Twelve years ago at the blog --How to lie with statistics -- rare cinema history edition

 

Friday, February 18, 2011

From David Leonhardt (via DeLong):

When I read that John Boehner, the speaker of the House, had said that the federal government added 200,000 federal workers under President Obama, I wondered, “Really? Where?” I’m not aware of any major federal hiring initiatives since January 2009.

... It turns out that the 200,000 number is simply incorrect.

...

Second, Mr. Boehner was starting his clock in December 2008, the month before Mr. Obama became president. The Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts its monthly survey during the week that contains the 12th day of each month, so there is no reason to start the clock in December 2008 as opposed to January 2009. On Jan. 12, 2009, George W. Bush was still president.

To be more accurate there wasn't an honest reason. As Leonhardt points out later, 11,000 jobs were added by President Bush in his last month in office. Speaker Boehner was interval shopping, one of the most effective and time-honored methods of lying with statistics. (Given that, by Leonhardt's estimate, Boehner went from 57,000 actual jobs to a claim of 200,000, he used lots of effective and time-honored methods of lying with statistics.)

Interval shopping is based on the idea that if you can adjust the period being studied, you can make something look much better or worse than it actually is. For example, if you take one day off of the service record of the Titanic, it looks like a remarkably safe form of transportation.

The method also allows you to have a great deal of fun with denominators. You will often see people in positions of responsibility pointing to a period of growth that started just after a disastrous collapse and ends just before the next one. The worse that initial collapse was, the better your growth rate looks.

Interval shopping can be particularly effective when the groups being compared are at different stages of life. You can, for example, use it to argue that a product is less reliable than one that was introduced a couple of years later, not taking into account the difference in average ages, or you could 'prove' the mental inferiority of one immigrant group over another by comparing test scores, not taking into account the higher proportion of non-English-speaking first generation immigrants.

For beautiful example of egregious interval shopping, check out this excerpt from a rebuttal to Gore Vidal written by Peter Bogdanovich in the New York Review of Books:

Now I’m getting in a foul mood because I’m reading this sentence again: “The badness of so many of Orson Welles’s post-Mankiewicz films ought to be instructive.” That’s another of those glib, sweeping statements that play right into the reader’s lack of information and is written so as to presume a general critical atmosphere, which in this case is not just superficial, it is decidedly untrue, which makes it all the more offensive and irresponsible on Gore’s part. Almost everyone with any sense knows that Orson Welles is a great director and that Herman Mankiewicz was a talented hack,* but for the record, here is a list of the movies Orson Welles has directed since Citizen Kane:

The Magnificent Ambersons

The Stranger

The Lady from Shanghai

Macbeth

Othello

Mr. Arkadin (Confidential Report)

Touch of Evil

The Trial

Chimes at Midnight (Falstaff)

The Immortal Story

F for Fake

And these are all of Herman Mankiewicz’s post-Welles films:

Rise and Shine

Pride of the Yankees

Stand by for Action

Christmas Holiday

The Enchanted Cottage

The Spanish Main

A Woman’s Secret

The Pride of St. Louis

One of the surest signs of interval shopping is the arbitrary start point, but the key to making it work is finding an arbitrary point that doesn't look arbitrary. Here Bogdanovich is able to make use of a sloppy writing by Vidal. The phrase "post-Mankiewicz" implies that there is some special significance to these films coming after Citizen Kane. If Vidal were comparing Welles' post-Mankiewicz films to his pre-Mankiewicz films (which he obviously isn't), or if he were arguing that Welles was changed by working with Mankiewicz (which seems unlikely, though I'd need to get behind the paywall to be sure), then the wording would have been appropriate. Here, though, we simply have Vidal saying "post-Mankiewicz" when he means "non-Mankiewicz."

This small bit of imprecision on Vidal's part gives Bogdanovich the opportunity to use Kane as the start point for his interval (and Peter Bogdanovich has never been one to pass up on opportunity). When comparing careers you would normally look at entire careers. This interval includes all of Welles' films and less than half of Mankiewicz's.

To make matters worse, the intervals aren't even close to the same length for the two men. Mankiewicz drank himself to death in 1953. Welles died in 1985 (the last film on Bogdanovich's list was released in 1974).

More importantly, though, this list includes all of Orson Welles' career as a director barring some shorts and TV work, while it leaves out most of Mankiewicz's major accomplishments as a writer and producer. Even in his final, declining, alcohol-soaked years, Mankiewicz still managed a good picture or two, but a list of films that he wrote or produced before Kane would include Dinner at Eight, Million Dollar Legs (with W.C. Fields) and three out of four of the Marx Brothers' best movies Monkey Business, Horse Feathers and Duck Soup.

And when you leave out Duck Soup, that's just going too far.



*Bogdanovich's senseless group here include Mankiewicz collaborators and admirers such as Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Dorothy Parker, Robert E. Sherwood, George S. Kaufman, Marc Connelly and Nunnally Johnson, but that's a topic for another post and perhaps another blog.

Update: The conversation continues here and here.

In the original armor, the slide rule came in one of those nerdy belt holsters

 [Derek Flint's spy watch had a slide rule hidden in the inside of the band but we're getting off topic.]

 

["Does this armor make my butt look fat?" would also be off topic.]

I just read "The Tinkerings Of Robert Noyce" by Tom Wolfe (more on that later) and it got me to thinking about the cultural impact of transistors. This was one of the defining technologies of the post-war era, a period when that particular bar was really high.

Because my mind is so cluttered with trivia that I can barely make it to that door, the first example that came to mind was Iron Man's suit. Transistors loomed large in the popular imagination when the character was created sixty years ago, and Stan Lee made heavy use of the technology. The armor, the gadgets, even the life support system were "powered" by transistors.

 

As many have noted, other than the fact they were small, Lee knew absolutely nothing about transistors, which arguably adds to the charm.

 

 

 Obviously there are less silly examples, but even the hardest of hard science fiction written by people who did understand the technology treated it as at least slightly magical.

 

Math time

This is Joseph.

One of the great lessons of the Brexit referendum is that it makes sense to require a large majority to do a big change via a referendum. Why? Because change has costs and you might well end up with a policy that no longer has popular support:

Consider:

Now look upon the rebuttal:

Notice the careful switching of the reference group. A large majority (70-75%) of the 52% of the voters to leave still have the same opinion. That is a large majority of half of the group. If we use the math suggested with his estimates we get:

    52% x 0.725 + 48% x 0.05 = 40.1%

Which would suggest that the opposition to Brext, once the costs were known, is about 60-40 among the people who voted. Of course, young people (less pro-Brexit) have aged into voting in the past seven years and older adults (more pro-Brexit) have left us for a better place. A recent poll pegged the decision to leave as being correct as a view held by 34% of the population, which seems about right. 

Now it is true that the vote was advisory, but there is a reason that a super-majority makes sense for this type of poll. A weak majority can easily drift back and it makes a country seem unreliable if major treaties can be snapped with a weak mandate. If the UK was utterly convinced that the EU was a bad plan (say 67% in favor of leaving) then it is also plausible that majority support would have survived the downside surprises. 

Now this is a bit of an oversimplification, as the Brexit also had a misleading campaign. It promised to bolster the NHS, the British social medical care scheme, whereas it actually hurt it. People skeptical about claims were told they were part of Project Fear, a claim that the detractors were unduly pessimistic. Now it looks like they might have been correct and the planners of Brexit would have been well advised to consider that in terms of planning for how to keep public support high.

Now it is true that rejoining the EU is likely impossible, who wants a member who can leave with such a narrow majority of a single referendum, but it does suggest that there is also no plan to go forward from here. Brexit is done and will now be an never-ending series of pressure points. Lots of problems were very conveniently solved by Brexit: Spanish claims over Gibraltar and Northern Ireland both look a lot less pressing when the UK is in a free trade and movement compact with the other polity. Unification of Ireland, for example, brings many fewer obvious benefits when both parts are a part of the same large and democratic union. 

The College Board caving in to DeSantis and his thugs was shamefully craven, but on the bright side, it did give me an excuse to revisit one of my favorite post titles

 Our old friend David Coleman is back in the news. 

From Talking Points Memo:

College Board Strips Down African American Studies Course After DeSantis Loudly Rejects It

“At the College Board, we can’t look to statements of political leaders,” David Coleman, the organization’s president, told the New York Times. He said that the final version was influenced mostly by “the input of progressors” and “longstanding A.P. principles.”

Much of the feedback the College Board received focused on the source material, Coleman told the Times. Some said that the more theoretical sources included in the curriculum were “quite dense,” as opposed to primary sources like biographies.

But it’s hard not to see the influence of DeSantis’s high-profile rejection of the work. This new curriculum differs from the early version leaked to the National Review back in September in many ways. While it kept most of the historical material intact, the new version mostly omits writers on modern issues like the Black Lives Matter movement and feminism. It does, however, add “Black conservatism” as an idea for a research project.

Notable writers on these issues like Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at Columbia University who the school describes as a “pioneering” scholar on race studies, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, the Black journalist famous for advancing the case for reparations for chattel slavery, have been removed from the final version.

On Tuesday, a group of 200 African American studies teachers published an open letter defending the field of study from DeSantis’s politically calculated attacks.

 The DeSantis administration is rife with fools and scoundrels (with considerable overlap), which makes this New York Times puff piece even more unintentionally amusing.

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Being a management consultant who does not suffer fools is like being an EMT who faints at the sight of blood

An April 1st post on foolishness.

When [David] Coleman attended Stuyvesant High in Manhattan, he was a member of the championship debate team, and the urge to overpower with evidence — and his unwillingness to suffer fools — is right there on the surface when you talk with him.

Todd Balf writing in the New York Times Magazine

Andrew Gelman has already commented on the way Balf builds his narrative around Coleman ( "In Balf’s article, College Board president David Coleman is the hero and so everything about him has to be good and everything he’s changed has to have been bad.") and the not suffering fools quote certainly illustrates Gelman's point, but it also illustrates a more important concern: the disconnect between the culture of the education reform movement and the way it's perceived in most of the media.

(Though not directly relevant to the main point of this post, it is worth noting that the implied example that follows the line about not suffering fools is a description of Coleman rudely dismissing those who disagree with his rather controversial belief that improvement in writing skills acquired through composing essays doesn't transfer to improvements in writing in a professional context.)

There are other powerful players (particularly when it comes to funding), but when it comes to its intellectual framework, the education reform movement is very much a product of the world of management consultants with its reliance on Taylorism, MBA thinking and CEO worship. This is never more true than with David Coleman. Coleman is arguably the most powerful figure in American education despite having no significant background in either teaching or statistics. His only relevant experience is as a consultant for McKinsey & Company.

Companies like McKinsey spend a great deal off their time trying to convince C-level executive to gamble on trendy and expensive "business solutions" that are usually unsupported by solid evidence and are often the butt of running jokes in recent Dilbert cartoons.  While it may be going too far to call fools the target market of these pitches, they certainly constitute an incredibly valuable segment.

Fools tend to be easily impressed by invocations of data (even in the form of meaningless phrases like 'data-driven'), they are less likely to ask hard questions (nothing takes the air out of a proposal faster than having to explain the subtle difference between your current proposal and the advice you gave SwissAir or AOL Time Warner), and fools are always open to the idea of a simple solution to all their problems which everyone else in the industry had somehow missed. Not suffering fools gladly would have made for a very short career for Coleman at McKinsey.

 

Clash of the Oracles

Joseph's recent post reminded of Thiel's comments about another well known oracle.

From Caleb Ecarma writing for Vanity Fair.

 It doesn’t matter if you’re a fellow billionaire, in Peter Thiel’s book, you either see cryptocurrency as the future, or you’re an “enemy.” “Enemy number one: the sociopathic grandpa from Omaha,” Thiel, the billionaire PayPal cofounder and pro-Trump Republican mega-donor said in an address at a cryptocurrency conference in Miami this week, sneering at business magnate and Nebraska native Warren Buffett. Thiel, whose current firm amassed a substantial Bitcoin fortune, also condemned JPMorgan Chase chairman Jamie Dimon and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink as two other “enemies” of Bitcoin, dismissing Dimon, Fink, and Buffett as a trio of geriatric tyrants standing in the way of progress. Thiel’s comments were his latest attempt to turn crypto into a right-wing culture issue, hailing Bitcoin as a revolutionary conservative movement fighting against “woke” corporations and the financial establishment.

 Here's what we had to say about this conference at the time.

We'll probably do another post of this article by Emily Shugerman [we did -- MP] focusing on the politics of this 2022 bitcoin conference (Jordan Peterson, Peter Thiel, you see where this is going). Most of the well-written piece focuses on less famous and far more likeable characters. Much of it is funny. Most of it is sad. This will not work out well for these people.

Jump cut to 2023.

So let me get this straight - Thiel was calling Warren Buffett a “sociopathic Grandpa” for shunning Bitcoin he was dumping billions on his unwitting fans. This is what psychologists call”projection” https://t.co/QRBSEuMd1E

— Spencer Jakab (@Spencerjakab) January 19, 2023

 Peter Thiel's reputation as the smartest man in the room owes a lot to the time he spent hanging out with Elon Musk.

Speaking of oracles

This is Joseph

Marginal Revolution pointed me to this quote by Peter Thiel:

[Thiel] has described British people’s affection for the state-backed health service as “Stockholm syndrome.”

The venture capitalist’s comments came during a Q&A session after a speech at the Oxford Union, a 200-year-old debating society, on Monday. He also said that the crisis-stricken health service, currently grappling with strikes and long wait times for emergency care, was making people sick and needs “market mechanisms” to fix it. Such mechanisms include privatizing parts of it, avoiding rationing and loosening regulations…

“In theory, you just rip the whole thing from the ground and start over,” Thiel said after an address in which he argued that a perceived fear of disruption was holding back technological and scientific developments. “In practice, you have to somehow make it all backwards-compatible in all these ridiculous British ways.” 

Let me be blunt. I can improve any pension plan by starting over and no longer needing to pay out previous obligations. It's trivial.

The political challenge is that older adults have paid into the NHS their entire working life. The National Health Service (NHS) started in 1948, only a few people over 90 will have worked at any point in their career without contributing to the national health care plan. Tear it down might be ok, if and only if the new package of services are equivalent. Privatizing and avoiding rationing, together, make it hard to see how services can be maintained. Further, if a major infrastructure projects go way overtime or fail then that is one thing -- but if it is an entire healthcare system is being rebuilt there is a lot of risk inherent in loss of services or poor performance. 

How can you impose a market mechanism without these risks? Now maybe radical change is a good decision in the face of an unsustainable problem. But let us not fool ourselves that it will be  cheaper, just as comprehensive and have equal or better outcomes. 

Supply side reforms

This is Joseph.

Following up on Jan 27th's post about resilience, I want to really engage why supply side reforms are tricky. The Canadian example is physicians, the capacity of which has been reduced over time to curb demand by restricting supply. In the short term, this can create efficiency and there can be benefits.

For example, food restrictions can reduce the consequences of diabetes:

During the Franco-Prussian War of the early 1870s, the French physician Apollinaire Bouchardat noted that his diabetic patients' symptoms improved due to war-related food rationing, and he developed individualized diets as diabetes treatments.

It is probably true that, in the very short term, restricting food availability in North America could end up creating some health benefits. But it could also go desperately wrong if this overshot and there was a famine. The consequences of a famine are worse than what one is trying to treat, as we see from the lifetime ill effects from the Dutch famine in WW2.  

Another good example of supply restrictions going terribly wrong is in housing. Tight housing restrictions start off by offering benefits (e.g., adequate parking) but can quickly go very, very wrong. What started looking like a good plan for improving livability has turned into an exodus away from crushing housing prices. Once again, a supply side solution shows extremely poor resilience. 

So the point here is a general skepticism about the consequences of this style of reform. It is easy because it lets you address a problem (i.e., increasing medical costs) in a way that the consequences are diffused (wait times are just a little but longer, just a few fewer people get careers as physicians) so that the political costs are minimized. But the consequence appears, increasingly to induce fragility. It is over 40 years since Ronald Reagan made supply side solutions popular -- could it be time for a serious rethink on what we've learned? 

P.S. See this great comment by Josh Marshall

In the long run, it is rarely a good thing to have a weak bench of workers when you suddenly need them. 

Deferred Thursday Tweets -- TBH, I have trouble arguing against "unvaccinated sperm is the next Bitcoin"

I know this isn't new information, but take a minute and let the following sink in:

1. While many in the mainstream press (particularly the NYT) have been visibly pleased at the thought of Ron DeSantis taking the nomination from Trump, the one issues that genuinely divides the two men is the former president's role in developing (and continued desire to take credit for) covid vaccines. DeSantis has also tacked to the right by being even more trans and homophobic than Trump, but it is with the anti-vaxxers that he has truly set himself apart;

2.  Though it's difficult to define our terms exactly, a large part, possibly a majority, of the GOP are to some degree anti-vaxxers. Many, particularly in the MAGA base, also believe that the covid vaccines is a leading cause of death among the otherwise healthy. There is also a widespread belief that one can literally catch the vaccine and suffer serious effects (including death) by coming into contact with the vaccinated.

3. By the standards of today's Republican Party, none of this qualifies as fringe. You can find these beliefs alluded to and sometimes openly espoused by members of congress, scholars at think tanks, public health officials, powerful journalists, and influencers with massive followings.

Should be an interesting Republican primary. pic.twitter.com/ACiXuPeZ06

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) January 19, 2023

If you want to know how far anti-vaxxers have pushed into the GOP mainstream, this is the head of the Heritage Foundation: pic.twitter.com/kZ1dsjpc4d

— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) January 27, 2023

The entire online conservative moment is up in arms over "parents" who decided to LET THEIR CHILD DIE rather then undergo a simple procedure.

The child wasn't even required to get vaccinated! It was because the blood transfusion MIGHT involve some vaccinated blood!!! pic.twitter.com/brXVRfcqBj

— Lucas 🧡🧦 (@PunishedLink) December 11, 2022

The demand to remain "pure" reaches beyond blood to social media posts soliciting sperm from unvaccinated men - conspiracy theorists speculate online that the precious commodity will be the "next Bitcoin" - as well as breast milk from unvaccinated mothers.https://t.co/QyPJgEvagO

— Anuj Chopra (@AnujChopra) January 25, 2023

So now after railing against the vaccine every day for almost 3 years, Silk is suggesting Diamond died from the vaccine. When exactly did she supposedly take something that she was screaming to her audience was a bio weapon from globalists? pic.twitter.com/LceIzmk5J5

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) January 22, 2023

Going back and watching it again, Silk is clearly going with the “shedding” conspiracy. She is saying that Diamond was “poisoned” by coming into contact with vaccinated people, with Donald Trump sitting right next to her. pic.twitter.com/gNwroPQSJ9

— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) January 22, 2023

Antivaxxers are convinced Damar Hamlin is being hidden away by Pfizer, and most believe recent public appearances by him are actually a body double.

They're demanding he personally reassure them with a video that he's not being played by an actor.

I'm serious, by the way. pic.twitter.com/QnNxgzPGjw

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) January 25, 2023

This was always the main concern with deep fakes — not so much that a bunch of fake videos would be widely believed and passed off as real, but that the existence of the technology would allow people to cast doubt on the legitimacy of *real* videos.

— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) January 29, 2023

It's bad enough that Massie does this just to rile up the base, but that he is educated and intelligent enough to do do it knowing full well that his implication is wrong -and that his target audience won't know the difference.
No one has less respect for GOP voters than the GOP. https://t.co/qPMJJvlolw

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) January 28, 2023

And the funniest exchange.

Though it is easy to have a laugh at the crazies, this remains a frightening story, not only because of the damage these people can do, but because, while there are notable exceptions, I honestly don't believe that sane people have come to terms with this level of craziness and its implications. (For my thoughts on this, you might start with our feral disinformation posts.)

Now on with the tweets.

Margaret Sullivan says in the coverage of the Biden classified documents, she detected "a certain gleefulness on the part of the mainstream media that finally there was something they could jump on, to create some equivalence" between Biden and Trump https://t.co/cIs1ji0ugQ

— CJR (@CJR) January 18, 2023

No analyst came out of 2022 looking better than Tom Bonier

This is an incredibly thorough retelling of how skewed red wave polls may have cost Dems the House and an extra seat in the Senate, by creating a hostile message environment and diverting resources to the wrong places. https://t.co/oyUleADsjx

— Tom Bonier (@tbonier) December 31, 2022

Finally, ⁦@SimonWDC⁩ and ⁦@tbonier⁩ get proper credit for being the only top Democratic strategists who got it right in 2022. The smartest thing I did all year was listen to them and publish their accurate takes on https://t.co/ucYw5JFE9H
https://t.co/qO1XAN4z2q

— Jonathan Alter (@jonathanalter) December 31, 2022

More on the Social Security beat.

Sen. Graham wants to RAISE the age of qualifying for Social Security to 70. This is the equivalent to cutting Social Security by 21%!

Let's REMIND Lindsey Graham that Social Security is OUR money.😡

— Peter Morley (@morethanmySLE) January 18, 2023

Please send a thoughts and prayers note to your Social Security checks and Medicaid/Medicare coverage. https://t.co/T5g3jlGcBj

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) January 6, 2023

I should have posted this while it was still topical, but I can't resist a good "how many licks" parody.

mister owl, how many votes does it take to get a speaker of the house?

owl: pic.twitter.com/fCE0JgTSyi

— Alex Kliment (@SaoSasha) January 6, 2023

fundamental difference:

RBG's retirement decision was entirely within her control

if raising debt limit had been within control of Pelosi and Schumer, they'd have done it

but in a 50-50 Senate, without Republican help, it wasn't https://t.co/wacwl6GlxT

— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) January 6, 2023

Media criticism tweet #2 for today: When inflation was at 40-year highs, there was no shortage of coverage. But now 👇👇 https://t.co/kPsOFCHWSP

— Ronald Klain (@WHCOS) January 6, 2023

All 40 under 40 lists should include parents’ net worth.

— 🔥Brianna Bailey🔥 (@briOKC) December 28, 2022

Oh to be famous enough for multiple editors to let me publish a sentence this bad and then have it praised by other famous reporters pic.twitter.com/E3YrHhiIQN

— Emmanuel Felton (@emmanuelfelton) December 28, 2022

I’m sorry, but at some point you’re going to have to convince me that this isn’t the product of some horribly misaligned large language model wreaking havoc in the wild. I mean, what even is this other than buzzword salad? https://t.co/fAsPIxA66d

— Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D (@RVAwonk) January 19, 2023

Intelligence is the ability to adapt to what you're not prepared for. An entity capable of adapting on the fly (like these Marines) will run circles around one that is limited to past training data. https://t.co/m5h6TRduUR

— François Chollet (@fchollet) January 19, 2023

I'd make a Foley artist joke if anyone out there knew what a Foley artist was.

An all-timer from the Attenborough archives: the superb lyrebird from southern Australia, one of the world's great mimics. pic.twitter.com/fTvf8KntP4

— Henry Wismayer (@henrywismayer) January 29, 2023

Looking at nothing but the historic shipping logs since 1945 still draws a very clear picture of the continents. Source: https://t.co/fCW2Wy9j0t pic.twitter.com/3paHtbNx7Q

— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) January 9, 2023

It’s occlusion. It’s always occlusion

2/2pic.twitter.com/x9pKawThap

— Peyman 𝕄𝕀𝕃𝔸ℕ𝔽𝔸ℝ (@docmilanfar) January 6, 2023

Great thread.

A Brief History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore

🧵

— Paul Fairie (@paulisci) July 19, 2022

Richard Feynman on understanding Math pic.twitter.com/KefTR80i82

— Fermat's Library (@fermatslibrary) January 28, 2023

Resilience

 This is Joseph

I wanted to highlight this recent article by Chris Dillow. He doesn't use quite the examples that I would but it is very much a critique of how we have ended up creating a rather fragile system. 

The auto industry was a pioneer of just in time inventory, which was a major savings and a notable improvement in efficiency. But the global shortage of computer chips for cars was a clear example of that system not building in redundancy for a slowdown in sales nor could it pivot quickly when there was a supply interruption. 

Medical systems in Canada experienced a great deal of cuts over the years, to try and save on costs. Health economists convinced premier Bob Rae that you could save costs by reducing capacity, a goal continued by many left of center successors.  This worked well, at first, by increasing efficiency and forcing the health care system to focus on priority cases. But it was left mortally vulnerable to a demand side shock (like a pandemic). It is also notable that they kept this process up even as the large baby boom cohort aged, creating exactly the inverse age pyramid that accelerates a crisis. 

Chris Dillow's conclusion is exactly right:

This issue is, however, off the political agenda. One of the many defects of our political debate is a belief that things will be tolerable if only we could find the right people; this is Bonnie Tylerism, holding out for a hero. This, however, is the wrong question. We should be looking not for good people but for the right institutions, selection mechanisms and processes - devices which would make our economy and politics more resilient to idiots or crooks

In many ways this is also a critique of the general culture of needing "the right people" or the "lone genius" model of success. Mark has been discussing a famous businessman lately, and part of what makes that situation so clearly tragic is that good business plans should still work if the leader is distracted by acquiring a social media company. The corporate plan should also include the real world challenges that arise, when considering realistic targets.  The same way that people say that a policy would have worked had it been "done right" need to accept human fallibility as a design constraint for a good plan. 

None of this is to say that efficiency is bad or that we need to guard against every conceivable tail risk. But I suspect the last few years would have gone better in Canada if there had been a modicum of planning around "what if something goes wrong?".

As Columbo might say, just one more thing about our previous post

A few days ago, the New York Times Magazine ran a piece arguing that when Elon Musk put drivers' lives at risk with dangerous products, he is actually performing a "blunt utilitarian calculus," tolerating short term sacrifices (not coincidentally from other people) in order to advance his life-saving technologies.

I pushed back.

With the complicated exception of SpaceX, none of Musk's businesses are on the cutting edge of anything. In autonomous  driving, AI, solar cell development, brain-machine interfaces, tunneling machines, and countless other technologies where Musk has promised revolutionary disruptions, his companies are, at best, in the middle of the pack and, in some cases, not making any serious effort at all. (On a related note, despite attempts to muddy the waters with creative statistics, Tesla spends far less than any of its major competitors on R&D)

A few hours after that posted, I came across this perfect coda from Consumer Reports.

Of the 12 ADA systems we just finished testing, Ford BlueCruise came out on top, followed by Cadillac Super Cruise and Mercedes-Benz Driver Assistance. Tesla, once an innovator in ADA with its Autopilot system, fell from its second-place showing in 2020 to seventh this time around—about the middle of the pack. That’s because Tesla hasn’t changed Autopilot’s basic functionality much since it first came out, instead just adding more features to it, says Fisher. “After all this time, Autopilot still doesn’t allow collaborative steering and doesn’t have an effective driver monitoring system. While other automakers have evolved their ACC and LCA systems, Tesla has simply fallen behind.”

 

"Elon Musk’s Appetite for Destruction" is nothing compared to his appetite for suckers

NEW: Elon Musk oversaw the creation of a 2016 video that exaggerated the abilities of Tesla’s driver-assistance system Autopilot, even dictating the opening text that claimed the company’s car drove itself, according to internal emails viewed by Bloomberg https://t.co/Uq5pO7jd7s

— Bloomberg (@business) January 19, 2023

 While a lot of people (your humble bloggers included) were skeptical from the beginning of the tech messiah narrative in general and Musk as a real life Tony Stark in particular, there were real accomplishments coming out of both SpaceX and Tesla and it was easy to get caught up in the moment. Besides, where was the harm? Rockets, electric cars, solar cells... these were all good things. Even if Musk was a bit of a snake oil salesman, his heart certainly seemed to be in the right place. 

It wasn't until four or five years ago that it became obvious to anyone even casually following the story that Musk was neither genius nor altruist. He was simply a moderately talented grifter with no background in or talent for engineering who came along at the right time. Early on he hired some very smart engineers who did produce some impressive advances at SpaceX and solved some daunting manufacturing challenges at Tesla, but it quickly became clear that not only was Musk not the brains behind these things; he didn't even have a basic grasp of the underlying concepts.

Putting aside a few sycophants and Flavor-aid drinkers, everyone on the front lines has seen through the con. Whether it's the LA Times, the NYT, CNBC, Bloomberg, Business Insider, the reporters who work this beat have learned to be skeptical of both his claims and his intentions.

 Somehow, though, with the exception of the LAT (where pretty much the whole paper was onto the guy from the beginning), word never made it up the chain to the editors and star journalists. It's true that Musk's reputation has been tarnished by infantile displays, Covid denial, and the embrace of the alt-right, but that just makes the story better. Now he's a flawed hero, brilliant but self-destructive, trying to save the world despite his personal demons. 

Which brings us to Christopher Cox's piece for the New York Times Magazine.

Peter Thiel, Musk’s former business partner at PayPal, once said that if he wrote a book, the chapter about Musk would be called “The Man Who Knew Nothing About Risk.” But that’s a misunderstanding of Musk’s attitude: If you parse his statements, he presents himself as a man who simply embraces astonishing amounts of present-day risk in the rational assumption of future gains. 

...

Some of Musk’s most questionable decisions, though, begin to make sense if seen as a result of a blunt utilitarian calculus. Last month, Reuters reported that Neuralink, Musk’s medical-device company, had caused the needless deaths of dozens of laboratory animals through rushed experiments. Internal messages from Musk made it clear that the urgency came from the top. “We are simply not moving fast enough,” he wrote. “It is driving me nuts!” The cost-benefit analysis must have seemed clear to him: Neuralink had the potential to cure paralysis, he believed, which would improve the lives of millions of future humans. The suffering of a smaller number of animals was worth it.

This form of crude long-term-ism,* in which the sheer size of future generations gives them added ethical weight, even shows up in Musk’s statements about buying Twitter. He called Twitter a “digital town square” that was responsible for nothing less than preventing a new American civil war. “I didn’t do it to make more money,” he wrote. “I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love.”

...

Autopilot and F.S.D. represent the culmination of this approach. “The overarching goal of Tesla engineering,” Musk wrote, “is maximize area under user happiness curve.” Unlike with Twitter or even Neuralink, people were dying as a result of his decisions — but no matter. In 2019, in a testy exchange of email with the activist investor and steadfast Tesla critic Aaron Greenspan, Musk bristled at the suggestion that Autopilot was anything other than lifesaving technology. “The data is unequivocal that Autopilot is safer than human driving by a significant margin,” he wrote. “It is unethical and false of you to claim otherwise. In doing so, you are endangering the public.”

There are serious debates to be had about the trade-offs between short term sacrifices and long term benefits to mankind that can come from research in autonomous systems, AI, and medicine, but none of these debates will feature Tesla or Neuralink, These avoidable car crashes and animals being tortured to death serve no purpose other than to enhance Elon Musk's super-genius brand and to directly or indirectly pump the value of Tesla.  

Musk's fame and adoration, his sense of identity, and the vast majority of his wealth all come from the perception that he is one of the world's greatest engineers and inventors, which is a big problem given that Musk is not only not an engineer, he has never shown any talent in the field even by layman standards.

Even down something like two thirds from its peak last year, Tesla is still wildly overvalued based on conventional metrics for an auto company. The stock price only makes sense if people assume that some wonderful new breakthrough is just around the corner. But the product pipeline appears to be largely empty. The company hasn't introduced a new car for years. Despite having had a head start, the cybertruck was beaten to market by multiple competitors. The semi is a joke. The humanoid robot Optimus looks like something from a science fair, decades behind what we have come to expect from Boston Dynamics, not to mention other car companies like Honda.

 

 

With the complicated exception of SpaceX, none of Musk's businesses are on the cutting edge of anything. In autonomous  driving, AI, solar cell development, brain-machine interfaces, tunneling machines, and countless other technologies where Musk has promised revolutionary disruptions, his companies are, at best, in the middle of the pack and, in some cases, not making any serious effort at all. (On a related note, despite attempts to muddy the waters with creative statistics, Tesla spends far less than any of its major competitors on R&D)

Given all this, the "rational assumption of future gains" argument is simply absurd, and anyone who still buys this or the line about Elon's love of humanity needs to talk to the people who actually cover Musk for a living.

* Longtermism: a philosophical school which argues that we should give billionaires more money and which has proven surprisingly popular with billionaires.

Understanding ChatGPT

From the Kids in the Hall:

Reposted for no particular reason.

Monday, December 7, 2020

On the bright side, how much damage could one of the world's three richest men with the personality of a cult leader do?

Cult is a dangerous term to throw around and it obviously doesn't apply in the narrow sense to Musk's followers, but there are some aspects that give one pause.

Take a look at the following list from former FBI agent Joe Novarro [emphasis added]:

If you know of a cult leader who has many of these traits there is a high probability that they are hurting those around them emotionally, psychologically, physically, spiritually, or financially. And of course this does not take into account the hurt that their loved ones will also experience. 

Here are the typical traits of the pathological cult leader (from Dangerous Personalities) you should watch for and which shout caution, get away, run, or avoid if possible:

    He has a grandiose idea of who he is and what he can achieve is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, or brilliance.

    Demands blind unquestioned obedience.

    Requires excessive admiration from followers and outsiders.

    Has a sense of entitlement - expecting to be treated special at all times.

    Is exploitative of others by asking for their money or that of relatives putting others at financial risk.

    Is arrogant and haughty in his behavior or attitude.

    Has an exaggerated sense of power (entitlement) that allows him to bend rules and break laws.

    Takes sexual advantage of members of his sect or cult.

    Sex is a requirement with adults and sub adults as part of a ritual or rite.

    Is hypersensitive to how he is seen or perceived by others.

    Publicly devalues others as being inferior, incapable, or not worthy.

    Makes members confess their sins or faults publicly subjecting them to ridicule or humiliation while revealing exploitable weaknesses of the penitent.

    Has ignored the needs of others, including: biological, physical, emotional, and financial needs.

    Is frequently boastful of accomplishments.

    Needs to be the center of attention and does things to distract others to insure that he or she is being noticed by arriving late, using exotic clothing, overdramatic speech, or by making theatrical entrances.

    Has insisted in always having the best of anything (house, car, jewelry, clothes) even when others are relegated to lesser facilities, amenities, or clothing.

    Doesn’t seem to listen well to needs of others, communication is usually one-way in the form of dictates.

    Haughtiness, grandiosity, and the need to be controlling is part of his personality.

    Behaves as though people are objects to be used, manipulated or exploited for personal gain.

    When criticized he tends to lash out not just with anger but with rage.

    Anyone who criticizes or questions him is called an “enemy.”

    Refers to non-members or non-believers in him as “the enemy.”

    Acts imperious at times, not wishing to know what others think or desire.

    Believes himself to be omnipotent.

    Has “magical” answers or solutions to problems.

    Is superficially charming.

    Habitually puts down others as inferior and only he is superior.

    Has a certain coldness or aloofness about him that makes others worry about who this person really is and or whether they really know him.

    Is deeply offended when there are perceived signs of boredom, being ignored or of being slighted.

    Treats others with contempt and arrogance.

    Is constantly assessing for those who are a threat or those who revere him.

    The word “I” dominates his conversations.

    He is oblivious to how often he references himself.

    Hates to be embarrassed or fail publicly - when he does he acts out with rage.

    Doesn’t seem to feel guilty for anything he has done wrong nor does he apologize for his actions.

    Believes he possesses the answers and solutions to world problems.

    Believes himself to be a deity or a chosen representative of a deity.

    Rigid, unbending, or insensitive describes how this person thinks.

    Tries to control others in what they do, read, view, or think.

    Has isolated members of his sect from contact with family or outside world.

    Monitors and or restricts contact with family or outsiders.

    Works the least but demands the most.

    Has stated that he is “destined for greatness” or that he will be “martyred.”

    Seems to be highly dependent of tribute and adoration and will often fish for compliments.

    Uses enforcers or sycophants to insure compliance from members or believers.

    Sees self as “unstoppable” perhaps has even said so.

    Conceals background or family which would disclose how plain or ordinary he is.

    Doesn’t think there is anything wrong with himself – in fact sees himself as perfection or “blessed.”

    Has taken away the freedom to leave, to travel, to pursue life, and liberty of followers.

    Has isolated the group physically (moved to a remote area) so as to not be observed.

We needed that

From SF meteorologist Drew Tuma.

Start of September...

To mid-January.

"Has it really been ten years" ago at the blog -- When 3D printing was just about to change everything

Don't get me wrong. This is amazing technology with incredible promise, especially in the field of medicine, but it's probably not on the verge of revolutionizing our lives and it certainly wasn't on the verge ten years ago.

 

Monday, January 7, 2013

The Ddulite Bifurcation

From inappropriate aggregation to silly juxtapositions.

For the original definition of Ddulite check the link. For now it's sufficient to say we're talking about people (particularly journalists) who have an emotional, gee-whiz reaction to technology without really thinking seriously about the functionality.

Ddulite journalists can be spotted by a few defining characteristics: a remarkable ability to be impressed by the unimpressive; a focus on shiny, sexy toys; a tendency to report on technologies that really aren't that close as being just around the corner; a recurring amnesia about the slow development of similar technologies; general obliviousness to questions about implementation and demand; and what we might call the ddulite bifurcation.

The typical bifurcation consists of two applications of a new technology, one application mundane but realistic, the other impressive but so wildly ambitious that it may not even be theoretically possible with the technology being discussed.

I was going to make up an absurd example here but now that I think about it, I'm not sure I could do better than this actual story from Planet Money. The subject is 3-D printers and it's worth listening to.The Planet Money people are good, solid reporters and they do a reasonable job putting things in economic context, even bringing in Tyler Cowen to shoot down some of the more extravagant this-is-the-future claims.

But you can count on any story like this to have at least a few ddulite moments and you can certainly find them here, including this classic bifurcation. First we get this claim from a CEO named Pete Weijmarshausen:

Now, I think in a few years, we can print clothing, and then you can have clothing without sizes, but you have the size that fits you.

(Note the qualifiers here: "I think"; "in a few years.")

This is followed a few lines later by analyst Terry Wohlers saying:

WOHLERS: You lose a finger, you print out a new one.
CHACE: Yeah, like, actual body parts, printing out new fingers using your cells.
WOHLERS: Bones and bladders and eventually kidneys and so forth.

(glad he put the "eventually" qualifier with kidneys)

At the risk of belaboring the obvious and working under the assumption that most of you reading this know waaaay more about regenerative medicine and therapeutic cloning than I do, the day when we can easily grow new limbs is probably not just around the corner. Important fundamental research is being done and it's reasonable to talk about being able to do this someday but it could be a long way off. As for 3D printing approaches, we seem to be at the appears to be theoretically possible stage where we can work with masses of tissue rather than just a few cells by creating synthetic vascular systems.

This is exciting research but it's the sort of thing that's probably years away if it ever proves viable. Like most reporting about nanotech, the story mixes the ongoing with the theoretically possible in a way that obscures the huge gap between the two.