Voter Discrimination in Guam?

The blog of the Competitive Enterprise Institute reports that people on American soil are being barred from voting on the basis of race, and that, "the Obama Justice Department is refusing to enforce federal voting-rights laws in a race-neutral manner." According to a former Justice Department lawyer writing for National Revies:

Guam . . . bars anyone who is white, Asian, or Filipino from voting in this plebiscite, and even makes it a crime for them to try to register.

Guam is unapologetically and unabashedly violating federal law. Section Two of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibits the "denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color." Section Two was derived from (and is authorized by) the 15th Amendment, the post–Civil War amendment that established that the right of American citizens to vote could not be "denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Both the Voting Rights Act and the 15th Amendment apply to all U.S. citizens, including residents of Guam. Further, the 1950 Organic Act of Guam . . . states that no "discrimination shall be made in Guam against any person on account of race." . . .

There is a class-action lawsuit underway against Guam.

When I first encountered this news, it made by blood boil for a moment, but then a simple Google search showed me that things may not be so simple. According to the voter registration manual published by the Guam Election Commission:

"Native Inhabitants" shall mean those persons who became U.S. citizens by virtue of the authority and enactment of the 1950 Organic Act of Guam and descendants of those persons... "Descendant" shall mean a person who has proceeded by birth, such as a child or grandchild, to the remotest degree, from any Native Inhabitant of Guam, as defined in Subsection (e), and who is considered placed in a line of succession from such ancestor where such succession is by virtue of blood relations.

...

These included Spaniard, English, American, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Mexican and citizens of other countries. They had one year from the American take-over to step forward and reaffirm to retain their respective country citizenship or choose to make Guam their home. [format edits, italics added]

Further reading at the Statehood for Guam site indicates that there are indeed non-Chamorro individuals among the eligible voters. That said, I am nonplussed by the dubious eligibility requirements. On the one hand, just as any state would limit voting in a plebiscite to its own residents, the territory of Guam is arguably doing the same. On the other hand, these requirements in no way look like the residency requirements of the states some in Guam aspire to join.

The last line of the above quote makes it sound to me like anyone there who was already an American citizen, but wanted to make Guam his home would have had to renounce his citizenship, then gain it back to become a citizen of both -- something that strikes me as inconvenient and not likely done. If that's correct, then Guam's eligibility requirements less resemble normal state residency voting requirements and more closely resemble some of the thinly-disguised voting requirements, such as "literacy", that were used to exclude black voters from the rolls of southern states under Jim Crow.

-- CAV

Prestige-Driven "Science"?

Bad Science blogger Ben Goldacre notes the startling commonality of a certain type of statistical error in the academic literature of the field of neuroscience:

We all like to laugh at quacks when they misuse basic statistics. But what if academics, en masse, deploy errors that are equally foolish? This week Sander Nieuwenhuis and colleagues publish a mighty torpedo in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

They've identified one direct, stark statistical error that is so widespread it appears in about half of all the published papers surveyed from the academic neuroscience research literature. [bold added, link dropped, minor format edits]

Goldacre goes on to describe the nature of the error in layman's terms, and then speculates as to the answer to the obvious question, "Why?"

These errors are appearing throughout the most prestigious journals for the field of neuroscience. How can we explain that? Analysing data correctly, to identify a "difference in differences", is a little tricksy, so thinking very generously, we might suggest that researchers worry it's too longwinded for a paper, or too difficult for readers. Alternatively, perhaps less generously, we might decide it's too tricky for the researchers themselves.

But the darkest thought of all is this: analysing a "difference in differences" properly is much less likely to give you a statistically significant result, and so it's much less likely to produce the kind of positive finding you need to look good on your CV, get claps at conferences, and feel good in your belly. Seriously: I hope this is all just incompetence. [format edits, bold added]

Either possibility is disturbing to contemplate, but I see no reason to doubt that such slipshod methodology doesn't infect other fields, especially given work, such as that by John Ioannidis, that shows how dubious so many major medical findings, many receiving large amounts of press, have turned out to be.

-- CAV

--- In Other News ---

Here's a news story for anyone who is hoping that popular discontent with the mullahs will lead to the overthrow of Iran's theocratic regime: "Iranian Protestors Storm UK Compound in Tehran."

Statistician John Cook makes an interesting observation about the ad hominem fallacy: "A statement isn't necessarily false because it comes from an unreliable source, though it is more likely to be false." [format edits]

Heh: "How To Write Unmaintainable Code"

11-26-11 Hodgepodge

State Planning vs. Education

The Chinese Ministry of Education has announced that it is going to phase out majors that produce unemployable graduates:

[T]he government's decision to curb majors is facing resistance. Many university professors in China are unhappy with the Ministry of Education's move, as it will likely shrink the talent pool needed for various subjects, such as biology, that are critical to the country's aim of becoming a leader in science and technology but do not currently have a strong market demand, a report in the state-run China Daily report said. [minor format edits]

This is at once highly ironic and utterly predictable. If state planners were omniscient, as so many collectivists like to assume, why have they run into a problem matching the numbers of graduates in their educational system with the demands of the other parts of economy they also run? The answer lies in the fact that state planners actually know much less about what is needed by the millions of individual actors they presume to call "the economy". Their solution will not be to question their assumptions, however. Their response, as it has always been, is to assume even more control over the lives of the millions.

Weekend Reading

"From Amtrak to interstate highways, the U.S. government's balance sheet is bloated with assets lacking the funding to support them." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Time to Sell Government Assets?" at SmartMoney

"President Obama seems frustrated these days -- lashing out emotionally, intensifying his rhetoric against money-makers, doubling down on his demagoguery, and claiming that heartless GOP rivals want dirty air, unsafe water, poisoned food, and no health care." -- Richard Salsman, in "Obama's Hopeless 'Malaise' Moment" at Forbes

My Two Cents

Although I have seen calls to sell off government-owned assets before, Hoenig's is the first I have seen that brings up the fact that, not only would the sales bring in money, they would end losses.

Mmmm. Smoked Turkey!

Kudos to my brother and his wife for hosting an outstanding late Thanksgiving dinner, yesterday. And, yes, I do find myself jealous of that smoker he got as an anniversary gift! This dark meat guy never knew turkey breast could be that flavorful and succulent.

One day, when we have a yard again...

-- CAV

Stossel on FIRE

John Stossel writes an interesting column about the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), an organization dedicated to protecting freedom of speech in academia. Most notably, Stossel relays perhaps the best one-line refutation of the leftist "anti-harassment" and "anti-bullying" excuse for attacking freedom of speech. Stossel quotes FIRE founder Harvey Silverglate:

Silverglate was once hired by faculty members at the University of Wisconsin who objected to a speech code intended to protect minorities, women and gays from offensive expression.

"I didn't actually win that battle. You know who won it? A gay student got up and said, 'If you're looking to have a speech code to protect me, don't do it, because I actually like knowing who hates me. It's useful. It tells me when I should watch my back.'" [bold added]

Not only does speech not pick our pockets or break our legs, forcibly restricting it can, in many ways, make us less able to protect ourselves from actual harm.

-- CAV

--- In Other News ---

I noted a highly negative review of the Kindle Fire here recently, but have since seen several mixed-positive reviews, such as one by Farhad Manjoo, and a few highlighted by Glenn Reynolds.

Townhall's Kate Hicks notes a tactical similarity between a recent proposal to force airlines to allow all passengers one "free" bag at check-in and the Durbin Amendment, which caps debit card interchange fees.

... Sen. Dick Durbin, President Obama, and a host of others on the left villified banks -- notably Bank of America -- for issuing a monthly debit card fee. Of course, they failed to mention that the fee was a direct result of new government regulations that made debit transactions more expensive for banks -- in favor of the retail lobby. [link removed]

I beg to differ with Hicks that the Democrats have a "minimal understanding of the economy." Some of them know exactly what they are doing.

And speaking of holiday travel, the Van Horn family will be in the air and on the road quite a bit over the next ten days. I won't blog tomorrow, and posting may be irregular until we get home. Happy Thanksgiving!

Lessons from Steve Jobs

Via HBL is a list of things author and venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki learned by working with and closely observing Steve Jobs. Here is a list of the points, to each of which Kawasaki devotes about a paragraph:

• The biggest challenges beget best work. 
• Design counts. 
• You can't go wrong with big graphics and big fonts. 
• Changing your mind is a sign of intelligence. 
• "Value" is different from "price." 
• A players hire A+ players. 
• Real CEOs demo. 
• Real CEOs ship. 
• Marketing boils down to providing unique value. 
• Bonus: Some things need to be believed to be seen. 

All of these, even the last, whose title sounded hokie to me, teach something valuable. What strikes me the most about the list is how Jobs's independence undergirds so much of it. This is most obvious in Kawasaki's maxim that "Real CEOs demo":

Steve Jobs could demo a pod, pad, phone, and Mac two to three times a year with millions of people watching, why is it that many CEOs call upon their vice-president of engineering to do a product demo? Maybe it's to show that there's a team effort in play. Maybe. It's more likely that the CEO doesn't understand what his/her company is making well enough to explain it. How pathetic is that?

Also pathetic is the fear of superior talent that the second-hander, the opposite of the independent man, shows in his hiring decisions. (It is an interesting exercise to speculate as to why this is the case.) It is worthwhile to learn, from Kawasaki's discussion of the hiring practices of what he calls "A players," that such foolishness inexorably comes with its own just desserts:

Actually, Steve believed that A players hire A players -- that is people who are as good as they are. I refined this slightly -- my theory is that A players hire people even better than themselves. It's clear, though, that B players hire C players so they can feel superior to them, and C players hire D players. If you start hiring B players, expect what Steve called "the bozo explosion" to happen in your organization.

The take-home message, on top of "Value and respect talent," is, "Beware of the second-handed". If you find yourself in an organization with a second-hander who holds a position of power, for example, you could well catch shrapnel from his "bozo explosion".

For the value-oriented, this list is worth reading in full -- and thinking about very carefully.

-- CAV

Remembering Randy Pausch

I don't think the government has any business telling us whom to honor or when, but the Mayor of Pittsburgh did at least get the matter of whom to honor (if not exactly why) right when he declared yesterday, November 20, to be "Randy Pausch Memorial Day". Fortunately, Pausch's brilliant "Last Lecture" will straighten out anyone who takes the time to listen to it, as the announcement of Randy Pausch Memorial Day on the Carnegie-Mellon web site indicates:

Outside the classroom, he gained public fame for delivering what would come to be known as "The Last Lecture." On Sept. 18, 2007, only a month after doctors told him that he had three-to-six months to live following a recurrence of pancreatic cancer, he presented a lecture called "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" to an overflow crowd in McConomy Auditorium.

The moving and often humorous talk recounted his efforts to achieve such childhood dreams as becoming a professional football player, experiencing zero gravity and developing Disney World attractions.

If I recall correctly, one of the points Pausch made in the above lecture is that we're all dying, and we should try to enjoy whatever time we have as much as we can while we have it -- but he may have said this during his valuable (and also, often humorous) lecture on time management, or, perhaps he made the point several times.

It is hard to believe that this man has been dead for over three years. Fighting pancreatic cancer is certainly a worthy cause, but Pausch's message is even bigger than that. He deserves to be remembered by all of us, and those of us who remember him will be all the richer for it.

-- CAV

11-19-11 Hodgepodge

Not Exactly a Coincidence

The U.S. budget deficit recently topped $15 trillion for the first time in history. In the meantime, an article in Forbes that offers a blistering attack on Obama's economic policies notes that, "The poverty rate climbed to 15.1%, higher than in the late 1960s when the War on Poverty was getting underway, $16 trillion ago." When I first made this mental connection, I thought something like, "It's incredible that our debt isn't even worse than this." But then I remembered the various unfunded liabilities of the entitlement state, which total $62 trillion by one recent estimate.

Regarding the Forbes article... Peter Ferrera attacks apologists for "Obamanomics" for relying on a book titled, This Time Is Different, to argue that what we face differs in kind from a typical recession -- because such reasoning ignores the fact that America has, in his words, a "free market, capitalist economy." This is wrong. If our economy truly were capitalist, and not mixed (and becoming more like the economies of the countries in This Time Is Different every day), we wouldn't even have economy-wide booms and busts, nor would we have an entitlement state.

Ferrera is right that Obama's policies are wrong, but he undercuts himself when he fails to acknowledge that our economic policies weren't exactly good before Despair and More-of-the-Same -- I mean Hope and Change -- arrived.

Weekend Reading

"[M]any people are not independent thinkers, and when confronted with a dilemma they either ignore it or hope it will resolve itself." -- Michael Hurd, in "With Friends Like These..." at DrHurd.com

"The more you think about trades or talk about them, the more likely you are to feel committed to hold onto them and be proven right." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Three Simple rules for Buying Stock" at  SmartMoney

"The actual history of America shows something else entirely: picking your neighbors' pockets is not a necessity of survival." -- Yaron Brook and Don Watkins, in "America Before The Entitlement State" at Forbes

My Two Cents

Familiarize yourself with the Brook and Watkins piece -- and be ready to point receptive people to it -- the next time some unimaginative oaf implies that we'd all drop like flies were it not for the welfare state.

Getting Closer...

Ever since I read the following over at Armed and Dangerous, I've been wondering how long it would take to happen.

All my software development projects and personal papers live on the same device I make my phone calls from. It looks a lot like the G1 now sitting on the desk inches from my left hand; a handful of buttons, a small flatscreen, and a cable/charger port. My desk has three other things on it: a keyboard about the size of the one I have now, a display larger than the one I have now, and an optical drive. Wires from all three run to a small cradle base in which my phone sits; this also doubles as a USB hub, and has an Ethernet cable running to my house network. And that's my computer.

Now, we're one step closer: "USB Stick Contains Dual-Core Computer, Turns Any Screen Into an Android Station."

-- CAV

Friday Four

1. I'm going to get an e-book reader soon, but a good review I bumped into at the beginning of my survey of the options caused me to hold off on my decision until some of the newer models were released. I was particularly curious about the Kindle Fire. Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, however, has all but extinguished that curiosity by panning Amazon's tablet. He goes into great (but highly relevant) detail, throws in perspicacious observations about tablets as such along the way, and nails the coffin shut for me by calling it "a bad Kindle". I want something like a Kindle: Getting some tablet functionality would only have been a nice extra for me, as I strongly prefer netbooks to tablets.

As a bonus, Arment refers to the current state of the economy as an "economic depression". I like a man who calls a spade a spade.

2. Nathan Zegura makes the case for Green Bay wide receiver Jordy Nelson as the most efficient fantasy football player of the season.

Nelson is only the 70th most targeted receiver on a per-game basis at 5.1 targets per contest, but that has not stopped him from racking up 633 yards and seven touchdowns through nine games.

Needless to say, he's on my roster. I know you don't care, but my opponents do each week, and that's enough to put a smile on my face.

3. Google now has a verbatim search function or, as I think of it, you now have an easy way to turn its auto-"correct" off.

[W]e've received a lot of requests for a more deliberate way to tell Google to search using your exact terms. We've been listening, and starting today you'll be able to do just that through verbatim search. With the verbatim tool on, we'll use the literal words you entered without making normal improvements...

I hope Google is as responsive to criticisms of their new, tablet-centric email interface. 

4. This recipe for crockpot chicken with artichokes -- with double the onions, olives, and artichokes -- has lately been a tasty way to save time from cooking for other things.

-- CAV

Updates

4-16-12: Added hypertext anchors.

Furedi on "Transparency"

Back in early October, Frank Furedi wrote an eye-opening column urging us to stop "kowtowing to the cult of transparency". His remarks focus on transparency laws, but he notes that these are a manifestation of a preoccupation with what he calls "total openness" that is common in our modernist culture. He notes that these laws have had some very bad, unintended (by Tony Blair, at least) consequences:

These days, any official or politician exposed for attempting to exchange his private thoughts with colleagues "in confidence" will be denounced. This is what happened in Britain recently when it was revealed that the office of Michael Gove, the Lib-Con coalition's education secretary, went to great lengths to communicate through private email exchanges. This is now fairly common practice in many departments of the state, where officials go to great lengths to conceal their discussions from being exposed under Freedom of Information laws. Some policymakers in Britain's Department of Education clearly decided that they would like to keep their private deliberations just that: private.
...

One acquaintance of mine, who runs a large public-sector organisation, boasts that he writes the minutes of the discussion before the meeting and takes great care to ensure that nothing which might later be "misinterpreted" gets recorded. Like all sensible people, he understands that virtually any innocent remark or proposal can be interpreted as a statement of malevolent intent when taken out of context. A half-baked idea raised by a junior official in passing can appear as evidence of the "real agenda" when circulated by bloggers or in a newspaper column. [minor format edits, bold added]

If the quotes around "misinterpreted" aren't scare quotes, they should be. Since communication would be impossible without concepts, any attempt to completely record every detail of even a single meeting will necessarily leave out non-essential details on top of any honest mistakes on the part of the recorder. In addition, some details, like what the participants are actually thinking, are impossible to obtain, anyway. To top all of this off, for such a record to be of a readable length, it must be delimited to its essentials, which requires some accounting for who the intended audience of the report is, and how this audience may use it. ("Anybody, for any purpose whatsoever", is an impossible editorial standard.) These facts alone make such records wide open to misinterpretation, deliberate or not, by third parties and fair game for sensationalism. The latter can easily gain traction since most people simply do not have the time to fact-check every news story that comes down the pike against the records for such meetings.

Where the minutes of a meeting might once have served a legitimate purpose -- as a memory aid for those for whom the meeting was a concern -- they now serve as an ammunition depot for anyone with an ax to grind to seemingly base an allegation of wrongdoing or bad intent on reality. Predictably, transparency laws have had a stifling effect on debate in the corridors of power:

The ethos of transparency encourages a climate of organisational caution and conformity. It discourages the clash of opinions and diminishes the potential for the open clarification of problems. That is because people are unlikely to take risks and disclose their real concerns when they know they are effectively doing so in front of the whole world. In such an environment, people have little incentive to acknowledge mistakes, and typically we see the emergence of regimes of responsibility-aversion. It is difficult for individuals to throw out ideas or express unconventional views when they court being ridiculed or stigmatised by their public critics, who have no stake in the outcome of their deliberations.

The chief accomplishment of the cult of transparency is to eliminate informal exchanges of views and to abolish the exchange of confidences. And without the exchange of confidences, it is not possible for people to have real confidence in their colleagues and in the organisations that employ them. The present confusion between accountability for decisions and accountability for institutional behaviour is symptomatic of a political culture of voyeurism, which thrives on leaks and gossip. A democratic society should understand that it is important to uphold the right to the private exchange of views and that not everything officials do ought to be visible to all. [bold added]

I completely agree. Openness and transparency have their appropriate times and places. Those who treat these as intrinsically good, regardless of context, thereby confess, at best (and among other things), a fundamental failure to grasp the nature and purpose of communication.

Ayn Rand once rightly pointed out that privacy is a hallmark of civilization. Those who truly appreciate this, but won't stand up for privacy, risk opening themselves up to all kinds of mistaken suspicion and plain old bullying about anything they happen to do that might be misinterpreted -- or "misinterpreted".

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Changed "dump" to "depot". 

The OWS Red Herring

Over at Slate is a piece on Occupy Wall Street, penned by Raymond Vasvari, an attorney who has represented some of the Occupy Cleveland squatters in federal court. The piece is remarkable for two things. First, it notes the ineffective rationale and cowardly manner of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's eviction of the squatters from Zuccotti Park, which is private property. Second, it has the gall to frame this confrontation as a freedom of speech issue, rather than a property rights issue. To wit:

When Power [i.e., the government --ed] evicted the demonstrators today, it told them to take their tents, structures and bedrolls with them, but promised they could return, sans mattresses, once Zuccotti Park had been cleaned. The need to clean the park may or may not have been a pretext for evicting the demonstrators -- who several weeks ago took the job of cleaning the park in hand themselves. But the core dispute in the case -- as it has been in other cities -- is whether the demonstrators can use the park as an encampment. The city argued that such a use is inconsistent with the use of the park by the general public for "passive recreation." And this afternoon, a state court judge agreed.

Note the absence of the one word, "trespassing," that could cut through this whole issue like a hot knife through butter. Few people miss the term because most take for granted the idea that the government should own, or at least be in charge of running, "public spaces", such as streets and parks. As with schools, this inevitably leads to conflicts between the government's proper role as guardian of freedom of speech and its improper role of allocating fora for such speech. The government shouldn't own (or dictate the use of) such "public spaces." In a truly free society, where the government was properly limited in scope to the protection of individual rights, the whole matter of whether squatters could use Zuccotti Park as a communal mattress/latrine would be up to the owner of the park and, if they created a nuisance, anyone affected.

Mayor Bloomberg, who sympathizes with the squatters, and has an extensive record as a "nanny-state" collectivist, plainly has a feeble grasp of the concept of property rights. Otherwise, he would have evicted the squatters much sooner; on principled, rather than merely pragmatic grounds; and permanently. Most people, due to the confusion I noted above, will see this as a reasonable compromise. But people like some of the squatters and Vasvari understand that the real issue isn't freedom of speech, but property rights. They will seek to take advantage of  everyone else's confusion about property rights, and use that confusion (and everyone's respect for the right of freedom of speech)  to continue to gut property rights.

Occupy Wall Street exists in a First Amendment space all its own. The protestors do not, in an important sense, occupy the spaces in which they exist to the exclusion of other uses, like a rally or a parade. They depend for their rhetorical force not on a temporary massing of thousands, but on the persistent presence, day in and day out, of a committed core of demonstrators, whose ongoing presence extends the teachable moment of their message into a perpetual, if not permanent, opportunity for dialogue. The Occupy movement, in that sense, is a sort of national sit-in, whose continuing presence forces us to confront those questions we would otherwise more easily avoid. The essential moral challenge is the same as that posed by the lunch-counter demonstrators of the civil rights era: We are here, we politely dissent, and we defy you to move us along for your own convenience.

In sum the intended use of a piece of private property is, not a right, but a convenience; but the desire, on the part of a mob, to persist somewhere permanently somehow is a right.

Really? By what right?

The obscene moral equivalence Vasvari draws between these squatters and the lunch counter demonstrators of the civil rights era is similarly vacuous (and, thanks to public confusion) dangerous. The moral force of many of the acts of civil disobedience during the civil rights era came from making everyone see that racial bigotry and Jim Crow laws were harming actual human beings. These squatters are, in fact, doing the opposite with regard to the victims of trespassing.

The owners of Zuccotti park are unknown to practically everyone and arguably suffer little from the crime. (Although anyone who wants to enjoy the park is victimized in a small way.) But that last fact is non-essential. The proper way to think about a crime conducted in plain view of everyone is to consider what it would mean for other, similar crimes to be condoned. So consider the idea that someone who wants an "ongoing presence" in your neighborhood or home to extend a "teachable moment" indefinitely is entitled to do so -- with your home or yard affording him the opportunity he wants. Now, you tell me whether these rabble occupy the same moral high ground as the lunch-counter demonstrators of the civil rights era.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, as revealed by its non-government target, is not opposed to the forcible redistribution of wealth, despite its complaints about who ends up on the receiving end. Its method of protest shows it to favor the confiscation of wealth from private citizens. Everyone, these squatters included, has the right to voice his opinions, but no one has the right to simply take over whatever platform he happens to think will make him be heard.

OWS has nothing to do with freedom of speech. It is all about destroying government protection for the inalienable right to property.

-- CAV

Updates

11-17-11: Corrected spelling of Zuccotti Park to have two c's consistently. 

Markets Trump Prohibition

Many advocates of capitalism, myself included, often point to the prohibition of alcohol in the United States nearly a century ago as an example of a futile government program that spawns other problems, such as higher crime. (Effective advocacy doesn't end with touting freedom as practical: Capitalism, as the political system that best protects the pursuit of individual happiness, deserves to be praised from the rooftops on moral grounds, as well.)

Looking at history is fair and good, but doing so passively, in the face of the common notion that drug use leads to crime, and the huge, nationwide drop in violent crime despite such use, can be worse than futile since the crime data seem, prima facie, to contradict what happened in the 1920's.

With our federal government as committed as ever to prohibition, including its lynchpin strategy of making drugs more expensive, what explains the drop in crime? An article in Atlantic Cities is very helpful in answering the fair question of whether lower crime rates nationwide -- a trend that began abruptly in the early 1990s -- can be credited in some way to the war on personal freedom better known as the War on Drugs:

[D]espite drug busts and stricter regulations, cocaine prices kept declining. In fact, prices have been declining since before the War on Drugs even began. An Atlantic story from 2007 noted that the price per gram for cocaine had gone from an average of around $600 in the early 1980s to less than $200 in the mid 1990s, and was down to as little as $20 per gram with ever-increasing purity. In some instances, illegal drug prices spiked in the wake of a large drug bust or the dismantling of a cartel, but the larger trend has been markedly downward. That's due in large part to the ingenuity of drug importers, who only got more sophisticated in their ability to bypass border security and avoid arrest following a significant bust, ultimately bringing in more product with time. That growing supply resulted in more competition between dealers who started supplying a higher purity product, at a lower cost, to win over consumers.

But it's not only a growing supply of product that led to the collapse of the cocaine market. Newfound competition in the form of locally-produced methamphetamines and prescription narcotics would continue to drive business away from cocaine and the inner city to the suburbs and exurbs.[bold added]

Crime fell precisely because the Feds have been laughably unable to make drugs too expensive for users. The crime drop, far from being an example of a partial success of this program, occurred in spite of it.

This fascinating article shows how simple market forces have conspired to all but eliminate the incentive to deal drugs, as a primary (or even significant) source of income. Dealing drugs has thus become far less attractive to individuals, and made turf wars between drug gangs far less common.

The rapid evolution of this black market has outpaced the ability of our misguided government to keep up, resulting in a de facto repeal of prohibition. Examined more closely, what might look, without deeper analysis, as a fatal counterexample to the argument that prohibition is futile is, in fact, even stronger evidence that the War on Drugs is wasteful and futile at best, and actively inimical to public safety when it "works" at all.

That last is on top of the following: The War on Drugs is wrong because it is wrong for the government to prohibit behavior that, in and of itself, harms no one but the individual who performs it, if it harms anyone at all.

-- CAV

Paternalists vs. Nudging

Over at Slate is an article that objects to the "libertarian paternalism" of Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein on paternalistic grounds. Like so many economic critiques of more traditional government economic interventions that avoid (or assume common answers to) moral questions, the critique raises some good points, like this one:

This points to the key problem with "nudge"-style paternalism: presuming that technocrats understand what ordinary people want [or need -- ed] better than the people themselves. There is no reason to think technocrats know better, especially since Thaler and Sunstein offer no means for ordinary people to comment on, let alone correct, the technocrats' prescriptions. This leaves the technocrats with no systematic way of detecting their own errors, correcting them, or learning from them. And technocracy is bound to blunder, especially when it is not democratically accountable. [bold added]

But whatever value these points might have is compromised by the unquestioned assumptions that motivate both the libertarian paternalists and the authors:

All this suggests democratic arrangements, which foster diversity, are better at solving problems than technocratic ones. Libertarian paternalism is seductive because democratic politics is a cumbersome and messy business. Even so, democracy is far better than even the best-intentioned technocracy at discovering people's real interests and how to advance them. It is also, obviously, better at defending those interests when bureaucrats do not mean well. [bold added]

Democracy? Regarding personal decisions? How about reason? And why aren't we questioning the premise that the government should be dictating things like how I plan for retirement, or whether I donate (or sell, or keep) my (own) organs? More to the point, since when have all my decisions become a communal affair?

Since many commonly-accepted communal "public policy" goals happen to align with self-interest (or conceivably could, under some circumstances), it can be worthwhile to learn that, even as a method of achieving these goals, libertarian paternalism fails. Nevertheless, so does such an analysis, on the more fundamental, unexamined level, as we see in this very piece:

However natural, though, this won't work because libertarian paternalists are often wrong on the underlying social science. For example, Thaler and Sunstein's claims about the benefits of opt-out schemes are belied by little evidence it increases donations. According to Kieran Healy, a sociologist at Duke University differences in donation rates are better explained by differences in organizational effectiveness than differences in opt-in/opt-out. It is not clear that opt-out would increase donations; unsexy but crucial reforms to regional schemes would almost certainly work better. [bold added]

So the government won't force me to dispose of my organs in a certain way? By these lights, it still will, but the exact means will be different. That's exactly the result when questions like, "Works? For whom and for what purpose?" Go unasked.

As someone who opposes all forms of government paternalism, I welcome the knowledge that there is plenty of room to question the effectiveness of libertarian paternalistic schemes, but I will not fall into the trap of opposing them merely on such grounds. I want nothing that will permit the government to order me around more effectively to "work."

-- CAV

11-12-11 Hodgepodge

The Impotence of Consistent Evil

The man who is running Venezuela into the ground is doing the same to himself:

"Chávez wants his people to believe that he was 'healed' months ago and that the recent visits to Cuba have confirmed his miraculous recovery," he said.

"However, his physical deterioration is speeding more rapidly than his doctors had predicted and, despite this serious situation, Chávez has insisted on receiving low doses of chemotherapy to avoid long absences from the political scene during this fragile period."

He added that Chávez's political advisors are worried that he will die soon and leave his successor with the incredible task of explaining why the leaders of the country instigated such a big lie.

According to Noriega, the doctors believe that the decision of receiving a lower dose of chemotherapy to try to continue his public functions is suicidal, but they have no alternative but to follow the plan.

This is one of the clearest examples how answering a basic metaphysical question incorrectly can have real life-and-death consequences. Chávez is a primacy-of-consciousness guy living -- but not for much longer -- in a primacy-of-existence universe.

Base your decisions on bunk and you will ultimately get what you deserve -- as the Venezuelan electorate, and now its dictator, are demonstrating.

Weekend Reading

"Like the drug or alcohol addict, or the compulsive shopper or gambler, the person who projects actually 'needs' to criticize in order to lower anxiety about his own real or alleged flaws." -- Michael Hurd, in "Finding Fault in All the Wrong Places" at DrHurd.com

"Ignoring or squelching politically inexpedient prices doesn't make them go away." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Speculators Make Markets, Too" at SmartMoney

"The bigots among the 99% of people who seek to control or destroy the top 1% of U.S. income-earners and wealth-owners are targeting a minority and treating its members as inferior citizens devoid of full rights, not based on skin color, gender, or religion, but because the minority displays superlative productive power." -- Richard Salsman, in "The Limits of Tax Reform Amid Envy" at Forbes

"Redistributing wealth suddenly became a lot less appealing when one was the victim of the 'redistribution,' rather than the recipient." -- Paul Hsieh, in "In Praise of Capitalist Inequality" at PJ Media

My Two Cents

Michael Hurd's piece is an interesting and valuable look at a common psychological phenomenon, and one I have long taken as a serious red flag when I observe it coming from people I have to deal with for some reason or another. Understanding its cause can be highly useful in knowing what to do about such people.

"In Defense of the Google Chef"

As a late-blooming chef, I have come to value the ability to find really good starting points for recipes I want to try by using the Internet, so the title of this article drew me in on that basis.

What I read about was very different, but quite worthwhile:

Working at a startup is hard. The hours are long, the stress can be brutal, and there is no guarantee of success. In fact, the odds for a raw startup (which is what Google was when Charlie joined) are very much against you. I have no idea what Google's deal with Charlie was, but typically you take a pay cut for a shot at the brass ring. Charlie didn't make $20M for cooking, he made $20M for taking the risk that the company he was joining would fail and that he could end up five years older, unemployed, and with nothing to show for his trouble.

All I would add is this: In a business, the terms under which everyone works are nobody's business but their own, assuming it isn't some criminal enterprise. The writer makes a very good point, but nobody outside such arrangements is owed an explanation, nor should anyone not actually concerned have a say.

-- CAV

Friday Four

1. I frequently wear a flat cap. The often sunny and often windy weather in Boston makes them very practical, and I like them, anyway. My wife spotted a baby-sized flat cap in the store recently, and bought it for our daughter. Needless to say, the baby and I get lots of friendly smiles and laughs when I have both of us wearing them, and especially when I'm carrying her in the Baby Bjorn.

2. This new country selector bar for web forms is a clever solution to a minor, but very common annoyance for American customers.

3. It's not the amount of time, but its quality that makes someone into a virtuoso, as a study of violin players has shown:

We can start by disproving the assumption that the elite players dedicate more hours to music. The time diaries revealed that both groups spent, on average, the same number of hours on music per week (around 50).

The difference was in how they spent this time. The elite players were spending almost three times more hours than the average players on deliberate practice -- the uncomfortable, methodical work of stretching your ability. [emphasis in original removed]

The elite players were also more relaxed, apparently because they clearly separated practice time from other parts of their life, allowing them to focus on those other things.

4. Okay, my mind is apparently fascinated by usability today... Farhad Manjoo makes a stand for the humble scroll bar, and some good points along the way, in discussing something that too many people take for granted.

-- CAV

The "Milkshake Test"

From the man who brought us the term "disruptive technology" comes another colorful term, the "milkshake test", which he uses as an aid to understanding how some new innovations succeed, while others fail. The term comes from a partially made-up example of a restaurant chain figuring out how to improve milkshake sales after first looking at why milk shakes were selling so well, often as whole orders) during the morning commute. Slate then goes on to consider several market hits and flops -- like "Second Life," its point of departure -- by considering what the milkshake example teaches us.

[W]hen you evaluate the next big thing, ask the [Clay] Christensen question: What job is it designed to do? Most successful innovations perform a clear duty. When we craved on-the-go access to our music collections, we hired the iPod. When we needed quick and effective searches, we hired Google. And looking ahead, it’s easy to see the job that Square will perform: giving people an easy, inexpensive way to collect money in the offline world. [link dropped]

The flops show us that having an unclear mission -- or performing a clear mission poorly -- can doom a product. Nevertheless, "Christensen’s test calls correctly about a half-dozen of the big technology hype cycles of the last 20 years," making it fail as a predictive tool. One suspects that some innovation, entailing the satisfaction of a need customers don't know they have or don't think can be filled, will continue to fly under the radar of prognosticators every time.

-- CAV

Question. Question. Question.

Over at Litemind is a thought-provoking post by Luciano Passuello about how to use questions to improve thinking for any of various broad goals.

1. Creative Problem Solving
2. Shifting Your Perspective on a Problem
3. Directing Thinking and Debate
4. Education and Leadership
5. Creating Conversation and Empathy
6. Critical Thinking
7. Shifting Your Focus
8. Inspiration, Goal Setting and Action
9. Self-Reflection
10. Questioning as a Way of Life

And here is what Passuello has to say about using questions to improve critical thinking:

Skillful use of inquiry is the cornerstone of critical thinking. Again, it's only through questioning that we can truly think by ourselves -- instead of blindly accepting whatever we're told as the right thing to do or the only acceptable answer.

When I say "skillful use of inquiry", this does not mean necessarily getting fancy: oftentimes, it means being playful and "thinking like a child". Great critical thinkers don't get embarrassed to ask seemingly naïve questions: these are usually the most effective -- as well as the ones snob intellectuals are more prone to overlook.

As an effective initial set of questions to use, it's hard to beat the famous 5Ws (what, where, who, when and why). "Where did you see it?", "What are the causes of it?", "Why is the emperor naked?" [minor format edits, bold added]

I'm both fairly new to the Litemind blog, which focuses on "ways to use our minds efficiently," and have rather limited time to keep up with blogs (including my own!) these days. As a result, I don't know if I simply missed the fact that there is a free eBook offer there or it's new since I learned about (and last visited) the site last month. That said, if you look around there and like what you see, there's an easy way to cull the best that site has to offer.

-- CAV

--- In Other News ---

Speaking of questions, A Smart Bear asks, "How do I get my first few customers?"

I'm very glad to see that the "personhood" amendment got trounced in Mississippi, in the same election that saw it elect a Republican governor by an even wider margin and seat a majority Republican House for the first time since Reconstruction. There's a lesson in that somewhere for fiscal conservatives and libertarians who insist on pandering to the theocrats who are, in the words of a writer at Salon, "poisoning" the "GOP brand".

Android web app recommendation: Epistle. Oddly enough, I didn't first hear about this through Lifehacker, but there is a nice write-up of "Android's Dropbox Note Sync" there.

Everyday, Run-of-the-Mill Doom

Brandan O'Neill of Spiked considers the litany of modern panics against what he calls the "moral panics" of yesteryear and reaches the following conclusion:

A society that has no clear moral line on marriage or sex or hedonism is forced to fall back on a grisly, bovine form of moral pressure. Incapable of telling young people what is right and what is wrong, our society prefers to spread panic about[, for example,] physical decay and physical ailments. It appeals to us to modify our behaviour, not in the name of morality and decency, but in the name of protecting our own livers and genitalia from disease.

I think O'Neill is on to something, here, although he's looking at the wrong level of philosophy when he calls these "post-moral" panics. On the one hand, O'Neill is absolutely right that morality isn't being explicitly used to foment panic. Indeed, if we look at any such panic -- obesity, drinking, climate, or violence -- it is even easy to see examples of pragmatically pandering to completely different explicit moral codes, so the name is descriptive up to a point. (e.g., Eat better selfishly, for the sake of your health -- or eat better, selflessly, because that's what everyone else is doing; or to reduce your impact on others via redistributed health costs or a smaller "carbon footprint".) But the real question is this: Why doesn't a moral stand seem to pack a punch any more?

The short answer is that, in addition to the loosened grip of religion on the West, religionists and moral relativists alike all agree (wrongly) that there is no objective (i.e., real-world, evidence-and-logic-based, or rational) basis for morality. On the other hand, science is commonly regarded as objective, which it can be, although most laymen fail to appreciate how hard it can be to reach solid scientific conclusions, particularly about certain complex topics. (Conveniently for the panic-mongers, these topics are often the very ones they like to scare people about.) What these panic-mongers were missing in their crusades until they decided to co-opt the credibility of science isn't morality, so much as certainty.

Westerners used to be (or feel) more certain (rightly or wrongly) overall about their various moral convictions (right or wrong), but now, certainty is rare (although possible to obtain, and including about morality). When someone pushes the panic button, people will want to know why they should be afraid and why they should act. People generally don't fear going to hell for masturbating anymore, but if "science" tells them that something is killing them (or endangering something they care about), they are much more likely to listen.

The reason panics can still occur is in part because -- even if the "science" is over-simplified, distorted, wrong, not-even-wrong, or even undecided -- most people will take "science" at its word, and will not necessarily dispute its alleged conclusions or its alleged call for a specific course of action. (See the various global warming political remedies many people support.) Westerners today, in general, both crave certainty and have no idea how to achieve it. Along with the panic comes the comfort of being (or pretending to be) right about something.

O'Neill could have more aptly named his modern phenomenon post-certainty panics. Interestingly enough, they share the same fundamental epistemological cause as their religious predecessors: non-objectivity. Only when this problem is addressed at the level of advocacy is it possible to argue convincingly for a moral stand, and only when it is addressed culturally will the phenomenon of panic fads land in the dustbin of history, where it belongs.

-- CAV

--- In Other News ---

For some interesting and amusing reading, take a look at the venture funding application for Dropbox, my favorite cloud application by far. I like how founder Drew Houston summed up (and solved) his problem: "This idea requires executing well in several somewhat orthogonal directions, and missteps in any torpedo the entire product."

Fellow fans of the Loeb Classical Library and Robert Mayhew will be delighted to learn that his two-volume translation of Aristotle's Problems is now available. (HT: HBL)

In The Atlantic is a long article about someone whose GMail account got hacked, and at Lifehacker is an article it reminded me of about how to automatically create your own local backup of such an account. The Lifehacker article recommends fetchmail, but I use getmail for added security.

Massive Evasion

Brad Harper emails me one of the most incredible examples of evasion I have seen in some time, both in terms of what is being said and in terms of how many people apparently take it seriously. An academic has apparently become popular with a young and foolish segment of the population by dressing up in egg-headed jargon the idea that piracy of electronic media isn't really stealing. His whole argument boils down to, "Theft removes the original. Piracy makes a copy. [So piracy isn't really theft.]" This brilliant Ph.D. passes off this mush as erudition in part as follows:

Larsson addresses the issue in his thesis Metaphors and Norms -- Understanding Copyright Law in a Digital Society, for which he just received his doctorate. Talking to TorrentFreak, he explains why copyright infringement isn't theft, and how this problematic metaphor keeps the gap between public norms and the law intact.

"The theft-metaphor is problematic in the sense that a key element of stealing is that the one stolen from loses the object, which is not the case in file sharing since it is copied. There is no loss when something is copied, or the loss is radically different from losing something like your bike," Larsson explains. [format edits]

It is Larsson who is worse than using a wrong metaphor here, in equating the transcript of mental effort with the mental effort itself. To see what's wrong with this, let's perform a thought experiment, here.

Suppose you are an all-but-degree Ph.D. student with (you and your committee imagine) a great insight on the nature of piracy. You are finishing up your research and have it all nicely organized on electronic media somewhere. You know generally what you want to say already, but you estimate that it will take about a year to write up your results. You've always found writing to be difficult and you do have other commitments.

In the meantime, someone else, wanting a degree in your field and knowing about your situation, copies your notes and data without your knowledge. He pays an unscrupulous expert to analyze your results, and a hack to write them up fast enough that he is able to present the work as his thesis. This he successfully defends, before going on to churn out a series of journal articles based on the same work. Might this pose a problem with your committee, since doctoral defenses have to be based on original research? Might this also present some difficulty in the matter of publishing your work in journals later on? No biggie, according to Larsson, since you still have your copy.

Indeed, by Larsson's lights, this other guy got the word out about your (He might use scare quotes here.) findings faster than you would have, so good for him! Suppose further that the hired gun made connections you hadn't thought of, so that your improved theory becomes all the rage, and turns your field on its head. All the better, according to Larsson, since this might not have happened in your hands.

But, in fact, there has been a theft here: Your effort and thinking, which were recorded on those media, have been stolen in such a situation. In the process, your career would have been made much harder, if not impossible. The fact that someone else might have done more with the same data makes your research no less your own, and in no way alters the fact that making and using a copy of it is theft -- of that effort and thinking. So, while you still have a copy of the transcript of that effort and thinking, it is, in terms of what you had hoped to achieve through that effort and thinking, as if you hadn't done it (or, at least, all of it) at all.

I suspect that Larsson would have been very angry if something like this had (deservedly) happened to him on the way to presenting this thesis. Nevertheless, he is plainly counting, for his prestige, on the eagerness, among so many in our culture, to get something for nothing, and the inability of many to see how "little" thefts, such as of music recordings, represent the same injustice and the same crime of which he would have been victim. But others have already addressed such issues far better than I.

-- CAV

11-5-11 Hodgepodge

Daylight Savings Scam

As one who usually finds (mere) grousing about daylight savings time almost as annoying as daylight savings time itself, I do find it worthwhile to note that, as with government-mandated retirement plans and government-mandated nutritional guidelines, we are being forced, once again, to act stupidly:

But it was evening-time activists like entomologist George Vernon Hudson and golfer William Willett​ who can be  blamed for Daylight Saving Time. Noting that a little extra well-lit time on a balmy evening would be nicer than in the morning when everybody's asleep anyway, the two independently proposed shifting clocks forward for the spring and summer. [Great. Thanks for making that decision for me. -- ed] Governments soon seized upon the idea as a way to cut down on energy use -- more sunlight in the evening means less coal-burned [sic] to provide artificial alternatives.

Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to hold up too well. And changing back and forth to Daylight Saving Time twice a year seems to be bad for human health -- from increased risk of heart attack to more mine accidents. Nevertheless, in 2007, the U.S. Congress saw fit to extend Daylight Saving Time's reign from earlier in spring to deeper into fall in 2007.

Perhaps an early sign that the tide against the Leviathan state is finally turning will be the repeal of this idiotic semi-annual government intrusion into every aspect of our lives.

Weekend Reading

"Was she a prophet? No, she answered. She had simply identified the basic cause of why the country was veering from crisis to new crisis." -- Onkar Ghate, in "How Did Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged Predict an America Spinning Out of Control?" at Fox News

"You can't overcome arrogance by substituting it with equally distorted modesty." -- Michael Hurd, in "Are You Modest, or Arrogant?" at DrHurd.com

"His prescience was uncanny. Twelve years later, [stock trader Jesse] Livermore was bankrupt, save the trusts. " -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Play a Volatile Market With Less at Risk" at SmartMoney

"There are obvious differences between Madoff's and FDR's Ponzi schemes, but reviewing how Madoff's is being handled does provide ... valuable insights." -- Amit Ghate, in "Entitlement Programs: A Plan to End Them" at PJ Media

My Two Cents

I was happy to be reminded, at the end of Onkar Ghate's piece, that Penguin has released an iPad app for Atlas Shrugged. (It's almost impossible to get enough people to read that book fast enough.) That said, and with Android phones being more numerous than iPhones (and Android tablets rapidly gaining market share), I hope there are plans for a similar Android app. Amazon's hot, new Kindle Fire, which the New York Times recently described as "80 percent of an iPad, for 40 percent of the price," will be Android-based, too.

Heh!

I cut Brandon Jacobs from my fantasy football roster last week for bye-week room, after learning that, in addition to his low production, he wasn't getting along with his coaching staff. Now, with Ahmad Bradshaw injured, we get to see whether this "opportunity to get out there and show myself again" will make me look foolish. I think he's caught between balky knees and a bad attitude, the latter of which The Onion sums up pretty well in "Brandon Jacobs Furious At Giants Coaching Staff For Not Giving Him More Yards Per Carry."

-- CAV

Friday Four

1. In response to my mention of not wanting to wake my daughter in last week's Friday Four, a reader told me he was reminded of the following song, in which Ben Folds sings about his daughter.

I finally got around to listening to it just this morning. Thanks!

2. The beat from a live performance of the song below lent a festive air to a wait on a subway platform last week:

3. There's a good post about immigration over at Individual Rights and Government Wrongs.

Certainly, those who immigrate illegally are breaking the law. But, it was a crime to make or drink alcohol during Prohibition; it was a crime to harbor fugitive slaves prior to the Civil War. Millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens drank alcohol during Prohibition. And any decent person would have gladly broken the law to help fugitive slaves. We recognize these laws as immoral, and we judge those who broke them accordingly.

And be sure to look around there some more, when you've finished reading the whole thing.

4. What a difference facing outward in my Baby Bjorn, rather than inward, made for my daughter, yesterday! She barely tolerated the thing (at best) before, but just loved being able to see everything. A trip to the grocer was my trial run. Noticing that she enjoyed the sightseeing so much, and since it was a gorgeous day, I took her out for a walk in the park later on. The only downside: Since I am not used to thinking about sunscreen, it slipped my mind to treat her face before I left, so she has rosy cheeks, now. We were out only about twenty-five minutes.

-- CAV

Advice vs. (Survivor) Bias

Over at A Smart Bear is an interesting post by Jason Cohen about a phenomenon I hadn't seen labeled before, although I once blogged about the example (Scroll down to Item 4.) he opens with. Cohen calls the phenomenon "survivor bias", but Wikipedia calls it "survivorship bias". In a nutshell, Cohen says that if you're learning only from the successful, you may be missing out, although your error is certainly understandable:

Do you read business blogs where the author has failed three times without success?

No, because you want to learn from success, not hear about "lessons learned" from a guy who hasn't yet learned those lessons himself.

However, the fact that you are learning only from success is a deeper problem than you imagine.

Some stories will expose the enormity of this fallacy. [bold in original]

Cohen then gives us a clear example:

During World War II the English sent daily bombing raids into Germany. Many planes never returned; those that did were often riddled with bullet holes from anti-air machine guns and German fighters.

Wanting to improve the odds of getting a crew home alive, English engineers studied the locations of the bullet holes. Where the planes were hit most, they reasoned, is where they should attach heavy armor plating. Sure enough, a pattern emerged: Bullets clustered on the wings, tail, and rear gunner's station. Few bullets were found in the main cockpit or fuel tanks.

The logical conclusion is that they should add armor plating to the spots that get hit most often by bullets. But that’s wrong.

Planes with bullets in the cockpit or fuel tanks didn't make it home; the bullet holes in returning planes were "found" in places that were by definition relatively benign. The real data is in the planes that were shot down, not the ones that survived. [bold added]

That's a neat story, but one thing I like about Cohen's post is that he looks around -- and finds -- plenty of other examples of this type of failure to see the full context of a problem one is considering, from science, pseudo-science, and business advice.

Another thing I appreciate is what Cohen does with this observation, which differs starkly from an approach I have seen recently, once at Slate and once (in a less slick form) at Cracked. Focusing on the first, a review of Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, consider what Kahneman prescribes as a cure for the various errors in thinking he discusses in his book:

... Again and again he reminds us that having the means to describe your own bias won't do much to help you overcome it. If we want to enforce rational behavior in society, he argues, then we all need to cooperate. Since it's easier to recognize someone else's errors than our own, we should all be harassing our friends about their poor judgments and making fun of their mistakes. Kahneman thinks we'd be better off in a society of inveterate nags who spout off at the water-cooler like overzealous subscribers to Psychology Today. Each chapter of the book closes with a series of quotes -- many suggested by the author's daughter -- that are supposed to help kick off these enriching conversations: You might snipe to a colleague, for example, that "All she is going by is the halo effect"; or maybe you'd interrupt a meeting to cry out, "Nice example of the affect heuristic," or "Let's not follow the law of small numbers."

How does Kahneman know that knowing about a cognitive bias won't do an individual much good? And why would "we" want to enforce anything in society other than recognition of our own rights? Are we wholly incapable of introspection, and is our own well-being not reason enough to develop better self-awareness? Granted, many -- perhaps most -- people are quite content to muddle along in  second-hand fashion, but the practice of indiscriminately hectoring the obdurate strikes me as a waste of my time. In the hands of the well-intended, his advice creates annoyance, and in other hands, it excuses mindlessness by attacking all certainty as mere bias. (See the second article. Our minds working in a certain way is not the same thing as our minds being "programmed".)

Cohen offers advice in what I am increasingly beginning to think of as the only acceptable way: when it is sought out (including as, in this example, by a reader whose interest Cohen has succeeded in winning, and whose mind he engaged). Why do I think this? First, I disagree with several premises Kahneman seems to hold implicitly: (1) that we are incapable of self-correction; (2) we have some kind of obligation to indiscriminately correct others; and (3) that we are merely parts of some kind of social collective, and thus at the mercy of any error by anyone else. But there's still a deeper issue here: Someone who isn't seeking advice isn't ready, for whatever reason, to hear it.

Setting aside intellectual sloth (which hectoring usually makes resolute anyway), the reason someone might be unready for good advice is simple: He hasn't the requisite intellectual context to appreciate the need for that advice. For example: He doesn't have the problem you purport to solve, at all. He doesn't realize he has the problem you purport to solve. He doesn't know enough about the problem you hope to solve to even evaluate whether he has the problem or whether your advice is any good. Aside from the obligation to actually have good advice to offer, if you care enough about it to broadcast it, you have to take into account the cognitive context of your potential audience. This means, for a couple of extreme examples I have personally encountered, not patronizing your audience or presenting your advice so poorly that it sounds ridiculous.

Although mistakes like the above are not, per se, proof that unsolicited, poorly-presented advice is bad, they raise my hackles. Why, to someone who claims to want to persuade me, is my mind being treated like an obstacle to be overcome, rather than a potential ally? Isn't advice supposed to enhance my grasp of reality, rather than replace it?

-- CAV

Updates

11-5-11: Taking a look again at the John Cook post on the bomber data, I see that, in fact, he referred to this kind of error as  selection bias.

What OWS "Victory" Looks Like

Not long ago, I noticed a headline at Slate that asked, "Did Occupiers Just Beat Bank of America?" From the link, it would appear that Senator Bernie Sanders (Socialist-VT) thinks so:

Is this the first popular victory for Occupy Wall Street? The first politician who hinted as much was (get ready for a shock) Sen. Bernie Sanders, who went to the floor of the Senate to congratulate the "American people" for beating the bank.

Since socialists are so fond of claiming to be champions of "the people", let's take a closer look, courtesy of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, at the spoils of this victory. The CEI elaborates further on each of the below:

• Free checking is becoming harder to get.
• Debit card rewards programs are going by the wayside.
• Banks are closing or laying off employees across the country.
• Higher prices are being charged for some low-priced goods.

When the government makes doing business more expensive, such as by the Durbin Amendment, a business must either pass along this added expense, or eliminate other expenses. Since debit card usage fees are so unpopular, the above is what we're getting, instead. Too bad the government calling all the shots, for everything, all the time, isn't loathed half as much.

So, if you find yourself getting nickeled-and-dimed to death, or someone you care about suddenly looking for work, don't forget to thank Congress, your local squatter camp, and anyone who expresses a shred of sympathy for this mindless cause.

-- CAV

Ignorant and Arrogant

In California, there seems to be steam building up behind a leftist infatuation with regulating the payday loan industry. The fact that this is a matter of serious debate at all testifies to the power of ideas in political philosophy that are prevalent in a culture. Could you imagine one whiff of this if most people, for example, regarded the only proper role of a government as enforcement, with regard to non-fraudulent contracts between consenting, competent adults?

Be that as it may, I found Thomas Sowell's column about efforts to regulate this part of the financial sector very illuminating, regarding the context-free thought processes of its proponents.

Now to the 460 percent rate of interest. You don't need higher math to figure out that $45 is 15 percent of $300. How did we get to 460 percent? Very simple: By distorting the actual conditions of most payday loans.

As the name might suggest, payday loans are short-term loans to tide people over until they get their next check, whether a salary check, a welfare check or whatever. Payday loans are relatively small sums of money borrowed for very short periods of time, often by low-income people who want some cash right now, for whatever reason.

Is it worth paying the $45 to get the $300 right now, rather than wait a couple of weeks for your check to arrive?

No third party can know that. But taking decisions out of the hands of those most directly affected is one of the central patterns of the political left that make them dangerous to the very people they think they are helping. This is not idealism. It is arrogance -- and too often, it is ignorant arrogance, as in this case.

The 460 percent figure comes from imagining that the borrower is not just going to borrow the money for a couple of weeks, but is going to keep on borrowing every couple of weeks all year long. [bold added]

Not to wrongly concede that a lousy deal equals fraud (and would thus properly call for government action), but in order to make these lenders look predatory, proponents create a shady context out of thin air by imagining it (instead of looking at reality, the proper context) and taking advantage of the common notion that high interest rates are sinful. (Sowell seems, unfortunately, to share this view as he entertains the idea that the rates are justifiable.) At the same time, when imagination would suggest (and reality would confirm) that there could be a real value for the services of a payday lender, and thus, satisfied customers, proponents blank out and conveniently assume they know what's best for everyone else.

Consider the implications of this kind of "thinking" in the broader context of our mixed economy, where laws banning this service or making it much harder to obtain can be passed. Two Ayn Rand quotes will be very helpful here. First, as John Galt of Atlas Shrugged puts it, "No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge." Second, as Rand once stated in writing about ethics, "One must never make any decisions, form any convictions or seek any values out of context, i.e., apart from or against the total, integrated sum of one’s knowledge." With the government able to force us to act as people who know nothing in any real sense would have us act, we are thus rendered incapable, with increasing frequency these days, of acting as we judge best for our own benefit.

-- CAV