From June 19, 1909
From November 21, 1908
From February 2, 1902
Monday, December 18, 2017
From the back of the Scientific American -- the ads they'd like you to forget
From June 19, 1909
From November 21, 1908
From February 2, 1902
Friday, December 15, 2017
Megan McArdle is worth reading today
This is Joseph
I want too outsource today's comments to Megan McArdle. I don't agree with everything in her piece, but I think that she highlights the consequences of not working out due process for these issues. The real underlying issue, which I think that she omits, is that powerful people have been protected by position of great privilege from facing the consequences of loathsome behavior. That has led to some justifiable rage, after years of torment and this needs to be thoughtfully considered. But let's make sure that the path forward is developed on solid ground, because it would be a pity for this forward progress to be lost.
I want too outsource today's comments to Megan McArdle. I don't agree with everything in her piece, but I think that she highlights the consequences of not working out due process for these issues. The real underlying issue, which I think that she omits, is that powerful people have been protected by position of great privilege from facing the consequences of loathsome behavior. That has led to some justifiable rage, after years of torment and this needs to be thoughtfully considered. But let's make sure that the path forward is developed on solid ground, because it would be a pity for this forward progress to be lost.
"All that lava rushing 'round the corner" – – A musical accompaniment for the post-Moore GOP mood
We've been hearing a lot about growing Republican anxiety over a possible electoral "tsunami" in 2018. Without getting into the likelihood of this particular scenario, I would like to suggest a different natural disaster metaphor.
Note to AI researchers: why don't you forget about chess for a while
[Another game post brought to you by Kruzno.]
By digging into the rich history of board games (and possibly doing a little tweaking) I suspect we can come up with other abstract strategy games of perfect information that put humans and machines on a more equal footing, and more importantly, provide as or more interesting fields of study for AI. Of course, there's always go, but wouldn't it be fun to do something different for a change?
Whenever you need to make a survey of games, the best place to start is almost always David Parlett (followed by Sid Sackson but more on that later). Lots of promising potential candidates both historical and modern. To get things started, how about the medieval game that for a while rivaled chess for popularity, rithmomachy?
From Wikipedia.
Any other suggestions?
By digging into the rich history of board games (and possibly doing a little tweaking) I suspect we can come up with other abstract strategy games of perfect information that put humans and machines on a more equal footing, and more importantly, provide as or more interesting fields of study for AI. Of course, there's always go, but wouldn't it be fun to do something different for a change?
Whenever you need to make a survey of games, the best place to start is almost always David Parlett (followed by Sid Sackson but more on that later). Lots of promising potential candidates both historical and modern. To get things started, how about the medieval game that for a while rivaled chess for popularity, rithmomachy?
From Wikipedia.
Very little, if anything, is known about the origin of the game. But it is known that medieval writers attributed it to Pythagoras, although no trace of it has been discovered in Greek literature, and the earliest mention of it is from the time of Hermannus Contractus (1013–1054).
The name, which appears in a variety of forms, points to a Greek origin, the more so because Greek was little known at the time when the game first appeared in literature. Based upon the Greek theory of numbers, and having a Greek name, it is still speculated by some that the origin of the game is to be sought in the Greek civilization, and perhaps in the later schools of Byzantium or Alexandria.
The first written evidence of Rithmomachia dates back to around 1030, when a monk, named Asilo, created a game that illustrated the number theory of Boëthius' De institutione arithmetica, for the students of monastery schools. The rules of the game were improved shortly thereafter by the respected monk, Hermannus Contractus, from Reichenau, and in the school of Liège. In the following centuries, Rithmomachia spread quickly through schools and monasteries in the southern parts of Germany and France. It was used mainly as a teaching aid, but, gradually, intellectuals started to play it for pleasure. In the 13th century Rithmomachia came to England, where famous mathematician Thomas Bradwardine wrote a text about it. Even Roger Bacon recommended Rithmomachia to his students, while Sir Thomas More let the inhabitants of the fictitious Utopia play it for recreation.
The game was well enough known as to justify printed treatises in Latin, French, Italian, and German, in the sixteenth century, and to have public advertisements of the sale of the board and pieces under the shadow of the old Sorbonne.
Any other suggestions?
Thursday, December 14, 2017
Wednesday, December 13, 2017
If we are going to talk about games, everyone should probably read this first.
[Brought to you by Kruzno]
I've long been an advocate of board games (particularly the abstract strategy variety). They're wonderful for both recreation and education, they can provide intriguing examples of mathematical and logical concepts, and, of particular relevance these days, they can be a great testing ground for AI research.
All of these purposes would be better suited if people were familiar with a wider range of games and knew more about their history. This brings us to the game designer and historian, David Parlett and his indispensable Oxford history of board games. I'll be coming back to this book in the future, but for now, this is just a general recommendation. If you're an educator, a researcher, or just someone with an interest in the topic, you should definitely try to get your hands on a copy.
I've long been an advocate of board games (particularly the abstract strategy variety). They're wonderful for both recreation and education, they can provide intriguing examples of mathematical and logical concepts, and, of particular relevance these days, they can be a great testing ground for AI research.
All of these purposes would be better suited if people were familiar with a wider range of games and knew more about their history. This brings us to the game designer and historian, David Parlett and his indispensable Oxford history of board games. I'll be coming back to this book in the future, but for now, this is just a general recommendation. If you're an educator, a researcher, or just someone with an interest in the topic, you should definitely try to get your hands on a copy.
The powerful combination of effective marketing and a product that's literally addictive
[The New Yorker piece, "The Family That Built an Empire of Pain” by Patrick Radden Keefe is an extraordinary piece of longform journalism and you should take the time to read the whole thing, particularly if you have any interest in scientific research, healthcare, and the second coming of the gilded age. I'm not going to attempt any kind of comprehensive summary (like I said, just read it), but I am going to do a few blog post highlighting some points that jump out at me.]
If you've ever wondered what would happen if you crossed an unscrupulous ad man with an unscrupulous pharmaceutical executive.
If you've ever wondered what would happen if you crossed an unscrupulous ad man with an unscrupulous pharmaceutical executive.
Arthur [Sackler] helped pay his medical-school tuition by taking a copywriting job at William Douglas McAdams, a small ad agency that specialized in the medical field. He proved so adept at this work that he eventually bought the agency—and revolutionized the industry. Until then, pharmaceutical companies had not availed themselves of Madison Avenue pizzazz and trickery. As both a doctor and an adman, Arthur displayed a Don Draper-style intuition for the alchemy of marketing. He recognized that selling new drugs requires a seduction of not just the patient but the doctor who writes the prescription.
Sackler saw doctors as unimpeachable stewards of public health. “I would rather place myself and my family at the judgment and mercy of a fellow-physician than that of the state,” he liked to say. So in selling new drugs he devised campaigns that appealed directly to clinicians, placing splashy ads in medical journals and distributing literature to doctors’ offices. Seeing that physicians were most heavily influenced by their own peers, he enlisted prominent ones to endorse his products, and cited scientific studies (which were often underwritten by the pharmaceutical companies themselves). John Kallir, who worked under Sackler for ten years at McAdams, recalled, “Sackler’s ads had a very serious, clinical look—a physician talking to a physician. But it was advertising.” In 1997, Arthur was posthumously inducted into the Medical Advertising Hall of Fame, and a citation praised his achievement in “bringing the full power of advertising and promotion to pharmaceutical marketing.” Allen Frances put it differently: “Most of the questionable practices that propelled the pharmaceutical industry into the scourge it is today can be attributed to Arthur Sackler.”
Advertising has always entailed some degree of persuasive license, and Arthur’s techniques were sometimes blatantly deceptive. In the nineteen-fifties, he produced an ad for a new Pfizer antibiotic, Sigmamycin: an array of doctors’ business cards, alongside the words “More and more physicians find Sigmamycin the antibiotic therapy of choice.” It was the medical equivalent of putting Mickey Mantle on a box of Wheaties. In 1959, an investigative reporter for The Saturday Review tried to contact some of the doctors whose names were on the cards. They did not exist.
During the sixties, Arthur got rich marketing the tranquillizers Librium and Valium. One Librium ad depicted a young woman carrying an armload of books, and suggested that even the quotidian anxiety a college freshman feels upon leaving home might be best handled with tranquillizers. Such students “may be afflicted by a sense of lost identity,” the copy read, adding that university life presented “a whole new world . . . of anxiety.” The ad ran in a medical journal. Sackler promoted Valium for such a wide range of uses that, in 1965, a physician writing in the journal Psychosomatics asked, “When do we not use this drug?” One campaign encouraged doctors to prescribe Valium to people with no psychiatric symptoms whatsoever: “For this kind of patient—with no demonstrable pathology—consider the usefulness of Valium.” Roche, the maker of Valium, had conducted no studies of its addictive potential. Win Gerson, who worked with Sackler at the agency, told the journalist Sam Quinones years later that the Valium campaign was a great success, in part because the drug was so effective. “It kind of made junkies of people, but that drug worked,” Gerson said. By 1973, American doctors were writing more than a hundred million tranquillizer prescriptions a year, and countless patients became hooked. The Senate held hearings on what Edward Kennedy called “a nightmare of dependence and addiction.”
Tuesday, December 12, 2017
The dark magic of the market – – OxyContin edition
[The New Yorker piece, "The Family That Built an Empire of Pain” by Patrick Radden Keefe is an extraordinary piece of longform journalism and you should take the time to read the whole thing, particularly if you have any interest in scientific research, healthcare, and the second coming of the gilded age. I'm not going to attempt any kind of comprehensive summary (like I said, just read it), but I am going to do a few blog post highlighting some points that jump out at me.]
One of the most pernicious ideas of the past few decades is that markets are both magical and moral, that simply removing government oversight and unleashing market forces would always, automatically improve everything. This is, at best, a questionable approach, but it becomes absolutely disastrous when selectively applied. Removing certain regulations while keeping in place anticompetitive rules and government granted monopolies such as patents and copyrights produces a worst of both worlds scenario (at least for the consumer).
While the roots of this philosophy are complex and long-standing, its success can be explained in large part, perhaps even almost entirely, by the way it was subsidized by interested parties. Industries that stand to make windfall profits and billionaires with an ideological ax to grind (huge overlap in these two) pour stunning amounts of money into biased and often worthless academic research, fake institutes and think tanks that start with their conclusions and work backwards, and propaganda/lobbying operations that build themselves as educational foundations. You would have to put scare quotes around every other word to do this justice.
In this particular instance, the single-minded pursuit of optimal profit, rather than serving the social good, corrupted the process and inflicted a huge toll.[emphasis added.]
A 1995 memo sent to the launch team emphasized that the company did “not want to niche” OxyContin just for cancer pain. A primary objective in Purdue’s 2002 budget plan was to “broaden” the use of OxyContin for pain management. As May put it, “What Purdue did really well was target physicians, like general practitioners, who were not pain specialists.” In its internal literature, Purdue similarly spoke of reaching patients who were “opioid naïve.” Because OxyContin was so powerful and potentially addictive, David Kessler told me, from a public-health standpoint “the goal should have been to sell the least dose of the drug to the smallest number of patients.” But this approach was at odds with the competitive imperatives of a pharmaceutical company, he continued. So Purdue set out to do exactly the opposite.
Sales reps, May told me, received training in “overcoming objections” from clinicians. If a doctor inquired about addiction, May had a talking point ready. “ ‘The delivery system is believed to reduce the abuse liability of the drug,’ ” he recited to me, with a rueful laugh. “Those were the specific words. I can still remember, all these years later.” He went on, “I found out pretty fast that it wasn’t true.” In 2002, a sales manager from the company, William Gergely, told a state investigator in Florida that Purdue executives “told us to say things like it is ‘virtually’ non-addicting.”
May didn’t ask doctors simply to take his word on OxyContin; he presented them with studies and literature provided by other physicians. Purdue had a speakers’ bureau, and it paid several thousand clinicians to attend medical conferences and deliver presentations about the merits of the drug. Doctors were offered all-expenses-paid trips to pain-management seminars in places like Boca Raton. Such spending was worth the investment: internal Purdue records indicate that doctors who attended these seminars in 1996 wrote OxyContin prescriptions more than twice as often as those who didn’t. The company advertised in medical journals, sponsored Web sites about chronic pain, and distributed a dizzying variety of OxyContin swag: fishing hats, plush toys, luggage tags. Purdue also produced promotional videos featuring satisfied patients—like a construction worker who talked about how OxyContin had eased his chronic back pain, allowing him to return to work. The videos, which also included testimonials from pain specialists, were sent to tens of thousands of doctors. The marketing of OxyContin relied on an empirical circularity: the company convinced doctors of the drug’s safety with literature that had been produced by doctors who were paid, or funded, by the company.
Monday, December 11, 2017
Model Decay, Causal Mechanisms and Townhallophobia
[Now with title.]
I know I've been going to the well a bit too often recently in terms of old posts. I'll admit there's an element of laziness here, but I also think it's useful and even important to review old arguments in terms of new developments.
This also gives us a chance to dig a little deeper into pertinent related topics. For instance, despite living in a data obsessed age when every journalists feels the need to pepper reporting with graphs and statistics and models and algorithms (and frequently models mislabeled as algorithms), there are still a number of fundamental analytic concepts that generally evade even the more sophisticated data journalists.
A notable example is model decay. With the exception of the physical sciences, even the best models tend to lose explanatory and predictive power over time (though in the life sciences, the changes can be very slow). This is particularly true in the social sciences where people quickly adapt to conditions, sometimes specifically in response to awareness of the very models in question.
Model decay can happen slowly or suddenly and there's no simple procedure for seeing how well things are standing, but there are red flags you can look out for.
Though I may get some pushback on this, I think most good modelers and researchers at least implicitly have a set of plausible mechanisms in mind when they propose a causal relationship. (If a researcher can't think of any plausible mechanisms that might cause the relationship he or she is seeing, that's probably cause for concern.) For example, let's say a study found that people who purchased a gym membership and did not make serious use of it saw their body fat tend to increase. The researcher might hypothesize that the subjects were rationalizing bad dietary choices based on the belief that they would work off the pounds.
Though these plausible mechanisms are just good guesses, it is a good idea to keep them in mind when considering model decay. If we have reason to believe that the mechanisms for a particular model no longer function in the same way, we also have reason to believe that the model may no longer be viable. Going back to our previous example, imagine that a certain unnamed financial institution buys a health club chain and starts signing up customers without their knowledge. We definitely have reason to believe that the relationship between unused gym memberships and body fat will break down.
With the rise of data-based political reporting, we've also seen an uptick in simplistic A-then-B models. Writers will often explicitly acknowledge that conditions are completely different then turn around and insist that the same relationships that held before hold now.
Consider the incumbency advantage. There's obviously a relationship here, but what are the plausible mechanisms behind it? We could always reach out to political scientists or dig into relevant studies and polling data, but we can also make some pretty good common sense guesses. It's entirely reasonable to suppose that the advantage is at least partially dependent on incumbents being responsive to their constituents' wants and needs and maintaining a strong connection with the people back home through regular contact via multiple channels.
When politicians take stands that are unpopular with their constituents and then abruptly and publicly cut off these channels of communication, there is reason to believe that assumptions about the incumbency advantage may no longer hold.
Here's what we were saying about this ten months ago.
We have all heard the statistics about how difficult it is for a Congressional representative to lose his or her job. This is partially because of things like gerrymandering and spigots of campaign cash, but it also reflects a process that does a pretty good job allowing a reasonably competent and dedicated legislator to keep the constituents fairly happy in his or her district. A big part of that process is the maintaining of good relationships and lines of communication with voters and communities. Many political career has ended when voters felt someone had "lost touch with the people back home."
In this context, stories like the following from Talking Points Memo's Allegra Kirkland take on a special significance.
I know I've been going to the well a bit too often recently in terms of old posts. I'll admit there's an element of laziness here, but I also think it's useful and even important to review old arguments in terms of new developments.
This also gives us a chance to dig a little deeper into pertinent related topics. For instance, despite living in a data obsessed age when every journalists feels the need to pepper reporting with graphs and statistics and models and algorithms (and frequently models mislabeled as algorithms), there are still a number of fundamental analytic concepts that generally evade even the more sophisticated data journalists.
A notable example is model decay. With the exception of the physical sciences, even the best models tend to lose explanatory and predictive power over time (though in the life sciences, the changes can be very slow). This is particularly true in the social sciences where people quickly adapt to conditions, sometimes specifically in response to awareness of the very models in question.
Model decay can happen slowly or suddenly and there's no simple procedure for seeing how well things are standing, but there are red flags you can look out for.
Though I may get some pushback on this, I think most good modelers and researchers at least implicitly have a set of plausible mechanisms in mind when they propose a causal relationship. (If a researcher can't think of any plausible mechanisms that might cause the relationship he or she is seeing, that's probably cause for concern.) For example, let's say a study found that people who purchased a gym membership and did not make serious use of it saw their body fat tend to increase. The researcher might hypothesize that the subjects were rationalizing bad dietary choices based on the belief that they would work off the pounds.
Though these plausible mechanisms are just good guesses, it is a good idea to keep them in mind when considering model decay. If we have reason to believe that the mechanisms for a particular model no longer function in the same way, we also have reason to believe that the model may no longer be viable. Going back to our previous example, imagine that a certain unnamed financial institution buys a health club chain and starts signing up customers without their knowledge. We definitely have reason to believe that the relationship between unused gym memberships and body fat will break down.
With the rise of data-based political reporting, we've also seen an uptick in simplistic A-then-B models. Writers will often explicitly acknowledge that conditions are completely different then turn around and insist that the same relationships that held before hold now.
Consider the incumbency advantage. There's obviously a relationship here, but what are the plausible mechanisms behind it? We could always reach out to political scientists or dig into relevant studies and polling data, but we can also make some pretty good common sense guesses. It's entirely reasonable to suppose that the advantage is at least partially dependent on incumbents being responsive to their constituents' wants and needs and maintaining a strong connection with the people back home through regular contact via multiple channels.
When politicians take stands that are unpopular with their constituents and then abruptly and publicly cut off these channels of communication, there is reason to believe that assumptions about the incumbency advantage may no longer hold.
Here's what we were saying about this ten months ago.
Though, to be perfectly fair, Tennessee has always been a hotbed of leftist radicals
We have all heard the statistics about how difficult it is for a Congressional representative to lose his or her job. This is partially because of things like gerrymandering and spigots of campaign cash, but it also reflects a process that does a pretty good job allowing a reasonably competent and dedicated legislator to keep the constituents fairly happy in his or her district. A big part of that process is the maintaining of good relationships and lines of communication with voters and communities. Many political career has ended when voters felt someone had "lost touch with the people back home."
In this context, stories like the following from Talking Points Memo's Allegra Kirkland take on a special significance.
Constituents requesting that Rep. Jimmy Duncan Jr. (R-TN) hold a town hall on repealing the Affordable Care Act aren't being met with a polite brushoff from staffers anymore. Instead, Duncan's office has started sending out a form letter telling them point-blank that he has no intention to hold any town hall meetings.Admittedly, it is a long time until midterms, but possibly not long enough to repair this kind of damage.
“I am not going to hold town hall meetings in this atmosphere, because they would very quickly turn into shouting opportunities for extremists, kooks and radicals,” the letter read, according to a copy obtained by the Maryville Daily Times. “Also, I do not intend to give more publicity to those on the far left who have so much hatred, anger and frustration in them.”
In the first weeks of the 115th Congress, elected officials dropping by their home districts were surprised to find town halls packed to the rafters with concerned constituents. Caught off guard and on camera, lawmakers were asked to defend President Donald Trump’s immigration policies and provide a timeline on repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act.
Now, many of them are skipping out on these events entirely. Some have said large meetings are an ineffective format for addressing individual concerns. Many others have, like the President himself, dismissed those questioning their agenda as “paid protesters” or radical activists who could pose a physical threat.
Voters turning out to town halls are pushing back hard on this characterization, arguing that they represent varied ideological backgrounds and have diverse issues to raise. Constituents unable to meet with their elected officials over the weekend told TPM that they’re not attending town hall events to make trouble. Instead, they say they want accountability from the people they pay to represent them.
Kim Mattoch, a mother of three and event planner, told TPM that she tried to go to a Saturday town hall in Roseville, California with GOP Rep. Tom McClintock but couldn’t make it in. The 200-seat theater hosting the event was quickly filled to capacity, leaving hundreds waiting outside.
“I’m a constituent of McClintock and a registered Republican in a very Republican district—though I don’t really align very well these days with the Republican Party,” Mattoch said in a Monday phone call. “So I wanted to go to the town hall because I legitimately had questions for the congressman.”
Mattoch said the protesters waiting outside had a wide range of “legitimate concerns.” She personally hoped to ask her representative about how the GOP was progressing on repealing and replacing the ACA and why House Republicans last week voted to kill a ruling aimed at preventing coal mining debris from ending up in waterways.
Yet McClintock told the Los Angeles Times that he thought an “anarchist element” was present in the crowd outside his event, and said he was escorted to his car by police because he’d been told the atmosphere was “deteriorating.”
Ramon Fliek, who attended the McClintock event with his wife, told TPM on Monday that police “were kind enough to block the whole road” to make space for the overflow crowd, and that he overheard protesters thanking law enforcement for “doing their jobs.”
“If you look at the videos from the event, you can’t get any notion that it was aggressive,” he said. “There was an older woman with a poodle that ran after him and it’s like, okay, the older lady with the poodle is not going to threaten you. I understand that he might want to give that impression, but it was very pleasant.”
Saturday, December 9, 2017
Consequences of budget deficits
This is Joseph
Paul Krugman via Mark Thoma:
But, in the long run, to spend is to tax. All that reducing taxes now is doing is moving this taxing off into the future. Or shifting the tax burden around, by future defaults on bonds (for example), which might target specific segments of the population.
What I find hard to swallow is how the deficit language is swallowed by the media as if they are not able to follow the basics of the structure of the arguments. If we use the (imperfect) household analogy, we are saying that we should reduce our income (taxes) and then discover that we need to reduce expenses, in world where there is plenty of income available.
Now you could make a first principles argument for why social security and medicare are bad ideas (or perhaps defense, the other large item). But that should be done in parallel with the cuts in income and not afterwards because of the cuts. If a family decides that they no longer need a car, and thus can work less, the correct order is deciding to ditch the car and then deciding to cut back on work. Not waiting for a crisis.
I really wish that the reporting on this issue was more explicit.
Paul Krugman via Mark Thoma:
For budget deficits are going to soar thanks to Republican legislation — probably by even more than the official scorekeepers say, because the legislation creates so many new loopholes. And offsetting those deficits will require going after the true big-ticket programs, namely Medicare and Social Security.
Oh, they’ll find euphemisms to describe what they’re doing, talking solemnly about the need for “entitlement reform” as an act of fiscal responsibility — while their huge budget-busting tax cut for the rich gets shoved down the memory hole. But whatever words they use to cloak the reality of the situation, Republicans have given their donors what they wanted — and now they’re coming for your benefits.I am actually a big opponent of "deficits don't matter", even when spouted by the left. I totally understand the need to invest and that low interest rates that right now is a fine time to run deficits if there is a good reason. But, in the long run, deficits either need to be paid or are going to act in an inflationary way. What is saving us, for now, is that the rich are so rich that there are a shortage of secure investment opportunities so rates are low.
But, in the long run, to spend is to tax. All that reducing taxes now is doing is moving this taxing off into the future. Or shifting the tax burden around, by future defaults on bonds (for example), which might target specific segments of the population.
What I find hard to swallow is how the deficit language is swallowed by the media as if they are not able to follow the basics of the structure of the arguments. If we use the (imperfect) household analogy, we are saying that we should reduce our income (taxes) and then discover that we need to reduce expenses, in world where there is plenty of income available.
Now you could make a first principles argument for why social security and medicare are bad ideas (or perhaps defense, the other large item). But that should be done in parallel with the cuts in income and not afterwards because of the cuts. If a family decides that they no longer need a car, and thus can work less, the correct order is deciding to ditch the car and then deciding to cut back on work. Not waiting for a crisis.
I really wish that the reporting on this issue was more explicit.
Friday, December 8, 2017
Adam ruins lab nice
Given the number of readers with relevant experience in this field, perhaps someone would like to weigh in on this.
Thursday, December 7, 2017
Agon
I'm a big fan of abstract strategy games, particularly those played on hexagonally-tiled boards (such as the ones you can purchase here). One of my favorites is Agon. It's a challenging but easy to learn game that's deserves a much bigger following. Here is the write-up I did of the rules a few years ago.
Agon may be the oldest abstract strategy game played on a 6 by 6 by 6 hexagonally tiled board, first appearing as early as the late Eighteenth Century in France. The game reached it greatest popularity a hundred years later when the Victorians embraced it for its combination of simple moves and complex strategy.
The Pieces: Each player has one queen and six pawns a.k.a. guards placed in the pattern indicated below
The Objective: To place your queen in the center hexagon and surround her with all six of her guards.(below)
Moves: Think of the Agon board as a series of concentric circles (see above). Pieces can move one space at a time either in the same ring or the ring closer to the center. In the figure on the left, a piece on a hexagon marked 4 could move to an adjacent hexagon marked either 4 or 3. Only the queen is allowed to move into the center hexagon. The figure below shows possible moves.
Capturing: A piece is captured when there are two enemy pieces on either side of it. The player with the captured piece must use his or her next move to place the captured piece on the outside hexagon.
If the captured piece is a guard, the player whose piece was captured can choose where on the outer hex to place the piece. If the piece is a queen, the player who made the capture decides where the queen should go.
If more than one piece is captured in one turn, the player whose pieces were captured must move them one turn at a time.
If a player surrounds the center hexagon with guards without getting the queen into position, that player forfeits the game.
Agon may be the oldest abstract strategy game played on a 6 by 6 by 6 hexagonally tiled board, first appearing as early as the late Eighteenth Century in France. The game reached it greatest popularity a hundred years later when the Victorians embraced it for its combination of simple moves and complex strategy.
The Pieces: Each player has one queen and six pawns a.k.a. guards placed in the pattern indicated below
The Objective: To place your queen in the center hexagon and surround her with all six of her guards.(below)
Moves: Think of the Agon board as a series of concentric circles (see above). Pieces can move one space at a time either in the same ring or the ring closer to the center. In the figure on the left, a piece on a hexagon marked 4 could move to an adjacent hexagon marked either 4 or 3. Only the queen is allowed to move into the center hexagon. The figure below shows possible moves.
Capturing: A piece is captured when there are two enemy pieces on either side of it. The player with the captured piece must use his or her next move to place the captured piece on the outside hexagon.
If the captured piece is a guard, the player whose piece was captured can choose where on the outer hex to place the piece. If the piece is a queen, the player who made the capture decides where the queen should go.
If more than one piece is captured in one turn, the player whose pieces were captured must move them one turn at a time.
If a player surrounds the center hexagon with guards without getting the queen into position, that player forfeits the game.
Dilation and contraction.
Our standard narrative is deeply invested in the idea that progress is ever accelerating and that we are always on the cusp of an unimaginable leap forward. One of the favorite devices used to sustain this belief is dilation/contraction. The rate of technological change and its impact on society in the past is underestimated (particularly when describing the periods of the late 19th/early 20th centuries and the postwar era) while the current rate of change is overestimated, often wildly so when it comes to near-future predictions.
The following by Jim Hoagland is a good example.
It is essential to note that, despite decades of serious and aggressive research and development, none of these technologies currently exist (at least not at the levels implied here) and, with the exception of autonomous vehicles, they probably won't exist a decade from now. Even with AVs, ruling the road will probably take decades unless we start heavily regulating non-autonomous cars.
(As we've pointed out before, there is an important distinction between driverless cars and driverless trucks. While both are coming, the current economic case for autonomous trucking makes far more sense and the technological challenge of driving a relatively small number of routes is considerably less. Long haul truck driving has the potential to go away quite suddenly.)
It's true that outside factors often slowed implementation in fields like electricity in the past. Factories had to be reconfigured. Power lines had to be laid. This meant that the adoption of certain technologies was delayed, particularly in certain localities, but even with this, the rate of technological change around the turn-of-the-century and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in the postwar era, was stunning.
More importantly in this case, (barring the special case where a new technology can be uploaded without any kind of change or upgrade of hardware) the same basic issues still apply. Even with AV's, there's still development time, infrastructure and adoption to consider.
The day is coming when you'll be able to say an address into your phone and have your car on its way without ever leaving the comfort of your couch. The prognosis for Hoagland's other just-around-the-corner innovations is considerably less promising. There are daunting problems involved with using AI to take over complex, badly understood tasks that largely lack reliable and agreed-upon metrics of success. While as for flying cars, the obstacles are huge and we have a history of failed promises going back literally a century. Just because some compulsive liar whose primary accomplishment has been getting gullible venture capitalists to write him ginormous checks makes this particular promise doesn't mean you should report it in the pages of the Washington Post as a done deal.
But even allowing for the vanishingly small chance that all of these things do come to pass roughly in the time frame given, we would still be nowhere near the level of technological change that people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had to adapt to in virtually every aspect of their world, from day-to-day living to industry to transportation to mass media to telecommunications to medicine to agriculture and to all the others that I have invariably left off the list.
The following by Jim Hoagland is a good example.
Driverless cars and trucks rule the road, while robots “man” the factories. Super-smartphones hail Uber helicopters or even planes to fly their owners across mushrooming urban areas. Machines use algorithms to teach themselves cognitive tasks that once required human intelligence, wiping out millions of managerial, as well as industrial, jobs.
These are visions of a world remade — for the most part, in the next five to 10 years — by technological advances that form a fourth industrial revolution. You catch glimpses of the same visions today not only in Silicon Valley but also in Paris think tanks, Chinese electric-car factories or even here at the edge of the Sahara.
Technological disruption in the 21st century is different. Societies had years to adapt to change driven by the steam engine, electricity and the computer. Today, change is instant and ubiquitous. It arrives digitally across the globe all at once.
It is essential to note that, despite decades of serious and aggressive research and development, none of these technologies currently exist (at least not at the levels implied here) and, with the exception of autonomous vehicles, they probably won't exist a decade from now. Even with AVs, ruling the road will probably take decades unless we start heavily regulating non-autonomous cars.
(As we've pointed out before, there is an important distinction between driverless cars and driverless trucks. While both are coming, the current economic case for autonomous trucking makes far more sense and the technological challenge of driving a relatively small number of routes is considerably less. Long haul truck driving has the potential to go away quite suddenly.)
It's true that outside factors often slowed implementation in fields like electricity in the past. Factories had to be reconfigured. Power lines had to be laid. This meant that the adoption of certain technologies was delayed, particularly in certain localities, but even with this, the rate of technological change around the turn-of-the-century and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in the postwar era, was stunning.
More importantly in this case, (barring the special case where a new technology can be uploaded without any kind of change or upgrade of hardware) the same basic issues still apply. Even with AV's, there's still development time, infrastructure and adoption to consider.
The day is coming when you'll be able to say an address into your phone and have your car on its way without ever leaving the comfort of your couch. The prognosis for Hoagland's other just-around-the-corner innovations is considerably less promising. There are daunting problems involved with using AI to take over complex, badly understood tasks that largely lack reliable and agreed-upon metrics of success. While as for flying cars, the obstacles are huge and we have a history of failed promises going back literally a century. Just because some compulsive liar whose primary accomplishment has been getting gullible venture capitalists to write him ginormous checks makes this particular promise doesn't mean you should report it in the pages of the Washington Post as a done deal.
But even allowing for the vanishingly small chance that all of these things do come to pass roughly in the time frame given, we would still be nowhere near the level of technological change that people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had to adapt to in virtually every aspect of their world, from day-to-day living to industry to transportation to mass media to telecommunications to medicine to agriculture and to all the others that I have invariably left off the list.
Wednesday, December 6, 2017
Insert obligatory what's-a-newspaper? joke here
Another small piece (or, more accurately, medium-size piece of a big piece) of the late 19th/early 20th century technology spike.
Media innovation was a big part of this story, not in the same league as internal combustion and electricity, but still a big player marked with a number of stunning advances.Most of the attention here tends to go to the then completely new developments such as recorded sound and moving pictures, but in terms of impact, advances in printing may have had more of an effect on the period.
I have been going through some old Scientific Americans for material and came across this excellent example from 1896. In the middle of the century, putting out a major metropolitan daily required the equivalent of a medium-size, well staffed factory.
By the last decade of the century, the presses were five times as fast, a fraction of the size, and largely automated.
This and other technological innovations (such as color printing) made publications like the Strand magazine and journalistic events like the Hearst/Pulitzer circulation wars and the rise of the comic strips possible. All of this had an enormous impact on American culture and politics.
Media innovation was a big part of this story, not in the same league as internal combustion and electricity, but still a big player marked with a number of stunning advances.Most of the attention here tends to go to the then completely new developments such as recorded sound and moving pictures, but in terms of impact, advances in printing may have had more of an effect on the period.
I have been going through some old Scientific Americans for material and came across this excellent example from 1896. In the middle of the century, putting out a major metropolitan daily required the equivalent of a medium-size, well staffed factory.
By the last decade of the century, the presses were five times as fast, a fraction of the size, and largely automated.
This and other technological innovations (such as color printing) made publications like the Strand magazine and journalistic events like the Hearst/Pulitzer circulation wars and the rise of the comic strips possible. All of this had an enormous impact on American culture and politics.
Tuesday, December 5, 2017
Non-belated Tuesday Tweets
You'd think coming out against women's suffrage would be Thiel's low point, but he keeps exceeding expectations. https://t.co/Uvs1G0IwGV— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) November 23, 2017
For years I've been meaning to write something about new forms of price discrimination undermining price discovery.— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) November 25, 2017
Looks like I shouldn't have dragged my feet. https://t.co/TvtiaDFlT0
Interesting how these articles always say we need to develop something that sounds exactly like a CLEP without acknowledging we already have a program in place. It's almost as if focusing on making better use of existing tools isn't sexy (or profitable). https://t.co/ZFw1nEZ5Rx— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) November 27, 2017
Excellent work from Matt Lewis, though I'd still frame it more as "drinking from the wrong pipe."https://t.co/TmmIZhw3xB https://t.co/iJ3Xmzeple— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) November 28, 2017
The expression back in Arkansas was "towns that Walmart killed twice," first by opening a store that drove local merchants out of business, then by closing met store and forcing residents to drive to the next town. https://t.co/0yAgJCOuPA— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) December 4, 2017
Monday, December 4, 2017
Want to see a 19th Century polar exploration balloon? Thought so...
Besancon and Hermite never actually made the trip, of course, but, damn, the illustrations are cool.
Friday, December 1, 2017
Yes, I know I've reposted this, but it keeps getting more relevant
As we were saying in August (point 2.2 to be precise)https://t.co/5k86uQjWOz— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) December 1, 2017
Republicans Are Building Themselves a Political Trap with ‘Tax Reform’ https://t.co/ChaPJSaxqb via @TPM
Tuesday, August 22, 2017
The Republicans' 3 x 3 existential threat
I've argued previously that Donald Trump presents an existential threat to the Republican Party. I know this can sound overheated and perhaps even a bit crazy. There are few American institutions as long-standing and deeply entrenched as are the Democratic and Republican parties. Proposing that one of them might not be around 10 years from now beggars the imagination and if this story started and stopped with Donald Trump, it would be silly to suggest we were on the verge of a political cataclysm.But, just as Trump's rise did not occur in a vacuum, neither will his fall. We discussed earlier how Donald Trump has the power to drive a wedge between the Republican Party and a significant segment of its base [I wrote this before the departure of Steve Bannon. That may diminish Trump's ability to create this rift but I don't think it reduces the chances of the rift happening. – – M.P.]. This is the sort of thing that can profoundly damage a political party, possibly locking it into a minority status for a long time, but normally the wound would not be fatal. These, however, are not normal times.
The Republican Party of 2017 faces a unique combination of interrelated challenges, each of which is at a historic level and the combination of which would present an unprecedented threat to this or any US political party. The following list is not intended to be exhaustive, but it hits the main points.
The GOP currently has to deal with extraordinary political scandals, a stunningly unpopular agenda and daunting demographic trends. To keep things symmetric and easy to remember, let's break each one of these down to three components (keeping in mind that the list may change).
With the scandals:
1. Money – – Even with the most generous reading imaginable, there is no question that Trump has a decades long record of screwing people over, skirting the law, and dealing with disreputable and sometimes criminal elements. At least some of these dealings have been with the Russian mafia, oligarchs, and figures tied in with the Kremlin which leads us to…
2. The hacking of the election – – This one is also beyond dispute. It happened and it may have put Donald Trump into the White House. At this point, we have plenty of quid and plenty of quo; if Mueller can nail down pro, we will have a complete set.
3. And the cover-up – – As Josh Marshall and many others have pointed out, the phrase "it's not the crime; it's the cover-up" is almost never true. That said, coverups can provide tipping points and handholds for investigators, not to mention expanding the list of culprits.
With the agenda:
1. Health care – – By some standards the most unpopular major policy proposal in living memory that a party in power has invested so deeply in. Furthermore, the pushback against the initiative has essentially driven congressional Republicans into hiding from their own constituents for the past half year. As mentioned before, this has the potential to greatly undermine the relationship between GOP senators and representatives and the voters.
2. Tax cuts for the wealthy – – As said many times, Donald Trump has a gift for making the subtle plain, the plain obvious, and the obvious undeniable. In the past, Republicans were able to get a great deal of upward redistribution of the wealth past the voters through obfuscation and clever branding, but we have reached the point where simply calling something "tax reform" is no longer enough to sell tax proposals so regressive that even the majority of Republicans oppose them.
3. Immigration (subject to change) – – the race for third place in this list is fairly competitive (education seems to be coming up on the outside), but the administration's immigration policies (which are the direct result of decades of xenophobic propaganda from conservative media) have already done tremendous damage, caused great backlash, and are whitening the gap between the GOP and the Hispanic community, which leads us to…
Demographics:
As Lindsey Graham has observed, they simply are not making enough new old white men to keep the GOP's strategy going much longer, but the Trump era rebranding of the Republican Party only exacerbates the problems with women, young people, and pretty much anyone who isn't white.
Maybe I am missing a historical precedent here, but I can't think of another time that either the Democrats or the Republicans were this vulnerable on all three of these fronts. This does not mean that the party is doomed or even that, with the right breaks, it can't maintain a hold on some part of the government. What it does mean is that the institution is especially fragile at the moment. A mortal blow may not come, but we can no longer call it unthinkable.
Lots of threads converging on this one
And all of them tremendously important. Corruption and regulatory capture. An almost mystical faith in the magic of markets and private-enterprise approaches (even if they end up being all but completely government-subsidized). An inexhaustible tolerance for concentration of wealth and power. Internalized Randianism complete with the belief that the rest of us owe a debt to the rich and powerful that we can never fully repay. Regulatory capture and occasionally good old-fashioned corruption.
Thank God for John Oliver.
Thank God for John Oliver.
Thursday, November 30, 2017
I'm running behind again so...
Here are two beautiful French planes from 1909. Back tomorrow with actual prose.
And a few impressive airships.
Tuesday, November 28, 2017
Belated Tuesday Tweets
“Newsworthy” implies “demands coverage,” not “deserves platform.”— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) November 13, 2017
Under its existing model, Uber's competitive advantage is mainly based on cheap nonunion labor providing its own vehicles. Under this model, Uber has no special advantage while competitors from Amazon to Google to car rental companies to auto manufacturers are better positioned.— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) November 13, 2017
Josh missed the most important point, Forget racist, conspiracy theorist and fabulist. Cernovich first came to fame through the men's rights movement. Misogynists have now weaponized the backlash against harassment.— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) November 21, 2017
True, but those decisions were made before false balance and Clinton derangement syndrome helped put Trump in the WH. This shows the NYT has learned nothing from its mistakes. @jayrosen_nyu— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) November 13, 2017
Of course, if the New York Times had followed the Washington Post's lead instead of doubling down on false balance, we might not have a situation they all need to rise to.— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) November 20, 2017
Substitute 50s and Russian for 80s and Japanese and work in Sputnik...https://t.co/JdzsgDyDNX— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) November 22, 2017
Kruzno
Despite the pieces (I decided to go with something off the shelf for the prototype), it's not a chess variant. Instead, it's a capture-and-evade abstract strategy game where the rank of the pieces is non-transitive. The rules are simple enough for a small child to play but challenging enough to keep reasonably competent chess players on their toes. It is also the official game of a small village in Slovakia, but that's a story for another time.
Between now and Christmas, I'll be writing some posts on game design and possibly sharing some thoughts and cautionary tales about jumping into a small business with no relevant experience. In the meantime, I still have some of that first run up for sale on Amazon. Go by and check it out.
Monday, November 27, 2017
Another Tesla article from the Scientific American archives (along with some very cool train pictures).
19th Century drawing of a Geissler tubes.
This story mainly stands on its own but there are a couple points I want to emphasize. First, it's a nice example of that distinctive Tesla combination: important innovator; savvy showmen; extravagantly over-promising flake. That's not just something that shows in retrospect; you can see it coming through contemporary accounts. Sober observers were well aware of all of these facets. The man was capable of amazing advances; he also reported getting messages from Mars.
I also like the way the story knocks down a false but persistent trope. There's a tendency to treat earlier generations as innocent and unimaginative, often oblivious to the extraordinary events that were starting to unfold. Call it the "little did they imagine" genre. The trouble is it's almost entirely wrong. Particularly in America, people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw themselves as living in a wondrous time and they tended to greet new developments with great excitement, if anything, often overestimating the degree to which their world was about to change.
Reading through these old articles, one thing that strikes me is that wildly ambitious ideas were not accepted unskeptically, but they weren't treated dismissively either. People seemed to get that an idea could fail miserably and still be of great value.
This story mainly stands on its own but there are a couple points I want to emphasize. First, it's a nice example of that distinctive Tesla combination: important innovator; savvy showmen; extravagantly over-promising flake. That's not just something that shows in retrospect; you can see it coming through contemporary accounts. Sober observers were well aware of all of these facets. The man was capable of amazing advances; he also reported getting messages from Mars.
I also like the way the story knocks down a false but persistent trope. There's a tendency to treat earlier generations as innocent and unimaginative, often oblivious to the extraordinary events that were starting to unfold. Call it the "little did they imagine" genre. The trouble is it's almost entirely wrong. Particularly in America, people in the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw themselves as living in a wondrous time and they tended to greet new developments with great excitement, if anything, often overestimating the degree to which their world was about to change.
Reading through these old articles, one thing that strikes me is that wildly ambitious ideas were not accepted unskeptically, but they weren't treated dismissively either. People seemed to get that an idea could fail miserably and still be of great value.
Friday, November 24, 2017
This is what a good job market looks like.
In the postwar era, employers (particularly what we would now call the stem fields) were genuinely hungry. They were willing to be flexible about qualifications and creative about recruiting.
What's My Line? (1950–1967)
Episode dated 20 February 1955
What's My Line? (1950–1967)
Episode dated 20 February 1955
Thursday, November 23, 2017
"As God as my witness..." is my second favorite Thanksgiving episode line [Repost]
If you watch this and you could swear you remember Johnny and Mr. Carlson discussing Pink Floyd, you're not imagining things. Hulu uses the DVD edit which cuts out almost all of the copyrighted music. .
As for my favorite line, it comes from the Buffy episode "Pangs" and it requires a bit of a set up (which is a pain because it makes it next to impossible to work into a conversation).
Buffy's luckless friend Xander had accidentally violated a native American grave yard and, in addition to freeing a vengeful spirit, was been cursed with all of the diseases Europeans brought to the Americas.
Spike: I just can't take all this mamby-pamby boo-hooing about the bloody Indians.
Willow: Uh, the preferred term is...
Spike: You won. All right? You came in and you killed them and you took their land. That's what conquering nations do. It's what Caesar did, and he's not goin' around saying, "I came, I conquered, I felt really bad about it." The history of the world is not people making friends. You had better weapons, and you massacred them. End of story.
Buffy: Well, I think the Spaniards actually did a lot of - Not that I don't like Spaniards.
Spike: Listen to you. How you gonna fight anyone with that attitude?
Willow: We don't wanna fight anyone.
Buffy: I just wanna have Thanksgiving.
Spike: Heh heh. Yeah... Good luck.
Willow: Well, if we could talk to him...
Spike: You exterminated his race. What could you possibly say that would make him feel better? It's kill or be killed here. Take your bloody pick.
Xander: Maybe it's the syphilis talking, but, some of that made sense.
Wednesday, November 22, 2017
Igon values, superstar coin flippers, and the Gladwell problem
Malcolm Gladwell has started coming up in quite a few major threads and larger pieces, so I decided I needed to get up to speed on some of the controversies involving the author. Some of the more substantial have centered around what Steven Pinker has called the Igon value problem
From Pinker's review of "What the Dog Saw"
Gladwell got the best of the follow up exchange, dismissing “igon value” as a spelling error while getting Pinker sucked into a bunch of secondary or even tertiary arguments. (One of the best indicators of intelligence is the ability to avoid discussions about the heritability of intelligence.)
The spelling error defense is technically correct but it misrepresents the main point of the criticism. First off, on a really basic level, this indicates poor fact checking on the part of Mr. Gladwell and the New Yorker. Even working under the relatively low standards of the blogosphere, I always try to Google unfamiliar phrases before quoting them. You'd think that the editors of America's most distinguished magazine would do at least that much.
More importantly, spelling errors fall in two basic categories. The first does not tell us anything substanitive about the writer. Given the ghoti insanity of the English language, being a bad speller does not necessarily imply a weak vocabulary or poor mastery of the language (put another way, not knowing whether it's double C or double S in "necessarily"does not necessarily suggest that you don't know what "necessarily" means). There are, however, cases (particularly involving transcription) where spelling errors can indicate that the writer is unfamiliar with the words in question. That appears to be the case here.
Pinker's central criticism largely boils down to phonetic reporting. Gladwell often goes into stories with a weak grasp of the field in question, as a result he frequently makes serious mistakes, constantly misses important subtleties, and is almost completely dependent on his subjects for understanding and context. Add to this poor fact checking and a disturbing nonchalance about getting the story right, and things can get ugly quickly.
Somewhat ironically, Gladwell hit back at Pinker for employing one of the same techniques which Gladwell is so proud of, picking a detail that told a good story and memorably illustrated a larger idea. The Igon Value Problem worked beautifully on those terms but it was far from the most serious or conclusive example available, even if we limit ourselves to the single article in question, "Blowing Up."
For example, the piece is very much invested in the idea of Taleb as Wall Street revolutionary. We could quibble about just how radical the Black Swan ideas and strategies are, but it is an entirely defensible interpretation. Unfortunately, Gladwell doesn't really understand which ideas are debatably new and which are familiar to anyone in finance. Here's an excerpt (starting and ending mid-paragraph):
But of course, Taleb didn't have to "do the arithmetic in his head" because, like virtually everyone else on Wall Street, he had probably read almost the same analogy in a famous passage from A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel [transcribed via Dragon so beware of homonyms]:
(I love that second paragraph. Pretty much any time I flip past CNBC it comes flooding back to mind.)
Malkiel published this book in 1973 and though it more than ruffled a few feathers, it quickly became one of the seminal books on investing. Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker piece came out 25 years later.
None of this is meant to imply any kind of deliberate plagiarism. Quite the opposite. I very much doubt that Gladwell realized he was paraphrasing a well-known passage. What I strongly suspect happened was that Taleb cited this in an interview as a standard example that everyone would be familiar with, sort of like describing a situation as a "frog in boiling water."
Gladwell's unacknowledged paraphrase is yet another indication that he didn't understand the strange role that economic theory and particularly market efficiency (in this case the semi-strong variety) plays on Wall Street, a role that was central to his narrative. This would be bad enough if he was just shooting for a straightforward profile, but Gladwell insists on playing the deep thinker, making pseudo-profound points, even closing with a grand sweeping moral about human nobility:
Gladwell loves to tell what Christopher Chabris has termed "just-so stories," cute little fables counterintuitive and surprising enough to catch the eye but neat and simple enough to go down easy. Paradoxically, pulling off that sort of simplicity requires that the writer have a deep and subtle understanding of his or her subject. Simplifying a subject you don't understand never goes well.
From Pinker's review of "What the Dog Saw"
An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “sagittal plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.
Gladwell got the best of the follow up exchange, dismissing “igon value” as a spelling error while getting Pinker sucked into a bunch of secondary or even tertiary arguments. (One of the best indicators of intelligence is the ability to avoid discussions about the heritability of intelligence.)
The spelling error defense is technically correct but it misrepresents the main point of the criticism. First off, on a really basic level, this indicates poor fact checking on the part of Mr. Gladwell and the New Yorker. Even working under the relatively low standards of the blogosphere, I always try to Google unfamiliar phrases before quoting them. You'd think that the editors of America's most distinguished magazine would do at least that much.
More importantly, spelling errors fall in two basic categories. The first does not tell us anything substanitive about the writer. Given the ghoti insanity of the English language, being a bad speller does not necessarily imply a weak vocabulary or poor mastery of the language (put another way, not knowing whether it's double C or double S in "necessarily"does not necessarily suggest that you don't know what "necessarily" means). There are, however, cases (particularly involving transcription) where spelling errors can indicate that the writer is unfamiliar with the words in question. That appears to be the case here.
Pinker's central criticism largely boils down to phonetic reporting. Gladwell often goes into stories with a weak grasp of the field in question, as a result he frequently makes serious mistakes, constantly misses important subtleties, and is almost completely dependent on his subjects for understanding and context. Add to this poor fact checking and a disturbing nonchalance about getting the story right, and things can get ugly quickly.
Somewhat ironically, Gladwell hit back at Pinker for employing one of the same techniques which Gladwell is so proud of, picking a detail that told a good story and memorably illustrated a larger idea. The Igon Value Problem worked beautifully on those terms but it was far from the most serious or conclusive example available, even if we limit ourselves to the single article in question, "Blowing Up."
For example, the piece is very much invested in the idea of Taleb as Wall Street revolutionary. We could quibble about just how radical the Black Swan ideas and strategies are, but it is an entirely defensible interpretation. Unfortunately, Gladwell doesn't really understand which ideas are debatably new and which are familiar to anyone in finance. Here's an excerpt (starting and ending mid-paragraph):
There was just one problem, however, and it is the key to understanding the strange path that Nassim Taleb has chosen, and the position he now holds as Wall Street's principal dissident. Despite his envy and admiration, he did not want to be Victor Niederhoffer -- not then, not now, and not even for a moment in between. For when he looked around him, at the books and the tennis court and the folk art on the walls -- when he contemplated the countless millions that Niederhoffer had made over the years -- he could not escape the thought that it might all have been the result of sheer, dumb luck.
Taleb knew how heretical that thought was. Wall Street was dedicated to the principle that when it came to playing the markets there was such a thing as expertise, that skill and insight mattered in investing just as skill and insight mattered in surgery and golf and flying fighter jets.
...
For Taleb, then, the question why someone was a success in the financial marketplace was vexing. Taleb could do the arithmetic in his head. Suppose that there were ten thousand investment managers out there, which is not an outlandish number, and that every year half of them, entirely by chance, made money and half of them, entirely by chance, lost money. And suppose that every year the losers were tossed out, and the game replayed with those who remained. At the end of five years, there would be three hundred and thirteen people who had made money in every one of those years, and after ten years there would be nine people who had made money every single year in a row, all out of pure luck.
But of course, Taleb didn't have to "do the arithmetic in his head" because, like virtually everyone else on Wall Street, he had probably read almost the same analogy in a famous passage from A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel [transcribed via Dragon so beware of homonyms]:
Perhaps the laws of chance should be illustrated. Let's engage in a coin flipping contest. Those who can consistently flip heads will be declared winners. The contest begins and 1,000 contestants flip coins. Just as would be expected by chance, 500 of them flip heads and these winners are allowed to advance to the second stage of the contest and flip again. As might be expected, 250 flip heads. Operating under the laws of chance, there will be 125 winners in the third round, the three in the fourth, 31 in the fifth, 16 in the sixth, and 8 in the seventh.
By this time, crowds start to gather to witness the surprising ability of these expert coin-flippers. The winners are overwhelmed with adulation. They are celebrated as geniuses in the art of coin-flipping, their biographies are written, and people urgently seek their advice. After all, there were 1000 contestants and only eight could consistently flip heads. The game continues and some contestants eventually flip heads nine and ten times in a row. [* If we had let the losers continue to play (as mutual fund managers do, even after a bad year), we would have found several more contestants who flipped eight or nine ads out of 10 and were therefore regarded as expert coin-flippers.] The point of this analogy is not to indicate that investment-fund managers can or should make their decisions by flipping coins, but that the laws of chance do operate and that they can explain some amazing success stories.
(I love that second paragraph. Pretty much any time I flip past CNBC it comes flooding back to mind.)
Malkiel published this book in 1973 and though it more than ruffled a few feathers, it quickly became one of the seminal books on investing. Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker piece came out 25 years later.
None of this is meant to imply any kind of deliberate plagiarism. Quite the opposite. I very much doubt that Gladwell realized he was paraphrasing a well-known passage. What I strongly suspect happened was that Taleb cited this in an interview as a standard example that everyone would be familiar with, sort of like describing a situation as a "frog in boiling water."
Gladwell's unacknowledged paraphrase is yet another indication that he didn't understand the strange role that economic theory and particularly market efficiency (in this case the semi-strong variety) plays on Wall Street, a role that was central to his narrative. This would be bad enough if he was just shooting for a straightforward profile, but Gladwell insists on playing the deep thinker, making pseudo-profound points, even closing with a grand sweeping moral about human nobility:
“That is the lesson of Taleb and Niederhoffer, and also the lesson of our volatile times. There is more courage and heroism in defying the human impulse, in taking the purposeful and painful steps to prepare for the unimaginable.”
Gladwell loves to tell what Christopher Chabris has termed "just-so stories," cute little fables counterintuitive and surprising enough to catch the eye but neat and simple enough to go down easy. Paradoxically, pulling off that sort of simplicity requires that the writer have a deep and subtle understanding of his or her subject. Simplifying a subject you don't understand never goes well.
Tuesday, November 21, 2017
Tuesday Tweets
One of my great, ongoing problems is what to do with ideas that I'm not ready to write up or which are not ready to be written. One of the wonderful things about a blog is that it's a welcoming environment for these not-ready-for-prime-time pieces. It's low-stakes and flexible both in terms of length and format. In other words, a great place to pin notions and notes.
That said, there are things too insubstantial even for a blog. That and the need for self-promotion are the main reasons I've taken to Twitter. The bar for a tweet is not so much low, as it is sitting on the ground. Nonetheless, there are a few that feel like they might be worth sharing, either because I liked how they turned out or in parentheses far more frequently) they cite some article that might be of interest to our regular readers.
That said, there are things too insubstantial even for a blog. That and the need for self-promotion are the main reasons I've taken to Twitter. The bar for a tweet is not so much low, as it is sitting on the ground. Nonetheless, there are a few that feel like they might be worth sharing, either because I liked how they turned out or in parentheses far more frequently) they cite some article that might be of interest to our regular readers.
The evillest place on earth. Disney's chilling response to a critical LA Times story. @jayrosen_nyu @Sulliview https://t.co/vUA6CwRtaL— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) November 4, 2017
Given that for years, John Tierney was the face of New York Times science writing, anything by Brad Plumer has to be a vast improvement. https://t.co/VjjfWcGKjs— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) November 4, 2017
Someone should do a dangers-of-concentrated-media-power on this and Disney's attack on the LA Times. @Sulliview @jayrosen_nyu https://t.co/3n5K4nCJEF— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) November 6, 2017
Keep in mind, YouTube is a monopoly/monopsony owned by a monopoly/monopsony with a history of abusing its power. https://t.co/WUwABkZp4h— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) November 6, 2017
GOP “tax reform” spin relies heavily on journalists not understanding how marginal rates work.— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) November 7, 2017
It is getting more and more difficult to tell whether a story came from New York Magazine or Goop. https://t.co/kAgOi2Sow3 via @strategist— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) November 7, 2017
Abuses of media monopoly power have been come increasingly flagrant and dangerous. Disney cannot be allowed to just walk away from this. https://t.co/82rCIScujZ— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) November 7, 2017
Monday, November 20, 2017
Australia citizenship furore
This is Joseph
Here is a case where they missed the main argument. In Australia a number of MPs have been disqualified because the constitution prohibits dual citizens from running for office. The referenced article asks why MPs will not be forced to repay their salaries when welfare debts are collected all of the time. Now I am not necessarily a great fan of putting in place debt collection on the most vulnerable. But that's not the real issue here.
The real issue is that you don't want to raise the stakes any higher. As it is, being disqualified is a terrible process for a politician to go through. Forcing the unexpectedly unemployed person to pay back hundreds of thousands of dollars can well add destitution to the consequences.
And, in some cases, this may be out of proportion to the crime. In some cases MPs were either sloppy, cavalier, or deceptive and this makes sense. These are not traits one would want. But how can you be sure you don't have citizenship somewhere? After all, many people have overseas links and it is often possible that a parent has taken actions that you are unaware of (estrangement does happen). Or, even more likely, is ambiguity like in the case of Susan Lamb. She might have UK citizenship but cannot prove it and so cannot renounce it.
In the case of these types of complex administrative cases, being punitive only makes a bad case worse. I am all in favor of rooting out corruption but this would appear to run some risks of making defiance the most viable strategy and I am not sure that ends well.
Here is a case where they missed the main argument. In Australia a number of MPs have been disqualified because the constitution prohibits dual citizens from running for office. The referenced article asks why MPs will not be forced to repay their salaries when welfare debts are collected all of the time. Now I am not necessarily a great fan of putting in place debt collection on the most vulnerable. But that's not the real issue here.
The real issue is that you don't want to raise the stakes any higher. As it is, being disqualified is a terrible process for a politician to go through. Forcing the unexpectedly unemployed person to pay back hundreds of thousands of dollars can well add destitution to the consequences.
And, in some cases, this may be out of proportion to the crime. In some cases MPs were either sloppy, cavalier, or deceptive and this makes sense. These are not traits one would want. But how can you be sure you don't have citizenship somewhere? After all, many people have overseas links and it is often possible that a parent has taken actions that you are unaware of (estrangement does happen). Or, even more likely, is ambiguity like in the case of Susan Lamb. She might have UK citizenship but cannot prove it and so cannot renounce it.
In the case of these types of complex administrative cases, being punitive only makes a bad case worse. I am all in favor of rooting out corruption but this would appear to run some risks of making defiance the most viable strategy and I am not sure that ends well.
Friday, November 17, 2017
That sense of living in a science fiction novel
As previously mentioned, I'm working on a project about technology. One of the central points is the ways we think and feel about technology -- the language, the attitudes, the mental frameworks -- were largely in place by the early 20th century, and became set in the post-war era.
When people internalize their reactions to abnormal conditions, unconsciously continue to respond to new things in old ways, The result is seldom good. We'll delve more into that later. For now, we're still in the anecdote and data gathering stage of the process, so here's an excellent example of how even the most sober observers of the period were so conscious of how astounding the times were that they explicitly described the advances of the time in terms of science fiction novels (even before the term "science fiction" had been coined).
From Scientific American May 17, 1890
When people internalize their reactions to abnormal conditions, unconsciously continue to respond to new things in old ways, The result is seldom good. We'll delve more into that later. For now, we're still in the anecdote and data gathering stage of the process, so here's an excellent example of how even the most sober observers of the period were so conscious of how astounding the times were that they explicitly described the advances of the time in terms of science fiction novels (even before the term "science fiction" had been coined).
From Scientific American May 17, 1890
We know that at the time of the first official experiment, the two navigators of the Goubet remained eight full hours under water without any other communication with the outside world than the telephone wire that they used to give their impressions, which, by the way, were of a cheerful character. When they made their appearance, they were fresh, well, and lively, having been able to attend to all the functions of life, and being ready to begin again. There was still in the tubes enough oxygen to last twenty hours.
It has been said of the Goubet that it is a realization of the dream conceived by Jules Verne in his "Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea;" but the Goubet is better than that. It is not only one romance, but it is rather two of the great amuser's romances amalgamated. It is both "Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea" and " Doctor Ox" in action!
Thursday, November 16, 2017
Tax policy
This is Joseph
There are two pieces of journalism by Kevin Drum that are worth not missing.
One, is his noting that some of the current tax reform plans are absurdly generous to inherited wealth:
But turning tax policy into a way to maximize the benefits of inherited wealth seems to an unnecessary enhancement, above and beyond the paperwork simplification. There should be one or the other.
Two, is his piece on how tax havens actually make income taxes regressive in Scandinavia. It's a good item for considering how much real tax burden there is among the elite (the one's who are getting a large tax cut, or potentially getting a large tax cut at least). You can make moral arguments about what is the right level of obligation that people have to support the nations and laws that make their wealth possible. It's a complicated area. But this does somewhat undermine the narrative that taxes at the topic are actually crushing.
There are two pieces of journalism by Kevin Drum that are worth not missing.
One, is his noting that some of the current tax reform plans are absurdly generous to inherited wealth:
If you’re not following what this means, here’s an example. Suppose you’re uber-rich and you buy $1 billion in Apple Stock. By the time you die it’s worth $3 billion. Your heirs, lucky ducks that they are, don’t have to pay estate tax on that $3 billion. But they do have to pay normal capital gains on the $2 billion appreciation in the Apple stock. At 20 percent that comes to $400 million.
However, the Republican bill eliminates that too. Not only does it eliminate the estate tax completely, but it allows you to “step up” the value of the estate and avoid capital gains taxes entirely. In our example, you literally get $3 billion free and clear, and you owe taxes in the future only on the appreciation above $3 billion.Now it is possible to decide that there should not be capital gains taxes. This is actually an area of policy discussion as Canada has had a lifetime capital gains exemption. But if this is what you would like to see happen then you should do it for all capital gains and not focus all of the benefit on the wealthy. And if you don't exempt these assets from capital gains then the paperwork can get messy. So, in a sense, the estate tax is a nice way to give the gift of less paperwork to recently bereaved families (not a bad thing).
But turning tax policy into a way to maximize the benefits of inherited wealth seems to an unnecessary enhancement, above and beyond the paperwork simplification. There should be one or the other.
Two, is his piece on how tax havens actually make income taxes regressive in Scandinavia. It's a good item for considering how much real tax burden there is among the elite (the one's who are getting a large tax cut, or potentially getting a large tax cut at least). You can make moral arguments about what is the right level of obligation that people have to support the nations and laws that make their wealth possible. It's a complicated area. But this does somewhat undermine the narrative that taxes at the topic are actually crushing.
Wednesday, November 15, 2017
What if shame works?
I've been meaning to do multiple posts on Patrick Radden Keefe's extraordinary article on how the Sackler family built a fortune by largely engineering the opioid crisis. You should definitely read the whole thing, but there are a number of interesting points that are worth singling out.
For instance, the role of social pressure in curbing bad corporate behavior.
There is something both sad and hopeful in this passage.
One of the overarching themes of this article is the way we are replaying the gilded age in increasingly obvious way. Specifically, the piece compares 19th century robber barons buying respectability with libraries and universities and today's billionaires doing much the same (though I think the comparison may be somewhat unfair to Carnegie and Stanford). This certainly applies to the Sackler family.
But if vanity and the pursuit of respectability can persuade plutocrats to give large chunks of money to good causes (or at least causes with the appearance of good), is it possible that fear of shame might dissuade these same people from doing bad things?
For instance, the role of social pressure in curbing bad corporate behavior.
Mike Moore, the former Mississippi attorney general, believes that the Sacklers will feel no pressure to emulate this gesture until more of the public becomes aware that their fortune is derived from the opioid crisis. Moore recalled his initial settlement conference with tobacco-company C.E.O.s: “We asked them, ‘What do you want?’ And they said, ‘We want to be able to go to cocktail parties and not have people come up and ask us why we’re killing people.’ That’s an exact quote.” Moore is puzzled that museums and universities are able to continue accepting money from the Sacklers without questions or controversy. He wondered, “What would happen if some of these foundations, medical schools, and hospitals started to say, ‘How many babies have become addicted to opioids?’ ” An addicted baby is now born every half hour. In places like Huntington, West Virginia, ten per cent of newborns are dependent on opioids. A district attorney in eastern Tennessee recently filed a lawsuit against Purdue, and other companies, on behalf of “Baby Doe”—an infant addict.
There is something both sad and hopeful in this passage.
One of the overarching themes of this article is the way we are replaying the gilded age in increasingly obvious way. Specifically, the piece compares 19th century robber barons buying respectability with libraries and universities and today's billionaires doing much the same (though I think the comparison may be somewhat unfair to Carnegie and Stanford). This certainly applies to the Sackler family.
But if vanity and the pursuit of respectability can persuade plutocrats to give large chunks of money to good causes (or at least causes with the appearance of good), is it possible that fear of shame might dissuade these same people from doing bad things?
Tuesday, November 14, 2017
If you believe in n-rays, believing in mental radio is not that heavy a lift
Another visit to the Scientific American collection of the Internet Archive.
Having spent a big chunk of the past few weeks reading over contemporary accounts of science and technology from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I've come to the conclusion that, from our 21st century perspective, we tend to overestimate the credulousness of people at the turn-of-the-century while greatly underestimating our own gullibility
The key here is context, belief in something (or, more precisely, belief in the possibility of something) that turns out not to exist has to be judged based on the amount of evidence (or, more precisely, the amount of non-evidence) that had accumulated at the time. 150 years ago or so, sending expeditions to look for legendary mega-fauna was an entirely reasonable type of scientific investigation. 50 years ago, not so much. Today, not at all. Every time a researcher, preferably one who very much wants to find a phenomenon in question, comes up empty, the lack of result adds to the evidence that the phenomenon simply doesn't exist. Eventually, enough would be believers dig enough dry wells to make the nonexistence a confirmed scientific fact.
But there's another important difference between 1900 and 2017 that needs to be taken into account. Without understating the steady and impressive current flow of new ideas and discoveries, we now generally work under a relatively stable intellectual framework. We reject the possibility of telepathy in part because so many motivated researchers have failed to find it, but also because no one has proposed a plausible mechanism for it consistent with the other things we know with great confidence about the world.
The close of the 19th century was a time of great optimism and discovery, but as a consequence not one of great certainty. Science and technology were causing cataclysmic shifts in the way people viewed the world. When Einstein endorsed a book on mental telepathy and Tesla speculated that he had just received communications from Martians, they were working under a framework that was assumed to be changing and incomplete.
Coming shortly after the discovery of x-rays, n-rays did not initially seem all that implausible, and once you've accepted the possibility of a new kind of radiation that was related to biological and even mental activities, accepting ideas like "mental radio" and even spiritualism isn't that much of a reach. N-rays themselves were debunked fairly quickly (see below for the fascinating details), but the sense that everything you know can suddenly change remained a key part of the mentality of the period.
June 17, 1905
The debunking of n-rays is, itself a fascinating story. From Wikipedia.
Having spent a big chunk of the past few weeks reading over contemporary accounts of science and technology from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, I've come to the conclusion that, from our 21st century perspective, we tend to overestimate the credulousness of people at the turn-of-the-century while greatly underestimating our own gullibility
The key here is context, belief in something (or, more precisely, belief in the possibility of something) that turns out not to exist has to be judged based on the amount of evidence (or, more precisely, the amount of non-evidence) that had accumulated at the time. 150 years ago or so, sending expeditions to look for legendary mega-fauna was an entirely reasonable type of scientific investigation. 50 years ago, not so much. Today, not at all. Every time a researcher, preferably one who very much wants to find a phenomenon in question, comes up empty, the lack of result adds to the evidence that the phenomenon simply doesn't exist. Eventually, enough would be believers dig enough dry wells to make the nonexistence a confirmed scientific fact.
But there's another important difference between 1900 and 2017 that needs to be taken into account. Without understating the steady and impressive current flow of new ideas and discoveries, we now generally work under a relatively stable intellectual framework. We reject the possibility of telepathy in part because so many motivated researchers have failed to find it, but also because no one has proposed a plausible mechanism for it consistent with the other things we know with great confidence about the world.
The close of the 19th century was a time of great optimism and discovery, but as a consequence not one of great certainty. Science and technology were causing cataclysmic shifts in the way people viewed the world. When Einstein endorsed a book on mental telepathy and Tesla speculated that he had just received communications from Martians, they were working under a framework that was assumed to be changing and incomplete.
Coming shortly after the discovery of x-rays, n-rays did not initially seem all that implausible, and once you've accepted the possibility of a new kind of radiation that was related to biological and even mental activities, accepting ideas like "mental radio" and even spiritualism isn't that much of a reach. N-rays themselves were debunked fairly quickly (see below for the fascinating details), but the sense that everything you know can suddenly change remained a key part of the mentality of the period.
June 17, 1905
The debunking of n-rays is, itself a fascinating story. From Wikipedia.
The "discovery" excited international interest and many physicists worked to replicate the effects. However, the notable physicists Lord Kelvin, William Crookes, Otto Lummer, and Heinrich Rubens failed to do so. Following his own failure, self-described as "wasting a whole morning", the American physicist Robert W. Wood, who had a reputation as a popular "debunker" of nonsense during the period, was prevailed upon by the British journal Nature to travel to Blondlot's laboratory in France to investigate further. Wood suggested that Rubens should go since he had been the most embarrassed when Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany asked him to repeat the French experiments, and then after two weeks Rubens had to report his failure to do so. Rubens, however, felt it would look better if Wood went, since Blondlot had been most polite in answering his many questions.
In the darkened room during Blondlot's demonstration, Wood surreptitiously removed an essential prism from the experimental apparatus, yet the experimenters still said that they observed N rays. Wood also stealthily swapped a large file that was supposed to be giving off N rays with an inert piece of wood, yet the N rays were still "observed". His report on these investigations were published in Nature, and they suggested that the N rays were a purely subjective phenomenon, with the scientists involved having recorded data that matched their expectations. There is reason to believe that Blondlot in particular was misled by his laboratory assistant, who confirmed all observations. By 1905, no one outside of Nancy believed in N rays, but Blondlot himself is reported to have still been convinced of their existence in 1926
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