to the headhunters, like a Word and a pdf file, they will use one (Word if it's available, or text), forwarding that to the hiring managers, and throw the others away.
Don't just do your resume in Open Office or Wine on Linux and start sending it out. I learned this one the hard way a few years ago. Although Open Office and Wine are trying hard to emulate Microsoft Word, for some reason, possibly legal, they aren't allowed to use exactly the same fonts, so things don't line up exactly the same way and your resume can look like a disaster (columns collapsing, pages overflowing 5-10% followed by a page break) when the headhunter views it using real Microsoft Word. Over a couple of months in 2002, I sent out many copies of a resume I had painstakingly done with Wine before finding out it looked absolutely horrible when the headhunters were viewing it with true Microsoft Word.
When you save your resume on Microsoft Word, don't save according to an old format. Saving to an old Word format was a good idea when new Microsoft products could read old Microsoft formats, but now Microsoft deliberately hobbles new versions of Word so they can't read files created by old versions of Word (to force people to buy every release that comes out).
Make sure you view it with the latest Word. I did my resume on Word 2000 and then viewed it on Office 2007, and it looked awful. It is outrageous that a resume viewed on a later version of the same company's product doesn't look the same, but that's Microsoft for you. You don't have to buy the latest Microsoft Office, just do you resume on whatever version you have, then take it on a RAM key to an internet cafe, and edit it on the latest Word there.
Just because your resume looks good on true Microsoft Word, don't assume you're home free. View it with Open Office. Often the different fonts will bite you then. Though basically none of the headhunters will be using Linux to view your resume, they will be forwarding it to managers and engineers, many of whom will be Linux or Unix-based. Generally, I have found that the fonts on Linux are a little bigger than the ones on Windows, so a resume has to have about 5% empty space at the bottom of the page on Word to fit right on Open Office.
One thing a headhunter told me is to make sure that your contact info appears on every page of a printout of your resume. Many headhunters have a pile of unstapled printouts of resumes all over their desk (I think I would use a stapler if I were in their position, but we have to play the game their way) and the pages get mixed up and they have trouble telling which page belongs to whose resume.
Don't change your resume too often, when you overhaul it, spend days on it. You have to examine it very carefully for typos, typos will kill you. The spelling checkers don't understand the computer jargon and acronyms, it's really easy to get typos into your resume, and every time you make any change whatsoever, you have to check it looks good from Windows, and that it looks good from Open Office. If you don't have Open Office, you can download it for free here.

Job Boards

The places to post your resume to get results seem to be craigslist.org, Dice, Monster, Careerbuilder, and Hotjobs. Craigslist seemed to be the most widely read.
The main thing I have to offer is my extensive C/C++ background. Most job boards can't cope with a search for "C" and return all job listings that contain words containing the letter "c", so you have to look at lots of irrelevant jobs. Some object if the search string contains a "+" character, perhaps thinking it's a regular expression. Only Dice and Careerbuilder were able to search effectively for "C" or "C++" jobs.
Dice is particularly good in that you can narrow down your job search to specific telephone area codes. No other job board that I saw can do this.
I was able to set up Dice and Careerbuilder to deliver to me, every day, an email listing all the new jobs in C/C++ in certain geographic areas that I was looking for. This was very efficient in time usage.
A lot of robots scan job boards to harvest email addresses to spam with really stupid offers for work at home schemes, "resume blaster" services, and invitations to visit obscure job boards that don't really have any worthwhile jobs on them. When you start a job search, create a new email address that is forwarded to your regular email address. When you finish your job search, forward that email address into oblivion so your real email address will be unspammed by these parties in the future. In my text resume, I put spaces between every char of the email address to make it harder for the robots to harvest.

Editor

If you use soft keys in your editor, turn them off at the beginning of your job search so you get proficient at using your editor without them. You may be asked to write some code during the interview, and it probably won't be feasible to load your own softkeys into the editor.

Web Presence

Headhunters and HR departments now commonly google candidates to get the dirt on them. Article.
Visit your social networking sites, such as facebook, linkedin, and twitter, and make sure nothing that you don't want a headhunter to see is visible on those sites. Update the privacy settings so a stranger can see as little as possible.
Age: If you are a programmer over 40, headhunters will discriminate against you illegally and quite strongly. Make sure that neither your pictures nor your full birthday are visible to strangers on any social networking site. If you dropped some of your early career off of your resume, make sure it's not showing on linkedin either. Take the dates of your college degree off of linkedin.
Google yourself. See if anything unfortunate shows up, and if you can, clean it up.
One trick to make websites, such as your blog, ungooglable is to remove your full name from text everywhere, and have your full name be visible only on a picture.

Interviews

Always eat a big breakfast before interviews. You may need the energy, and you can't be sure what sort of lunch opportunity you're going to have. If you're in a strange town, the "Big Breakfast" at MacDonald's will do just fine.
Usually, they ask you if you would like a coke or something between each person you talk to. Always go for the coke so you'll be as awake as possible. Bring change to pay in case it's a vending machine. When I was interviewing at Amazon in Seattle, they didn't have a coke machine in the building, and at the end of the day I was getting exhausted and stumbled on this unbelievably basic question, something everybody learns in college, which I think cost me the job.
Always bring several copies of your resume with you. Often you show up and the engineer interviewing you has either a text version of your resume (which in my case is much harder to read than the Word version) or a horribly mangled version the headhunter has forwarded to him. It's good to be able to pull out a nicer resume and say "read this" and when I've done that they've always agreed that what I gave them was more usable than the headhunter's version. Plus it will have your contact info on it.

The God Assumption

2009-12-28T16:16:00.002-05:00

The Economist this week did a story about a new scientific research project called "Explaining Religion", which seeks to understand why religion is so ubiquitous among human societies. The article goes on to discuss how they are giving brain scans to pious and non-pious people, and analyzing various neurotransmitters and the role they may be playing.
I think it may be simpler than that.
Suppose that human beings are animals, created by evolution. It is clear that a nervous system as complex as a human's is capable of having detailed instructions programmed into it. Many species of cattle, possessing slightly simpler nervous systems, are able to stand up and walk, without training, within minutes of birth.
After a human being is born, it is trying to make some sense of the world. The faster it can do this, the less of a burden it will be to its parents, the sooner they can resume breeding, the sooner the individual can reach adulthood and being breeding itself. So having babies born with instincts that help them figure out the world would be a beneficial evolutionary trait.
One assumption that a baby could make is that the chaos surrounding it is controlled by an all-powerful, benevolent (or sometimes not-so benevolent) being, in many ways like the baby itself. If the baby makes this assumption and tries to establish a rapport with this benevolent being, it will sooner learn to communicate with its parent, a very constructive step. If humans are genetically programmed with this instinct, couldn't it reverberate through adulthood in efforts to establish contact with a cosmic almighty? Or, for that matter, in the popularity of conspiracy theories, the determination of so many college students in idle, unresearched bull-sessions to believe that everything that happens in political or economic spheres is determined by a small group in a smoke-filled room somewhere?

Book Review: Godless, by Ann Coulter

2009-12-28T16:11:00.003-05:00

Ann Coulter's style is engaging, inflammatory, and entertaining. Her work is filled with jokes, and she often goes over the top, sometimes spiraling into crass tastelessness. But she is never boring.
She loves to attack, and she loves to get personal. She never tires of talking about Bill Clinton's sex life or Ted Kennedy's driving record (nearly 4 decades after the fact).
Coulter spends a lot of time in her books discussing obscure court cases. I think there are a couple of reasons for this - as an ex-law student, she is genuinely interested in the subject. But it is also a great source of ammunition - the book was written after 5 years of the Bush administration, which she has no desire to attack, and there are so many court decisions going on at any time that it is easy to cherry pick lunatic examples to criticize.
Coulter only operates in the negative. The closest she comes to saying anything nice is defending people she likes by attacking their attackers. This is not a good book to turn a liberal into a conservative, because she never proposes conservative solutions or describes how a policy she believes in will work. By contrast, in The Truth (with jokes), her nemesis Al Franken spends a whole chapter talking about how life would because paradise if only Democrats could get elected.
I've never seen Coulter mention Franken. Maybe she's afraid of him. But I haven't read most of her books.

Coulter's book starts off on the subject of crime. She blames the escalating crime rates of the sixties and seventies on liberal criminal-coddling, especially by the Warren court, such as in the famous Miranda decision. To the argument made in Freakonomics that legalized abortion resulted in a drop in crime right around the time the aborted children would have reached criminal age, she points out that this does not explain the increase in crime prior to Roe vs Wade. She gives Republican New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani complete credit for the drop in crime in NYC. Unfortunately, she doesn't describe what exactly he did - as someone who moved to New York after, and partly because of, that drop in crime, I would've been interested to hear more detail, but Coulter doesn't really enjoy praising anybody in detail. Also, she says crime rate dropped dramatically in Rudy's first year in office - if it was really his doing, wouldn't it have taken longer than that for his policies to have the desired effect?

She then spends a whole chapter discussing Willie Horton. Willie Horton was a famous murderer rapist who became a big campaign issue in the 1988 presidential election. Because I am middle aged and have lived most of my life in liberal territory, I had heard the liberal side of the story, accusing the Bush Sr. campaign of pandering to voter racism, many times. Coulter does an excellent job of cutting the liberal case to shreds, establishing that the Willie Horton case really did reflect on candidate Michael Dukakis's attitude toward crime, that Willie Horton, as a murderer sentenced to life without parole, should never have been furloughed and would not have been eligible for parole in any state but Massachusetts, where he was only eligible for parole because of a veto by governor Dukakis, and that most of the TV commercials discussing Horton did not even show Horton's face or discuss the fact that he was black. So, to that extent, good work, Ann. But isn't this issue a little old to be spending a whole chapter on in a book published in 2006?

She moves on to Roe vs Wade. She says many times that what's at stake is the right of women to "have casual sex with men they don't especially like". I think this is a major part of the issue, and it's a way that liberals don't like it framed. She also pokes fun at the pro-abortion side's fondness for euphemisms, how they always talk about "choice" and avoid the worth "abortion". But I had long observed that the anti-abortion people were just as bad, always using the term "life". Neither side of that debate wants to use the term "abortion", I feel the issue is the extreme case of one where each side insists on using their own vocabulary to the point where you can hardly tell they are talking about the same thing. Coulter points out that abortion is not just a women's issue, most abortion doctors are men, and many men are pro-abortion because they want women to be at liberty to have casual sex with them.
At one point she attacks some liberal newspaper that ran a story pointing out that the word "abortion" never occurs in the Bible. She quotes Ex 20:13 "Thou shalt not kill" as her entire scriptural case that God doesn't approve of the practice. How totally lame, coming from someone who, two chapters before, was raving about the virtues of capital punishment, and who obviously has no problem with killing Taliban. Also, if she does actually read the Bible that much (it's really not that clear she does), she would have found, 3 books later, by the same author, Deut 20:16-17 "However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them; namely, the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites; as the LORD your God has commanded you.". My take on reading the Old Testament is that "Thou shalt not kill" was intended by its author, and understood for centuries afterward, to mean "Thou shalt not kill Jews". So as long as the aborted fetus is of Gentile descent, the almighty will not be offended.
Coulter also completely fails to address the argument that a fetus is not yet a human being, any more than is a sperm or an ovum, and therefore not entitled to the same moral protection, though if she did read the Bible, she might point to Luke 1:41-44.
So Coulter, alleged super-Christian, fails to even build a good scriptural case against abortion.
Coulter also fails to make the argument that a believer might make, that if a woman is pregnant, it's because God wanted that to happen. One could then counter that if an abortion occurs, then God similarly must have wished for that as well.
She never discusses pregnancies due to rape or incest.
But Coulter also totally missed the central feminist reason for wanting abortion - if a woman wants to develop a career, or get advanced degrees, is it reasonable to expect her to remain celibate that whole time? No birth control method is 100% reliable (I know someone who got pregnant after having her tubes tied). For birth control to be effective, abortion is a necessary backup. Abortion is necessary to having more empowered women, and I would really be interested in hearing what Coulter, a strong woman with quite a career, has to say about that.

The next chapter was interesting, I had heard quite a bit of it in the media, stories denouncing Coulter for this. It's about free speech.
Just because you won't get thrown in jail for saying something doesn't mean you have free speech. Society will punish you so severely for saying some things that you will wish that all you had suffered was a jail sentence. Liberals love to limit free speech, and one tactic they have adopted in recent years is putting forward bereaved people, like Cindy Sheehan, the mother of an Iraqi war casualty, as spokespeople. Because Sheehan has suffered a terrible loss, it is considered unacceptable to criticize her. Sheehan then proceeds to utter statements like Bush is "the biggest terrorist in the world" and the US Government is "a morally repugnant system" and "this country is not worth dying for". Coulter wants to know, at what point is this person fair game? She says "After your third profile on Entertainment Tonight, you're no longer a grieving mom, you're a C-list celebrity trolling for a book deal or a reality show".
She moves on to talking about the "Jersey Girls", several wives bereaved by 9/11, who were wanting to investigate whether Bush could have prevented 9/11.
I never followed this story closely - it seems to me that, given that our enemies are so treacherous and low that they will come here disguised as peaceful civilians, one of them, in 1993, participating in a terrorist attack attempting to kill tens of thousands of civilians after having taken an oath of loyalty to the US when becoming a US citizen, and a context where the US had been immigrating more people than all other countries in the world combined, without discrimination against terrorism-prone ethnicities, while Al-Qaeda had declared war on us and trained 10,000 terrorists in Afghanistan, it just seems to me that a slaughter was inevitable.
Coulter talks about the August 6, 2001 PDB (Presidential Daily Brief), a confidential (now declassified) memo that liberals claim tipped off the administration that 9/11 was going to happen, and claim that the administration ignored it and could have prevented 9/11 had they paid heed. Coulter bitterly criticizes they New York Times (she's always criticizing that paper) for not publishing the document in its entirety. Well, Ann, since you've got a whole book and not just a newspaper, why didn't you print the whole thing? Coulter claims, as did Condoleeza Rice, that the document said nothing new, that it did not contain information that specifically warned of anything like the type of attack that occurred (hijacking planes and turning them into Kamikazes), and this time she's totally right. I found it on the web, it's less than a page and a half, right here.
After this subject, she moves on to another sacred cow, Valerie Plame. Coulter doesn't make a very convincing case here. She's in her element dragging the name of Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame's husband, through the mud and painting him as a loser and a nobody, but her argument that the administration's disclosure of her status as a CIA employee (Coulter claims she was not an undercover agent) was justified because it was relevant that Wilson only got to go to Africa on the CIA's behalf because his wife in the CIA wangled him the job. I don't think that justifies the disclosure, that's really a stretch.
Coulter moves on to talking about Democrat Vietnam Vets, and how wrong it is that nobody is allowed to attack these guys (which she promptly proceeds to do). But if free speech is what Coulter wants, how about the conservative limitations on free speech, like "No one is allowed to criticize the commander-in-chief once he gets us in a war", or "Anyone who opposes any US military action, future or past, is a traitor"? How about "It's wrong to question the virtue of any religion"?. How about the popular conservative refrain, whenever someone suggests we adopt some successful practice from another country "Why don't you shut up and move to that country?"?. One reason the Democrats keep fielding weeping widows and veterans as spokespeople is that the conservatives have excluded everybody else from the debate! And Coulter herself is very guilty of this - one of her books (which I haven't read) is titled "Treason".
I think there are way too many limitations on free speech in the American political scene, by both the left and the right. My solution to it is that personal attacks are to be frowned upon and we should attempt to discuss whatever the topic is on its merits, but I really don't think that's what Coulter wants, because it would exclude at least 80% of her material.
(News flash: Yesterday (August 10th 2007), Cindy Sheehan announced she will run for office against Democratic majority leader Nancy Pelosi unless Pelosi impeaches Bush like Sheehan wants her to. I guess if Schwartznegger can do it, why can't she? I predict that if she does run, she will be able to raise a lot of campaign contributions from Republicans who would love to see one of their most skilled adversaries replaced by a weeping mom).

The next chapter isn't very long or very good. She makes a pretty strong case that teachers are quite well paid, but spends the whole chapter insulting them in every way she can. She points out that teachers molest children at a higher rate than do priests, but I think that's partly because priests, unlike teachers, spend a large proportion of their time with the elderly adults who hang around church because they want to be reassured they will go to heaven when they die. True to form, Coulter never makes any positive suggestions about how education in the US should be reformed, preferring to stick to the negative. To my surprise, she never really talks much about the teachers' union, nor does she discuss vouchers.

In the next chapter, she discusses the many ways that liberals dislike science.
She talks a lot about IQ, and how liberals have scientifically unsupported dogmatic positions about how it doesn't really exist, isn't really genetic, and isn't affected by race & gender. She says Christians are more open-minded to opinions about IQ because "we don't think humans are special because we are smart. There may be some advantages to being intelligent, but a lot of liberals appear to have high IQs, so, really, what's the point?". She points out that "It's difficult to have a simple conversation, much less engage in free-ranging, open scientific inquiry, when liberals are constantly rushing in with their rule book about what can and cannot be said.".
She castigates liberal elements of the media for stressing that AIDS is every bit as much a heterosexual disease as a gay disease, resulting in AIDS hotlines being overwhelmed with calls from hysterical heterosexuals. She says it was determined in 2004 that 70% of AIDS cases were from homosexual transmission, with only 13% alleged to be through heterosexual contact. She also points out that many people who got it through homosexual transmission will lie and claim to have gotten it heterosexually, but not the reverse. So liberal concerns about stigmatizing gays prevailed over accurate transmission of medical information.
She discusses when Harvard president Larry Summers commented that women might have different levels of academic talent than men "Some of the women paired off and went to the ladies' room to discuss possible responses. Others went on eating binges. Most chose to just sit there sobbing. A quick show of hands revealed that every woman in attendance needed a hug. The Best in Show award went to MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins, who told the Washington Post 'I felt I was going to be sick.' She continued, 'My heart was pounding and my breath was shallow.' (Some might describe Hopkins's response to Summer's remarks as 'womanish'). Hopkins told the Boston Globe she had to flee the room because otherwise she 'would've either blacked out or thrown up'".
Coulter continues "Can anyone imaging evangelicals behaving this way if someone mentioned evolution? ... Only the feminists can behave like children with so little reflection.". Later she says "If Summers's milquetoast remarks caused fainting and nausea in the ladies, they should hear what I think about women's genetic endowments! They'd have me burned at the stake -- if Cambridge weren't a 'smoke-free zone'".
Coulter goes on to discuss how trial lawyers, including presidential candidate Edwards, distort science to get astronomical rewards from corporations in lawsuits.
She discusses stem cells, claiming that embryonic stem-cells are a long way from curing anything, while adult stem-cells have cured many diseases. I find this hard to believe, but I'm not a biologist.
She says "What's so disarming about the Left's pretend interest in 'science' is that they have the audacity to shut down debate in the name of "science." Science is the study of the world as it exists, which, to their constant annoyance, is not he world liberals would like it to be. Liberals are personally offended that AIDS virus seems to discriminate against gays. So they lie about it. They are sad that IQ is not infinitely malleable but has a genetic component. So the lie about it (and denounce people who tell the truth as racists). They are angry that men and women have different innate abilities. So they lie about it (also cry and stamp their feet)."

She goes on to discuss evolution, for several chapters. "Liberals' creation myth is Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which is one notch above Scientology in scientific rigor.".
She spends a lot of time on the standard claim that transitional forms have not been found in the fossil record. I find this unpersuasive - if one found a fossil halfway between two species, a creationist could just claim that the fossil is from a third species. The only way to prove it was a transitional form would be to show that it could interbreed with both of the neighboring species, but that they couldn't breed with each other, a difficult experiment to perform on fossils. However, with living creatures such experiments can be performed. Armadillos from north Texas can't interbreed with those from south Texas, but both can interbreed with those from mid Texas, making mid Texas armadillos a transitional form between northern and southern ones. But Coulter stresses at great length that not a single transitional form has ever been discovered.
She complains that evolution is a tautology that cannot be disproved, that evolutionists will not discard it regardless of how much evidence against it is provided, instead, they just keep changing the theory. I don't think that's true. For me, evolution makes many predictions about the world that are true. If someone presents me with another theory that does a better job of making as many accurate predictions and has fewer flaws, I think I would adopt that theory.
Coulter does the standard creationist tactic of attacking evolution as imperfect, but never comparing it to any alternative. A theory does not have to be perfect to be accepted. It just has to make predictions that are true, and do a better job of this than any competing theory. Is the Bible really a more accurate discussion of the past? It says the universe is about ten thousand years old or less. How then, do we explain the stars in the sky that appear to be much further than 10,000 light-years away? The Grand Canyon sure looks like something created by millions of years of water erosion, and that's what most geologists say it is. The Bible says, in 1 Kings 7:23, that pi is 3. I measured a circle once, you have to do it very carefully, but it was definitely more than 3. The Bible has myriad inconsistencies, which you can google or read a list here. Evolution does not have anywhere near so many flaws, or such serious flaws.
Coulter, to her credit, is apparently not a young earth creationist, and she bitterly attacks evolutionists for painting all creationists as young earth creationists. But she never says exactly what she is. This is partly because that is standard operating procedure for creationists, and partly because she is just a very negative person who prefers to attack others rather than promote any specific belief.
If God were going to write a book, couldn't He have done a better job than the Bible? Really.
She says that one can be a Christian and believe that God used evolution to create life, but an atheist needs evolution. I don't think that is true. I think there are many magnificent things about the world that I have not explained, and that would therefore tempt one to believe they were intelligently designed, but that would leave me with a question: how was this even more magnificent creator created? Postulating the existence of this creator would just leave me with a bigger unanswered question than saying "I don't know" to the original question. At the same time, one cannot be a fundamentalist Christian and believe in evolution. If you are going to believe the Bible is literally true, you have to be a young-earth creationist.
She says some really dumb things about we have not observed creatures evolving within the past couple of centuries.
She complains about how scientists who give any credit to creationists get ostracized from the scientific community. This may be true.
She spends a lot of time discussing how the Scopes trial happened, and that it was all really a publicity stunt and a sham, nothing like how it's been portraying in many movies. I didn't see those movies, so I don't really care.
She talks about how the Nazis liked evolution. This is interesting. Shortly after denouncing the Left for it's hostility to talking about genetics and IQ because they fear a slippery slope to eugenics, she applies exactly the same tactic to denounce evolution. I find this unpersuasive. The Nazis believed 2+2 = 4, too, but I'm not going to quit believing it.
Similarly, we can see how nuclear physics led to the atom bomb. The atom bomb was really horrible. Should we therefore conclude that nuclear physics is scientifically inaccurate? As Coulter so recently pointed out, science is supposed to show us the world as it is, not how we want it to be. If you don't want to commit atrocities, then don't commit atrocities. I don't see how believing lies is necessary to achieve that. Personally, I think that people who make a habit of lying to themselves are much more likely to do terrible things.
Coulter describes the Nazi holocaust (which she says is a consequence of believing in evolution) as "the first genocide in recorded history". What an idiot! What about the Armenians, and the American Indians, and the many genocides in the Old Testament that the Jews committed, sometimes with God performing miracles to help them do it (ever hear of a place called "Jericho"?)?
She blames Stalinism on evolution - that's a stretch. Stalin was a monster, but no big evolutionist. The Left believes in evolution just long enough to get God out of the picture, they really don't have the stomach for the part about evolutionary progress depending upon the death of the weak -- leftism is generally very enthusiastic about being nice to the weak. Also, believing that evolution was how we got here and thinking that we should take murderous measures to accelerate it are two entirely different things. Stalin's murderous rampages weren't based on eugenics, they were based on a ruthless drive for personal power. People say he was paranoid, but I'm not sure he was -- if I'd been a Russian those days, I would have wanted him dead.
She then has some fun talking about loony animal rights activists.

If you buy this book, be sure to get it new, because there's an afterword that she wrote a year after publishing the rest of the book. It's pretty funny. She just talks about the media response to her book, and her disappointment with how many of her attempts to shock failed to provoke a response. For example, no one really complained about her calling liberals "Godless". Not a peep about that. "The fact that liberals are Godless is not even controversial any more.". Hillary Clinton made no complaints about Coulter calling her husband a rapist. Coulter goes on to complain that some of her valid points, like the irrelevancy of the August 6 PDB, have been ignored. But face it Coulter, you're a comedian, not a philosopher, people don't take you seriously. You're a conservative, female shock jock in print.

Movie Review: Capitalism: A Love Story

2009-12-28T16:02:00.002-05:00

Capitalism: A Love Story
by Michael Moore

I saw this movie with a woman who did not normally read the business news, and her reaction was that Moore only showed negative consequences, he did not explain how things happened. I agree that Moore's intention was to incite class hatred, rather than to inform. It was two hours of non-stop vilification.

A few things:

Pilot Pay:

Moore went on and on about how little airline pilots are paid. The fact he quoted was that beginning pilots on American Eagle are paid $20K a year.

Lots of people want to be pilots, the pay if you're flying a large plane is reasonable to good, but you have to log a lot of hours to be qualified to do that. To get those hours, you have to work many years for practically nothing as a flight instructor or flying small planes, basically as an apprenticeship. Eventually an experienced captain of a jumbo jet will make over $200K. Moore doesn't talk about that -- the fact that he raves about the low pay of beginning pilots without mentioning the high pay of experienced pilots is such a grave omission that it's basically a lie, or at least a major distortion. Source on pilot's pay: http://www.fool.com/community/pod/2000/000522.htm

Foreclosures:

He spends 20-30 minutes on this one couple being evicted from a farm in the Midwest they'd lived on for 40 years. A few questions come to mind: if they'd been there for 40 years, why wasn't the farm paid off? Most mortgages are for 30 years. If they'd taken out huge equity loans on the farm, then it wasn't their farm any more, was it? Lots of people would like to live on a farm, but they have to live in apartments or trailers to make ends meet. If this couple was finding themselves strapped for cash, they should have sold the farm and moved into cheaper accommodations rather that just sitting there waiting to be foreclosed upon.

The Wayne County Sheriff

The movie covers the announcement by the Wayne County sheriff (Wayne County includes a major part of Detroit) that he would no longer evict anybody from houses that were being foreclosed upon. Michael Moore depicted the guy as a hero, a role model for other law enforcement officers to follow.

If no one could be evicted when foreclosed upon, no one would have any incentive to pay their mortgages. If I was a bank, I would take note of the sheriff's actions and stop making any home loans to anyone for a house in Wayne County. If the banks did this, which they should, it would become impossible for anyone in Wayne County to sell their house.

Banks don't foreclose upon people just to be mean. Foreclosure is a necessary part of the system. It is interesting that Moore puts no responsibility on all the people who borrowed money that they weren't going to be able to pay back.

The devastation of Michigan:

There was a feeling of deja vu for those of us who had seen "Roger & Me" as he spent a lot of time talking about how the Michigan auto industry was devastated. It never seems to occur to Moore that the reason Michigan's auto industry got so wiped out was that aggressive unions had undermined its global competitiveness.

Priests:

Moore interviews a lot of clergy who tell us how profoundly "evil" capitalism is. Interestingly, he does not interview any Evangelicals, only Catholic priests.

I do not disagree, however, that Jesus had a negative attitude toward the wealthy. He lived centuries before anyone said anything intelligent about economics. He thought the end of world was going to happen in a very short time, so he was not the least bit concerned about productivity or job creation. Pretty much everything he said about economics was counterproductive. Catholics are more faithful to Jesus's messages about economics than Protestants, there was a re-thinking about the subject in the Protestant Reformation called the "Protestant Work Ethic" that reconsidered these values and resulted in a great increase in productivity in the Protestant countries.

The Clown:

Moore spends a lot of time interviewing some red-headed bearded guy who I didn't recognize and who I don't remember being introduced. He said that Wall street served no productive function, in fact their function was totally destructive. He said Obama's Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner had been a screw up in every job he'd had before nomination, and that Geithner's only qualification was a willingness to tell his bosses whatever they wanted to hear, however absurd. I was really wondering who this clown was, and what his qualifications were, other than a willingness to tell Moore whatever he wanted to hear, however absurd.

Having followed the business news, it was amazing to hear that Geithner was so unqualified. Wall Street was quite happy with him -- if Obama had picked someone unqualified for such an important position at such a crucial time, there would have been a lot of alarm about it in the marketplace and in the news.

Wall Street's function is not "totally destructive". It is where decisions are made about which companies are going to survive and which are going to fail.

Derivatives:

Moore asserts that derivatives are "deliberately difficult to understand to avoid regulation" and interviews some boob who can't coherently explain what an option is. I can assure you, the people who trade in derivatives generally understand them, it's very unwise to trade in derivatives you don't understand. I've been paid handsomely with stock options, it's an excellent way to provide incentives to workers in a start-up.

The Advisors:

Moore makes a big deal talking about how much money many of the economic advisors had been paid prior to being appointed, as though that were a disqualification for office. I want the best financial minds in the world in those jobs, and one sign of being one of the best financial minds in the world is having made millions of dollars.

Moore extensively vilifies Goldman-Sachs, and makes a big deal of the fact that Henry Paulson, Bush's Treasury Secretary, and many of his advisors, worked there. For one thing, Goldman-Sachs came through the housing bubble better than any of the other big banks and was the least in need of being bailed out. For another, there's nothing wrong with people who've worked in the private sector taking jobs in government.

Vikram Pandit:

Vikram Pandit, the CEO of Citigroup, was among the bankers vilified by this movie. Pandit did not assume control of Citigroup until AFTER his predecessors had made a mess of it, and he is currently being paid $1 a year in compensation.

The Bailout:

Moore really goes out on a limb, saying there really was no financial emergency, there was no risk of the economy sliding into a depression, it was all a hoax concocted by Bush to justify the bailout and thereby steal taxpayer's dollars. This is totally disconnected from reality.

For one thing, much of the bailout money has been returned to the government at this point, so if it was theft, it wasn't a very effective way to steal. For another, the bailout was terrible news for the Republicans -- it all but guaranteed a victory for the Democrats in the elections, both presidential and congressional, whereas before it, McCain had a fighting chance. Most of the resistance to the bailout in congress came from Republicans. Moore interviews some female congresswoman, a blithering idiot, who said it was very "suspicious" that the whole thing happened so shortly before an election. I don't see how being before an election HELPED pass the bailout, when 90% of the phone calls congress was receiving about the measure were against it. The congressmen voted AGAINST what their constituents were overwhelmingly telling them to do. They did it because the alternative was to be eventually held responsible for disaster. When Fed chairman Ben Bernanke announced the need for the bailout to a bunch of congressmen, one of the first questions they asked was "Can't this wait until after the election?".

For that matter, if the bailout was an evil Republican plot, why did Obama vote for it?

Suburban Public Transport

2009-12-28T15:41:00.001-05:00

Description of Problem

A large share of the residential neighborhoods of the United States consist of suburbs, which have very low population density, consisting of one or two story residential buildings with lawns. Among the adult residents of these neighborhoods, car ownership is nearly unanimous, public transportation in these areas being of extremely poor quality, consisting of routes that are very far apart, with vehicles that come extremely infrequently, and most of these public transport systems are utterly dependent upon government assistance to exist since they are completely unprofitable.

Having every adult in the population own and drive a car is not a sustainable situation for the coming decades. It involves a high use of energy, and the preferred form of energy used for operating automobiles is the combustion of liquid fossil fuels, which 1) has negative implications for global warming, 2) has negative implications for smog, 3) will run into serious problems as oil reserves get depleted just as the developing world increases its appetite for these fuels, 4) involves a dependency upon a few countries that, in recent years at least, the United States has not been getting along with very well.

It is possible that the US could be in for a rude awakening, due to some sort of political change such as a nuclear-armed Iran taking over the Persian Gulf, or the collapse of the House of Saud, sending oil prices to hundreds of dollars per barrel and many Americans suddenly finding it cost-ineffective to get to work. We need to change our transportation system, and the sooner the better.

In some American cities such as New York, particularly Manhattan, population density is high enough that high-quality public transport is possible (though it still needs government subsidies). However, as energy and environmental issues become more pressing, it would be extremely economically painful to massively move the population into cities, abandoning a fortune in suburban real estate. Since the peak in 2006, real estate prices have dropped 20% in this country, and that drop is destroying our financial system. If all the suburban real estate were to be abandoned, thereby losing 95% of its value, the economic consequences would be much more dire.

Unacceptability of Current Alternatives to Passenger-Owned Cars

In a typical American suburb, a consumer has to walk a very long way to get to a bus stop going in a desired direction, and then wait a very long time for the next bus to arrive. Rarely is the consumer lucky enough that a single bus route stops both at the start and end of his trip, he has to take multiple buses, waiting something like a half hour for each one.

With trains the problem of buses is exacerbated since special tracks are required, and a train is as big as many buses, so the tracks are even further apart than bus lines and the trains come less frequently.

With taxis, the expense of the driver is very great for a given amount of transportation, even though the driver is often working ridiculously long hours for very little pay. In addition, cities often severely limit the number of taxi licenses issued, resulting in major areas (like all burroughs of New York except Manhattan) being completely underserved. In a place like Manhattan, a consumer can hail a cab from the curb (at least on the right street, in the right neighborhood). In a suburb, that option is totally unavailable, one must call a cab company and wait for a cab to come pick one up, which typically takes a long time. Taxis are generally an extremely expensive way to get around.

It is generally understood by American suburban dwellers that it is so difficult to survive without a car that only really, really poor people even try. People who've had their licenses revoked usually drive illegally, people who can't afford insurance drive without it.

Part of the reason public transport is so bad in suburbia is that almost no one is using it, making the effective population density of actual public transport riders much, much lower that the density of the total population. If an acceptable public transport system could draw a critical mass of customers, the response time of the service would improve, resulting in a virtuous cycle of "improved service begets increased ridership begets improved service ...".

Desirability of Larger Vehicles

Larger vehicles are more economic and energy efficient than smaller ones. At highway speeds, most of the energy expended by a car is in the form of air friction. A bus has less air friction than enough cars to carry all the passengers in it, and the air friction a train encounters is negligible compared with that encountered by enough cars to carry its load. Also, larger vehicles need fewer drivers per rider carried. The technology for large transit vehicles exists and is well-developed.

The Last Mile Problem

It would be nice to be able to get everybody in large efficient vehicles to get efficiently to their destination, but these large vehicles can't stop at each rider's start and destination. Getting everybody that "last mile" to and from their thinly spread-out homes is key -- if we can solve that problem, we can then get people within reach of trunk lines of efficient, large-scale transportation that we know how to do well. Solving the "last mile problem" is key.

Jitneys or Shared Taxis

In the United States, "jitneys", also known as shared taxis, that is cabs carrying several independent passengers, were quite popular in the early 20th century, but were mostly banned due to pressure from public transportation monopolies. In many places, particularly the third world, shared cabs are today quite popular. Due to low wages in the third world, the cost of the driver is low, and due to the vehicles being small, the routes are close together and vehicles come frequently, providing very good service at a low price. More on Share Taxis

Computer-Routed Jitneys

Computer navigation systems are now quite common in cars, the technology is very well-developed. It should be possible for a rider to call a dispatching service that knows the location of all of a fleet of jitneys, which would issue orders to one of the jitneys that is near the rider and has a spare seat to deviate from its route to pick up the rider and take them toward their destination. The jitneys would follow no fixed routes, but roam about the suburb following orders from the dispatching service. The jitneys could go directly to addresses rather than riders having to congregate at stops. The driver would not know the details of where the jitney is going to go, he would just follow short-term instructions from the navigation system which is being driven by the dispatching computer.

Requesting a ride will be particularly easy because so much of the population already has cell phones, and most cell phones have GPS receivers in them, which could be incorporated into the system, so a rider would call the dispatcher and the dispatcher could instantly see from the GPS where the rider was, then needing to find out only where the rider wanted to go. More advanced phones such as iPhones and Blackberries could have efficient interfaces for requesting rides to favorite destinations, simplifying the process and cutting down on the expense of operators. Riders could also request rides from computers at home or at work.

Multiple-Vehicle Routing

There is no reason one would have to spend an entire trip in a single vehicle. You could be picked up near your home by a jitney, dropped off at a train station or bus stop, then ride the train or bus express 40 miles at high speed with few stops, then take a jitney the last 2 miles to your destination. So most of your trip is done efficiently, at high speed, with fewer stops.

If you're not in a hurry, you could get a cheaper cost ride for short distances by taking multiple jitneys. For an oversimplified example, if you were going about 6 miles northwest and most of the traffic in your neighborhood was east-west and north-south, you could catch one jitney 4 miles west, be dropped at a corner, and picked up by another jitney headed north which will take you to your destination.

If a large amount of the traffic were to eventually shift from driving their own cars to riding this public transit system, we could find ourselves in a situation where most of the freeway traffic is people riding in buses and jitneys, resulting in far fewer vehicles on the freeway for less congestion.

Computer-Driven Vehicles

Because a jitney carries many more passengers than a taxicab but many fewer than a bus, the cost of the driver is less problematic than for a taxi driver, but still much more problematic than for a bus or a train driver. If the jitney drivers are paid as poorly as NYC cab drivers, who I am told work 72 hour weeks, cheat on their taxes, and then take home only $20,000 a year, well, that's just gross. If they are paid as well as NYC subway drivers, who are paid $55,000 a year and retire with half-pay at 55 years old, the cost of the jitney service would be prohibitive.

The technology for computer-driven vehicles is getting fairly mature. In 2007, DARPA held an event called the Urban Challenge where university teams built unmanned, robot-driven autonomous vehicles driving a through streets in a neighborhood (actually an abandoned military base) with other traffic and traffic signals. Six vehicles successfully completed the course. Computer-driven jitneys could be an extremely cheap way to get riders around. When traffic is limited, jitneys could just park somewhere, turn off the engine, and wait for someone to want a ride. It could still take a few years before computer drivers are good enough that we will want to trust them driving around suburban neighborhoods with children and pedestrians in the streets.

Evolution of the System and Political Considerations

Evolution, not Revolution

Generally it is vastly preferable, with any new idea, to start small, prove the concept, learn from experience, and grow, rather than make a sudden change. It is unnecessary to plan a scenario where everyone junks their cars and starts riding jitneys overnight. Some people will really like their cars and want to continue using them. Also, raising initial funding a system capable of assuming the entire load of a suburb would be a huge problem.

The biggest reason that people have resistance to this whole idea is that they think I am proposing that everyone will abandon their cars and rely 100% on computer-routed jitneys overnight, and that if that doesn't happen, the entire idea is a failure. This idea is a success if one can make a computer-routed jitney company profitable, and my assertion is that such a company could be profitable anywhere a taxi company is profitable, which, right now, is basically everywhere. If one has a company with 30 jitneys operating in a suburb sprawl of a million people, it can move 0.001% of the people there more cheaply than a taxi company with 30 cabs, and make a profit. It will, at that point, be able to sustain itself and grow to carrying an increasing proportion of the area's total transit load.

No Monopolies

There is no reason the jitney service has to be given a monopoly, We have benefited from allowing UPS and FedEx to compete with the post office, we have multiple cellphone companies operating in the same areas, we have multiple cable TV and internet companies serving the same neighborhoods, we have multiple long-distance bus lines in this country. Competition will serve the customer better than imposing a monopoly. Some services might specialize in providing the cheapest service, while others might provide a higher-quality of service, perhaps ensuring faster delivery by taking fewer riders per vehicle, or providing more comfortable seating.

Customers could also negotiate different price schedules -- for a higher price, the computer will place a higher priority on assigning a jitney to deviate to pick you up, and put fewer co-travelers on that jitney since stopping to pick them up / drop them off will slow you down on your way. People could thus gauge how much of a hurry they're in and decide whether to save time or money on a given trip.

Proof of Concept

Government is mostly an obstacle to this change. It was government that killed the jitneys in the early 20th century, many public transport systems have legal monopolies, and to implement this idea nationwide will cost billions of dollars of legal fees. The main strategy should be to prove the concept in areas where regulation is lax to nonexistent, and then other localities will want the benefit of the service and that will drive the necessary political and legal change.

We have lots of large suburban areas in this country. To prove the concept of the computer-dispatch jitney, it would be best to find an area that does not have a public transportation monopoly that is going to provide legal barriers to entry. New York City is out of the question.

One ideal way to get a foothold is doing "para transit". In many cities the government provides para transit, a subsidized taxi service for people who are medically unable to drive, such as blind people or epileptics. Computerized jitneys could enormously enhance the quality of service provided by these services, while providing developers a chance to get the bugs out of the system before they have to achieve the efficiency necessary for profit-making competition. In New York, an eligible rider can get a para transit ride for $2 each way, but they have to reserve a day or two in advance. Computer routing could greatly reduce the lead time between making a reservation and being picked up.

Once the technology is fully developed and the concept has been proven, I anticipate it will spread to other markets. For example, in NYC, taxis have a legal monopoly while, for stupid political reasons, the number of permits for cabs is kept so low that only Manhattan and the airports are serviced, leaving Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx virtually without cabs. I think once the effectiveness of computerized jitneys has been established in other cities in the country, there will be no way to prevent the voters of the outer burroughs from voting to allow this sort of service in their neighborhoods.

Early Adopters

One argument I hear against this idea is that people like their cars. They aren't going to give them up easily. The answer to that is simple -- 150 years ago, people really liked their horses, and many people preferred animals to machines. But in the end, nearly everyone gave up their horses, not all at once, but slowly they did.

I feel that while many people absolutely love their cars, for many people owning a car is a big hassle. Many people, especially women, feel helpless taking their car to a mechanic because they fear being taken advantage of. And it's not a groundless fear. The median income in the US is about $43,000, with 20% of the population earning less than $18,000. Brand new, the cheapest cars sell for about $12,000 plus sales tax. Many people are afraid to buy used cars because they are not competent to deal with problems a used car may have, so buying and insuring a car is an enormous expense for a lot of people. If a cheap public transport alternative were available, many people will jump at the chance to use it.

Other than the poor, there are people who want to go out drinking sometimes yet are responsible enough not to want to drive home drunk. People medically unfit for driving, the blind, the elderly, epileptics, would all benefit greatly from this service, as would people too young to drive.

Resistance to Computer Drivers

There are a lot of people who drive vehicles for a living, and many of them are in unions, meaning they can organize themselves politically very easily. They will fight the introduction of computer driven vehicles to our roadways with everything they have. Another problem is that while computers won't make some mistakes human drivers will (for example, they will never drive drunk), they will have accidents of a sort that human drivers generally won't have. Lives will be lost, and it will be difficult to sell that to the public as an acceptable sacrifice. For example, the BART subway system in California originally had robot drivers in the '70's, until a robot malfunctioned, speeding a train up when it should have been slowing it down so that it crashed through the barriers at the end of the line. Ever since, BART trains all have drivers.