When catharsis becomes an end to itself

Ed Kilgore does a good job summarizing an important aspect of the GOP convention.

On Wednesday night, Team Trump deliberately provoked what can only be described as a lose-lose confrontation with Ted Cruz that created a nasty and divisive scene overshadowing the maiden speech of the vice-presidential nominee. With each such decision, you get the impression the people in charge of this convention have forgotten that the real "arena" is the general election, and that their real audience is an electorate far beyond this bowl seething with unaccountably angry delegates.

Otherwise it's hard to credit the constant, interminable, over-the-top feeding of red meat to the crowd, beginning with Willie Robertson's first-night taunting of people who are not "real Americans." It may be understandable that speakers are tempted to interact with the people on the floor howling for Hillary Clinton's incarceration, but the job of convention managers is to remind them that these people are TV props — ignore them and remember the whole world's watching!

It's almost as though the Trump people are treating the convention as the culmination of the mogul's campaign: an opportunity to glory in their extremely unlikely conquest of one of America's two major parties, to gloat over the shattered Establishment that's being forced to accept them, and to shake their fists at the unbelievers who still mock their orange-tinted champion. That there is still a difficult election ahead and that this convention is a priceless earned-media opportunity to reach out beyond their own ranks seems to be lost on this wild show's organizers and participants.

This unwillingness or inability to shift the focus from the base to a broader audience is something we've been discussing for a long time. Here's a representative post from last year.

Planned Parenthood, channeled information and catharsis

This recent TPM post about the looming government shut-down ties in with a couple of ideas we've discussed before. [Emphasis added]

Facing a Sept. 30 deadline to fund the government, GOP leaders in both chambers decided they would fast-track standalone anti-abortion bills in an effort to allow conservative Republicans to express their anger over a series of “sting” videos claiming to show that Planned Parenthood is illegally harvesting the tissue of aborted fetuses. The leadership hoped that with those votes out of the way, the path would be clear for long-delayed bills to fund the government in the new fiscal year, even if those bills contained money for Planned Parenthood.

But anti-abortion groups and conservative House members are not backing down from their hard line. They are reiterating that they will not vote for bills that include Planned Parenthood funding under any circumstances, despite the maneuvering by leaders to vent their outrage over the videos. If anything, anti-abortion groups are amping up the pressure on lawmakers not to back down from the fight.

Here's what we had to say about the GOP reaction to those videos a month ago.

Fetal tissue research will make most people uncomfortable, even those who support it. If you were a Republican marketer, the ideal target for these Planned Parenthood stories would be opponents and persuadables. By contrast, you would want the videos to get as little play as possible among your supporters. With that group, you have already maxed out the potential gains – – both their votes and their money are reliably committed – – and you run a serious risk of pushing them to the level where they start demanding more extreme action.

With all of the normal caveats -- I have no special expertise. I only know what I read in the papers. There's a fundamental silliness comparing a political movement to a business -- it seems to me that in marketing terms, the PP tapes have been badly mistargeted. They have had the biggest viewership and impact in the segment of the voting market where they would do the least good and the most damage (such as pushing for a government shutdown on the eve of a presidential election).

[I really should have said "causing supporters to push," but it's too late to worry about that now.]

I haven't followed the press coverage that closely, but based on what I've come across from NPR and the few political sites I frequent, I get the feeling that the center-left media is more likely to discuss the doctoring of the tapes than to focus on the gory specifics of harvesting fetal tissue. I'd need to check sources like CNN before making a definitive statement, but it appears that the videos are having exceptionally little effect on what should have been their target audience.

Instead, their main impact seems to have been on the far right. The result has been to widen what was already a dangerous rift. The pragmatic wing looks at defunding as a futile gesture with almost no chance of success and large potential costs. The true believers are approaching this on an entirely different level. It has become an article of faith for them that, as we speak, babies are being killed, dismembered and sold for parts. They demand action, even if it's costly and merely symbolic, as long as it's cathartic.

I've been arguing for quite a while now that we need to pay more attention to the catharsis in politics (such as with the reaction to the first Obama/Romney debate), particularly with the Tea Party.  Conservative media has long been focused on feeding the anger and the outrage of the base while promising victory just around the corner. This has produced considerable partisan payoff but at the cost of considerable anxiety and considerable disappointment, both of which produce stress and a need for emotional release.

There's a tendency to think of trading political capital for catharsis as being irrational, but it's not. There is nothing irrational about doing something that makes you feel better. That's the real problem for the GOP leaders: shutting down the government would be cathartic for many members of the base. It would be difficult to get the base to defer their catharsis, even if the base trusted the leaders to make good on their promise that things will get better.

For now, the Tea Party is inclined to do what feels good, whether it's supporting an unelectable candidate or making a grandstanding play. It's not entirely clear what Boehner and McConnell can do about that.

First it was Andrew Gelman* with the clickbait titles...

...then the GSA

While on the subject, Ken Levine recently collected a number of representative  Huffington Post headlines. As he put it, "Why write comedy when I can just cut and paste this?"

Morons Charged After Stomping On Iconic Yellowstone Hot Spring

Naked Jennifer Lawrence Pelted By BB Gun While, Of Course, Peeing

Turns Out Matthew McConaughey Is Really Good At Making Weird Noises

Kim Kardashian Vows To Keep Breaking The Internet With Nude Selfies

Meet Kim Kardashian: A Spy Intent On Corrupting Iranian Youth

Stunning Photos Finally Give Cat Ladies Their Due

How To Live An Orgasmic Life When You Don't Have A Sexual Partner

Texas Republican Wants Schools To Decide How To Police Bathrooms -- Unless They Decide Wrong

Congress Is Using Zika To Weaken Truck Safety

This Couple Decided To Take Their Engagement Pictures At Costco

Lawmaker Briefly Proposes Regulation To Keep Strippers Young, Trim

It Turns Out That Having Sex In A Self-Driving Car Is Kind Of Dangerous

Proof That George Washington Would Be Ashamed Of Trump

The 8 Avocado Hacks You Want And Need

Mysterious 'Ghost' Voice Turns Out To Be A Guy In The Chimney

* Actually, Andrew seems to have since dropped the fake clickbait title, but given the time lag for his blog queue, he can't very well complain about my posts being out of date.

Son, there used to be these things called antitrust laws

From a fascinating set of graphics from the good people at Gawker Media.

These last two connect to one of our long-running threads. One of the reasons I push the terrestrial superstation story so hard is because of the way it both contradicts and supports the message of these two graphics. We are talking about a highly profitable and rapidly growing industry segment that was virtually invented by the small and nimble Weigel Broadcasting. Not only did it take majors like NBC, Fox and CBS years to catch up, but the latter two actually made a deal with Weigel to essentially run their superstations (Movies! and Decades) for them.

So it is possible for a small but smart and aggressive media company to disrupt and dominate the industry, but the obstacles are daunting. Most journalists are completely oblivious to little companies without massive PR budgets. Despite being one of the most interesting business stories of the past decade (at least of those involving well-run businesses), Weigel is almost unheard of outside of Chicago. Worse yet, the entire terrestrial superstation industry under the potential death threat of lobbyists trying to sell off that chunk of spectrum.

The little guy who has the better idea and the faster reflexes can sometimes still beat the big players, but only by overcoming a system stacked against him.

Charter school financing has a way of getting complicated

Via LGM.


I know I've made this point before, but emotions run hot in the education reform debate so it's important not to demonize people  on the other side. Most people starting and operating charter schools, like most people working in traditional schools, are primarily there to do good.

But it is also important to remember that, in its current form, the charter school system has tremendous amounts of money changing hands often through complex and opaque financial deals, with no-bid contracts between connected players, lucrative sinecures, questionable metrics and frequently misaligned incentives.

Here, the Charlotte Observer's Ann Doss Helms walks us through a not-that-unusual example of funding.

When the Thunderbird board got approval to open in 2014, it signed a contract with Banyan Strategics, a Mecklenburg firm that provides support for charter and private schools. The founders were involved in starting Lake Norman Charter in the late 1990s.

...

During the first school year, the relationship between Thunderbird and Banyan fell apart. Mojica declined to discuss details, saying the separation agreement prohibits it, and Banyan couldn’t be reached for comment. But the Thunderbird board ended up borrowing $450,000 to pay a penalty for breaking that contract.

...


The rest came from ALK Angel Holdings of Virginia, which gave Thunderbird a $250,000 line of credit, with interest-only payments of $4,167 a month, or $50,000 a year. That’s the one that really raised eyebrows among state officials.


“That just seems like a bad loan,” said Steven Walker, an advisory board member who is also general counsel to Lt. Gov. Dan Forest. Walker pressed Mojica for details about Angel Holdings, including whether any Thunderbird board members did business with general partner Alex Karakozoff.


Mojica said Karakozoff is a venture capitalist with whom he had done business in the past.

...

In addition to paying off the Chinese investors and the three loans, Thunderbird pays rent to Vertex – under an agreement that also makes the school responsible for all maintenance and repairs.


Some of the classrooms flood during heavy rains, which means the school is paying to install a new drainage system and get rid of mold, which sparked parent complaints about health and safety. Families also complained to the Health Department about rats in the school; Thunderbird is hiring a pest control company.


Mojica says rent on the building is capped at 20 percent of the per-pupil allotment Thunderbird gets from taxpayers to run the school.


“We are within the norms. We might be on the high side of the norms,” he said. “It may not be the cheapest rent around.”


In 2014-15, the first year Thunderbird was open, expenses outstripped the money it took in. The 2015-16 audit isn’t due until October, but the school provided the state panel an informal report showing it had ended the year in the black.


But Alexis Schauss, the state Department of Public Instruction’s director of school business, said those numbers don’t seem to match what she has seen on monthly reports. “I don’t feel comfortable with the data I have,” she told the advisory board.

...

The Thunderbird board hired human resources consultants to screen candidates for the school’s volunteer board and the top job. The March decision to hire Emmanuel Vincent, an educator who had most recently worked at a Georgia charter school, over Andrea McKinney, a longtime local educator who had been hired as interim director, infuriated some families, who petitioned for Mojica to resign.


State charter board members said they want to see improvements on all fronts: relations with parents, healthy classrooms, board governance and financial reporting.


Mojica says that’s in the works – with more outside help. Even before last week’s meeting, Thunderbird had signed on two school leadership consultants to advise the board on academics and governing. A financial consultant will “audit the audit,” Mojica told the board, and Thunderbird is taking bids for a bookkeeping firm.


The board recently added two members and will continue working with the HR consultant to add two more, Mojica said.

Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking resume

It is important to remember that this ageism is part of a larger phenomenon. Though most of us don't have any adult memories of the Post-War period, it was not that long ago when having a shortage of science and technology workers actually meant a shortage. Companies like Texas Instruments were famous for being very flexible in their hiring and taking anyone who might be good at the job. Now when you hear employers in someplace like Silicon Valley complaining about a "shortage" of workers, what they mean is they can't find a large, ongoing supply of workers under the age of 30 with exactly the advanced degrees they need from top-ranked universities who are willing to work 60+ hours with no job security for good, but not great money until they burn out and have to be discarded.

It is also important to remember that those under-qualified and and over-protected workers of the Post-War era laid the technological foundation on which most of today's Silicon Valley fortunes are based.

From Dice.com:

In 2007, a fresh-faced Mark Zuckerberg famously ruffled feathers among some older colleagues when he suggested that tech companies should not hire people over 30. “Young people are just smarter,” the Facebook chief executive, then 22, told a crowd at Stanford University.

Nearly a decade after the public gaffe, some say little has changed in terms of how older workers are perceived in the tech industry. Despite making recent attempts to diversify their workforces through aggressive initiatives to attract more women and minorities, Silicon Valley firms still wear their disproportionately young ranks like a badge of honor, proudly flaunting a youth-focused culture in which 28 is seen as middle age and 35 over the hill.

While workers over 40 are protected by federal civil rights laws in the United States, the plight of older employees so rarely enters into conversations about workplace discrimination in tech that one would be forgiven for not realizing it’s an issue at all.

In fact, ageism is very prevalent. Just ask Dan Lyons, a technology journalist and writer for HBO’s “Silicon Valley.” As notably chronicled in his recent best-selling book “Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble,” Lyons lost his longtime position at Newsweek magazine when he was in his 50s and decided to switch gears by taking a marketing fellowship at the software company HubSpot. In his book, published earlier this year, Lyons describes the startup’s culture as a frat-like circus filled with Nerf gunfights and hookup dens.

To complement the book, Lyons also wrote a LinkedIn post in which he called out tech industry executives for their defiantly ageist rhetoric, including his old boss at HubSpot, who he said once called gray hair and experience “overrated.” The LinkedIn post went viral, and Lyons said it was at that moment that he realized how widespread the problem really is.

“I got this outpouring of emails from people,” Lyons told Dice Insights. “I don’t mean to toot my own horn—I don’t think it’s that the article was so good. It’s just that there are a s–tload of people out there who experienced this. It was upsetting really.”

Cracked: "Why Everybody Wins If Batman & Superman Are Public Domain "

I believe we can safely take this as a piece of devil's advocacy -- Warner Bros. would not really come out ahead on this  -- but it's well though-out and makes some excellent points. For instance, it points the self-evident absurdity of extending copyrights to encourage creativity when the old laws had recently produced an unprecedented wave of valuable commercial properties. It also points out that being in the public domain has not appreciably hurt and has arguably helped characters like Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes.

Matthew Stewart on McKinsey and Co.

Following up on yesterday's post and laying groundwork a Teach for India thread, here's  another selection from Matthew Stewart's seminal 2006 essay [Emphasis added]:

The first point to note is that management education confers some benefits that have little to do with either management or education. Like an elaborate tattoo on an aboriginal warrior, an M.B.A. is a way of signaling just how deeply and irrevocably committed you are to a career in management. The degree also provides a tidy hoard of what sociologists call “social capital”—or what the rest of us, notwithstanding the invention of the PalmPilot, call a “Rolodex.”

For companies, M.B.A. programs can be a way to outsource recruiting. Marvin Bower, McKinsey’s managing director from 1950 to 1967, was the first to understand this fact, and he built a legendary company around it. Through careful cultivation of the deans and judicious philanthropy, Bower secured a quasi-monopoly on Baker Scholars (the handful of top students at the Harvard Business School). Bower was not so foolish as to imagine that these scholars were of interest on account of the education they received. Rather, they were valuable because they were among the smartest, most ambitious, and best-connected individuals of their generation. Harvard had done him the favor of scouring the landscape, attracting and screening vast numbers of applicants, further testing those who matriculated, and then serving up the best and the brightest for Bower’s delectation.

Not to put too fine a point on this, bt arguably the primary architect of the Common Core initiative had no relevant education experience, either academic or professional, before being hired to work in the field by McKinsey. He was, however, smart (philosophy degrees from Yale and Oxford), ambitious (Rhodes Scholarship), and the son of a prominent university president.

It is also worth noting that Coleman's opposite number in the U.K. is also a former McKinsey man and that the company also played a major role in setting up Teach For India.

The birth of scientific management

I've had this in the queue for a while -- management gurus figure in a lot of our ongoing threads --but news of the emergence of Teach For India and similar organizations have recently have made the topic more topical. Seeing the same model tried in different countries has brought into high relief some things that were always implicit in the story such as the role of Taylorism in TFA and in the larger reform movement, particularly through the involvement of McKinsey and Company (more on that soon).

Arguably the leading debunker of scientific management is Matthew Stewart. Here's his account of how Taylor got started.

Management theory came to life in 1899 with a simple question: “How many tons of pig iron bars can a worker load onto a rail car in the course of a working day?” The man behind this question was Frederick Winslow Taylor, the author of The Principles of Scientific Management and, by most accounts, the founding father of the whole management business.

Taylor was forty-three years old and on contract with the Bethlehem Steel Company when the pig iron question hit him. Staring out over an industrial yard that covered several square miles of the Pennsylvania landscape, he watched as laborers loaded ninety-two-pound bars onto rail cars. There were 80,000 tons’ worth of iron bars, which were to be carted off as fast as possible to meet new demand sparked by the Spanish-American War. Taylor narrowed his eyes: there was waste there, he was certain. After hastily reviewing the books at company headquarters, he estimated that the men were currently loading iron at the rate of twelve and a half tons per man per day.

Taylor stormed down to the yard with his assistants (“college men,” he called them) and rounded up a group of top-notch lifters (“first-class men”), who in this case happened to be ten “large, powerful Hungarians.” He offered to double the workers’ wages in exchange for their participation in an experiment. The Hungarians, eager to impress their apparent benefactor, put on a spirited show. Huffing up and down the rail car ramps, they loaded sixteen and a half tons in something under fourteen minutes. Taylor did the math: over a ten-hour day, it worked out to seventy-five tons per day per man. Naturally, he had to allow time for bathroom breaks, lunch, and rest periods, so he adjusted the figure approximately 40 percent downward. Henceforth, each laborer in the yard was assigned to load forty-seven and a half pig tons per day, with bonus pay for reaching the target and penalties for failing.

When the Hungarians realized that they were being asked to quadruple their previous daily workload, they howled and refused to work. So Taylor found a “high-priced man,” a lean Pennsylvania Dutchman whose intelligence he compared to that of an ox. Lured by the promise of a 60 percent increase in wages, from $1.15 to a whopping $1.85 a day, Taylor’s high-priced man loaded forty-five and three-quarters tons over the course of a grueling day—close enough, in Taylor’s mind, to count as the first victory for the methods of modern management.

...

Yet even as Taylor’s idea of management began to catch on, a number of flaws in his approach were evident. The first thing many observers noted about scientific management was that there was almost no science to it. The most significant variable in Taylor’s pig iron calculation was the 40 percent “adjustment” he made in extrapolating from a fourteen-minute sample to a full workday. Why time a bunch of Hungarians down to the second if you’re going to daub the results with such a great blob of fudge? When he was grilled before Congress on the matter, Taylor casually mentioned that in other experiments these “adjustments” ranged from 20 percent to 225 percent. He defended these unsightly “wags” (wild-ass guesses, in M.B.A.-speak) as the product of his “judgment” and “experience”—but, of course, the whole point of scientific management was to eliminate the reliance on such inscrutable variables.

One of the distinguishing features of anything that aspires to the name of science is the reproducibility of experimental results. Yet Taylor never published the data on which his pig iron or other conclusions were based. When Carl Barth, one of his devotees, took over the work at Bethlehem Steel, he found Taylor’s data to be unusable. Another, even more fundamental feature of science—here I invoke the ghost of Karl Popper—is that it must produce falsifiable propositions. Insofar as Taylor limited his concern to prosaic activities such as lifting bars onto rail cars, he did produce propositions that were falsifiable—and, indeed, were often falsified. But whenever he raised his sights to management in general, he seemed capable only of soaring platitudes. At the end of the day his “method” amounted to a set of exhortations: Think harder! Work smarter! Buy a stopwatch!

The trouble with such claims isn’t that they are all wrong. It’s that they are too true. When a congressman asked him if his methods were open to misuse, Taylor replied, No. If management has the right state of mind, his methods will always lead to the correct result. Unfortunately, Taylor was right about that. Taylorism, like much of management theory to come, is at its core a collection of quasi-religious dicta on the virtue of being good at what you do, ensconced in a protective bubble of parables (otherwise known as case studies).

Curiously, Taylor and his college men often appeared to float free from the kind of accountability that they demanded from everybody else. Others might have been asked, for example: Did Bethlehem’s profits increase as a result of their work? Taylor, however, rarely addressed the question head-on. With good reason. Bethlehem fired him in 1901 and threw out his various systems. Yet this evident vacuum of concrete results did not stop Taylor from repeating his parables as he preached the doctrine of efficiency to countless audiences across the country.

...

That Taylorism and its modern variants are often just a way of putting labor in its place need hardly be stated: from the Hungarians’ point of view, the pig iron experiment was an infuriatingly obtuse way of demanding more work for less pay. That management theory represents a covert assault on capital, however, is equally true. (The Soviet five-year planning process took its inspiration directly from one of Taylor’s more ardent followers, the engineer H. L. Gantt.) Much of management theory today is in fact the consecration of class interest—not of the capitalist class, nor of labor, but of a new social group: the management class.

Flashman finds work (again)

[I'm planning a couple of posts on Teach For America's international push. One of the elements I'm planning to cover is the absolutely central role played in the reform movement by the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co which makes this post from 2011 once again relevant. The list of the company's highlights comes from  Barry Ritholtz.]

Back in the late Sixties, George MacDonald Fraser came up with a wonderful idea for a series of comic historical novels. He took Flashman, the villain from the best known example of Britain's beloved school novels (a genre that includes the Mike and Psmith books, much admired by Orwell, and, of course, Harry Potter) and placed him on the scene at every military fiasco of the Nineteenth century from the Charge of the Light Brigade to Custer's Last Stand.

Had Fraser been a student of business instead of military history and had decided to make Flashman a consultant in the late Twentieth Century, his resume might read something like this:

• Advocating side pockets and off balance sheet accounting to Enron, it became known as “the firm that built Enron” (Guardian, BusinessWeek)
• Argued that NY was losing Derivative business to London, and should more aggressively pursue derivative underwriting (Investment Dealers’ Digest)
• General Electric lost over $1 billion after following McKinsey’s advice in 2007 — just before the financial crisis hit. (The Ledger)
• Advising AT&T (Bell Labs invented cellphones) that there wasn’t much future to mobile phones (WaPo)
• Allstate* reduced legitimate Auto claims payouts in a McK&Co strategem (Bloomberg, CNN NLB)
• Swissair went into bankruptcy after implementing a McKinsey strategy (BusinessWeek)
• British railway company Railtrack was advised to “reduce spending on infrastructure” — leading to a number of fatal accidents, and a subsequent collapse of Railtrack. (Property Week, the Independent)

* Update: Here's a bit more on the Good Hands People, part of our ongoing "How to Lie with Statistics" series (more examples here and here).

One reason there were so few women in classic cartoons

I always assumed it was because the knockabout humor played better with male characters, but animation authority Mark Evanier points out an additional economic motive.

Once upon a time, voice actors working under the Screen Actors Guild contract were paid by the session. The actor received a flat fee for the cartoon whether he did one voice or twenty. Most of the early Hanna-Barbera cartoons had a cast of two: Daws Butler and Don Messick did the Pixie & Dixie cartoons. The Secret Squirrel cartoons were voiced by Paul Frees and Mel Blanc. The Atom Ant cartoons were Howie Morris and Allan Melvin until Howie quit H-B, at which time they became Don Messick and Allan Melvin. Once in a while, they'd spring for a guest voice — usually a woman — but the writers were told not to write in too many female parts so that wasn't necessary. (There are early H-B cartoons where small female roles were voiced by men.)

Most cartoons were done with small casts. The Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons were voiced by June Foray, Paul Frees, Bill Scott, William Conrad and no one else. I don't think there's a single other actor in any of them…and in some, some of those folks play five or six roles.

In '68, the S.A.G. contract was changed to limit the number of voices one actor could do for one fee. The math changed over the years but it pretty much came down to three voices per session fee per actor. Before, if a cartoon called for twelve speaking parts, you could have Daws and Don each do six and it cost you two session fees. After '68, you were going to have to pay four session fees…so you could pay Daws and Don each two fees per session or for the same money, you could bring in four actors. In most cases then, they would hire four actors.

This made things better for the kind of actor — like Hans Conried or Gary Owens — who couldn't do multiple roles. A voice actor no longer had to be like Blanc, Butler, Messick or Frees — guys who could do a couple hundred different voices. It also increased the opportunities for women since it led to shows having more female characters. And it even led to some of the multi-voiced guys making more money. I wrote a CBS Storybreak once which had a ton of tiny roles and we decided that we didn't want to bring in a parade of voice actors to each do 1-3 lines. It was easier to have Frank Welker do them all so that day, Frank — who was in the studio for about 90 minutes — played twenty characters and was paid for seven sessions.

If only they had come up with a cool name

When discussing the Hyperlink, it is essential to keep in mind that, though they may not have been combined in exactly this form in a widely publicized version before, the basic elements have been discussed extensively by countless engineers for a long time now.

From Wikipedia:

Russian professor Boris Weinberg offered a vactrain concept in 1914 in the book Motion without friction (airless electric way). He also built the world's first model of his proposed transport in Tomsk Polytechnic University in 1909.

I believe the illustration below is from 1917 (but I'm a bit confused by the annotation on the Wikisource page).

Damn you, Tom Simonite!

Earlier this week, I sent out emails to some transportation researchers asking about Tesla's argument that Autopilot saves lives because the system had one fatality in 130 million miles, the average for U.S. roads as a whole is one per 94 million. It appeared that those 130 were disproportionately driven under safer-than-average conditions, making the comparison largely meaningless.

Unfortunately, all of the points I wanted to make in my post (and then some) were covered yesterday in this excellent piece by Mr. Simonite of the MIT Technology Review.

Soon after, Tesla’s CEO and cofounder Elon Musk threw out more figures intended to prove Autopilot’s worth in a tetchy e-mail to Fortune (first disclosed yesterday). “If anyone bothered to do the math (obviously, you did not) they would realize that of the over 1M auto deaths per year worldwide, approximately half a million people would have been saved if the Tesla autopilot was universally available,” he wrote.

Tesla and Musk’s message is clear: the data proves Autopilot is much safer than human drivers. But experts say those comparisons are worthless, because the company is comparing apples and oranges.

“It has no meaning,” says Alain Kornhauser, a Princeton professor and director of the university’s transportation program, of Tesla’s comparison of U.S.-wide statistics with data collected from its own cars. Autopilot is designed to be used only for highway driving, and may well make that safer, but standard traffic safety statistics include a much broader range of driving conditions, he says.

Tesla’s comparisons are also undermined by the fact that its expensive, relatively large vehicles are much safer in a crash than most vehicles on the road, says Bryant Walker Smith, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina. He describes comparisons of the rate of accidents by Autopilot with population-wide statistics as “ludicrous on their face.” Tesla did not respond to a request asking it to explain why Musk and the company compare figures from very different kinds of driving.

Google has in the past drawn similar contrasts between the track record of its self-driving cars and accident statistics for humans, says Smith. He, Kornhauser, and other researchers argue that companies working on autonomous driving technology need to drop such comparisons altogether. In April, a RAND Corporation report concluded that fatalities and injuries are so rare that it would require an automated car to drive as many as hundreds of billions of miles before its performance could be fairly compared with statistics from the much larger population of human drivers.

Instead researchers say that Tesla and others need to release more data on the limitations and performance of automated driving systems if self-driving cars are to become safe and understood enough for mass market use.

You should read the whole thing.

The near miss effect -- what compulsive gamblers and tech reporters have in common [repost]

[This piece from 2014 seems once again relevant given our Hyperloop and Tesla threads.]

A few days ago I posted a bit of a rant about how excited tech reporters got over a Google press release about the company's driverless car. The problem was that, based on the details available in the reports, there didn't seem to be any significant indications of increased functionality.

Of course, reporters have a strong incentive to see signs of progress -- "just around the corner" sells better than "don't get your hopes up" -- but I think this eagerness has more than one cause (most things do) and I wonder if one of those factors might have something to do with the near-miss effect as described in this memorable story from This American Life:

Sarah Koenig

Habib and especially Dixon have spent a long time studying what's called the near-miss effect. In slot machines, a near miss is just what it sounds like. It's when, say, two cherries line up on the payoff line, and then the third is about to come but stops just short or just past the payoff line.

...

Sarah Koenig

In 2006, Dixon teamed up with Habib to see if they could figure out what was happening to people neurologically when they saw near misses. They scanned the brains of 22 gamblers-- 11 addicted, or what they called pathological gamblers, and 11 non-pathological gamblers-- as all these people watch near misses on slot machine displays.

The results surprised them. Because while both addicted and non-addicted gamblers said the near misses felt more like wins, their brains said something different. Here's Reza Habib.

Reza Habib

What you see in the non-pathological gamblers is that the regions that are activated for losses, those same regions tend to be also activated for near misses. And so the brain, at least, processes these near misses in the same way that it processes losses in the non-pathological gamblers. In pathological gamblers, the same regions that are activated for wins are also activated for near misses.

And so these include regions such as the amygdala, which is a region involved in emotional processing, as well as parts of the brain stem which are involved in reward and dopamine function, which is part of the reward system. So the pathological gamblers, their brains, at least, are responding to these near misses in the same way that they respond to wins.

Mark Dixon

This is Mark again. And one of the effects of this, or the implications of these data, are that a pathological gambler going into the casino who's actually losing, his brain is firing like he's winning. Disturbing, isn't it.

Sarah Koenig

Yeah. It's crazy.

Mark Dixon

Oh, it's way crazy. And so you are experiencing those same sensations as a win when you're not winning.

Just as casinos are very good at eliciting the reactions associated with winning even when very little winning is going on, companies like Apple and Google have become very good at eliciting the reactions associated with technological progress even when the technology is advancing little and sometimes not at all. In this case, Google assumed correctly that, by showing journalists a prototype that looked different but apparently did nothing new, the reporters would react as if they had seen an advance in the technology. They respond to these meaningless press conferences in much the same way as a pathological gambler responds to two cherries out of three.

If anything, the shift to custom-made, low-speed cars would seem to be a sign of trouble. Google's stated goal is to release this technology to manufacturers in 2018. Whenever you're designing complex systems that have to work with complex systems designed by others, compatibility is usually more than half the battle. I would therefore expect some of the most daunting engineering challenges to come from getting Google's technology to work smoothly with a wide range of makes and models. The decision to go from road testing Toyota Priuses ('Prii' believe it or not) and Audi TTs to track testing what are basically go-carts does not make the four year goal look more likely.

What happens if that deadline isn't met? I suspect it will still be business as usual. Google has proven that merely symbolic progress or, failing even that, just bringing the subject up is enough to create the desired effect of public perception. My guess is that the only real deadline is beating GM, Mercedes-Benz, or Nissan or any of the other companies that have equally gifted engineers working on these problems (but with less gifted PR departments to promote them).

In that last paragraph you can substitute in SpaceX, Solar City and the Hyperloop

From a very good article by Rick Newman

Tesla never should have said its cars operate on 'autopilot'

Tesla (TSLA) has never sold a self-driving car. No automaker has. The technology isn’t ready for the public yet.

Yet Tesla offers an option on its Model S sedan called “Autopilot,” which apparently factored into a fatal accident on May 7 in central Florida, which the federal government is now investigating. It’s the first known incident in which self-driving automotive technology may have contributed to a fatality, and it comes as Tesla is facing financial strains and is attempting a controversial tie-up with Solar City (SCTY) that shareholders may squash.

...

But Tesla has gone much farther than any other automaker in promoting its self-driving technology, and branding it as a breakthrough – which it’s not, really. “Autopilot” is a term borrowed from the aviation industry, and it refers to planes that are flown almost entirely by computers except during takeoff, landing and unexpected events at altitude. Autonomous technology for cars is nowhere near as advanced as it is for airplanes, which Tesla itself acknowledges, in a fine-print kind of way.

...

The cameras, lasers, sonars and other sensors that gather the info allowing computers to make driving decisions still aren’t as good as ordinary human drivers are at reacting to the unexpected craziness that occurs on America’s roads. At a conference in Boston earlier this year, MIT engineering professor John Leonard showed video footage of several things self-driving technology still can’t master, such as a police officer waving traffic forward through a red light, which contradicts coding that says cars should stop at red lights.

At the same conference, Gil Pratt, CEO of the Toyota Research Institute, said, “We don’t have any autonomous car yet where the car, on average, is better than a person.” Just about all the experts agree that while sensors and computers might be better at piloting a vehicle on a predictable route with no surprises – plus, computers don’t drink, do drugs or get emotional – technology still struggles to make good split-second decisions when something that’s not in the database occurs. Bright light, driving rain, snow and confusing construction detours still confound automotive sensors.

...

The traditional automakers are impressed with the fact that Tesla has brought compelling products to market against steep odds. But they’re also dismissive of Musk’s penchant for hype and his habit of claiming leadership on technologies that Big Auto has been developing for decades, and rolling out cautiously. A safety expert for Volvo, which probably focuses more on safety than any other automaker, told the Verge in April that Tesla’s Autopilot feature is “an unsupervised wannabe…. it gives you the impression it’s doing much more than it is.”

It's hard to believe, but we've been hammering away at the autonomous car story for over five years now, and in all that time, the pattern has remained remarkably consistent.

Ddulite journalists have, with very few exceptions, stuck close to a fundamentally flawed narrative that understates the serious problems with the technology, overstates the impediments of regulation, and fetishizes the role of visionary entrepreneurs.

This fetishizing has reached its zenith with Elon Musk. As I said earlier, the basic scenario described here with Tesla applies to virtually all of the man's enterprises. He has some good ideas, moves quickly, and tends to shake things up in a positive way, but the hype-to-substance ratio is astounding, the businesses invariably run on large checks from the government and still frequently manage to lose money, and the technological advances often owe most of their foundation to other companies.

In lieu of fireworks, here's some data visualization for the 4th

I realize that's probably not how the creator thought of it, but bear with me. Starting with a complex subject, this video presents a great deal of information in a clear and unambiguous fashion. What's more, it holds the interest, is aesthetically pleasing, and can give us real insight into the subject. Isn't that what we look for in data visualization?

(And wouldn't you rather listen to Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody rather than some guy talking about GDP?)



Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody 2


 

This is the sound of the sky not falling

From the LA Times:

Fatal crash of Tesla Model S in autopilot mode leads to investigation by federal officials

Federal regulators opened a preliminary probe into the autopilot feature on a Tesla Model S electric car after a fatal crash involving the technology, Tesla said Thursday.

The fatality – thought to be the first in the auto industry related to an autopilot feature – sparked questions about the limitations of the technology and its place in what is seen as an inevitable march toward self-driving vehicles. It followed other recent incidents in which drivers reported collisions while using such technology.

The male driver died in a May 7 crash in Williston, Fla., when a big rig made a left turn in front of his Tesla.

In a blog post, Tesla Motors Inc. said the 2015 car passed under the trailer, with the bottom of the trailer hitting the Model S’ windshield.

“Neither autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor-trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied,” Tesla said.

Tesla said it immediately reported the fatal crash to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The automaker emphasized that its autopilot feature is still in a beta phase of introduction and has limitations.

...

The need to maintain control became clear to Aaron Souppouris when he test-drove a Model S in April. Souppouris, a senior editor at the blog Engadget, said Tesla loaned him the car for an article about the autopilot feature and he drove it about 500 miles around England.

There were times at night, he said, when the car went back and forth within a lane and seemed “skittish,” he said.

Once on autopilot, the car tried to change lanes but then reverted back suddenly, and another time it disengaged the autopilot mode in the middle of a lane switch, Souppouris said. The car did better during the day than at night, he said.

I should probably do the smart thing and hold off until we see how things shake out, but I'm going to make a prediction:

This is not going to be that big of a deal.

According to the standard narrative this should be huge; the story has always been one of yet another good-to-go transformative technology kept out of our hands by lawyers and bureaucrats. One of the recurring comments in the reporting was that the first time a self-driving car was involved in a serious accident the result would be a litigious nightmare.

The truth is that the main reason we don't have fully autonomous cars is that parts of the technology have been remarkably hard to crack. Furthermore, the potential economic and environmental impact of driverless cars (level 4 or 5 depending on which scale you prefer) has been overstated, while far-less-hyped semi-autonomous features like adaptive cruise control and automatic braking are already revolutionizing auto safety.

There may be a lawsuit or some regulatory tightening after this, but these things will probably be minor factors (I'd worry more about the PR hit). The main problem facing Tesla is still the inability to turn a profit, and no amount of business-friendly policies will save a company that can't manage that.

You need to watch this

I don't want to give anything away except to say that the journalistic criticism you'll find here is a damned sight sharper than anything you'll find in the New York Times or in On the Media.

This would also be perhaps the first time a question starting with "how does it feel" will produce an interesting answer

As we've observed before, a handful of journalists and pundits have actually managed not only to maintain but to enhance their reputations through the recent primary. Some names that come to mind are Chait, Krugman, Ornstein & Mann and perhaps most of all, Josh Marshall. Over the past year, I don't think anyone has been better at what Orwell would call seeing one's noise in front of one's face than TPM's founder.

In an earlier post, we addressed the unique role that emotional gratification has played in the Trump campaign and speculated on how the candidate might react to the plummeting levels of fun. In a recent post, Marshall goes a step further, from not-having-a-good-time to “psychic disembowelment.”

If you are campaigning on the fact that you're a winner but you're losing, the premise of your campaign just falls apart.

Just as polls created a positive feedback loop for Trump in the primaries, where they seemed to confirm that no transgression or conventional misstep could hurt him, he is now entering a negative feedback loop with the same polls. The perception of losing amplifies every misstep. It makes him lose more both because the premise of the campaign starts to collapse in on itself but, relatedly, the brittle edifice of a narcissistic ego starts to come under an insuperable strain.

Put simply, he gets more erratic.

I suspect that in a couple months this will become the sum of most of the Democrats attacks on Trump both because it undermines the central premise of his campaign ("I always win; and I can make you win too.") but also because these attacks cut visibly cut Trump so deeply, triggering a sort of psychic disembowelment. You can see this in the increasingly irritated and thin-skinned responses to criticism or any references to his flagging campaign efforts.

...

At some point in the not distant future, some reporter - probably a not altogether pleasant one - will ask Trump: "How does it feel to be losing so badly? Just on a personal level? Does it hurt? Do regret getting into this?" It won't be pretty because Trump's ego is fragile. From there I suspect you'll see it cropping up in campaign attacks from every direction.

As mentioned before, under normal circumstances, psychoanalyzing presidential candidates is almost always a waste of time, but these are clearly special times. Addressing Trump's motives and emotional problems is not only productive; it's practically unavoidable.

Brexit Bregrets or Polls as Self-refuting Prophesies

I haven't been closely following either the Brexit in general or the Brexit polling in particular, so I don't want to go out on any limbs speculating about what drove what except to note that this post from Scott Lemieux raises an interesting possibility.

I don’t know how many Brexit voters fall into the remorseful category. But I remember seeing somewhere (HELP ME BROCKINGTON) that a large majority of Brexit voters assumed that Remain would win. For what was surely a decisive number of Brexit voters, the vote was not a considered view that leaving the EU would be better than remaining, but rather was a vehicle for sending a message to British elites. 

I'm not saying that this was a factor but just as an intellectual exercise, try this. Imagine that widely reported polls contributed to the perception that the voters would chose to remain. That in turn created the perception that "leave" was a safe protest vote. Does it make sense to say that the polls were wrong in this context?

Still coming up to the edge of the 1964 analogy

As mentioned before, I don't want to push this too far. For one thing, I don't see anything analogous to the Vietnam War and the draft currently on the horizon, which leaves a pretty big hole in the "look what happened then" argument. 1964 might give us some idea what to expect in November, but I don't see much point in looking to 1968 as a guide 2020 (or 1980 as a guide to 2032).

All that said, it has, at the very least, been entertaining looking for points of comparison. Which brings us to Henry M. Paulson Jr. writing for the Washington Post

Simply put, a Trump presidency is unthinkable.

As a Republican looking ahead to November, there are many strong conservative leaders in statehouses across the United States and in Congress, whose candidacies I am actively supporting. They have a big job to do to reinvent and revitalize the Republican Party. They can do so by responding to the fears and frustrations of the American people and uniting them behind some common aspirations, while staying constant to the principles that have made our country great.

When it comes to the presidency, I will not vote for Donald Trump. I will not cast a write-in vote. I’ll be voting for Hillary Clinton, with the hope that she can bring Americans together to do the things necessary to strengthen our economy, our environment and our place in the world. To my Republican friends: I know I’m not alone.

and yet another spin in the way-back machine.





And while we're here.

"Whom are you voting for? This guy can read your mind." -- with that headline, what could go wrong?

A few quick thoughts on this WaPo piece by Jacob Bogage:

Neuroscientist Ryan McGarry swabbed a brain activity headset with saline solution and lowered it onto Brian Hazel’s head, connecting circular prongs gingerly to different spots on his skull.

Then he showed Hazel 40 minutes of presidential debates and commercials as Spencer Gerrol tried to read his mind. Which of the candidates did Hazel, an African American real estate professional in his 40s, support?

Gerrol, founder and chief executive of creative agency Spark Experience, based in Bethesda, Md., stared through a one-way mirror from an observation room. “Trump,” he said five minutes into Hazel’s session.

Gerrol was right. “Donald Trump,” Hazel said after his session. “I’m all about jobs, and if I look at the whole field and who has created the most jobs, I think he would be able to do that better than anyone else.”

Spark's experiment is leading a new method of human factors research, which asks test subjects to interact normally with everyday products or services while researchers track their emotional reaction and attentiveness. The agency gathers data from four tests — electroencephalograms, galvanic skin responses, eye tracking and microfacial recognition — to instantaneously determine which candidate a subject supports, down to the severity of emotional response.

The firm gathered more than 30 test subjects from across the political spectrum in May. Their findings, released last week, show that what people feel and what they say they feel are rarely the same.

The experiment might be the closest the country gets to an explanation of this crazy presidential campaign without dissecting a brain.

Instead of placing participants in focus groups or asking them to fill out a questionnaire, experimenters harvest data directly from the brain using technology called "BrainWave." Companies such as Nielsen and Affectiva also conduct similar testing, which can gauge the effectiveness of advertisements and viewer response to TV shows and movies.

“This isn’t science fiction,” Gerrol said. “I can’t read your thoughts, but I can read your emotions.”

...

But it has particular application this election cycle because voters' responses have been so unpredictable. Spark's study may have provided some answers, namely that test subjects may subconsciously lie when they tell people what political messaging works and what doesn't.

“If you ask somebody what they’re feeling, you're not going to get a very accurate response. Emotion is subconscious,” Gerrol said. “The idea is to measure emotion without asking.

“When people make decisions, it’s tempting to think there’s a lot of rational thought. That’s not really true. You can't have decisions without emotion.”

...

Scores of political prognosticators predicted Trump’s demise almost a year ago. They predicted that Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders would fizzle out.

Alas, no political prediction has rung true, leaving political professionals and junkies alike asking, “What gives?” and “What are Trump and Clinton voters thinking?”

1. First and most obvious, a minimum level of skepticism is required in these situations. None is to be found in the article.

2. There are huge causal and logical leaps here. Determining who a debate viewer supports based on biometrics shouldn't be that difficult -- hell, you could probably do a good job just watching facial expressions -- but Gerrol claims all sorts of insights about the subjects' decision-making process.

3. All based on 30 subjects. If you read the article, you'll see that Gerrol seems able to infer some important relationship from almost every line of the debate. That's a huge edifice for such a narrow base.

4. Let's stick with the 30 a bit more. There's every reason to believe we are traversing a rugged landscape here, with a definite possibility of interactions and non-linear relationships. If you have to disaggregate 30 subjects by gender, age, etc., you start getting some very small numbers.

5. Why do they always want to do politics? There are lots of choices (sometimes strongly held -- "Coke or Pepsi?") that are difficult to explain and predict, choices that are clearly emotional and often marketing driven. Voting is not one of those. We have pretty good models to explain the process which usually comes down to rational factors like social issues and economic interests. If you factor in what information the voters rely on, the choice becomes even more rational (if you believe what you see on Fox News, supporting Trump is a sensible decision).

6. As for this cycle being unpredictable... A lot of people in the journalistic establishment don't want to admit this but the people who got this campaign humiliatingly wrong did so because they argued against the data (see here and here). As far as I know, actual political scientists did fine.

7. Spencer Gerrol is a TEDx presenter.

How long does Trump stick around after the fun stops?

I'm always leery of attempts to speculate too much about the character and motives of presidential candidates, at least not in real time. There is some potential value when it's done in a historical context by someone like Rick Perlstein, but when done as part of campaign coverage the results are almost always worthless.

This is partly because most pundits are terrible at this kind of analysis, prone to groupthink, blind to their own prejudices, easily swayed by the most blatant of manipulative ploys and generally not nearly as smart as they think they are.  Mainly though, the topic usually isn't worth that much attention. Compared to questions of policies and competence, issues of character and psychological make-up almost always fade into triviality.

Until recently, the only notable exception was Nixon, and even there, I'm not sure real time analysis would have been that productive. It took a while for the full story to come out. With Trump, though, the emotional issues are so close to the surface and are so obviously driving the process that to ignore them is to omit an essential part of the story..

For example, with a normal campaign, whether or not a candidate is having fun is a secondary, if not tertiary, issue. It's true that the best politicians tend to love campaigning, but they don't make tactical, let alone strategic, decisions based on whether they're enjoying themselves.

With Trump, though, it is entirely appropriate to ask what will happen to the presumptive GOP nominee when the process goes from non-stop fun to no fun at all. I was planning to write a post on this but Gawker's Ashley Feinberg got there first and hit most of the points I wanted to cover.

Remember, Trump had a blast during the primaries. Back then, he was free to spew any sort of nonsense he wanted. And not only did no one question him too seriously, but as his discourse became increasingly unhinged and racist, his poll numbers rose in kind. The more his poll numbers shot up, the more media attention he got. And for Trump, there is no purer joy. If Donald Trump is able to buy his way into heaven, it’s just going to be him reliving the 2016 primaries every day for the rest of eternity.

Now, though, the Democrats are just about done squabbling, Republicans are out of distractions, and the cold, sobering reality of what our nation has wrought is finally settling in. Now that the fun is winding down, the small-handed prince of our country’s most base anxieties is going to start looking for a way out. He’s already laying the groundwork, saying on Fox & Friends that “it would be nice to have full support from people that are in office, full verbal support. With all of that being said, I may go a different route if things don’t happen.”

Feinberg then walks through the various scenarios for withdrawal. All of them are long shots, but at this point I'm not ruling anything out.

It's not "vibranium." Hell, it's not even a "hyperloop."

[Caveat: I've been getting up to speed on the Hyperloop and reaching out to knowledgeable people in the field, but I'm no expert and though I'm trying to be careful, some of the technical details may need to be revised later. On a related note, if you do see something wrong (or even not quite right), please let me know.]

From the Verge [emphasis added]:

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) announced today that it will be using a new type of sensor-embedded carbon fiber to make its capsules, capable of transporting passengers through a nearly airless tube at speeds up to 760 mph, safer than ever. The company is calling this new material "Vibranium," which may sound familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of Marvel Comics and its wildly popular Cinematic Universe.

In the comics, Captain America's iconic shield is made of a nearly indestructible metal called Vibranium. It is almost exclusively found in the tiny (and fictional) African nation of Wakanda, the ancestral home of the Black Panther, who had his silver screen debut this month in Captain American: Civil War — and will be starring in his own standalone movie in 2018. Or around the same time the first Hyperloop is expected to be in operation.

HTT's Vibranium, though, won't be used to make any superhero flair, but rather a dual-layer coating for the company's Hyperloop pod that will provide the passengers with twice the protection should anything damage the exterior. The company boasts that its Vibranium is "eight times stronger than aluminum and 10 times stronger than steel alternatives," which is fairly standard for reinforced carbon fiber. What makes HTT's version special is the embedded sensors that can transmit "critical information regarding temperature, stability, integrity and more, wirelessly and instantly." HTT unveiled a section of its Hyperloop capsule made of Vibranium at the Pioneer's Festival in Vienna today.

We should probably come back to this as an example of how these hype spirals mix comically over-the-top language with outlandish claims that are supposed to be taken seriously (Vibranium is explicitly meant as a joke. With the numerous Elon Musk equals Tony Stark comparisons, the call is quite a bit more difficult). Instead of the hyperbole, for now though, I want to focus on the vagueness of the language and the way it interacts with journalists' weak grasp of the topic.

Musk never provided a really good answer to why the Hyperloop would cost so much less than comparable existing structures did but he could make the case that the hyperlink might cost less to implement that other proposed vactrains.

Before we go there, however, it is important to step back and realize just how little distinguishes the Hyperloop from the hundreds of similar proposals that have been made over the past century. This is very much the stuff of a mechanical engineering major's senior project. There is a very real possibility that every major aspect of the plan has been arrived at independently before over the years but without the necessary PR push to get it noticed.

That said, the idea of having the pods use some of the small amount of air in the near vacuum to generate their own air cushions rather than relying on mechanisms in the track is quite clever. Though questions remain as to whether this can be made to work reliably on a large scale over number of years, it does potentially offer a substantial cost advantage over many of the other designs for similar super high-speed trains. As I understand it (see caveat above), this design greatly simplifies the construction of the track (keeping in mind that simple is a relative term when you're talking about a structure that maintains a near vacuum over hundreds of miles and reliable handles passenger carrying pods traveling in excess of 700 mph).

Which brings us to this:

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, one of two LA-based startups working to build Elon Musk’s futuristic transportation system, announced today that it has licensed a technology called "passive magnetic levitation" to power its prototype. The system is "a cheaper, safer alternative" to regular magnetic levitation, or maglev, which is currently in operation powering high-speed trains in China and Europe.

Passive magnetic levitation, which was developed by the late physicist Richard Post in 2000, uses unpowered loops of wire in the track and permanent magnets in the train pod to create levitation. By contrast, maglev requires complex and expensive infrastructure upgrades, such as power sources placed at intervals along the track. Post, who worked for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, until his death in 2015, called his new system "the Inductrack."

For the record, Post's ideas are very cool. They might even be significantly cheaper than a standard maglev, but the system would almost certainly be more expensive than the pod-generated air cushion system Musk proposed.

To sum up:

1. HTT is not actually a Hyperloop but rather a maglev train;

2. The overwhelming consensus among independent experts is that the Hyperloop would cost at least 10 to 20 times as  much as Musk claims;

3. The HTT maglev will almost certainly cost more than the Hyperloop.

Red flags -- when contradiction becomes confirmation

Ariel Sabar as a great long-form piece up at the Atlantic profiling an extraordinarily disreputable figure  called Walter Fritz. If you have the time, you should definitely read the whole thing, but I wanted to highlight this:

On a humid afternoon this past November, I pulled off Interstate 75 into a stretch of Florida pine forest tangled with runaway vines. My GPS was homing in on the house of a man I thought might hold the master key to one of the strangest scholarly mysteries in recent decades: a 1,300-year-old scrap of papyrus that bore the phrase “Jesus said to them, My wife.” The fragment, written in the ancient language of Coptic, had set off shock waves when an eminent Harvard historian of early Christianity, Karen L. King, presented it in September 2012 at a conference in Rome.

...

On a more practical level, [King] couldn’t see how a con artist cunning enough to produce a scientifically undetectable forgery could at the same time be so clumsy with Coptic handwriting and grammar. “In my judgment,” she wrote, “such a combination of bumbling and sophistication seems extremely unlikely.” The crude writing, she argued, could simply indicate that the ancient scribe was a novice.

Yet “a combination of bumbling and sophistication” could well be the epitaph of many of history’s most infamous forgers, their painstaking precision undone by a few careless oversights.

Whether it's a con or just a conspiracy theory, if you dig into accounts of smart people falling for the implausible, you will usually find a point where the subject found a way of not just explaining away conflicting evidence, but of actually turning it around so that it supports the contention. Things never go well after that point.

Best pop culture reference by an economist

via Brad

Excellent post by Dietrich Vollrath. In particular, the discussion of the World Bank’s Doing Business index ("Apples and Oranges") is easily worth a thread. For now, though, I've got to share this.

From by Can we get rich by "Doing Business" better? 

Growth Economics with Nigel Tufnel

Below I’m going to get to the gory details of why the Doing Business (DB) indicators generally suck as a measure of anything useful. But let me start with this note. The DB index Cochrane uses is a “distance to the frontier” index. Meaning you get a number that tells you how close to best practices in business conditions a country gets. If you are at the best practices in all categories, you’d get a 100.

Cochrane says, and I quote, “If America could improve on the best seen in other countries by 10%, a 110 score would generate $400,000 income per capita…”. Stew on that for a moment. Think about how that DB frontier index is constructed.

Cochrane went there. He said it could go to 11.

This brings up the bigger and more important questions of how someone as smart as Cochrane can descend so deep into silliness and how little impact the descent has had on his reputation as a serious thinker, but those are topics for another day.

The coming of Trump -- what we were saying about journalistic decline and Republican dysfunction here at the blog in 2013 [Part 2]

With few exceptions, the failure to recognize the viability of Trump was directly tied to the failure to acknowledge the decline and, in some cases, near collapse of various political and journalistic institutions. We've been making this point for a while now.

Last time we covered why the party didn't decide. Now let's talk about the role of the press.



Journalistic decline and GOP dysfunction


Picking up from Tactics, Schmactics...

When we talk about the mainstream media and the right-wing media and all the other little sliver media out there, there are all sorts of standards with which we can make our distinctions. The one I prefer, at least for this discussion, is axiom-based.

In the New York Times, or Time Magazine, or Slate, or in any section of the Wall Street Journal except the editorial pages, most of the writers start from the same basic set of assumptions. To a slightly lesser extent, you can say the same thing about the right-wing media: Fox news; Rush Limbaugh; red state. We could argue about the validity of each of those sets of assumptions, but the important part for the moment is the difference between the two sets.

Though there had always been right wing papers and left wing papers, it has only been in the past few decades that it is possible to completely immerse yourself in one set of assumptions while your neighbor is completely immersed in another.

That's part one of the story. Parts two and three are what happened to the two halves of the journalistic universe since then and how those changes have affected the breakdown of the Republican party.

On the mainstream side, simplistic narrative journalism, dogmatic centrism, and a increasing disregard for accuracy and for holding subjects to a high standard of honesty all acted together to weaken the press's traditional role in checking party extremes. Since these practices had long been coupled with a sense that the Republicans were the dominant power and a fear of conservative pushback, this primarily worked on the right,  allowing unpopular and extreme Republican policies to gain traction. This was particularly true in the area of governance. Unprecedented use of filibusters and other obstructionist techniques were practiced up until recently with relative impunity due to the "both sides do it" mentality of many journalists.

On the right wing media side, journalists traded off their normal role as providers of feedback in order to be more effective motivators. This is perhaps most obvious with Ailes and Fox News where the goal (after turning a profit) was clearly to shape (and in some cases, falsify) the facts in such a way as to keep the base loyal and energized. In the short term, the strategy worked well but it always had inherent risks, risks that have finally started doing serious damage.

You can read this partly as a cautionary tale of Straussianism gone awry. The first, the most fundamental assumption of any society based on the noble lie is that you have a hierarchy with well-defined classes of the liars and the lied-to and that all major decisions are made by people in the first class.

Here's an analogy: officers have been known to paint overly rosy pictures for soldiers ("Things are going great on the Western front." "The enemy's factories are in ruins." "Victory is near."). We can argue over the ethics of this kind of lying, but it's easy to see why some officers might do it.

Now imagine that through a combination of field promotions, broken lines of communication and general confusion,  strategic and tactical decisions start being made by people who actually believe all of the misinformation that was fed to the ranks. I'm no military historian but I'm fairly sure this would probably end badly.

We had a pretty clear example of this kind of a breakdown in the Romney team's analysis of poll data in the last days of the election. There was clear value for Romney in having his supporters believe that he was ahead but that value was more than negated by having his advisers believe the same misinformation. You can see similar dysfunction in the recent shutdown where many congressmen made what now appear to be disastrous decisions based apparently sincere belief in such Fox News talking point as "people won't get that upset about a shutdown."

Put more broadly, the processes that allow the right version of the truth to get to the right people – something that has been an integral part of the Republican strategy – has seemingly broken down entirely.

In addition to the largely random flow of misinformation, conservative media created an unforeseen problem in the rank and file with narrative momentum. When most members of a group get much of their information from outside, there's a natural friction on in-group narratives when members realize that their version is not shared by the general public. Conservative media is immersive to an unprecedented degree. Narratives like "the only time Republicans lose is when they become too moderate" are allowed to build unchecked.

On a related note, the immersive quality also greatly facilitates social norming. This greatly encourages extreme positions and widens the gap when members of the group try to communicate with outsiders.

More on this soon.

The coming of Trump -- what we were saying about journalistic decline and Republican dysfunction here at the blog in 2013 [Part 1]

With few exceptions, the failure to recognize the viability of Trump was directly tied to the failure to acknowledge the decline and, in some cases, near collapse of various political and journalistic institutions. We've been making this point for a while now.

First, why the party didn't decide.  



Tactics, Schmactics -- why I don't buy the latest trope on the government shut down

[I haven't seen anyone frame the discussion in the following way, but a lot of the points I want to make in this thread have been made recently by Josh Marshall and Jonathan Chait. Both are on my fairly short list of daily reads and both have a rare gift for, to paraphrase Orwell, seeing what's in front of their noses.]

You've been hearing it everywhere from Paul Krugman to the National Review: the growing rift in the Republican Party is strictly over tactics -- everyone on the right agrees on what they want; they're just fighting over how to get there -- but having looked carefully at this (and I've stared into this abyss longer than I should have), I'm convinced that it's not just wrong but wrong on multiple levels. I don't think it fits the facts but, more importantly, I don't even think it answers a meaningful question.

Here's a rough analogy. Let's say you're standing in a subway station and a man next to you has a seizure, falls to ground and rolls off of the platform. In that situation, "Why would he want to do that?" is not a meaningful question. The idea of explaining actions through desires only make sense if we make certain assumptions about rationality, vantage and control.

When we're talking about groups, particularly groups large enough not to be able to form fully connected graphs, checking similar assumptions becomes even more important. We have a tendency to anthropomorphize institutions. "The business community wants this." "The Tea Party is trying to do that."   Of course, we know this isn't true. The most you can say is that there's a strong consensus or that the group is following the lead of an individual. This doesn't mean that it can't be useful to analyze groups as if they were individual actors; it can often be the best approach, but only if certain conditions are met. The first of these is that the groups have to be, for lack of a better word, functional.

To be functional, the group has to have certain mechanisms in place and working reasonably well:

Mechanisms to bring information into the system, analyze it and make appropriate decisions based on it;

Mechanisms to disseminate instructions for implementing these decisions, and gathering feedback from members to allow adjustments in strategy;

Mechanisms to check those personal agendas when they threaten the overall goals of the group.

My take is that for quite a while now, the Republican party and the conservative movement have not been functional by these standards. I'm not saying that conservatives are stupid or unbalanced or are acting in an irrational or erratic manner. I am saying that the mechanisms needed for functional operation have broken down and, furthermore, they have broken down in entirely predictable ways, as long as you apply the right principles (game theory, social and individual psychology, voting "paradoxes," collective action and principal agent problem, organizational theory, etc.).

For example, the Romney campaign's inability to process poll information clearly indicates a breakdown in the way that information is suppose to flow through a system. More recently, many of the statements being made by prominent conservatives are clearly cathartic; They can only be seen as the actions of people seeking emotional release without regard to the larger strategic goals of the group.

I've got some suggestions as to why this is happening that I will try to flesh out more later (with the caveat that I have no special expertise in any of these areas and I will invariably get in over my head). I've got first drafts of the next couple of posts, but just to restate the underlying thesis, when it comes to recent developments in the GOP, I think that we are less likely to find useful analogies in the Art of War and more likely to find them in When Prophecy Fails.

We haven't done one of these for a while

A few points on the latest Success Academy controversy:

While supporters of no-excuses charters like Success frequently argue that these schools shouldn't be held to the same rules and oversight as other schools, I've seldom seen the case made in such plain terms;

Eva Moskowitz frequently portrays criticisms of her schools and opposition to her plans as attacks on parents, teachers and/or children;

Between Michael Bloomberg, Joel Klein, and, more recently, Andrew Cuomo, the Success Academies spent their first eight years in the most sympathetic administrations imaginable. Adapting to a reform skeptic like Bill de Blasio has not been easy.


From Chalkbeat:

Success Academy Charter Schools won’t offer pre-kindergarten classes next year after losing a high-profile fight with city and state officials.

The charter network has refused to sign the city’s pre-K contract, arguing that it includes inappropriate regulations about how charter schools manage their time and design their curriculum. But neither Mayor Bill de Blasio nor State Commissioner MaryEllen Elia has allowed Success to bend the rules, and both have insisted that Success sign the contract or lose funding.

In recent months, Success officials have continued their fight in court. But with no resolution in sight, the city’s largest charter-school network will close its three existing pre-K programs and will not open two more planned for next school year, CEO Eva Moskowitz announced Wednesday.

“It is unbelievably sad to tell parents and teachers that the courts won’t rescue our pre-K program from the mayor’s war on Success in time to open next year,” Moskowitz said.

I always tried to do my best on tests. Now I learn the real money is in bombing them

... or more precisely, making the school think you're going to bomb them.

We've been writing a lot about the various often subtle and unanticipated ways that selection effects can affect educational metrics. I don't think we ever considered the possibility of schools paying the students at the bottom of their classes not to take certain tests.

From Paul Campos:

Bar-passage rates at the InfiLaw schools are now in a free fall. (The following percentages are for first-time takers of the July exam in the schools’ home states.) Florida Coastal’s bar-passage rate has fallen from 76 percent to 59 percent, Charlotte’s has fallen from 78 percent to 47 percent, and Arizona Summit’s has gone from 75 percent to an astonishing 30.6 percent.

This collapse has taken place despite the fact that, according to allegations in a lawsuit filed by a former Arizona Summit administrator, all three schools have been offering money to graduates who the schools identified as being at especially high risk for failure, to get them to hold off on taking the bar exam. Indeed, in July Arizona Summit’s dean confirmed that she had called various graduates the night before the exam, imploring them to consider the “opportunity” to withdraw from the test, in exchange for a $10,000 living stipend, that would be paid to them if they enrolled in enhanced bar-preparation courses provided by the school.

The rule for distinguishing the serious Hyperloop articles from the BS

Good reporting on the Hyperloop spends most of its time on infrastructure and cost (mainly infrastructure). Bad reporting spends most of its time on other aspects of the story, such as the technology of the pods, the personality of Elon Musk, and the widely discussed but never specified regulatory obstacles. There may be exceptions to the rule or caveats I should add to it, but I've been digging into this topic extensively and I haven't come across any.

You can make similar criticisms of much, perhaps most writing about supposedly world-changing technology. Issues like infrastructure and implementation costs are routinely glossed over or omitted entirely. The Hyperloop, however, is especially problematic both because of the exceptionally large role infrastructure plays in serious discussions of the proposal and because accepting Musk's cost estimates at face value requires pushing aside consensus opinion on some well established points.

Here's how I put it in an earlier comment thread.

It's useful to step back and think of this in terms of knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. There are a lot of aspects of building an intercity vactrain that are so far outside of our range of experience that any cost estimate has to be highly speculative -- independent experts tend to think Musk is being highly optimistic in these parts of his proposal but they can't say conclusively that he's wrong – but when it comes to things like putting large structures up on pylons or down in tunnels, we have a lot of relevant experience.

Remember this one?

[Michael L. Anderson, an associate professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Berkeley.] said that while some of the infrastructure is novel, the elevated guideway was not unlike existing structures such as the Bay Area Rapid Transit's aerial tracks. For the Hyperloop's tracks, that alone would cost in the tens of billions. As for the pipeline for the cars, he said, oil pipelines are $5 million to $6 million per mile, and they are seven times narrower than the Hyperloop's would need to be. In addition, the Hyperloop track could not change direction abruptly the way an oil pipeline could.

"It really has to be built to much higher standards than anybody has ever built a pipeline to," Anderson said.

As a general rule, elevating structures greatly adds to the cost. Building something to exceptionally tight tolerances (such as those required to maintain a near vacuum over hundreds of miles of track) greatly adds to the cost. Doing something big for the first time usually has the same effect. The third is a known unknown. The first two are pretty much knowns. Engineers have been dealing with these questions for a long time.

Unlike pure science, I don't think it's possible to write about technology effectively without seriously addressing issues like cost and implementation and, in general, viability. Implicit in pretty much every story on new tech is the promise of impact in the near future, and if the tech isn't viable that promise is deeply misleading.

"Life as seen in Dickens' fiction"

Mark Evanier points us to a site-relevant tune from the Austin Lounge Lizards.