Monday, March 25, 2024

Twelve years ago at the blog -- a rare double post day on the growth fetish.

Of course, the 2012 me had no idea what kind of VC-driven insanity the 2024 me would witness.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Venture capital and the growth fetish

Felix Salmon has another smart post on venture capital and the way he feels it distorts American business:
Another way to look at this question is to compare US fight-to-be-number-one capitalism with the kind of capitalism practiced in undeniably successful countries like Germany, Korea, Brazil, and Japan. Those countries don’t have nearly as many world-beating behemoths as the US does, but overall their economies and current accounts are doing very well on a bedrock of medium-sized firms and family-owned corporations.

So in a way, Gobry is making my point for me. The IPO market and the VCs who feed off it are playing a game which might make a small number of people extremely rich, and which will create a very small number of hugely successful world-beating companies. They’re not playing a game which is good for founders; they’re not playing a game which is good for healthy, long-lived companies; and they’re not playing a game which is good for the economy as a whole. That’s kind of the point I’m making in the piece when I say that “Silicon Valley is full of venture capitalists who have become dynastically wealthy off the backs of companies that no longer exist”.
I think this fits nicely with one of our ongoing themes here at OE, the growth fetish:
Think of it this way, if we ignore all those questions about stakeholders and the larger impact of a company, you can boil the value of a business down to a single scalar: just take the profits over the lifetime of a company and apply an appropriate discount function (not trivial but certainly doable). The goal of a company's management is to maximize this number and the goal of the market is to assign a price to the company that accurately reflects that number.

The first part of the hypothesis is that there are different possible growth curves associated with a business and, ignoring the unlikely possibility of a tie, there is a particular curve that optimizes profits for a particular business. In other words, some companies are better off growing rapidly; some are better off with slow or deferred growth; some are better off simply staying at the same level; and some are better off being allowed to slowly contract.

It's not difficult to come up with examples of ill-conceived expansions. Growth almost always entails numerous risks for an established company. Costs increase and generally debt does as well. Scalability is usually a concern. And perhaps most importantly, growth usually entails moving into an area where you probably don't know what the hell you're doing. I recall Peter Lynch (certainly a fan of growth stocks) warning investors to put off buying into chains until the businesses had demonstrated the ability to set up successful operations in other cities.

But the idea of getting in on a fast-growing company is still tremendously attractive, appealing enough to unduly influence people's judgement (and no, I don't see any reason to mangle a sentence just to keep an infinitive in one piece). For reasons that merit a post of their own (GE will be mentioned), that natural bias toward growth companies has metastasised into a pervasive fetish.

This bias does more than inflate the prices of certain stocks; it pressures people running companies to make all sorts of bad decisions from moving into markets where you don't belong (Borders) to pumping up market share with unprofitable customers (Groupon) to overpaying for acquisitions (too many examples to mention).

I didn't consider the role of venture capital at the time. Perhaps I missed the biggest factor. 

 

______________________________________

 

Thursday, March 22, 2012

More on the growth fetish -- Facebook vs. Groupon

There is a worthwhile exchange going on between Felix Salmon and Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry. I've already quoted Salmon, but Gobry makes some good points as well. Still, the part I found the most interesting is the part I think he got wrong.
Breakthrough technology startups are different from other kinds of businesses in that they either create a new market or violently disrupt an existing one. This means that they almost invariably require to spend lots of capital in order to stake out a defensible market position against their numerous competitors. In particular, many technology markets have winner-take-most or winner-take-all dynamics, either because of network effects or economies of scale…

Felix writes that Groupon had a profitable Q1 2010 and “it’s easy to see how it could have grown steadily from that point onward.” Except that given the characteristics of the daily deal business, particularly the need for scale, what would have happened if Groupon had tried to “grow steadily” and profitably, is that the company wouldn’t be around anymore.

It’s LivingSocial that would have raised over a billion dollars and be worth $10 billion today, Groupon would have been sold for scrap like BuyWithMe and plenty of other daily deals also-rans, and Andrew Mason would be back to doing yoga on YouTube. Groupon would be a footnote.
This illustrates (at least for me), a common error among growth fetishists -- overgeneralizing valid arguments for growth-at-all-costs. The first paragraph above is absolutely on target. There are situations where establishing dominance and critical mass as quickly as possible is incredibly valuable. Cases like Facebook. To make a bad pop culture reference, when it comes to mainstream social networking sites, there can be only one. Once Facebook was in place, all that was left was niches.

Put another way, it would cost more to unseat Facebook than it did to build it. Under those circumstances, Zuckerberg's bury-the-problem-in-money approach to running a business made sense (even if it was aesthetically lacking).

The first mover advantages for Groupon are far less obvious. There's no reason why we couldn't have two online gift card businesses. Consumers would get a wider selection and the merchants would almost certainly see lower fees (there's no way Groupon could charge those rates in a competitive market). Nor are the economies of scale that significant, at least not for the part of the business based on arranging deals with local merchants.

A potential competitor would have to spend a lot of money building a mailing list but probably not that much more than Groupon spent on its list. In short, if a potential competitor were to spend as much money as Groupon has, it might just catch up (particularly given the fact that Groupon is not a very well run company).

In terms of lifetime value, I suspect that the money Groupon spent on explosive growth was badly invested. However, in terms of buzz and stock price, it may have been money well spent as far as the backers were concerned.

 

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Friday, March 22, 2024

Is it money that matters? -- More Data Points

Remember what we've been saying about range of data?

To the extent that political scientists understand the effect of money on elections, it's an understanding limited to the precedented (or at least its general neighborhood). That's how predictive modeling works, at least the kind of modeling we're talking about here. When you find yourself deep in the unprecedented, you can no longer assume that the relationships behind your model will still hold. [Blogger recognizes the spelling of "unprecedented" but not of "precedented." Go figure.]

With that in mind, think about 2024. In particular, think about the role money or the lack of it might play.

How much experience do we have with fund raising imbalances that look like this?


 

How much experience do we have with candidates facing this level of financial crises?


 

"Five, ten, or even twenty-five dollars..."

 

 

And how often has a candidate's money problems had this kind of impact on their party?


"Adav Noti, the executive director of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center in Washington, said that is a break from fundraising norms. Usually, Noti said, candidates prioritize raising cash that can be spent directly on campaign activity. Save America, on the other hand, is structured as a "leadership PAC" and thus barred from spending directly on Trump's own campaign activities. The group devoted 84% of its spending to Trump's legal costs as of February."

 

 


I never thought I'd be favorably quoting Scaramucci, but this aged well.




  

p.s. And now this...

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Thursday, March 21, 2024

Six(ish) years ago at the blog -- with Elon it's always déjà vu all over again

With a radius of less than ten meters, any perceptible spin will only serve to make the crew sick. That's not to say that there aren't reasons why you might want a slight spin in an interplanetary flight, but based on past experience, we can be fairly sure Musk doesn't understand those reasons.

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Elon Musk is a terrible engineer (and why that is important)


From Fortune:
In a tweet on Friday, Musk posted a GIF of Dr. David Bowman, the main character in 2001: A Space Odyssey running around a track in space. He said in the tweet that the BF Spaceship will feature a similar track and that running around on it “will look something like this.”

During the scene in the film, Bowman is running around a centrifugal device that creates enough gravitational force to allow him to run and get exercise. But when Bowman was running around in space, he was on the Discovery One spaceship and not the BF that SpaceX is working on.

First, a very brief and hopefully painless physics lesson (with apologies for any details I might screw up – – it's been a long time since I took a class in the subject). We are all familiar with the idea of centrifugal force. When traveling in a circle, the amount of the force you experience is a function of rpm's and radius. Increase either of those and you increase the force.

The ring shaped space stations you've seen in NASA proposals and science fiction movies are based on this principle. (The actual proposals might be more likely to referred to shape as a "torus," but let's not get technical.) Another design, which will get to in a minute, involves a tether and a counterweight. You see this in actual engineering proposals but it seldom seems to make it into the movies.

A big problem with using centrifugal force to get around microgravity is the Coriolis effect. Both volume and mass are at a premium with spacecraft, so we would like to trade speed for radius. Unfortunately, spinning rapidly in a tight circle messes with the inner ear in ways that cause dizziness, nausea, and disorientation. While there's evidence that people can adapt to this to a certain degree, if you want to avoid these effects, you need a very large circle (think hundreds of yards across) traveling fairly slowly (around 2 RPMs).

If you're using the tether and counterweight approach, radius isn't that big of an issue, but with ring-shaped craft increasing radius means proportionally increasing mass and the habitable space you need to maintain and the amount of radiation shielding you need. The specs for the BFR give a diameter of 30 feet making it impractical to squeeze a running track inside one.

Now, obviously this is a hugely complex question and you probably wouldn't have any problem finding serious and highly competent engineers (of which SpaceX has many) who are actively working on ring shaped designs for craft and stations, but that does not at all appear to be what happened here. Instead, we have yet another instance of Elon Musk going off script and showing a fundamental ignorance of engineering while confusing seeing something in an old science-fiction movie with having an idea.

After you follow Elon Musk for a while, his proposals start to fall fairly neatly into two categories: the silly and other people's. It is something of an open secret that Musk likes to take credit for employee's work. Fortunately, the ruse is seldom difficult to see through. The proposals for SpaceX and Tesla that actually make it into production and necessarily involve the work of multiple engineers and specialists invariably come off as professional and mainstream.

Then there are those times when Elon Musk decides to go off script. Musk without his engineers is a bit like a bad comic without his writers.  The concepts he "comes up with" are without exception standard elements from old science-fiction shows, be it the Hyperloop or the giant underground slot car track or the brain communication microchip or the super fast tunneling machine.

As for the engineering, any vestige of competence vanishes when Musk ventures out on his own. A good engineer looks at a problem and sees the complexity. A great engineer sees the complexity and when it's there, sees through the complexity to the underlying simplicity. Bad engineers propose simple solutions because they miss the complexity entirely.

This is a hallmark of Elon Musk's attempts to sound like an engineer. His "solutions" simply make other parts of the process more complicated and unworkable. The perfect example is his handling of thermal expansion with the Hyperloop. Having the terminal points of the line move hundreds of yards based on the day's weather creates far more problems than it solves. His go-to answer of saving money on infrastructure projects by making tunnels smaller falls in the same category.

I realize this seems awfully harsh. To be clear, Elon Musk is a man of extraordinary and extraordinarily valuable talents. As a charismatic leader, finance guy, and promoter, he has few if any equals. Without these talents, there wouldn't be a SpaceX or a Tesla and for that alone he deserves tremendous appreciation.

But there are real dangers to the hype and bullshit standard narrative of 21st century technology. The lies we tell ourselves are increasingly costly and, in that context, the myth of a real life Tony Stark is not one we can afford.




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Wednesday, March 20, 2024

A few Wednesday morning data points

As we've discussed at some length, there is a strange inconsistency in much of the mainstream media's coverage of the election (actually, there are many strange inconsistencies, but we'll just focus when one for the moment).  In the run-up to the primaries, papers like the New York Times did their best to convince us and themselves that  DeSantis or Haley, or even Ramaswamy, was poised to take out Donald Trump.  In this phase of the election, even the pretense of objectivity was tossed aside.

Once reality came crashing down on these scenarios, many of these same journalists suddenly lost all interest in looking for signs of weakness in Trump's support.  We've already speculated on the reasons behind this curious shift and will probably speculate more in some upcoming posts (it's a hard habit to break).  Regardless of the causes, the disconnect continues, supplying endless material to the NYT pitchbot.  Biden getting support in the nineties in the primaries is seen as evidence of a party in disarray while Trump getting more than ten points less is depicted as an indication of strength.

Part of the problem is that many political observers still have trouble with the idea that the former president has an absolute lock on the primary with the loyal support of a solid majority of Republicans, but appears to have seriously alienated in the nontrivial minority of the party.  Perhaps the best indication of that has been the remarkable consistency of Haley's primary showings, even after dropping of the race.

Last night's primaries in Ohio and Arizona continued the pattern. 

But ironically, the state where he did the best should be the one that worries them the most.



Shockingly, the only publication I know of that called this spade a spade was Newsweek. Even though Florida itself almost certainly is not in play (barring something really big), 14% in Florida for Haley in what has to be seen as a protest vote should be deeply troubling for Trump and the party. Nate Cohn and other analysts have argued that Haley's numbers were in large part due to Democrats voting in Republican primaries, but that doesn't work in Florida. At ground zero for Trump support with all of his rivals long out of the race, almost one fifth of the state's Republicans voted against him.

That won't be how the major news organizations spin it, but that's the big lesson of the night.


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Tuesday, March 19, 2024

A couple of more red flags for "the Tesla of education companies"

Something about this tweet was familiar...

It took me a minute to realize that we had written about Bridge in two posts back in 2017.

Bring red flags, lots of red flags – part I: "the Tesla of education companies" 

Bring red flags, lots of red flags – part II: Maybe too-good-to-be-true claims might be too good to be true

Now, based on this article from the Intercept, I realize I was still a couple of flags shy.

Start with this quote, particularly the part at the end the NYT omitted.

“Technically, we’re breaking the law,” May said in a 2013 article in the education publication Tes — a quote that was reused [but not in its complete form -- MP]  in a mostly favorable 2017 New York Times profile of Bridge. “There would be more people and more organizations willing to try and push the envelope and get higher pupil outcomes if the regulatory and legal framework was less restrictive,” May went on. “You have to be extreme. You have to take real risks to work in those environments. Often there are [laws] preventing most companies from trying to figure out how to solve these problems.”

Those who follow Silicon Valley thought leaders have heard this refrain far too many times. We could make life perfect if not for all those silly rules and pesky regulators. This line is bullshit most of the time. Yes, there are overly restrictive rules and overly eager regulators, but most regulations exist for good reasons. The mindset that it is primarily rules that are holding us back is both wrong and dangerous. It is doubly dangerous when those rules apply to the safety of children.

That's a big red flag, An even bigger one is swatting your critics.


“You Need to Come With Us” 



 

You can read a detailed account in the Intercept piece or in the CBC or this from the Washington Post.

Here’s one for the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up files: A Canadian doctoral student who was in Uganda to research the operations of a for-profit outfit called Bridge International Academies (BIA) was arrested after complaints about his work by the company.

Curtis Riep, the University of Alberta researcher, was in Uganda to research BIA’s operations for a study commissioned by Education International, a federation of 396 associations and unions in 171 countries and territories. He was arrested in late May by Ugandan police on charges of impersonating a BIA officer and trespassing, but he was cleared of all charges and released two days later. He has now returned to Calgary, but the episode has put a spotlight on the company and how it works.


BIA co-founder Shannon May's statement ("When we received word that an unknown foreign gentleman had visited a number of our academies under false pretense you can imagine our alarm and immediate fear for our pupils.") might have been a tad more believable if

1. She had produced any log-in books (or any evidence period) that had him signed in with a false name or credentials.

2. He wasn't in a meeting with the national director of Bridge, Andrew White when they had him arrested (White was recorded during the arrest claiming not to know anything about what was going on which is almost certainly a lie).

or (and this is my favorite)

3. If they hadn't correctly identified his affiliation days before when they put out the ad in the local newspaper.

If you read the Intercept, it might help to visualize White...


Shannon May is also startlingly Caucasian. As with so many Davos darlings, there's a patronizing and somewhat creepy white savior feel to the whole enterprise. There is also a tremendous amount of money at stake. 

Everything about this business demands scrutiny, particularly from independent and sometimes critical observers. The fact that people like White and May will go to these lengths to avoid that transparency tells us quite a bit.

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Monday, March 18, 2024

No, the AARO report shouldn't make you more of a believer in alien visitors

When talking about alien visitation believers, Tyler Cowen is definitely one of the sharp ones.  He's a smart guy.  As far as I can tell, he never fell for Grusch and company's transparently absurd claims (which puts him one up on the New York Times).  He was also one of the few believers who caught the logical fallacy at the center of Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb's ʻOumuamua arguments.  In this crowd, he is definitely the leper with the most fingers.

This doesn't mean that Cowen's approach to the topic is free of motivated reason; it just means that his motivated reason is considerably more subtle and interesting.  His dismissive response to the AARO report ("a nothing burger") is a good place to start but first, a bit of context for those who came in late.

While we shouldn't underestimate the impact of sensationalistic popular pseudoscience from places like YouTube and the History Channel, the respectable case for extraterrestrial contact rests mainly on three pillars: declassified footage of anomalies observed by military pilots; claims from Harvard's Loeb that objects passing through the solar system or even entering our atmosphere were actually extraterrestrials spacecraft; and these statements by "whistleblowers" before Congress and in publications like the NYT.

In 2023, David Grusch, a United States Air Force (USAF) officer and former intelligence official, was interviewed by journalists and testified in a U.S. House of Representatives hearing. Grusch claimed that the U.S. federal government maintains a secretive UFO (or UAP) recovery and reverse engineering program and that it is in possession of "non-human" spacecraft along with their "dead pilots". In 2022, Grusch filed a whistleblower complaint with the U.S. Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) to support his plan to share classified information with the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He also filed a complaint alleging retaliation by his superiors over a similar complaint he made in 2021.

He claims to have viewed documents reporting that Benito Mussolini's government recovered a "non-human" spacecraft in 1933, which the Vatican and the Five Eyes assisted the U.S. in procuring in 1944 or 1945. Grusch claims that American citizens have been harmed and killed as a part of governmental efforts to cover-up that information. In response, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) stated that no evidence of extraterrestrial life had been discovered and that there was no verifiable information about the U.S. government or private aerospace companies possessing and reverse engineering any "extraterrestrial materials".

In a testimony given to the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability in July 2023, Grusch repeated several of his claims under oath. Testimonies were also delivered by Ryan Graves, a retired fighter pilot, and David Fravor, a retired U.S. Navy commander, on their experiences related to UFOs. Grusch testified that he could not elaborate further in public, but offered to provide details to representatives in a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF).

While all the witnesses were from time to time a bit X-Files-ish, Grusch's charges were qualitatively different and far more serious.  Rather than saying that there are things going on that we can't explain, he claimed that not only were the explanations known, but that the government possessed definitive physical proof.  With that distinction in mind, take a look at Cowen's reaction to the report.

You’ll find plenty of (justifiable) claims that there are no dead bodies, no alien spacecraft have been recovered, no technology is being reverse engineered, there is nothing to Roswell, and so on.  ...  What you won’t find in this report is any mention of Nimitz, Gimbal, or any of the other more puzzling cases about observed objects — on multiple sensors with independent verifications — that defy current explanation ["Defy" is probably not the right word here, but we'll get back to this later -- MP].  No real discussion of the more serious pilot eyewitness reports (and no, these pilots are not saying they saw aliens, they are reporting they cannot explain what they saw).  ...

So overall there is no reason to revise whatever your current views might be, at least provided those views were not the crazy ones in the first place.  If anything, perhaps you should do a slight Bayesian update toward believing in a real puzzle, given that in a 45 pp. report the government is not willing to directly explain or even confront the most anomalous cases.

But as I just noted, Grusch's testimony was fundamentally different from that of Graves and Fravor,  They were pointing out a serious issue that required additional study. He was charging highly-placed government officials with engaging in a massive and probably criminal conspiracy. It was the latter that demanded an immediate investigation and comprehensive report.

From the introduction. [Emphasis added.]

The goal of this report is not to prove or disprove any particular belief set, but rather to use a rigorous analytic and scientific approach to investigate past USG-sponsored UAP investigation efforts and the claims made by interviewees that the USG and various contractors have recovered and are hiding off-world technology and biological material. AARO has approached this project with the widest possible aperture, thoroughly investigating these assertions and claims without any particular pre-conceived conclusion or hypothesis. AARO is committed to reaching conclusions based on empirical evidence.

So, to put it bluntly, Cowen argues that we should be more likely to believe that aliens are behind UAPs based on the fact that a government report didn't go out of scope to discuss the phenomena (even though they've been discussed elsewhere). 

Cowen singles out "Nimitz, Gimbal" so let's take a look the Pentagon UFO videos.

Science writer Mick West writing for the Guardian.

But my experience with the Chilean UFO immediately suggested a more mundane explanation: the infrared glare from the engines of a distant jet. Some investigation confirmed this was a very likely hypothesis. I looked up the camera’s patents; these revealed a de-rotation mechanism used to correct for “gimbal roll”, which would inevitably mean glares would rotate in the manner seen in the video. This is also probably why the navy gave it the code name “Gimbal”, rather than, say, “Flying Saucer”.

Other, less impressive videos (which UFO buffs also describe as being remarkable) have quickly succumbed to analysis. “Go Fast” was not actually going fast, and was consistent with a balloon drifting in the wind. “Tic Tac” did not show a craft moving like a ping-pong ball, but instead looked more like a distant plane with the apparent movement caused by the camera switching modes and performing gimbal rolls. “Green Pyramid” looked like “the best UFO footage of all time” for two days, then I pointed out it looked exactly like an out-of-focus airliner shot in night vision with a triangular aperture.

West again, this time quoted in Scientific American.

In recent years, both NASA and the Department of Defense have shown renewed interest in unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP). Some of this increased scrutiny has indeed been enlightening: “The recent UAP reports that came out in January … they listed a whole bunch of new UAPs, and the vast majority of the ones that they identified were balloons, simply because it’s such a common thing to be in the air,” West says. Among the UAPs that were actually full of hot air, it’s possible that some were performing surveillance on behalf of other countries. This explanation is much more likely than extraterrestrial activity.

 

People arguing that these videos can't be explained by mundane factors often rest much of their case on the reliability of the military pilots who made these reports. Astronaut Scott Kelly's comments are relevant here.

(Seriously, you need to watch this.)





The thing to remember here is that we are talking about anomalies, million-to-one events that are not unexpected when you look at the numbers.  It's a bit like a royal flush.  You would be surprised to see one in person, but not for them to show up occasionally in Las Vegas given that the number of games being played every year. Likewise when you consider all of the missions the military flies (and we're talking about over a decade's worth in the case of these videos), we expect to see a few freak events. Not only have there been explanations proposed for pretty much everything we've seen, but the frequency of freaks doesn't seem that far off from what we would expect.


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Friday, March 15, 2024

This clip has pi, Trump, Elon and "a nearly decade-long conspiracy to breed 'giant sheep hybrids,'" how can I not post it?

Pretty much average for a Colbert monologue, but it connects with four of our favorite topics. (how does the fourth tie in? Check out the artist's rendering of the giant sheep hybrid after the break. Assuming the jump break still works on Blogger.)




Read more »
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Thursday, March 14, 2024

Finally, a constitutional crisis we can have some fun with

This was originally part of our Tuesday tweets post, but I decided the ETs deserved a spot of their own.

UFO believers have been having a bad couple of weeks. 

For starters, once highly respected astrophysicist Avi Loeb watched still more of his reputation go into the wood chipper. The NYT had a snarky article on the details. I'd normally be the last to criticize this sort of thing, but mockery would go down easier if the reporter would acknowledge the credulous reporting we've gotten recently from his paper. Fortunately, there's a better write-up by Joel Achenbach in a paper that hasn't been screwing up this story for years.

Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb scoured the Pacific seafloor last summer in search for debris from a meteor that had exploded in a fireball on Jan. 8, 2014. Loeb organized the two-week expedition because he thought the meteor might be something other than a random rock from space. Based on its astonishing speed, he suspected the object came from beyond our solar system — and might even be evidence of alien technology.

Loeb reported hitting pay dirt, retrieving hundreds of tiny blobs of molten material called “spherules” in the ocean off Papua New Guinea. Some of them, he later wrote, had such unfamiliar chemistry that they “may reflect an extraterrestrial technological origin.”

But reanalysis of seismic data now suggests Loeb may have been looking for the meteor remnants in the wrong place.

The analysis, led by seismologist Benjamin Fernando of Johns Hopkins University, contends that sound waves purportedly from the meteor exploding in the atmosphere, and cited by Loeb as helping to locate the meteor’s debris field, were most likely from a truck driving on a road near the seismometer.

“There are hundreds of signals that look just like this on that seismometer in Papua New Guinea in the days before and the days after,” Fernando said. Moreover, the pattern was more common during the daytime.

“That’s a smoking gun for a noise that’s produced by humans,” he said. “Meteors, earthquakes, waves, none of them care what time of day it is.”


Then came this.

"no verifiable evidence that any UAP setting represented extraterrestrial activity that the U. S. government or private industry has ever had access to extraterrestrial technology, or that any information was illegally or inappropriately withheld from Congress, and alleged hidden UAP reverse engineering programs either do not exist or were misidentified authentic National Security Programs unrelated to extraterrestrial activity or technology exploitation. So what we found is that claims of hidden programs are largely the result of circular reporting by a small group, repeating what they heard from others, and that many people have sincerely misinterpreted real events or mistaken sensitive U. S. programs as UAP or being extraterrestrial exploitation."

 

And the faithful are freaking out.

 

Pay close attention to that part about "circular reporting by a small group, repeating what they heard from others." This is a point that serious journalists on this beat have been making for a long time.


One thing you have to remember about the aliens are among us crowd. If their stories don't sound entirely crazy, it's only because they are holding back the really crazy parts. Dig into what the don't try to sell to the NYT and it's ghosts, demon, Navajo were-creatures and cryptids.


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Twelve years ago at the blog -- independence vs. contrarianism

 We really should have come back to this one more often. We also should have spent more time reminding everyone what a terrible writer, thinker, and human being Steven Landsburg is. 

 

Not to be confused with Steve Landesberg. That guy was great.

 

Friday, March 16, 2012

How our inability to distinguish between independence and contrarianism encourages Steve Landsburg to be, let's just say, a less effective pundit

[I decided that the tone was getting a bit sharp in this debate so I'm dialing things down a bit. This entailed some very slight rewriting but none of these changes the substance of the post]

Before getting to the main thesis, let's confirm just how bad this incident was. A radio personality with millions of listeners grossly misrepresented the comments of a private citizen speaking out on an issue then used those distortions to make offensive and badly-reasoned attacks on the the woman. The situation at that point was bad enough but we don't really achieve horrible until Landsburg jumped in. Not only did Landsburg throw his reputation behind Limbaugh's illogical and factually challenged comments, he actually added additional [poor] arguments to the abuse this woman has had to put up with.

Noah Smith, Scott Lemieux, my co-blogger and others have done an excellent job addressing the lies and idiocy of this affair (check out how this blogger dismembers the I'm-mocking-the-postion-not-the-person defense) . The question for now is how this happened. How did a mid-level economist manage to reach such national prominence by writing a series painfully sophomoric books and articles?

Part of the answer, I'd argue, lies in the way journalists and editors now treat the counterintuitive. Publications like Slate give us a steady diet of pieces that take some claim that seems obviously true and argue the opposite. These publications would have us believe that this practice is a sign of intellectual independence and healthy diversity of opinion. It's not.

Contrarianism is closer to the opposite of independence, a point that's easiest to explain if we think in the idealized terms of a simplified fitness landscape. and draw an analogy between the defensibility of an argument associated with a certain position and the fitness of a phenotype associated with a certain genotype. (more on landscapes here)

Of course, it would take a lot of variables to realistically describe this landscape but the basic concepts still hold even if we simplify it to a bare-bones x, y and v(x,y). For every position (x,y) you can take, there's a resulting viability (v). Some positions are easy to defend (v is high). Some are difficult (v is low). Pundits and news analysts who try to find the best positions to argue are therefore performing an optimization algorithm (though most probably never thought about it in those terms).

For the most part, we can place this commentary and analyses in three general categories:

Neighborhood

Independent/semi-independent

Contrarian


The neighbor searcher tries to find the most defensible position within the neighborhood of a starting point. The best example I can think of here is the work David Frum specialized in until fairly recently. Frum was not being independent with his pieces in the Wall Street Journal or public radio (the terminal point of his searches was almost always within the neighborhood of the established conservative consensus) but he was arguably doing something as or more important, thoroughly exploring the landscape of the region and encouraging evolutionary shifts to sounder, more defensible positions.

The independent searcher, by contrast, goes where the search leads regardless of the starting position. The semi-independent searcher adds the condition that the terminal point has to be original (in other words, you can't end up on a point that someone else has already argued). Technically, originality and independence are in opposition here but in practice, they tend to complement each other.

And the two categories tend to complement each other as well. To grossly oversimplify, one group searches x+1 to x-1 and y+1 to y-1; the other group searches everywhere else. Given the fact the consensuses originally form around what seem at the time to be good ideas, it makes sense to explore their neighborhoods (if it helps, you could think of this in terms of Bayesian priors), but it also makes sense to keep exploring new territory. David Brooks and Frank Rich refine and improve their relative corners of the political landscape while writers like Jonathan Chait or William Safire range further and are more likely to reach unexpected conclusions.

The contrarian approach is to start with a position (x.y) that seems obviously true (often because it is true) then jump to either (-x,y) or (x,-y) and argue from there. It can, at first glance, look like the result of an independent search,but it is actually far more constrained than the neighborhood searches of Frum and Rich. Both of those writers would shift positions based on their reasoning and would insist on finding a defensible point before sitting down to the keyboard.

The typical contrarian piece hews so closely to its initial (-x,y) that there's no indication of a search at all. By all appearances, the writer simply jumps to the contrarian position and starts typing.

Contrarian writing crowds out good journalism and pumps misinformation and faulty arguments into the discourse. This would be bad at any time, but in the current state of journalism, it's disastrous. Here's a list of dangerous trends in journalism from an earlier post (with a link added from a different paragraph):

1. Reliable information sources like the CBO are undermined;

2. An increasing amount of our information comes from unreliable subsidized sources like Heritage;

3. Journalists suffer no penalty for publishing inaccurate information;

4. Journalists also fashion for themselves an incredibly self-serving ethical rule that lets them, in the name of balance, avoid the consequences that would have to be faced if they honestly assigned responsibility for screw-ups;

5. A growing tendency to converge on a narrative makes the media easier to manipulate.
All of these factors make it more difficult for our society to deal with bad data and contrarians are a rich source of some of the worst.

In a healthy journalistic system, counter-intuitive claims would be held to a higher standard (at least if we think like Bayesians) and if a logically or factually flawed argument made it through, both the authors and the editors would feel pressure to see that it didn't happen again.

In our current system, counter-intuitive claims are held to a lower standard (because they generate traffic) and serial offenders can actually build careers by badly arguing points that probably aren't true. Editors have lost all interest in fact-checking and outside efforts at debunking are usually treated as he said/she said.

It's easy to object to the positions Landsburg takes, but perhaps the truly offensive aspect here is the way Landsburg and the other contrarians reach those positions.

 

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Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Ramifications of a bust-out


A "bust out" is a fraud tactic, commonly used in the organized crime world, wherein a business' assets and lines of credit are exploited and exhausted to the point of insolvency.

from Wikipedia. 






I should probably start by admitting that I have only a general idea of what national and state party organizations do or how big a role they play, but it's clear to even a casual observer that between the mafia-style takeover of the RNC and the total dysfunction we're seeing in places like Michigan, lots of Republican candidates with the exception of Trump will not be able to count on the support from the party they would normally expect, particularly given the recent GOP money problems.


 

Will that make a difference? I don't know, but people who think about elections for a living should probably factor this into their thinking.
 

Antonia Hitchens writing for the New Yorker:

“There have always been strong ties between the presumptive nominee and the R.N.C.,” Oscar Brock, a committee member from Tennessee, told me as we stood by the breakfast buffet. What’s notable here is the extent to which not only Trump’s campaign but now the committee also will focus on what they refer to as “election integrity” ahead of November. In his endorsement of Whatley, Trump praised Whatley’s passion for election integrity. Whatley, a member of George W. Bush’s recount legal team in 2000, promised that he would significantly increase the number of poll watchers to monitor the voting process this year. Under Whatley’s watch, Trump said, 2024 “can’t be stolen.” (At CPAC, in 2021, Whatley had said, of the 2000 election, “We knew, if we were not there, they were going to steal it.”) On Friday, he told the gathered members, “Over the next eight months, the R.N.C. will work hand in glove with President Trump’s campaign.”

...

In the meeting, there were no dissenting votes against Lara or Whatley. In his acceptance speech, Whatley spoke mostly of “protecting the ballot” and the “sanctity of their vote,” outlining plans for securing elections in battleground states: “recruiting and training tens of thousands of volunteers to serve as poll judges, workers, and observers who will act as real-time monitors.” Lara took the stage in a purple skirt and white shirt, and told the group that she was going to speak from the heart instead of from her speech. “The goal on November 5th is to win, and, as my father-in-law says, ‘bigly,’ ” she said. “We have to have election integrity like we’ve never seen it before. . . . We need to make sure that nothing is left to question on November 5th.” She held up a recently donated check for a hundred thousand dollars, and the room applauded.

...

One question hovering over the meeting was whether the R.N.C. would pay Trump’s legal bills. Using the already cash-strapped organization to help with his half billion dollars in legal judgments would create a barrier that’s too porous for some. (The R.N.C. is supposed to spend on down-ballot G.O.P. races, not pay legal bills. “We can walk and chew gum at the same time,” Brock told me.) The committeeman Henry Barbour, from Mississippi, had drafted a resolution to prevent the R.N.C. from covering the legal bills, but he didn’t get enough co-sponsors to bring the resolution to a vote. (Barbour said he knew it wouldn’t pass, but he thought the gesture was still important.) Several committee members told me that their constituents were keen to help with Trump’s legal fees.“It’s a legitimate expense because the only reason he’s being sued or indicted is for political reasons. I think ultimately every single one’s gonna be overturned. It might take him years and millions of dollars to do it, but I think that was all political retribution,” the committee member Roger Villere, Jr., told me as we waited to enter the ballroom. “These litigation expenses are campaign expenses. It is as legitimate an expense as a TV ad or travel or anything else. If we take a different position, we’ve surrendered to the Democrats,” Lyman, from Virginia, told me. Though Lara has said that she’s committed to using “every single penny” of R.N.C. money to make sure that her father-in-law wins, LaCivita has repeatedly insisted he won’t let it happen.



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Tuesday, March 12, 2024

"Elon Musk won the New Republic's Man of the Year?" "Close" -- the return of Tuesday tweets

Polls...
... and politics



Don't forget the multi-talented James O'Keefe.




It's difficult to have it both ways with anti-vaxxers.



No concerns here.

Dems in disarray.



As with the RNC developments, I don't believe people have thought through the implications of what's happening to the GOP on the state level.



North Carolina news



The Magic of Musk




 

AI




And misc.



Other than the name, what exactly are they buying?

 


Go ahead. Watch it. We won't tell.

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Monday, March 11, 2024

Reposted as a protest against losing an hour of weekend.

 Three Proposed Changes to Daylight Savings Time

 The first (from XKCD's Randall Munroe) has some obvious issues.

Monroe also suggests an alternate solution in the title text, averaging out the spring and fall changes and setting clocks 39 minutes ahead year-round.

While Monroe's 39 minute approach is more practical, it still doesn't address the primary advantages and drawbacks of the current system. Most people like getting an extra hour of weekend and dislike losing an hour. Historically, this has been presented as an unavoidable trade-off, but it doesn't have to be if we just broaden our thinking. If we just set our clocks back twice a month, by the end of the year, everything will work out even. 

The good people at Explain XKCD point out an unexpected benefit of the current system: in at least two separate cases, terrorists have blown themselves up due to failure to spring forward or fall back.

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Friday, March 8, 2024

"Better than Ezra"

Like Frank Bruni, Ezra Klein is a good soldier. I doubt that deep down Klein believes that we really need to seriously entertain claims of warehouses full of alien bodies and football field sized spaceships acquired by the government through a conspiracy involving Mussolini, the Five Eyes spy network, and the Vatican, but the New York Times put its reputation behind these loons and good soldiers do not let their papers look bad.

Even when it means taking one for the unit.

Many years ago, an old newspaperman told me how he came to write an editorial supporting (if memory serves) Senator John L. McClellan in the pre-merger Arkansas Democrat. Neither he nor any of the other editors were for McClellan but the paper had endorsed him and it looked bad having the paper not run a single editorial backing the man. This was, the editor admitted to me, a violation of the code of conduct but he decided it was worth it to help the paper avoid more embarrassment.

I don't think that Klein went through the same thought process, but his recent piece suggesting that Biden should step down was definitely a case of the writer backing the narrative at the cost of his own reputation. 

As I said at the time.

[Josh] Marshall is a common ground kind of guy so it is unusual for him to go after a colleague, particularly in one as respected as Klein without conceding that at least one or two secondary points have some merit, but he's not giving any ground here ("No. Ezra Klein is Completely Wrong. Here’s Why.")and quite rightly so.  Barring a few examples from writers with obvious ideological axes to grind, this may be the worst piece of political analysis I have ever seen from the New York Times, a paper which in recent memory has told us that Obama was toast in 2012, Trump couldn't possibly get the nomination in 2016, DeSantis was unstoppable in 2022, and Nikki Haley was building up real momentum in late 2023.

Lots of veteran political observers seconded Marshall's points.

Fast forward to last night, when part of the reaction to a forceful and energetic State of the Union speech were some comments suggesting that Klein's piece hadn't held up that well.


Even Alex Thompson, national political correspondent at @Axios joined in which has really got to sting.


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Thursday, March 7, 2024

How the New York Times defines bias (sorry I took so long to get around to this one)

Former NYT editorial page editor James Bennet's book length op-ed is stunningly bad by every standard we would conventionally use to judging editorial. I sent a link to a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist I greatly respect (I quote him often enough you may be able to guess who). He summed it up as "complete horseshit."

Beyond its obscene length (around twenty-five pages), it is self-serving, structureless, tone deaf, misrepresentative, oblivious to what those on the other side were actually saying, petty, and so painfully smug you want to see someone punch him in the face. In this bloated account, all of the problems of the New York Times and the country as a whole come down to weak and short-sighted people not listening to brave figures like James Bennet.

For those, however, who have been studying the New York times, trying to understand the increasing dysfunction of the country's most influential newspaper, much of this is unintentionally useful. Not useful enough to read the whole goddamn thing, but it does provide some highly telling passages, such as...

But Sulzberger seems to underestimate the struggle he is in, that all journalism and indeed America itself is in. In describing the essential qualities of independent journalism in his essay, he unspooled a list of admirable traits – empathy, humility, curiosity and so forth. These qualities have for generations been helpful in contending with the Times’s familiar problem, which is liberal bias. I have no doubt Sulzberger believes in them. Years ago he demonstrated them himself as a reporter, covering the American Midwest as a real place full of three-dimensional people, and it would be nice if they were enough to deal with the challenge of this era, too. But, on their own, these qualities have no chance against the Times’s new, more dangerous problem, which is in crucial respects the opposite of the old one.

The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether. All the empathy and humility in the world will not mean much against the pressures of intolerance and tribalism without an invaluable quality that Sulzberger did not emphasise: courage.

You'll notice that liberal bias is not "one of the Times's familiar problems." The possibility of other prejudices and blind spots isn't acknowledged, other than becoming illiberal which in this tome basically boils down to taking liberal bias to the next level. Bennett has successfully tuned out decades of complaints about class bigotry, personal grudges, pro-establishment bias, provincialism, cowardice in the face of conservative criticism, and self-righteous ass covering.  The idea that the paper might have overcompensated in 2016 when it buried Trump scandals (compare the initial coverage of Pam Bondi before comparisons to the excellent reporting of the Washington Post became a source of embarrassment) and teamed with Steve Bannon to dig up dirt on Hillary Clinton simply isn't there.

Bennet and Baquet have left the NYT, but the paper still operates very much under the same assumptions and worldview. Nobody learned anything over the past eight years/


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Wednesday, March 6, 2024

Undecideds, "Undecideds," and Shy Voters


Nate Cohn addressed this question last week. Longtime readers we be shocked to learn I didn't find his arguments all that convincing.

One simple explanation is that undecided voters ultimately backed Ms. Haley, the former South Carolina governor.

This is plausible. Mr. Trump is a well-known candidate — even a de facto incumbent. If you’re a Republican who at this point doesn’t know if you support Mr. Trump, you’re probably just not especially inclined toward the former president. It’s easy to see how you might end up supporting his challenger.

Yes, people who are not inclined to support Trump are less likely to support Trump, but in effectively a two person race, this still begs the question of why, if respondents are being honest and these people really are going into the polls not knowing who they'll vote for, they almost all make the same decision. Even if it's off-balance, how often can that coin keep coming up heads?

If I were picking plausible options instead of just criticizing the NYT, one of them might involve an ironic twist on the Bradley effect, where some saner Republicans are embarrassed to admit their doubts about Trump over the phone but are uncomfortable enough to pull the other lever in the privacy of the booth when things actually matter. I'm not sure how well the data fits this hypothesis, but when's the last time political analysts let that stop them?

 To be fair, Cohn's explanation worked reasonably well in Iowa, where a voter could be not Trump and still legitimately undecided between the other candidates, but in the case of a two candidate race, polling should give us a clean read.

Cohn continues [Emphasis added.]

It’s also a theory with some support in the polling patterns. Other than Mr. DeSantis dropping out of the race, which led that voting group to shift toward Mr. Trump, Mr. Trump’s support in the early states was flat over the month or so before these elections. Over the same period, Ms. Haley tended to make gains — gains most easily attributed to undecided voters coalescing behind her.

"[M]ost easily attributed" needs some supporting arguments -- I can think of plenty of other potential causes -- but putting that aside, we have here another case of Cohn ignoring data that doesn't fit the narrative. As far as I can tell there's nothing about this theory that limits it to early states, but when we pull back...

While we can't know who went where, it was Haley who had the immediate bump in the national polls when DeSantis dropped out while it was Trump who climbed steadily. More importantly, Trump's gains over that period were larger than DeSantis's total support was when he dropped out. On a national level, this suggests it is Trump rather than Haley who is pulling in undecideds.

This doesn't mean that the theory was wrong, but the "some" in "some support in the polling patterns" is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Which takes us to theory 2. I'm going to tread carefully here. On one hand, this part looks questionable, but it is out of my field of expertise so I'm just going quote Cohn then follow up with a couple of data points from CNN and the Washington Post which I believe were available when Cohn wrote his piece.

Another possibility is that the polls simply got the makeup of the electorate wrong. In this theory, pollsters did a good job of measuring the people they intended to measure, but they were measuring the wrong electorate. In particular, they did not include enough of the Democratic-leaning voters who turned out to support Ms. Haley.

It’s impossible to prove, but I think this is probably a major factor. It’s always relatively hard to predict the makeup of the electorate in a presidential primary, but the large number of Democratic-leaning voters motivated to defeat Mr. Trump is a particularly great challenge this cycle. For the first time since 2012, there’s no competitive Democratic presidential primary to draw Democratic-leaning independents away, and the Republican runner-up is a relative moderate who may be palatable to many Democratic-leaning voters.

We don’t yet have turnout data on how many Democratic-leaning voters actually participated in these primaries, but there’s good reason to believe this is part of what’s going on.

...

How much of a problem for pollsters is this? It could be a big one. The pre-election turnout estimates we used for our election night live model — you may know it simply as the Needle — supposed that 8 percent of the Republican primary electorate would be composed of former Democratic primary voters who hadn’t previously voted in a Republican primary, those who wouldn’t be eligible for the Monmouth/Washington Post poll. That group seems likely to have backed Ms. Haley.

That might seem like a lot of Democrats, but the final results suggest it might have actually been too low. In fact, these same pre-election turnout estimates unequivocally underestimated the turnout in Democratic-leaning areas relative to Republican-leaning areas, suggesting that the turnout from Democratic-leaning voters was even more vigorous than projected.




 Finally we get to the self-selection bias theory.

In this theory, the polls did well in modeling the electorate while undecided voters split between the candidates, but anti-Trump voters simply weren’t as likely to take surveys as pro-Trump voters. If this theory were true, then the general election polls might be underestimating Mr. Biden by just as much as they’ve underestimated Ms. Haley. [A bit of a misrepresentation of this position. Having someone who won't vote for Trump in the general is not the same as having someone who will vote for Biden. -- MP]

...

The absence of evidence for nonresponse bias doesn’t disprove it. Far from it. But in this case, the turnout and undecided voter theories are credible enough that there isn’t reason to assume any nonresponse bias either.
I don't have a dog in this fight. At this point, I'm not going to even hazard a guess as to what theory explains the disconnect (including the bizarro Bradley effect). That said, it's worth keeping in mind that Cohn's argument for dismissing the non-response theory depend on us finding his arguments for the previous two theories so convincing as to leave no room for another explanation. As far as I can tell, we have three theories without compelling evidence or even strong arguments to back them up.

 

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