Gus Van Horn

1-28-12 Hodgepodge

2012-01-28T03:00:00.000-06:00

Facebook Junior

Google CEO Larry Page has evidently decided that he is not running a search company, but a social network.

Now, a source tells us that CEO Larry Page, who seems to be hell-bent on competing with Mark Zuckerberg whether it's the right thing for Google or not, had this to say to employees at a Friday staff event after the Search Plus Your World launch: "This is the path we're headed down -- a single unified, 'beautiful' product across everything. If you don't get that, then you should probably work somewhere else."

Perhaps there's more money to be made that way, but, as Sarah Lacy indicates, this is money from a completely different kind of customer -- unless Google makes it easy to not use its (soon-to-be former?) products as mere features of a "new Facebook".

[T]hat's very different from the Google of the mid-2000s. This was a company that agonized over adding even a single additional word to the stark white homepage, lest it detract from the search box and the core mission of the site to provide the most relevant results.

As a customer who, if he wanted Facebook would already have an account there, I certainly "get that": I see that I need to watch these developments closely and perhaps become prepared to go elsewhere for what I actually want from Google.

Weekend Reading

"Verbal assaults by anti-capitalists like Gingrich, Perry and Santorum rely not only on Marxist and Christian prejudices against money-making but also on populism..." -- Richard Salsman, in "Mitt Romney's Uphill Battle Against Anti-Capitalist Conservatives" at Forbes

"To think that genuine criminals reform themselves is largely a fantasy borne of ignorance about how these kinds of people actually think." -- Michael Hurd, in "Some Minds Are Beyond Help" at DrHurd.com

"[R]ent controls have never worked: they create shortages and decrease the quality of housing." -- Michael Berliner, in "Why Rent Control Is Immoral" at The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights

"... I maintain that I'm a trader when I'm wrong and an investor when I'm right, ..." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Distinguishing Trades from Investments" at SmartMoney

My Two Cents

I am hardly a fan of Mitt Romney, but have to agree with Richard Salsman that his status as anti-capitalist lightning rod is very revealing of the rest of the GOP presidential field. Were he only equal to the task of taking advantage of the opportunities the other candidates are giving him (and Barack Obama will give him), this election would, alone, present the public with a much-needed dose of clarity about capitalism and the proper scope of government.

Living off Craigslist

A man from Portland, Oregon has turned buying and selling things through Craigslist into a full time job. The whole thing is interesting, but I like the fact that he even manages to be a sort of traveling saleman.

In addition to being able to support my family, this job has a flexible schedule and I really can do it anywhere there is a Craigslist. I can even work when I’m on vacation in places like Hawaii (where I am right now). I also love the thrill of the hunt!

It's as if he has delegated storing an inventory to the local Craigslist users wherever he happens to be!

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Clarified a sentence in first section.

Friday Four

2012-01-27T03:00:00.000-06:00

1. I saw Mona Simpson's eulogy for Steve Jobs recommended very strongly at HBL recently, but didn't expect it to be as moving as it is. If you haven't already read it, do so now.

2. Natural selection in a flask... A laboratory reports that it has succeeded in solving a very difficult problem -- getting a single-celled species to evolve into a multicellular form -- much more easily than many in the field thought possible.

An evolutionary transition that took several billion years to occur in nature has happened in a laboratory, and it needed just 60 days.

Under artificial pressure to become larger, single-celled yeast became multicellular creatures. That crucial step is responsible for life's progression beyond algae and bacteria, and while the latest work doesn't duplicate prehistoric transitions, it could help reveal the principles guiding them.

"This is actually simple. It doesn't need mystical complexity or a lot of the things that people have hypothesized -- special genes, a huge genome, very unnatural conditions," said evolutionary biologist Michael Travisano of the University of Minnesota, co-author of a study Jan. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [minor format edits]

The whole journal article can be found here. It is amusing to compare the amount of time this took to the duration of the demonstration in the next item.

3. Slower than molasses. The world's longest-running lab demonstration was started in 1927 and is continuing today:

The pitch-drop experiment -- really more of a demonstration -- began in 1927 when Thomas Parnell, a physics professor at the University of Queensland in Australia, set out to show his students that tar pitch, a derivative of coal so brittle that it can be smashed to pieces with a hammer, is in fact a highly viscous fluid. It flows at room temperature, albeit extremely slowly. Parnell melted the pitch, poured it into a glass funnel, let it cool (for three years), hung the funnel over a beaker, and waited.Eight years later, a dollop of the pitch fell from the funnel’s stem. Nine years after that, another long black glob broke into the beaker.

The demonstration languished in storage for years until a faculty member learned of it and persuaded his department to display it again. Today, it can be viewed on webcam, but the last time a drop fell, there was a camera malfunction, so nobody has, to this day, gotten to watch a drop fall.

4. What are the benefits to rising early in the morning? Some of these I don't or can't take full advantage of, but I have definitely noticed a few since shifting to waking up at 3:00 a.m. for my personal projects. The writer's advice on how to become an early riser is sound, although, in my case, I simply made the shift all at once/quit sleeping until 5:00 or 6:00 "cold turkey".

-- CAV

Egypt's GOP

2012-01-26T03:54:00.000-06:00

Over at Salon is an article that likens the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to the Republican Party in the United States.

[T]he Brotherhood is a free-market party led by wealthy businessmen whose economic agenda embraces privatization and foreign investment while spurning labor unions and the redistribution of wealth. Like the Republicans in the U.S., the financial interests of the party's leadership of businessmen and professionals diverge sharply from those of its poor, socially conservative followers.

While I disagree with Avi Asher-Schapiro that the economic interests of wealthy individuals and poor individuals differ, I think this writer has a point. Since privatization, as the term is too-commonly used today, does not necessarily even really mean "privatization", and many people who are said to be "free market" are not really pro-capitalists, but advocates of a less government-controlled mixed economy, I think that the article is right to note that each political party is a coalition between such "free market" types and theocrats. (I wouldn't tout either party as "pro-capitalist".) The article clearly depicts this as a bad thing for the wrong reason: Asher-Schapiro seems to regard any vestige of capitalism in post-Mubarak Egypt as a bad thing.

What is actually bad about this is that Islam (like Christianity) is, in fact, ethically incompatible with capitalism. These businessmen are already soothing foreign investors: If their economic policies really do represent a loosening of the economy, the theocrats in their coalition will be in a position to falsely gain credit when, as often happens, the loosening of state economic controls brings about an economic boom. The "free market" part of this coalition is, like that of the GOP, serving as "useful idiots" for the theocratic part of the coalition, and will, ultimately, either have to leave the coalition or lose after the theocrats entrench themselves and some choice has to be made between businessmen remaining wealthy (or free to enjoy their wealth) and the dictates of Islam.

In the meantime, watch for other unwarranted or premature sighs of relief from the West.

-- CAV

Graham on "Resourcefulness"

2012-01-25T03:08:00.000-06:00

Venture capitalist Paul Graham considers why it is that, in hindsight, the most successful and least successful start-up groups stand out in two seemingly unrelated metrics:

[T]he startups that did best were the ones with the sort of founders about whom we'd say "they can take care of themselves." The startups that do best are fire-and-forget in the sense that all you have to do is give them a lead, and they'll close it, whatever type of lead it is.

However,

[T]he least successful startups ... all seemed hard to talk to. It felt as if there was some kind of wall between us. I could never quite tell if they understood what I was saying.

Graham resolves his conundrum by making the following connection:

It turns out there is, and the key to the mystery is the old adage "a word to the wise is sufficient." Because this phrase is not only overused, but overused in an indirect way (by prepending the subject to some advice), most people who've heard it don't know what it means. What it means is that if someone is wise, all you have to do is say one word to them, and they'll understand immediately. You don't have to explain in detail; they'll chase down all the implications. [italics added]

Equally interesting are Graham's and one of his partner's thoughts on why some people are not wise (or, as Graham calls it "conversationally resourceful"). Graham sees the absence of wisdom as denial, while his partner sees a more passive, semi-automated process at work.

I think either or both can be at work in any given situation, with active denial being a moral flaw and the semi-automated process falling into the realm of the psycho-epistemological. Some of the unwise may well be unaware of that aspect of their thought process, but they can be made aware of it, and they can change their habitual mode of function through effort and self-monitoring. That said, someone who, "desperately tries to munge [possibly good advice from a clearly good source] into something that conforms with [his] decision" will have his work cut out for him.

-- CAV

Trivializing Honor

2012-01-24T05:50:00.001-06:00

With the recent death of Joe Paterno comes a great deal of speculation in the sports media about whether his legacy as a collegiate football coach is tarnished by a great failure on his part: He did not adequately follow up on an eyewitness report by an assistant of his of a child rape at a facility under his control, and allegedly committed by someone he worked with closely for years and who was still permitted regular use of those facilities. Regardless of whether Paterno was guilty of poor judgement, cowardice, or, morally, of knowingly harboring a child molester, something has become clear to me this morning: Despite his reputation for honor and his success as a collegiate coach, Joe Paterno either did not really understand (or care that much about) either. He couldn't have.

I base this on his motto: "Success without honor is an unseasoned dish."

Really? Honor is a mere seasoning, and not part of what makes success possible at all? And success is possible without virtue? While it is true that most people utter things they do not fully understand, we're talking about someone who held himself out as a mentor, as someone who accepted the charge of instilling virtue in the next generation. Apparently, he said this all the time. Most people in his audience surely lapped it up: To someone who hasn't thought much about virtue or success, this might sound good. Most people do confuse the trappings of success with the real thing. Most people do regard virtue as morally good, but unconnected to success. Most people will be guiltily relieved on some level to hear that honor is a nice, optional extra, and that they can go on pursuing their goals without worrying too much, so long as what they're doing is "working".

Most people who fall for this also won't bother themselves to ask questions like the following:

If you get by in your job by taking credit for other people's work, how will that "success" translate if you lose that job tomorrow or the people you are taking advantage of leave?
If you achieve some personal health goal by adopting a regimen you hear great things about, but don't really understand, how do you know you aren't in the process of causing yourself a health problem?
If you haven't done an honest day's work in your life, and somehow get away with robbing a bank, what will you do when the money runs out?

In every one of the above cases, someone has achieved what most people would regard as success, but without honor. Some form of deception, if even only of oneself, has been involved at minimum, and the "success" isn't real, in the sense of having been earned by understanding and applying knowledge of reality. Conversely, the person who does his own work, who makes sure he knows what he's doing, and who develops the skills he needs to survive -- as opposed to hoping to win one of life's lotteries, or sponging off or stealing from others -- can, and eventually will really succeed.

After considering Joe Paterno's motto, it hardly surprises me that, on some level, he regarded it as unnecessary to pursue the new information he obtained all those years ago about (in his context at that time) either Jerry Sandusky or Mike McQueary much more aggressively than he did.

-- CAV

Identity and Causation in Politics

2012-01-23T03:38:00.002-06:00

Approximately a year ago, I said the following of the so-called Arab Spring":

[S]ince Islamic totalitarians are so strong in the Middle East, I have a hard time imagining anything good coming of the unrest over there.

Two interesting historical parallels come to mind on the subject, though. (1) Tunisia's last ruler was installed after a popular uprising decades ago, showing how useful it is for people to revolt absent a coherent (and substantially correct) theory about the proper purpose of government. (2) Swap Islamic totalitarians with communists and consider how many such uprisings simply resulted in communist dictatorships during the Cold War. [minor format edits]

The people of Egypt have, sadly, proved me right. This isn't really a surprise, given that people act based on the ideas they hold true, and what most Egyptians regard as true. The people there voted as they were. Sadly for the dissenters, they, too, will get what the majority deserve to get as a result.

Final results on Saturday showed that Islamist parties won nearly three-quarters of the seats in parliament in Egypt's first elections since the ouster of authoritarian president Hosni Mubarak, according to election officials and political groups.

The Islamist domination of Egypt's parliament has worried liberals and even some conservatives about the religious tone of the new legislature, which will be tasked with forming a committee to write a new constitution. It remains unclear whether the constitution will be written while the generals who took power after Mubarak's fall are still in charge, or rather after presidential elections this summer.

In the vote for the lower house of parliament, a coalition led by the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood won 47 percent, or 235 seats in the 498-seat parliament. The ultraconservative Al-Nour Party was second with 25 percent, or 125 seats.

The Salafi Al-Nour, which was initially the biggest surprise of the vote, wants to impose strict Islamic law in Egypt, while the more moderate Brotherhood, the country's best-known and organized party, has said publicly that it does not seek to force its views about an appropriate Islamic lifestyle on Egyptians.

I wonder how long it will be before some Islamist politician says something to the effect that Islamic law isn't being crammed down anybody's throats since such a huge majority wants it. Such will be the fruit of the United States promoting "democracy" in the Middle East, rather than pursuing its national self-interest, and, along the way, standing up for government that protects individual rights, including against misguided popular will.

So now, our press is calling the Muslim Brotherhood, whose motto is, "Islam is the solution", "moderate"? All I will say about that at the moment is this: Even more wishful thinking isn't the answer.

-- CAV

1-21-12 Hodgepodge

2012-01-21T03:00:00.000-06:00

New (as in Coke) Google

FarhadManjoo hitsthe nail on the head whenhe discusses Google's tampering with search results in the name ofturning everything into a social network.

For more than a decade, Google search wasn't"social" in any way. When I searched for a new car or a European hotelor the best way to plunge a toilet, Google would give me results thatreflected the collected view of all Web users. That worked really well!

Not once during those years did I get to aGoogle results page and lament that I couldn’t see my friends' ideasabout the car I should buy or the hotel I ought to book. While myfriends are thoughtful and knowledgeable people, their views on thetens of thousands of large and small inquiries that I bring to Googleevery year are almost always irrelevant...

And,much later:

Google just broke its search engine. It didso under the guise of an improvement, an effort to mesh traditionalsearch results with stuff from your social network. Within hours ofannouncing the change, Google took fire from tech pundits andcompetitors. Most of the criticism focused on implementation: Insteadof drawing content from many different social networks, Google’s newresults will lean heavily on its own network, Google+. [link removed]

Yearsago, before Google became popular, I randomly discovered it when Inoticed how bad most search engines were. (One kept changing what "AND"meant between narrowing its results to having BOTH terms and expandingits results to include EITHER term.) What caused me to adopt it as mysearch engine -- and tell other people about it -- were its simplicityand the fact that I knew what I would be getting out of it would bebased on (a) my actual query and (b) relevance to most people, and notjust a possibly biased group of people.

Maybeit's time to start looking around for a search engine again.

Weekend Reading

"CharlesDow's original stock index wasn't the Dow Jones Industrial Average, butthe Transportation Index, first calculated in 1884 as a leadingharbinger of the economy." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Playingthe Rally in Transport Stocks", at SmartMoney

"...I frequently suggest that couples start with separate sessions, ratherthan meeting me as a couple." -- Michael Hurd, in "DoesCouples Therapy Work?", at DrHurd.com

"If we wish to continue enjoying the benefits of capitalisticinnovation, we should regard 'making a profit' as praiseworthy as'creating value,' and give those who earn honest profits the respectand gratitude they deserve." -- PaulHsieh, in "WhyIs Creating Value Good, Profits Bad?" at RealClear Markets

"[T]he fact that bad people can misuse a technology does not justifyrestricting the freedoms of honest users." -- Paul Hsieh, in "SOPA,Guns, and Freedom" at PJ Media

My Two Cents

MichaelHurd's column has several choice quotes about how the question forwhich he names his column often arises for the wrong reasons. I alsofound his discussion of what he calls "triangulation" interesting.

Calltriangulation, "the bane of the second-hander",since the very problem someone who does this needs to solve is gettingin the way of him solving it.

And the winner is ...

KompoZer. A couple of weeks ago, I blegged for ideas on HTML editors.I was leaning towards the first suggestion I got, which was a Chromeplug-in, but saw lots of complaints about its latest version on its website, so I dug a little more and found something that works well for me.

Noteto Google: Using Chrome as the browser sped things up very nicely, andthe new Blogger editor would be okay -- except that it drives me crazythat when I'm done with a paragraph and want to skip down a line, Ihave to hit a down arrow after hitting ENTER. Also annoying: When Itype something in bold, like the title of this sectionof the post and then skip down a line to start writing, why does youreditor (a) assume I want the paragraph in bold even after I toggle boldoff, and (b) make me switch to the HTML view to fix it.

WithKompoZer, I have restored order to the computer-aided editingexperience: I tell my computer to do something, and the computer doesit.

--CAV

Friday Four Five Six

2012-01-20T03:00:00.000-06:00

This week's Friday Four has a theme: Things that make my daughter laugh. She turns seven months old tomorrow.

Parents and "baby people", understanding the joy of hearing a baby laugh, will understand my urge to post. Others won't, and will move on, scratching their heads. To them, I say, quoting my daughter: "Pfffffffffft!" (The raspberry is one of her favorite sounds these days.)

1. Yawns

My baby is a tough audience. Originality is king for her, and"laughability" seems to "wear out" fairly quickly for many things --but not for yawning. For the past month or so, she has yucked it up anytime she has caught me yawning, including when I'm feeding her.Although I'm usually pretty good about keeping minor standing orderssuch as, "Stop feeding the baby when you feel a yawn coming on," thisone always sneaks up on me: I yawn, sometimes hear a little laugh, andlook down to see a broad little smile with a little "waterfall" of formula pouring out of it.

2. A Little Crinkly Bouncing Ball

Before the baby came along, I used to say, jokingly, of my wife, "Who needs kids? Imarried one." That said, she picks out good toys for the baby.Yesterday, during play time, I started bouncing a little ball Mrs. VanHorn had bought for the baby, and letting it bounce against the baby'schest or land in her lap. That got some good baby laughs, and I wasable to get them again later in the evening.

3. Bandages

I took a nasty fall back in October, and had to have stitches on myforehead. I had to wear a bandage over those for a few days. As withanother occasion I had to wear a bandage on my face, she'd laugh uponseeing me for the first time each day. If anything made that fall andthe emergency room visit worth it, that was it.

4. Touching her nose and saying, "Boop!"

I'm cheating a little here, because I haven't done this in a while, andit may have stopped working, but I include it because it worked on mybaby brother, too. I was young enough when he was born that I don'thave that many distinct memories of interacting with him when he was aninfant. But I remembered doing that one day, and was amused to see itwork on my daughter, too.

Between writing the above and posting, I remembered a couple more...

5. Being Imitated

This one has been pure gold lately, getting a smile at minimum: Right after she makes a baby noise, imitate it well. This has also backfired on me at meal time: If we're feeding her solid foods and she remembers Daddy reinforcing her raspberries by imitating them, we get a nice spray of whatever the Puree of the Day happens to be. No more, "Can you say pfffffffffft", for me.

6. Holding Her up to a Mirror

This is not the sixth one I was thinking about when I reopened this post for editing, but that one has slipped my mind. (This is why I'm posting these! Being a parent of a baby is so full of precious moments, one is bound to forget some of them. There's another, too, but I'm pressed for time, so I'm leaving it out, too.) In any event, the baby has started getting a kick out of seeing me hold her as we pass or stand in front of a mirror in the hall. This, too, will wear off, I am sure: Most of her laughter seems to be in response to novelty of one kind or another, and reflects her developing mind discovering the world.

-- CAV

Make-a-Wish Politics

2012-01-19T03:00:00.000-06:00

Via HBL comes a story that, even in this day and age, is a little hard for me to believe. The New York Times reports that energy producers are being fined by our government for not selling a biofuel that doesn't even exist.

When the companies that supply motor fuel close the bookson 2011, they will pay about $6.8 million in penalties to the Treasurybecause they failed to mix a special type of biofuel into theirgasoline and diesel as required by law.

In 2012, the oilcompanies expect to pay even higher penalties for failing to blend inthe fuel, which is made from wood chips or the inedible parts of plantslike corncobs. Refiners were required to blend 6.6 million gallons intogasoline and diesel in 2011 and face a quota of 8.65 million gallonsthis year.

...

Penalizing the fuel suppliers demonstrateswhat happens when the federal government really, really wants somethingthat technology is not ready to provide. In fact, while it may seemharsh that the Environmental Protection Agency is penalizing them for failing to do the impossible, the agency is being lenient by the standards of the law, the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act. [bold and hyperlink added]

In a sense, there is a strange logic to these fines: This law is, ofcourse, supposed to remedy global warming, a phenomenon that may or maynot exist, that may or may not be a problem if it does, and wouldn't be the government's problem to solve even then. When you start acting on the arbitrary, why draw a line anywhere, including whether what you want is even possible?

-- CAV

P.S. It is worth noting that President Bush signed the Energy Independence and Security Act into law.

Rent Control to the Supremes?

2012-01-18T03:00:00.000-06:00

Nicole Gelinas reports in The New York Post that New York City's infamous rent control laws may soon go before the Supreme Court.

[Jim] Harmon [who owns a five-story brownstone inManhattan] thinks it's time for a rehearing. He sued New York state andNYC in federal court in 2008. Though two lower courts ruled againsthim, at least one Supreme Court justice -- no one knows who -- isinterested. The court recently asked the city and state to respond toHarmon's petition. If four justices desire, the Supremes could hear thecase.

Harmon's arguments are compelling. Consider: The FifthAmendment says that nobody can be "deprived of ... property without dueprocess of law; nor shall private property be taken for public usewithout just compensation."

Rent regulations deprive Harmon ofhis property. These laws aren't like zoning laws, under which Harmonwouldn't be able to build a munitions factory on his home, a perfectlyreasonable restriction. Instead, Harmon can't use much of his ownproperty for any purpose. He's a trespasser in his own brownstone. Ifhe doesn't want to renew a tenant's lease, it's tough luck. In fact,Harmon has spent $30,000 in fees trying -- so far unsuccessfully -- tovacate one apartment so that his grandchild can live there. Becausetenants in the two other regulated apartments are (like Harmon) olderthan 62, if he wants "their" space, he has to find them similarapartments at the same or lower price in the same neighborhood.

Thefact that Harmon must renew leases over and over is a violation, too,of the Constitution's contracts clause. Rent regulation compels Harmonto sign his name to a piece of paper every year, whether he wants to ornot.

What about due process, another constitutional protection?The Constitution holds that laws can't be arbitrary or selective. Butthat's the definition of rent regulation. The city has declared anemergency -- but half of the city's renters get no protection from thatemergency.

Gelinas notes that, even if the case gets heard, "The Supremes couldrule narrowly, telling New York to remedy its laws." In addition, as anopponent of zoning and other government regulation of the economyas violations of individual rights, I think it is dangerous to concedethat it is okay for the government to deprive people of their propertyso long as it is "reasonable" or (mis)treats everyone in the same way.Since the above arguments make such concessions, I wonder whether theymight set the stage for a bad legal precedent in addition.

Nevertheless, color me cautiously optimistic that these laws could well be ruledunconstitutional.

-- CAV

John David Lewis, RIP

2012-01-17T03:00:00.000-06:00

I have learned only recently that John D. Lewis, an intellectual I admire and find inspirational, has died. I quote the below from the web page for his memorial fund at the Ayn Rand Institute:

At the time of his death, Dr. Lewis was visiting associate professor in the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Program at Duke University, a position funded by the Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Scholarship and by the BB&T Charitable Foundation. He was also adjunct associate professor of business at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After a 25-year career in business, he changed direction and earned his PhD in classics in 2001 at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England.

Dr. Lewis lectured internationally and was well known and respected by hiscolleagues at Duke. Dr. Lewis authored three books -- Nothing Less than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History (Princeton University Press, 2010); Early Greek Lawgivers (Bristol Classical Press, 2007); and Solon the Thinker: Political Thought in Archaic Athens (Duckworth Press, 2006) -- as well as many other publications in academia and in the popular press. He was a frequent lecturer at Objectivist and non-Objectivist conferences throughout his career.

Dr. Lewis drew personal inspiration from Ayn Rand's philosophy -- and his work and life reflected his beliefs. He had a unique talent for conveying his knowledge and views, whether in delivering a lecture, writing a book, or in discussion with those around him.

I was fortunate enough to have met Dr. Lewis a few times and to have attended several of his lectures in person: It was clear to me at every single one of these encounters that he was one of those rare men whose great passion for his work was matched by both high personal standards and great energy. When I learned that his motto was esse quam videri, I was hardly surprised, and have always thought of him first when encountering it ever since.

We Objectivists have lost a valiant fighter for the true and the good, a sincere and able ally, and a friend. In Ayn Rand's words, "[A]nyone who fights for the future, lives in it today." I usually find inspiration in that quote, but with this news, I take comfort in it, knowing that it applied to Dr. Lewis in life.

-- CAV

What People Are Missing About Property

2012-01-16T03:08:00.000-06:00

Over at Rondam Ramblings is a very interesting post about the debate over some Internet-threatening legislation (the Stop Online Piracy Act, aka SOPA) that Congress is considering. The author, "Ron", makes quite a few very interesting points, and shows himself to be quite astute about the importance of naming all the premises in any debate. Unfortunately, he reaches a dangerously wrong conclusion, which he claims is what "everyone is missing in the SOPA debate":

[I]ntellectual property [is] a granted right, not a recognized or fundamental right...

Ron reaches this conclusion by considering the clause in Article 2 of the Constitution that establishes patents and copyrights, and noting several differences between these rights and property rights, both legally and culturally:

[T]he "right" to "intellectual property" does not exist unless explicitly granted by Congress at its discretion. Furthermore, Congress is constrained to grant this right only in service of a specific purpose. namely, to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, and only "for limited times".

... "[I]ntellectual property" is clearly on a different legal footing from the "inalienable rights" to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" to which people are endowed by their Creator, as recognized in the [D]eclaration of Independence. Neither the Declaration nor the Constitution mentions "property" by name [correction: the 5th amendment does mention it. See the comments.], but it is quite clear that the right to physical property was universally considered an inalienable fundamental right by the Founders.

Ron clearly is grappling with the issue of what the Founding Fathers might have meant by their clause, as he looks for historical evidence within the Constitution and other historical documents. Unfortunately, two aspects of his approach lead him astray.

First, it seems to me that the Founding Fathers were themselves unclear about the exact nature of property. For one thing, a quick search of the web site usconstitution.net reveals that they themselves did not use the term "intellectual property". This suggests that perhaps the concept of intellectual property hadn't been fully formed yet (or at least was very new, or not yet widely accepted), although the Founding Fathers realized on some level that there was something about creative work that merited protection. For another thing, the fact that slavery was recognized in the Constitution suggests that the way that many people held "property" as a concept at the time was wrong. Otherwise, the idea that people could be property would have been widely ridiculed, rather than codified into law in any way whatsoever. The Founders thus were sincerely attempting to protect individual rights, while at the same time (and like anyone), facing errors (e.g., the slavery question, for some) and incomplete knowledge (e.g., an incomplete grasp of the nature of intellectual property) of their own, as well as whatever virtues or limitations the culture of their time placed on what, politically, was possible.

Second, and proceeding directly from the above, while I do not fault anyone with looking at history, an attempt to grapple with the question of whether intellectual property is an individual right is hampered without also considering the philosophical question of what property really is. Any errors or incompleteness of knowledge on the part of the authors of the Constitution will limit any such inquiry that does not account for (1) the essential purpose of the document (setting up a government that protects individual rights) and (2) the nature of those rights.

It is at this point that I defer to Ayn Rand, who made the following argument in a chapter of her book ("Patents and Copyrights"), Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal:

What the patent and copyright laws acknowledge is the paramount role of mentaleffort in the production of material values; these laws protect the mind’scontribution in its purest form: the origination of an idea. The subject ofpatents and copyrights is intellectual property.

An idea as such cannot be protected until it has been given a material form. Aninvention has to be embodied in a physical model before it can be patented; astory has to be written or printed. But what the patent or copyright protectsis not the physical object as such, but the idea which it embodies. Byforbidding an unauthorized reproduction of the object, the law declares, ineffect, that the physical labor of copying is not the source of the object’svalue, that that value is created by the originator of the idea and may not beused without his consent; thus the law establishes the property right of a mindto that which it has brought into existence.

It is important to note, in this connection, that a discovery cannot bepatented, only an invention. A scientific or philosophical discovery, whichidentifies a law of nature, a principle or a fact of reality not previouslyknown, cannot be the exclusive property of the discoverer because: (a) he didnot create it, and (b) if he cares to make his discovery public, claiming itto be true, he cannot demand that men continue to pursue or practice falsehoodsexcept by his permission. He can copyright the book in which he presents hisdiscovery and he can demand that his authorship of the discovery beacknowledged, that no other man appropriate or plagiarize the credit forit -- but he cannot copyright theoretical knowledge. Patents and copyrightspertain only to the practical application of knowledge, to the creation of aspecific object which did not exist in nature -- an object which, in the case ofpatents, may never have existed without its particular originator; and in thecase of copyrights, would never have existed.

The government does not "grant" a patent or copyright, in the sense of a gift,privilege, or favor; the government merely secures it -- i.e., the governmentcertifies the origination of an idea and protects its owner’s exclusive rightof use and disposal. [bold added]

Rand is arguing that, as a type of property (i.e., something obtained through individual effort), intellectual property is a fundamental right. Elsewhere in her article, Rand explains that the time limits on patents and copyrights are essential aspects of securing these rights: When the originator of the idea dies, his ideas cease to exist as property. She goes further:

Since intellectual property rights cannot be exercised in perpetuity, the question of their time limit is an enormously complex issue. If they were restricted to the originator's life-span, it would destroy their value by making long-term contractual agreements impossible: if an inventor died a month after his invention were placed on the market, it could ruin the manufacturer who may have invested a fortune in its production. Under such conditions, investors would be unable to take a long-range risk; the more revolutionary or important an invention, the less would be its chance of finding financial backers. Therefore, the law has to define a period of time which would protect the rights and interests of all those involved.

Intellectual property is a fundamental right, and the differences in how the government secures that right from other property rights are not concessions to its being a granted favor or a civil (rather than a fundamental) right, but rather recognitions of the fact that intellectual property differs from tangible property in fundamental ways.

I disagree with Ron's conclusion about intellectual property: Intellectual property is a fundamental right, regardless of whether the Founding Fathers regarded it as such. That said, breaking the Internet is not the proper way to secure that right, and for that reason, I agree that Congress should scrap SOPA/PIPA.

-- CAV

1-14-12 Hodgepodge

2012-01-14T03:00:00.000-06:00

We'll See

Michael Ledeen sees a death spiral for Iran's theocratic regime, but his last paragraph negates much of the rest of his column:

And yet, Khamenei’s killers continue to attack us in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we still have not openly supported his opponents, any more than we have supported Assad’s opponents in Syria. How many Americans have to die at the hands of this wicked regime before we help the Iranian and Syrian people put an end to their long national agony? [bold added]

In the meantime, we may look like we're hurting the man on the street while lining the pockets of members of the current regime (because we effectively are), and I doubt that there is significant cultural opposition to theocracy in Iran, anyway.

Weekend Reading

"As the old adage goes, 'one swallow does not make a summer.'" -- Johathan Hoenig, in "Stocks and the Dollar: A New Correlation?" at SmartMoney

"Up until this breakthrough, parents and reality were ignored so Freudian-based excuse-making and parent-bashing therapists could have control." -- Michael Hurd, in "Anorexia Causes and Cures" at DrHurd.com

My Two Cents

Hurd notes that anorexia is surfacing in ten-year-old children! This is shocking to me. As a parent, I am grateful that he has passed the word along that there is an effective way to stop such nonsense in its tracks.

Good Point

Tech writer Scott Hanselman likens phone apps to 1990's CD-ROMs. I think he has a point, and hope he's right about where things are headed:

Auto-updating fixes only part of the problem. Sure, we'll get that feature one day, but the apps are still little islands of functionality that don't talk to each other. It's great that they talk to the Cloud and to various services, but few apps know they aren't alone on my phone. In fact, nearly all my apps live in the Tiny Tower of my phone but think they are alone.

... But as a user, more and more, I want to Go Somewhere and get functionality as opposed to Bring Something To Me to get functionality. Managing apps, updates and storage is as pointless as my managing my growing Tiny Tower.

I find apps that simply replicate web sites particularly annoying. When I visit some web sites, I'll get a splash page asking me whether I want to install the app. "I already have that," I think. "It's called a browser."

Fortunately, Hanselman sees many apps getting assimilated into web browsers again as these and HTML improve.

-- CAV

Why They're Good

2012-01-13T03:09:00.000-06:00

I have noted several times here already that I am a big fan of New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton. And while I'm grateful for his turning the team from a perennial laughingstock to a perennial powerhouse, there's much more to like. Yahoo! News notes that this year's squad, "currently 14-3 and headed full throttle into Saturday's divisional round playoff game at San Francisco", has a roster loaded with my kind of player:

Nineteen of them share a similar background -- they went undrafted coming out of college. Six more Saints were picked in the seventh round (most by other teams), meaning 25 active players, or more than 47 percent of New Orleans' team, got here the hard way.

Having this concentration of such players -- on a team as good, as talented and as explosive as New Orleans -- though is stunning.

Around the locker room they point to the keen eye of the scouting staff and the savvy of general manager Mickey Loomis.

More often than not, though, they cite the culture created by head coach Sean Payton, who perhaps more than anyone in the NFL has managed to block out résumés from his week-to-week evaluations. Instead, he trusts what he sees, not what someone else, or even himself, saw previously. [bold added]

"I think it's a lot easier to be fair than to try to be fair," Payton said.

What I like particularly about Payton is his willingness to admit mistakes and correct them. He's in it to win, not to fool anyone else or himself:

What isn't easy is being so willing to replace players that you've invested draft picks, money and your own credibility in selecting in the first place. For many, that's an ego bruise that clouds the entire evaluation.

Not Payton.

"Sometimes you miss them in the evaluation process," he said with a shrug. "And then sometimes maybe you over-evaluate a player.

"I think what we ... do is evaluate the performance of each player once they get here and really try to separate ourselves from how they arrived here. [We] really try to look at getting the best players on the field regardless of whether they were drafted or signed as free agents or in some cases even in workouts situations."

And there's more. The article describes how Payton sets the tone in training camp (One player is quoted: "You don't have a security blanket here.") and fosters a culture of accomplishment.

And it's not with a roster stuffed with former college All-Americans or glamour picks and big-name free agents. Instead it's a disproportionately large collection of guys who, finally given their crack at stability, have wound up playing like they belonged all along.

"You give a guy an equal opportunity," Collins said, "and some will surprise you."

In particular cases, perhaps, but this is not a surprise, in general.

Read the whole thing.

-- CAV

PS: Geaux Saints!

While we're asking questions,...

2012-01-12T03:00:00.000-06:00

... I have one about the below sign, which is one of many I have observed over the weeks from a leftist union/outfit that is calling itself "Occupy Marriott".

"Are unionized malcontents deliberately infesting hotels with bedbugs?"

As the people clogging the sidewalks in front of the place might say, "Hey! It's just a question."

However: (1) I am asking my question with some basis (The above isn't just a question, but an attempt to damage the reputation of a business and, as such, an act of sabotage. Why would they stop there?); and (2) I am asking my question without what would, in a truly free society, be treated like the crime of trespassing (unless, of course, the private owner(s) of this street, or the sidewalk these thugs keep blocking permitted them to gather there).

-- CAV

Life Behind the Great Firewall

2012-01-11T03:00:00.000-06:00

As Congress debates what sounds like a horrendous Internet regulation bill, it is worth considering, in real, concrete terms, what having an unrestricted Internet really means. Rather than, perhaps, appreciating what we had only after losing it, we could consider what life is like for those who already don't have it. Someone living in China notes that lots of things we are beginning to take for granted (but would be hard-pressed to see ourselves doing without) just aren't there:

Imagine having no Google, no Youtube, no Facebook, no Vimeo, no Twitter...being forced to use Bing to search, no accessing any sites hosted on blogspot or wordpress, Gmail having intermittent outages, sites using Google Analytics taking ten times longer to load, Dropbox only working on occasion, and no other file sending services.

Imagine that there are equivalents of these sites that are state-owned and controlled: a search engine that only returns government approved sites, a censored twitter where you must register with your real name and passport number, and an internet radio site that is forced to play "red" songs celebrating the government. Imagine that these government-sanctioned alternatives are shoddily and hastily assembled and have none of the quality or convenience the originals had.

Don Chow ends with a warning and what amounts to a prediction:

I know SOPA doesn't imply that all of this would happen in the US. But it certainly feels like a step towards this sort of restriction, and sets a dangerous precedent.

... These restrictions here haven't slowed down pirating a single bit.

Private intellectual property and freedom of speech are both crucial for the prosperous, technologically-advanced civilization we now enjoy. As exemplified by the above, we cannot have either for long without the other. Congress seems to be laboring under the illusion that we can.

-- CAV

Honesty in Yoga

2012-01-10T03:38:00.000-06:00

In the New York Times is an interesting article titled, "How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body". Not having looked into the subject at all, I have no strong opinions one way or the other about whether yoga, at least as a kind of physical training, might be worthwhile. I am open to the idea that this discipline could, despite its dubious philosophic and scientific foundations, offer some benefits to its practitioners, but not inclined to look into the matter beyond that point.

What does interest me about the article is the following, particularly if we assume, for the sake of argument, that yoga does manage to offer physical benefits through its physical regimen:

When yoga teachers come to him for bodywork after suffering major traumas, Black tells them, "Don't do yoga."

"They look at me like I'm crazy," he goes on to say. "And I know if they continue, they won't be able to take it." I asked him about the worst injuries he'd seen. He spoke of well-known yoga teachers doing such basic poses as downward-facing dog, in which the body forms an inverted V, so strenuously that they tore Achilles tendons. "It's ego," he said. "The whole point of yoga is to get rid of ego." He said he had seen some "pretty gruesome hips." "One of the biggest teachers in America had zero movement in her hip joints," Black told me. "The sockets had become so degenerated that she had to have hip replacements." I asked if she still taught. "Oh, yeah," Black replied. "There are other yoga teachers that have such bad backs they have to lie down to teach. I'd be so embarrassed." [bold added]

Unsurprisingly, at the root of both the injuries and the persistence lies a mystical view of yoga as not needing to be understood rationally and intrinsically good. (Practicing anything this way is analogous to the following approach to travel: Toss out the road map and, if someone or something tells you you're headed the wrong way, press the accelerator to the floor.)

If yoga can, in fact, offer benefits, those benefits arise in some way. Therefore, there would necessarily be some basis in reality, understandable by reason, for such benefits. In that sense, yoga practitioners who ignore their own physical limitations in the name of "yoga" are failing to truly practice yoga -- at least in the rational sense of attempting to separate the wheat from the chaff regarding what that discipline might offer.

Among devotees, from gurus to acolytes forever carrying their rolled-up mats, yoga is described as a nearly miraculous agent of renewal and healing. They celebrate its abilities to calm, cure, energize and strengthen. And much of this appears to be true: yoga can lower your blood pressure, make chemicals that act as antidepressants, even improve your sex life. But the yoga community long remained silent about its potential to inflict blinding pain. [minor format edits]

There's not much else I can add to this, but to say that if you're taking classes in yoga from someone with self-inflicted yoga injuries, unless you know why those injuries occurred and how to avoid them, you are getting exactly the kind of instruction you deserve.

-- CAV

That's VAT.

2012-01-09T03:10:00.000-06:00

At the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Mitchell notes that GOP front-runner Mitt Romney, along with a couple of surprising others, views the Value Added Tax (VAT) favorably. Before we go on, it is worth it to pause for a moment and consider who else is on this bandwagon:

Herman Cain's 9-9-9 tax plan featured a flat tax and national sales tax. Very few people realized, however, that the final 9 was a VAT. And Rep. Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and a favorite of the tea party thanks to his bold reforms to modernize Medicare and Medicaid, includes a VAT in his "Roadmap" plan, where it helps finance other reforms such as eliminating the corporate income tax.

Mitchell notes that the VAT enjoys support from fiscal conservatives:

... for relatively benign reasons. It is a single-rate system, like the flat tax, for raising revenue, so it does not raise the possibility of class-warfare demagoguery. The VAT also doesn't hit savings and investment. And there are no distorting and corrupt loopholes. So there's a lot to like about the levy -- or would be, if there were some practicable way of substituting a VAT for taxes on income.

That last sentence is the first whiff of what will go awry if a VAT is imposed without being part of an actual plan (with lots of momentum behind it) to reduce the government's mission back to its proper scope of protecting individual rights. As I blogged years ago:

You've already conceded the moral high ground, so the battle never was about eliminating government programs. And since you were hoping to "starve the beast" (i.e., make cutbacks by inertia) you never really made a compelling case to rein in the growth of government programs either. Now, thanks to George Bush and the complicit "allies" of the fiscal conservatives on the religious right, the initiative in this battle has been seized. (And fiscal conservatives are worried about their alliance with the religious right faltering? It's already gone!)

The goal is now to use expansion of the federal nanny state to cut into the Democratic voter base. The momentum is now for expanding the federal government again and all these so-called "small-government conservatives" have to offer is their take on how we, the taxpayers, are going to pay for all of this? This is a far, far, cry from challenging Bush et al. on whether we should have to pay for any of this at all.

In short, this kind of advocacy of the VAT is both a symptom -- of the kind of cowardice that results from not actually holding professed free market principles in an objective manner -- and a turn for the worse for our economy -- because it's a bigger concession to anti-capitalists than these advocates seem to realize or be willing to admit to themselves.

But leftists opponents understand full well that this "win-win" is really just a win for the expansion of the welfare state:

And that's why, looking at the long-run fiscal situation, the left needs a VAT. It's is the only realistic way to collect the huge amount of revenue that will be necessary to finance the mountainous benefits promised by our entitlement programs. Which is exactly what happened in Europe, where welfare-state policies only became feasible after VATs were adopted, beginning in the late 1960s.

So a VAT lets people like Romney look like they're dismantling the welfare state (by addressing a few of its more irritating symptoms) without really having to do anything substantive, starting with making a moral stand for capitalism; and it lets leftists lay off the class warfare and gets them off the hook for the fact that there simply isn't enough money to be soaked from the rich to pay for their schemes.

I will add only two things here. First, it's worth noting, based on Europe's escalating sovereign debt crisis, that even a VAT is only a temporary reprieve from the fact that the state can't provide everything to everyone. Second, this all vaguely reminds me of a quote -- probably from Ayn Rand -- that I can't quite dredge up to the effect that it takes unprincipled Republicans to really expand the welfare state.

-- CAV

1-7-12 Hodgepodge

2012-01-07T03:08:00.000-06:00

A Note and a Bleg

In support of a long-range goal, I have been logging time spent blogging and how that time is used. This has been an illuminating exercise, and I have already identified some low-hanging fruit that, when picked, will speed things along for me very nicely in the wee hours. (And yes, when I composed most of this post yesterday, those problems put me over my time budget, and resulted in a shortened post.)

Firefox -- unless a supposedly speedier new version fixes things -- has to go as my blogging browser. Multiple tabs slow things to an excruciating crawl that becomes downright appalling when one becomes explicitly aware of the actual amount of time lost. That's easy enough, except that I am unsure how well Google Chrome will "play" with Blogger's new editor. (Certain common things did not work well in the old editor under Chrome.) But even if the new editor is smooth sailing under Chrome, it has annoying limitations I might want to do without, by switching to better HTML editing software, and just dumping posts into Blogger when I've completed them. After all, I already might have to toggle back and forth between browsers. If I'm going to do that, why not toggle between a fast browser and a decent editor?

I haven't looked into this at all yet, and I've gotten great technical advice by asking here before, so ...

If you have a recommendation for a good WYSIWYG HTML editor that meets the following criteria, please leave a comment or email me. (1) Must run natively on Linux. (2) Easily switches between plain text and HTML output views. (3) Is well-supported, or at least under active development. (4) Is free (as in beer), or at least inexpensive.

Thanks in advance!

Weekend Reading

"2012 is the year this outrageous government power grab [i.e., ObamaCare --ed] will be reversed, or the year it will be set in concrete." -- Richard Ralston, in "Save American Medicine in 2012" at The Orange County Register

"At the end of theday, one either continues to drink, use drugs, or engage inotherwise self-destructive behavior – or one doesn't." -- Michael Hurd, in "Stop Waiting and Help Yourself" at DrHurd.com

"The problem is not too much love or too many presents. The realproblem lies in not allowing the child to experience theconsequences of his actions and choices." -- Michael Hurd, in "Can There Be too Many Presents?" at DrHurd.com

"In a competitive market, however, persistent values don't oftenlast." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Big Ships, Cheaper Prices" at SmartMoney

"The rational and worthy institutions of governmentrequire a rational underlying political philosophy, with an abidingrespect for individual rights and the rule of law. That'swholly absent ... from most of the Middle East..." -- Richard Salsman, in "Credit Obama for Leaving Iraq, but the U.S. Remains Over-Committed" at Forbes

"Just as your real estate agent should represent your individual home buying interests and your lawyer should represent your individual legal interests, your physician should represent your individual medical interests -- not sacrifice you to some collectivist ideal of 'social justice.'" -- Paul Hsieh, in "Who Will Your Doctor Work for Under ObamaCare?" at Townhall.com

"Romney's claim that the Massachusetts plan didn't include price controls may have been technically true at the time the law was passed. But he helped create an unsustainable system that has quickly and predictably led to price controls -- with still more to come." -- Paul Hsieh, in "The Truth about RomneyCare", at PJ Media

-- CAV

An Unexpected Bonus

2012-01-06T04:07:00.000-06:00

In the process of going through some old files, I learned that the complete works of "Underground Grammarian" Richard Mitchell, an old favorite of mine, are online for free. I already own three of his four books, lacking only The Graves of Academe, which I look forward to reading at some point after I slowly work down a rather full book hopper with the help of my new ebook reader.

In the meantime, I'm enjoying back issues of Mitchell's Underground Grammarian newsletter. I'd forgotten how much I enjoy his sense of humor, and find his ability to laugh even while besieged with incompetence and foolishness -- whose consequences he understands -- quite bracing.One of Mitchell's opening statements of purpose provides a fair and entertaining introduction to Mitchell's style, for anyone lucky enough to have all of his work to look forward to:

The betterment of fools, Goethe tells us, is the appropriate business of other fools. The Underground Grammarian does not seek to educate anyone. We intend rather to ridicule, humiliate, and infuriate those who abuse our language not so that they will do better but so that they will stop using language entirely or at least go away. There are callings in which the abuse of English doesn't matter; ours isn't one of them. When Bole Administration Building is loud with the clatter of ball-point pens falling from the trembling fingers of frenzied administrators, when semi-literate instructors furtively eye the classified ads looking for honest employment as salesmen in discount stores specializing in floor-covering, when the Faculty Senate disbands because no one is willing to risk uttering gibberish in public, then The Underground Grammarian will have reached some of its goals. If we do our job well, more and more people at Glassboro State College will emit fewer and fewer memoranda. The taxpayers of New Jersey will be spared the cost of thousands of reams of paper; duplicators will consume less energy; professors could put into teaching the effort now expended in replying to inane surveys and checking meaningless ballots that will choose one mediocrity rather than another to serve in a position of no significance; and tall trees saved from destruction will stand for long years in noble forests.Virtues foster one another; so too, vices. Bad English kills trees, consumes energy, and befouls the earth. Good English renews it.

I've read three issues of the newsletter so far, and thought I'd share a few quotes from the first here, in the order I encountered them.

"We cannot honorably accept the wages, confidence, or licensure of the citizens who employ us as we darken counsel by words without understanding."
Regarding a poorly-written memo: "And furthermore, directness and precision would have relieved Yeldell's nagging fear that his readers would not easily identify his committee. He might then have avoided the ugly legalese of said committee in two places."
"[T]he clause implies that this assertion is, at least, arguable, or that the committee may be dead."
"The Underground Grammarian does not advocate violence; it advocates ridicule. Abusers of English are often pompous, and ridicule hurts them more than violence. In every edition we will bring you practical advice for ridiculing abusers of English."
"This month's target is any barbarian who says advisement..."

Happy reading!

-- CAV

Worrisome "Good News"

2012-01-05T03:36:00.000-06:00

Americans United, a church-state separation watchdog group, reports that funding shortfalls are threatening to keep a creationist-themed theme park from opening in Kentucky. While we do not appear, fortunately, to have reached the point, where states are actively funding such unconstitutional, improper fiascoes, we are seeing a state granting favorable treatment to a religious group, hence the concern:

The "Ark Park" is a classic case of state officials using bad fiscal policy to appease the Religious Right. Kentucky has committed more than $40 million in tax incentives to this project, which is being headed by a prominent fundamentalist Christian ministry that believes the Earth is only 6,000 years old, that dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time and that unicorns once existed – ideas utterly rejected by mainstream science.

I suspect that my only disagreement with Americans United here is about what is bad about Kentucky's fiscal policy: It doesn't go far enough. The state should phase out all welfare programs and quit taxing everyone, permanently.

As someone who thinks that, in addition to not promoting any ideology (this term emphatically includes religion), the state shouldn't tax anyone and shouldn't be involved in education, I agree: Until the state is out of the education business, it should at least not promote unscientific views in the name of teaching science; and until the state is out of the business of forcibly parting citizens from their money, it shouldn't grant ad hoc exemptions to some people at the whim of whichever politicians hold power.

I'm glad the park may be in trouble, but the worrisome context in which this piece of news occurs makes the term "good news" impossible to apply to it in anything other than the narrow sense that a single bullet from a machine-toting madman has missed. The fact is that our state increasingly "plans" the economy and otherwise meddles in our lives, and theocrats see these as opportunities to be taken advantage of (a la tax "incentives"), rather than problems to solve permanently and in a principled manner.

-- CAV

Managing Expectations

2012-01-04T03:36:00.000-06:00

Late last year, tech blogger and telecommuter David Tate wrote a humorous and very enlightening post (linked by Lifehacker) discussing the unique problems faced by people who telecommute. One passage that particularly struck me was the following:

There are two common complaints that affect worker and SO [significant other --ed]: the SO complains that the worker continues working past normal work hours (since the office is right there) and the worker complains of being constantly interrupted by their SO during the day. Both of these common failures are just cases of work and home not being separated aggressively.

Not only can the telecommuting arrangement cause problems for both the telecommuter and his SO, but avoiding these problems requires effort and good communication from each. It is the telecommuter who has to take the initiative here to overcome the new lack of a physical separation between his home and work lives by means of a psychological one. This is what Tate is talking about, and he focuses on how to set those both for oneself and for one's SO.

An additional difficulty not covered much in the post is the fact that telecommuting is new and unusual enough that not many people, potential telecommuters or their SOs, really know what to expect. Fortunately, Tate is writing a book about successfully working from home and provides a link at the end of his post to an email notification list for anyone interested in knowing when his book is complete.

--- In Other News ---

The Tate post reminds me of a hilarious cartoon at The Oatmeal: "Why Working from Home Is Both Awesome and Horrible".

Speaking of books, Brian Phillips, who used to blog at Live Oaks, has just published Individual Rights and Government Wrongs.

Here's a time-saving tip: Use the "fetch news" recipe in calibre to dump the contents of your Instapaper account onto an ebook reader. Now, you don't even have to wait for a download to read some interesting tidbit you found, but didn't have time to read, and can read it on the subway or a plane. I also find the reading experience more satisfying when cleanly separated from the browsing "experience".

Holiday Hodgepodge

2011-12-23T06:29:00.000-06:00

Heh!

Reader Snedcat emails me a link to a news story whose title just about says it all: "Gay Community Apologizes to Amy Koch for Ruining her Marriage". (Koch supports a ban on gay marriage.)

The letter comes on the heels of Koch's own apology, released yesterday, in which she expressed her deep regret for "engaging in a relationship with a Senate staffer." Although the letter did not specify the identity of the other participant in the "inappropriate relationship," it is widely rumored to be former communications chief Michael Brodkorb, who lost several positions with the GOP in the wake of the scandal.

The only thing legalized gay marriage really threatens is the shaky sense of self-esteem of meddlesome theocrats.

Holiday Reading

"Capitalism and business get the blame for people's shopping compulsions. That's like blaming air for the fact that people say stupid things." -- Michael Hurd, in "Be Happy Within Your Means" at DrHurd.com

"Even in an age of instantaneous electronic communication, there's simply no substitute: You can't email a tanker full of methanol." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Stocks that Could really Sail in 2012" at SmartMoney

"If the eventual GOP nominee supports 'personhood,' they risk alienating these independent voters for whom outlawing birth control pills and IUDs would be anathema. In other words, 'personhood' could give the 2012 election to Obama." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Would a President Gingrich Ban the Birth Control Pill?" at PJ Media

"Yet ever since the writings of Mises, Hayek, and Rand, we've known the nature and outcome of such intervention, economically, politically, and morally. Seventy more years of its practice, both here and abroad, has only served to confirm and reinforce that knowledge." -- Amit Ghate, in "Time for Emergency Freedom" at PJ Media

One More...

I've always considered Leonard Peikoff's "Why Christmas Should Be More Commercial", to be a classic. I particularly like what he says about Santa Clause: "Nor is Santa a champion of Christian mercy or unconditional love. On the contrary, he is for justice--Santa gives only to good children, not to bad ones."

Annual Blogging Break

Each year, during the holidays, I take around a week off from blogging -- completely: I don't even look at my blogging-related email account. A couple of times, I have even taken a holiday from the Internet altogether. This year, I'm taking slightly more time off than usual. There will be no post tomorrow, and I'll resume posting here on either the third or fourth of January. I'll respond to email and comments through tomorrow morning, and maybe again the day before my return. So don't be surprised to see me disappear from the face of the earth until the Tuesday or Wednesday after New Year's Day.

As I get ready to relax, I would like to take a moment to thank you, my readers, for making Gus Van Horn a part of your Internet routine. Those of you I have met, be it through comments or correspondence, or in person, have invariably enriched my blogging experience through the interaction and, for that, I thank you.

I look forward to seeing you again in the new year. In the meantime, I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

-- CAV

The Fallacy of the Fence

2011-12-22T05:42:00.000-06:00

Technology blogger David Pogue, considering a few of the more questionable decisions made by CEOs over the past year, naturally considers what Megan McArdle called the "brief and tragic life of Qwikster." In the process, Pogue reminded me of McArdle's post, whose title, "If Everyone Else Is Such an Idiot, How Come You're Not Rich?", intrigued me when I encountered it. I hadn't gotten around to reading it yet, so I did, because I saw Pogue, although not directly calling Reed Hastings an idiot, questioning how he could have reached the decision he did.

After reading the two pieces, I think McArdle and Pogue are on the same page regarding Hastings, which I would sum up as, "That was a bad decision, but one Hastings made, based on what he thought were good reasons."

But the McArdle piece brought up something called, "The Fallacy of Chesterton's Fence," which she quotes elsewhere, and which I think is worthy of consideration by people who, like myself, are interested in cultural change as a means of achieving political change. There are obvious and non-obvious reasons for thinking about this:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.

Libertarians, who see no need to understand political philosophy before embarking on reform, are guilty of this fallacy, and the liberty-endangering results are perhaps most clear when we see so many of them -- such as Ron Paul -- adopt a pacifistic "non-interventionism" in foreign policy.

People who so reflexively reject traditions that they seem unable to entertain the idea that they might exist for good reasons -- and rush to condemn anyone who upholds a tradition as, ipso facto, an unthinking boob -- also fall prey to the fallacy. Both fail to connect their abstractions with reality, failing in the process, as McArdle puts it so well, to form "a theory of the transition" between the state of affairs they "want" and the one that exists.

The scare quotes around "want" are significant. Someone who does not thoroughly understand some cause he supports risks damaging that cause, because what he means when he uses the words of that cause is highly questionable. A nation cannot have freedom for very long, for example, without a strong military and a principled foreign policy of national self-interest. Someone like Ron Paul clearly does not understand this on some level, or his praise of "freedom" and his military "non-interventionism" would not be bedfellows in his own mind.

In the realm of cultural activism, someone like Paul damages his own cause not merely by espousing notions that plainly contradict it, sewing confusion in the process. He also understandably repels potential allies (to the actual cause) by sounding like an idiot.

While people who don't know what they are talking about can sometimes accidentally lead others to discover knowledge, it is worth considering how a rational person would properly react to what such people say. "A statement isn't necessarily false because it comes from an unreliable source, though it is more likely to be false," as John Cook has rightly pointed out. Based on an implicit understanding like this, it would not be unreasonable for a perfectly rational person whose only exposure to, say, the thought of Ayn Rand, were due to the fact that he thought Ron Paul fairly represented her -- and he'd heard Paul say something patently ridiculous -- to think that Rand is a crackpot. Other exposure to Rand from other sources could cause such a person to revise his opinion later, but this will be despite Paul's insistence that he is a champion of liberty.

The kind of error that manifests as the "Fallacy of Chesterton's Fence" is thus both an impediment to thoughtful reform and to communication about why such reform is necessary, in what direction such reform must move, and in how best to achieve it. This is why advocates of Ayn Rand's ideas should distance themselves from the likes of Ron Paul.

-- CAV

Pipes on Socialized Medicine

2011-12-21T05:28:00.000-06:00

Writing at Forbes, Sally Pipes discusses something I commented on long ago:

[British patients have] foregone cutting-edge medical treatments available in the United States, told by their leaders that these new therapies were no better than the old ones -- just more expensive. At least in Britain, they thought, everyone has access to basic health care. That has to be better than the situation in America, where tens of millions of people lack health insurance, right?

Hardly. The British healthcare system may "guarantee" access to care -- but that doesn't mean patients actually receive it.

Take the case of David Evans, a 69-year-old farmer living in Cornwall, in southwest England. About a year ago, he developed a hernia and needed an operation. Despite government requirements that he receive treatment within 18 weeks of diagnosis, he still hasn't been treated.

Recently, he had to use his own ultrasound equipment -- typically used to examine pregnant sheep -- to check the hernia himself and determine if it was getting worse.

Pipes puts scare quotes around the term "guarantee", but she could have just as easily used them around the word "access", as I did when considering the issue before:

That's right: If you obtain more medical care than John Conyers, Barack Obama, or Donna Christian-Christensen (D-Virgin Islands) feel like allowing you to have, that's "excess consumption."
I suppose that one way to get around your constituents not having "access" to medical care is to effectively make it illegal.

And the global economic depression is, as Pipes notes, only going to further curtail "access" to "excess" medical care. The whole article is worth reading for its up-to-date examples of central planning -- once again -- utterly failing to provide customers with services their lives (or the quality of their lives) depend on.

Following the article is this interesting blurb:

Sally C. Pipes is President, CEO, and Taube Fellow in Health Care Studies at the Pacific Research Institute. Her next book -- The Pipes Plan: The Top Ten Ways to Dismantle and Replace Obamacare (Regnery) -- will be released in January 2012.

I am unfamiliar with Pipes, and tend to react with skepticism when I hear claims to the effect that some public policy proposal or other relies on "market forces". Nevertheless, I hope that this book and others like it succeed in rekindling the debate about the government's current, improper role in the medical sector.

-- CAV

Keep on Talking!

2011-12-20T04:32:00.001-06:00

Over the years, I have learned that sometimes, the best way to defeat someone spewing nonsense is to sit back and let him keep on talking, and then make it easy for the thinking part of the audience to connect the dots.

For that reason, I found myself first wondering why leftist blogger (and OWS cheerleader) Matthew Yglesias posted "U.S. More Unequal than Ancient Rome", on the "problem" of income inequality, at all -- and then wishing he'd spent more time explaining why he would consider this a problem, if it were true, rather than simply implying that he disagrees with the analysis.

Research from Walter Schiedel and Steven Friesen suggests that the Gini coefficient for the ancient Roman Empire was 0.42–0.44, slightly lower than today's 0.45.

Of course an interesting exercise would be to try to think about this in human welfare terms rather than in monetary terms. The past would arguably have been extremely egalitarian in welfare terms simply because the overall living standards were so low compared to today. No air conditioning, no out-of-season food, no air travel to visit family in a different city, no penicillin if your kid gets sick.

Indeed the exercise Yglesias suggests would be, "interesting", and much more, in part for reasons that Paul Hsieh recently brought up in "In Praise of Capitalist Inequality":

The fact that Steve Jobs earned a greater fortune than most others reflects the fact that he created much more value than most others -- and in the process enhanced others' lives to a proportionately greater degree. Steve Jobs' earned wealth was a direct reflection of the value he added for himself and others -- and his wealth should be praised and respected as a noble achievement.

It is also important to recognize that America is not currently a capitalist country, but rather a mixed economy with both capitalist and socialist elements. Hence, some Americans have become undeservedly rich through political "pull" and favors. But the OWS protestors aren’t opposed to government favoritism in principle -- they merely want to shift those special favors onto themselves.

Another exercise in a similar vein would also be "interesting" -- a thought experiment that I dare say not a single OWS sympathizer has bothered to attempt, but which Ayn Rand once conducted for their 1960s and 1970s counterparts: imagining what the results of stealing the property of "the rich" would really entail:

In view of what they hear from the experts, the people cannot be blamed for their ignorance and their helpless confusion. If an average housewife struggles with her incomprehensibly shrinking budget and sees a tycoon in a resplendent limousine, she might well think that just one of his diamond cuff links would solve all her problems. She has no way of knowing that if all the personal luxuries of all the tycoons were expropriated, it would not feed her family -- and millions of other, similar families -- for one week; and that the entire country would starve on the first morning of the week to follow . . . . How would she know it, if all the voices she hears are telling her that we must soak the rich? [from "The Inverted Moral Priorities," which appeared in The Ayn Rand Letter]

Seeing Yglesias actually think of all the modern conveniences we have that the Romans didn't caused me to wonder for a moment whether he'd had a Yeltsinesque "supermarket epiphany," or might be on the verge of one. If so, he could potentially be a valuable ally in the (actual) fight against poverty, with his words being even more valuable for the cause than they would be otherwise.

But either way, I hope he keeps on talking.

-- CAV

Manufacturing Rebounds

2011-12-19T04:34:00.001-06:00

Despite what one blogger at The American Interest calls, "efforts to regulate it out of existence," manufacturing is making a comeback across America. The blog links to a longer article by Joel Kotkin of New Geography, who names the following proximate causes:

Already the boom in natural gas has sparked a considerable industrial rebound in parts of eastern Ohio including the building of a new $650 million steel plant for gas pipes in the Youngstown area. Karen Wright, whose Ariel Corporation sells compressors used in gas plants, has added more than 300 positions in the past two years. "There's a huge amount of drilling throughout the Midwest," Wright says. "This is a game changer."

But the industrial rebound is not only about energy. Another critical factor is rising wages in East Asia, including China. Increasingly, American-based manufacturing is in a favored position as a lower-cost producer. Concerns over "knock offs" and lack of patent protection in China may also spark a growing "Made in the USA" trend.

The American Interest also rightly points out that, "Solyndra style subsidized and government planned 'green jobs'", are not part of the picture. But this mere slap at central planning verges on generosity when we consider the enormous costs to our economy exacted by regulations and the mis-allocation of resources that also result from the "investments" of know-nothing government "planners". It cannot be stressed enough that American manufacturing is coming back because of the remaining capitalist elements of our mixed economy, and despite the increasingly numerous and large statist elements. Without the latter, we would be enjoying a roaring comeback that would not have required a bloodhound like Joel Kotkin to sniff out

-- CAV

12-17-11 Hodgepodge

2011-12-17T05:18:00.001-06:00

Why Publish?

Several times (most recently, here), I have brought up the problem of unreliable published scientific results. Be that as it may, Ben Goldacre, writing at Bad Science, discusses why scientific publication is so important, despite the fact that bad papers do get past the process of peer review:

But the value of a scientific publication goes beyond this simple benefit, of all relevant information appearing, unambiguously, in one place. It's also a way to communicate your ideas to your scientific peers, and invite them to express an informed view.

In this regard, I don't mean peer review, the "least-worst" system settled on for deciding whether a paper is worth publishing, where other academics decide if it's accurate, novel, and so on. This is often represented as some kind of policing system for truth, but in reality, some dreadful nonsense gets published, and mercifully so: shaky material of some small value can be published into the buyer-beware professional literature of academic science; then the academic readers of this literature, who are trained to critically appraise a scientific case, can make their own judgement.

And it is this second stage of review by your peers -- after publication -- that is so important in science. If there are flaws in your case, responses can be written, as letters, or even whole new papers. If there is merit in your work, then new ideas and research will be triggered. That is the real process of science.

Goldacre's whole post is well worth reading, for he raises an issue that is often lost in today's media-driven culture: the importance of critical review of expert opinions by other experts. Publication of a result may be newsworthy, but it is often the beginning -- not the end -- of the story.

Weekend Reading

"Long before Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and even Friendster, online dating was the most prominent social experience changed by the Internet." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Dating Stocks to Go Steady With" at SmartMoney

"A relationship is a dynamic collaboration. If one person changes significantly, his or her relationship will not be the same as it was." -- Michael Hurd, in "Not Everybody Welcomes Change" at DrHurd.com

"What possible market value did Gingrich produce to attain such net worth while occupying political office?" -- Richard Salsman, in "Why Do Takers Obama And Gingrich Attack Creators Like Romney?" at Forbes

My Two Cents

In bringing up the business background of Mitt Romney (in contrast to the backgrounds of Gingrich and Obama), Salsman raises a very good point. Nevertheless, as he argues elsewhere, such as in "Warren Buffet and Other Anti-Rich Capitalists", this doesn't get Romney off the hook for the lack of understanding of capitalism he showed in signing RomneyCare into law.

Salsman has, in successive columns, succeeded in making me willing to consider voting for Romney over Obama (versus abstaining from such a choice), but I would do so with open eyes about Romney.

Heh!

Some time ago, reader Snedcat emailed me a link that includes the following amusing anecdote:

Soon, the members of the collective began taking to the road to spread the gospel of universal togetherness and stuff, which led to their participation in big open-air rock festivals, such as Woodstock and the Texas International Pop Festival, where B. B. King inspired Hugh Romney to adopt the name "Wavy Gravy." While still on the road, Johanna gave birth to their son, and since B. B. King wasn't around to suggest a name for the kid, his parents put their heads together and christened him Howdy Do-Good Tomahawk Truck Stop Gravy. Interviewed today, the young Mr. Gravy, who seems remarkably well-balanced, all things considered, says, "The legal age you have to be to change your name is 13. I spent my 13th birthday in court." He answers to "Jordan" now. [bold added] (HT: Snedcat)

It's nice to read a story about hippies that includes an example of rebellion against something other than reality, for a change.

-- CAV

Friday Four

2011-12-16T04:20:00.000-06:00

1. The "official" record is two minutes and two seconds, but I stopped counting several days ago. Baby Van Horn is now routinely sitting for minutes at a time without falling! It is astounding to realize, upon watching a baby learn how to do all the "simple" things we take for granted, how complicated such things really are. No less astounding is the noticeable progress one can observe from one day to the next.

2. Here are links to three videos I hope to watch (or start watching) during some lulls I expect to have over the next few days. The first two come by way of HBL, and the third I learned about through a local Objectivist mailing list. Peter Schiff's "I am the One Percent: Let's Talk.", Yaron Brook's "Ayn Rand and the Tea Party: A Recipe for Cultural Change", and Yaron Brook debating Dominick Ianno at Ford hall Forum in "From the Government and Here to Help".

3. Football fans will find this piece on the NFL's proprietary "All 22" game film interesting: "The reality of special teams remains largely unknown for this reason. No one sees it. The ball is kicked, it flies through the air and a man catches it. Then he is swarmed by a murder of crows, followed by a TV timeout."

4. Along the lines of advice to book a meeting with yourself at work in order to have uninterrupted work time, but taken to a "big picture" level, Jacob Gorban recommends a weekly appointment dedicated to "thinking time" at Lifehacker.

In this age of Internet and social networks with all the fun distractions that they provide, it becomes more important to go away from it all at least for a couple of hours each week, sit down with a pen and paper (or even an iPad running some notepad-type application), and just think it all through.

This sounds like just the sort of thing I need to do each week, and it would compliment my daily planning sessions very well.

-- CAV

How the Islamists Won

2011-12-15T03:24:00.001-06:00

Spiegel Online offers a good account of how elections went in Egypt after the so-called Arab Spring, and why they look certain to turn Egypt into an Islamist theocracy.

Is it for this that the Egyptian youth took to the streets in late January? Is this why they overthrew autocratic former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak?

No, says Amr Iss al-Rigal. "But this is merely a transitional phenomenon. We had a feeling that the religious groups would triumph at first -- because they, like the Salafists, have friends in the oil monarchies. And because they, like the Muslim Brothers, were long members of the opposition, which gave them time to organize."

The financial support of our "ally", Saudi Arabia comes as no surprise, and is not unimportant, but Rigal notes something else that is much more important, although he seems not to fully appreciate it:

The former revolutionary has now turned into a candidate for parliament. And his prospects are good, even though he is campaigning directly against the Islamists in the poor Imbaba neighborhood. As the son of a bus driver, Rigal is familiar with the people who vote for the Islamists. And because his father was once a member of the radical group al-Gamaa al-Islamiyya, he also knows what makes the Islamists so successful. "They appeal to your religious feelings, to your conscience. They distribute meat and coal. But that isn't a platform. You don't create jobs just by being devout." Rigal says that whenever he has told voters about their political rights, about their right to participate in the democratic process, to education and to healthcare, they have almost always reacted with astonishment and curiosity. [bold added]

Rigal is correct to note the incompatibility between Islamic altruism and the requirements of prosperity, but he grossly underestimates the power of morality as a motivator. Even if theocrats -- or some theocrat-military alliance -- actually permitted free elections (and honored their results) down the road, unless this morality is challenged directly and often in Egypt's popular culture, there is no reason to think that an Islamist-dominated parliament is somehow a "transitional phenomenon".

-- CAV

Coming and Going

2011-12-14T05:28:00.000-06:00

Noticing that Matt Drudge had linked to a story about rising electricity costs, I read it and found that, as I expected, environmentalist regulations have quite a bit to do with the problem:

The increase reflects higher fuel prices and the expense of replacing old power plants, including heavily polluting -- but cheap to operate -- coal plants that don't meet federal clean air requirements.

And don't forget that environmentalists have kept us from taking advantage of a "clean" alternative, nuclear energy, for decades, now, not that building a plant any time soon would be feasible -- again, due to such required red tape as environmental impact studies and the omnipresent threat of litigation made possible by a court system more intent on redistributing wealth or dictating its use than on protecting the individual right to property.

None of this is really news to anyone who has followed this blog, but it occurred to me that another tentacle of the Big Government Octopus is intimately involved, to wit:

Residential demand for power dropped briefly in 2009 but rebounded strongly last year to a record high. Air-conditioners and household appliances use less power than ever. A new refrigerator consumes half the electricity as a similar one bought in 1990. But consumers have bigger houses, more air-conditioning and more electronics than before, outpacing gains in efficiency and conservation.

How many people nationwide, thanks to the government's practice of "encouraging" home ownership at all costs, live in much larger houses than they can really afford? It is interesting to speculate on how much the artificial, government-produced demand for housing might be contributing to the strain on our utility grid, on top of the government-imposed restraints on the supply of electricity. And the people living in such houses get to pay for more electricity, and at a higher real cost, using inflated dollars.

-- CAV

Early Risers

2011-12-13T04:54:00.000-06:00

It looks like Joseph Kellard, my baby daughter, and I have something in common, at least this morning. With the baby up unusually early, we're all early risers.

Not to engage in one-upsmanship, but ever since Baby Van Horn's arrival, I have shifted to going to bed at 9:00 and waking at 3:00. (Yes. The other three o'clock!) It's really the only way I can have time to think or get various thought-intensive tasks, like blogging, done. (Now and then, I even manage to take a peek at other blogs...) I especially like the following passage:

When I used to live with others, including night owls who watched TV late, getting up early in the morning was always the only opportunity to take advantage of some quiet in the house, which was a tremendous value when I needed to think, write or read. Today I live alone in a studio apartment in a home that almost seems hermetically sealed to sound. It's too good to be true.

I am currently in the process of reevaluating my use of time from top to bottom, and one thing that I've come to enjoy is the half-hour or so I now start with, before doing anything else, to plan my day. In addition to helping me get my bearings, this ritual has turned out to be a nice, quiet, and reflective way to ease myself into the day, with a nice cup of coffee, of course.

-- CAV

--- In Other News ---

Probably one of the most obvious (and annoying) symptoms of scientific and philosophical illiteracy is the confusion of correlation with causation. I'll take pleasure in whipping out these graphs the next time I have to make such a point. Continuing the theme of the main post: Who knew that naming so many babies "Ava" could wreak such havoc?

Via the LinkedIn group for Jean Moroney's Thinking Directions course alumni, I recently encountered "Eight Habits of Highly Productive People", and several other useful articles in a similar vein.

Provocative/Inspirational Quote of the Day: "Remarkable work often comes from making choices when everyone else feels as though there is no choice." -- Seth Godin, via John Cook, who also points to some interesting-looking reading about choice by Venkatesh Rao.

Updates

12-16-11: Corrected a typo.

Sowell's Latest Book

2011-12-12T04:12:00.001-06:00

Via the following quote, Arts and Letters Daily led me to a piece in Commentary that reminded me of what an enjoyable writer Thomas Sowell is:

If a mad scientist were to repair to his laboratory to design a machine that would make white liberals uncomfortable, that machine would be Thomas Sowell...

True, and quite amusing, but the article put me off a little bit by accounting for this discomfort by painting Sowell as a consummate "nerd". I suppose, but despite the sympathetic use of the term, its shallowness tends to distract (and detract) from the very things I find most engaging about Sowell's body of work: the honesty and first-handedness with which he approaches the issues he writes about, and the broadness of his interests. These are both virtues, and not mere personality quirks.

Fortunately, the article succeeds in giving the reader a taste of both. The above quote continues:

... whose input is data and whose output is socioeconomic criticism in several grades, ranging from bemused observation to thorough debunking to high-test scorn -- all of which are represented in The Thomas Sowell Reader (Basic Books, 404 pages).

Starting off by noting Sowell's rare -- for a modern intellectual -- plain-spoken-ness, the article continues by looking at some of the writing he has done about his other interests:

[U]nder the heading of “Social Issues” in the Reader, ... the essay is "'Dead Ball' Versus 'Lively Ball'." Baseballologists will be familiar with the debate: Relatively few home runs were hit before 1920, after which the number grew very quickly. Legend has it that the Powers That Be in MLB introduced a so-called lively ball in 1920, hoping to produce a crop of exciting new home-run hitters to distract the public from the recent scandal of the Chicago "Black Sox," who had fixed the 1919 World Series. "Denials by baseball officials that the ball had been changed have been dismissed out of hand," Sowell writes, "in view of the dramatic and apparently otherwise inexplicable changes in the number of home runs hit in the 1920s and thereafter."

Sowell, as is his habit, does not accept the orthodoxy, in baseball or in politics. He goes to the data: How did specific hitters perform before and after the putative introduction of the lively ball? Did Ty Cobb and Joe Jackson start hitting more home runs? What do the statistics say? ...

Sowell's answer is that in baseball, as in economics, culture matters. In this case, the culture of baseball seems to have been changed by the phenomenon of Babe Ruth, whose home-run-hitting prowess made him a baseball demigod. Batting styles changed. "Gross numbers may suggest a change in the ball," Sowell writes, "but a finer breakdown of the statistics indicates a change in the batters." [links dropped]

I remember this wide-ranging exploration from my readings of several of Sowell's other books, most recently Black Rednecks and White Liberals a few years ago. Although I do not follow baseball closely, I have read about this controversy and like Sowell's approach to the question.

Having recently settled on an ebook reader, I'm sure, after this review, that this is one book that will land on it. Incidentally, Sowell himself makes some other intriguing reading suggestions in a recent column.

-- CAV

12-10-11 Hodgepodge

2011-12-10T05:03:00.001-06:00

Charlotte vs. OWS

The city of Charlotte, North Carolina, which will be hosting next year's Democratic Convention, is enacting ordinances to keep OWS protestors at bay.

.... The North Carolina city, sometimes called the "Wall Street of the South," is not taking any chances, and is already working to pass an ordinance that would make occupying downtown spaces with tents a "public nuisance," in addition to banning "noxious substances," padlocks, and other camping equipment. The fact that it would knock out the city's current overnight demonstrators is an added bonus.

Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx said dubiously last month that the rule, which could be enacted in January, is not aimed at a specific group. "Unlike many cities that have well-developed regulations governing protest activity, our local regulations contain gaps that need to be filled," he said. But a memo about the ordinance does note, "The recent issues related to camping on city property have further amplified the need to review whether the city wants to regulate this activity during the DNC." A city councilman added of the current Occupy Charlotte faction, "Once those ordinances go into effect, those overnight stays will end."

Note that, of these measures, (1) only (perhaps) the proposed nuisance ordinance would exist in a truly capitalist society; and (2) none of the others would be needed were all property private, and trespassing were consistently treated like the crime that it is. As with an annoying union protest, on the sidewalks and streets in front of a hotel, I've had to walk past daily for over two weeks, this story reminds me that the streets would be far cleaner in a capitalist society.

Score this one a victory for the anti-freedom, anti-property OWS movement, as unintuitive as that might sound to many, including the impudent squatters themselves.

Weekend Reading

"But what is capitalism, exactly? How do we know it when we see it or have it -- or when we haven't, or don't?" -- Richard Salsman, in "Capitalism Isn't Corporatism or Cronyism", at Forbes

"Although never actually pursued under President Bush, the principles of private property, free trade and individual choice implied in The Ownership Society would remedy the economy in a way no other stimulus can." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Bring Back the Ownership Society", at SmartMoney

"Some of us have a hard time receiving criticism because we automatically take it personally." -- Michael Hurd, in "Don't Take It Personally!", at DrHurd.com

Two Perspectives on Apple

I have long been ambivalent about Apple products, having a high degree of respect for the quality and aesthetics of the hardware, but too much annoyance with the user interfaces of its software to ever seriously consider switching over. (I also strongly object to vendor lock-in.) Two articles I ran into recently have helped me better understand both the "love" and the "hate".

First, one writer argues that Apple's hardware design is good at essentializing:

Apple never designed the iPad. Instead, they undesigned it by creating the simplest shape possible. The iPad is the core essence of what a tablet *can* look like.

Apple is really good at this. Look at the Cinema Display, the Apple wireless keyboard, the Macbook Air, the iPod, and all their other devices. The reason why their "design" is so successful is because they are not actually designing their products. They are reducing them to the simplest form possible.

It is beauty through simplicity.

The writer's main thrust is an argument that Apple shouldn't be able to get legal protection for its iPad design. He raises interesting points, but I'm not sure I agree with him.

Regarding the "hate" (which extends to aspects of Windows and relates to my preference for Linux), another writer has finally identified the aspect of modern GUIs that puts me off:

Growing up I was always very small for my age. I didn't mind the size ("the bigger they are, the harder they fall!" was my rallying cry), but I hated being thought of as younger than I was, be it in physical or intellectual capabilities. When you're a knowledge sponge as a kid, the first time someone tells you something, it feels amazing, and you love that person. The second time someone tells you the same fact, it's pure torture. "I know this already, I'm not an idiot! Sheesh."

My problem with many modern UIs is that they never get past the telling phase. They're always dressing up their various functions with glows and bevels and curves, and in the process they somehow become overbearing to my senses. "Did you know you can click this? ...

Related to this tendency is skeuomorphism, the use of familiar metaphors in computing interfaces to permit non-computing people to use computers easily. I think the practice does help sell lots of computers, but I agree with Paul Miller and Andy Mangold that it doesn't always help that much, and can even get in the way of productive work.

Praising the Good

While I'm dumping computing links, I might as well end on a good note. As a very satisfied Dropbox user, I pass along what Scott Hanselman calls a "good [user experience] in the wild":

We need to continue to push ourselves and our work groups to implement ideas that we know are right. We need to advocate for the Customer and always try to see things from their experience. I don't know anyone at Dropbox but I think it's a fair guess that not only did they have the will to implement this friendly download feature, but they also knew it was the right kind of attention to detail that their customers needed. What a nice, almost subliminal way to kick off your relationship with your users than a subtly customized download page.

I didn't have to use this feature myself, but the degree of thoughtfulness Hanselman discusses extends throughout my user experience with Dropbox.

-- CAV

How to Cover a Baby Bjorn

2011-12-09T04:10:00.001-06:00

Editor's Note: I am, in fact, a very satisfied Baby Bjorn customer and do appreciate the fact that pictorial instructions save money. Nevertheless, I feel entitled to have some good-natured fun with this. That said, I highly recommend the carrier and the cover. What's really odd is that, looking over the instructions without time pressure or being distracted by the baby (but still, after having assembled things properly), they seem borderline obvious, now! Perhaps the moral of the story is something like, "Assemble new baby gear as a sort of 'playtime activity', and not just before you need to use it."

1. Receive text from wife on way to work: "VERY COLD!! Cold strong winds. Maybe use baby Bjorn bunting. It's on table."

2. Think, "Hmmm. I meant to look at that when it arrived, but how hard can using a slip cover really be?"

3. Get baby dressed for morning stroller walk, being sure to put on socks snugly, due to the cold.

4. Put baby in ExerSaucer.

5. Get self ready for morning stroller walk.

6. Consult to-do list for any morning errands.

7. Recall that art studio is garden level, and has no elevator.

8. Pick up very cranky baby.

9. Remove pants and socks from baby, who gets too hot easily, like her old man.

10. Rock baby to sleep.

11. With baby on chest and netbook in lap, get about an hour's worth of work done on side project.

12. Feed baby.

13. Put pants and socks on baby.

14. Place baby in crib.

15. "Saddle up", by strapping Baby Bjorn most of the way on. Glance at picture on box. Think, "This should take about five seconds."

16. Put right sock back on baby.

17. Strap baby in.

18. Remove cover from box, roll eyes at "hieroglyphic" pictorial instructions.

19. Put right sock back on baby.

20. Realize that hood needs to be detached from cover, or it will cover baby's face.

21. Detach hood.

22. Discover that cover is too short by attempting to slip cover onto baby, as suggested by picture on box and common sense.

23. Put left sock back on baby.

24. Remove cover from baby and Bjorn.

25. Attempt to decipher hieroglypics.

26. Discover that there are two small slits in cover for straps on Bjorn. Also, conclude that cover orientation was wrong, and that cover must be strapped onto Bjorn first.

27. Place baby in crib.

28. Remove Baby Bjorn.

29. Unfastening and refastening the appropriate straps, install cover on Baby Bjorn.

30. Change baby's diaper and put pants back on.

31. Saddle up.

32. Find socks.

33. Put socks on baby.

34. Discover that cover, as installed, will not cover baby by saddling up and attempting to place baby in Bjorn-cover assembly.

35. Place baby in crib.

36. Put right sock on baby.

37. Unsaddle, and take cover off of Baby Bjorn.

38. Attempt to use picture on box as Rosetta Stone for hieroglyphic instructions on Baby Bjorn cover.

39. Install cover on Baby Bjorn in correct orientation and saddle up.

40. Hastily conclude that cover is too short by attempting to slip cover onto baby, as suggested by picture on box, knowledge of slit locations, and common sense.

41. Place baby in crib, unsaddle, and take cover off Baby Bjorn.

42. Put left sock on slightly cranky baby.

43. Turn on computer monitor across room so screen saver can mesmerize baby.

44. Realize that cover goes on after saddling up, but before last two straps holding baby in carrier are fastened by doing a slightly better Champollion impression.

45. Saddle up.

46. Put socks on baby.

47. Put baby in Baby Bjorn, except for last strap.

48. Slip last strap into cover and fasten.

49. Slip cover over baby and Baby Bjorn.

50. Unfasten corresponding strap on other side, slip it through its slit, and re-fasten.

51. In parallel with the next three steps, solve mildly interesting topology problem en route to snapping hood onto cover in the opposite orientation to that in which it shipped, and by pairing the following snaps together: hood snap 4 with cover snap 2, hood snap 3 with cover snap 1, hood snap 1 with cover snap 3, and hood snap 2 with cover snap 4.

52. Notice that baby is getting hot and cranky.

53. Consider putting off run to art store and doing carriage stroll instead.

54. Think, "What the hell? If she's still complaining by the time I get outside, I'll do that."

55. Go outside and see that baby is fine.

56. Formulate "Van Horn's Weather Codicil to Murphy's Law": "You never get a stiff wind, unless you really don't want or need one."

57. Take subway for one stop rather than hiking to art store.

58. Realize on platform that the walk would have been quicker.

59. Go to art store.

60. Take not being flash frozen over saving time and wait on subway again.

61. Make mental note to check cover for socks after removing it from baby at home.

62. Remove cover from baby and Baby Bjorn.

63. Place baby in crib.

64. Unsaddle.

65. Take pants off baby.

66. Take socks off baby.

-- CAV

Rickover on Humble Pie

2011-12-08T03:27:00.001-06:00

Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, who brought the numerous advantages of nuclear propulsion to the United States Navy, had the following to say, among many other valuable job-related insights, about the value of admission -- the first stage of correcting a major error:

It is a human inclination to hope things will work out, despite evidence or doubt to the contrary. A successful manager must resist this temptation. This is particularly hard if one has invested much time and energy on a project and thus has come to feel possessive about it. Although it is not easy to admit what a person once thought correct now appears to be wrong, one must discipline himself to face the facts objectively and make the necessary changes - regardless of the consequences to himself. The man in charge must personally set the example in this respect. He must be able, in effect, to "kill his own child" if necessary and must require his subordinates to do likewise. I have had to go to Congress and, because of technical problems, recommend terminating a project that had been funded largely on my say-so. It is not a pleasant task, but one must be brutally objective in his work.

Rickover thought he had a good idea, but learned that he was wrong. He had the good sense to admit as much, rather than obstinately stick to his guns, or double down on what he had come to realize was actually a folly.

Many people in our culture would mistakenly accuse someone who failed to do what Rickover did of being too "proud" to admit his error, but that is exactly the opposite of the problem. This is most easily grasped by taking the use of pride in the idiom, "pride in a job well done", as being closer to the true meaning of pride than the arrogance or putting-on-of-airs too commonly (and wrongly) associated with that virtue.

-- CAV

--- In Other News ---

I can't use Item 4 on the list, but this list of the Top Ten Slate Readers' Best Ideas for Starting a Business or Reinventing a Career is worthwhile. Item 5 is, for example, the idea of "market disruption" applied to the individual level.

Alan Greenspan's betrayal of capitalism has, fortunately, not made it impossible for people to "trust a Randian banker". Thank you, Mr. Allison!

I already had the flashlight when I ran into this list of free apps that can "turn your [Android] device into a digital toolbox".

Beyond Evasion?

2011-12-07T05:10:00.001-06:00

Writing at Slate, Katie Roiphe, herself a victim of statutory rape, takes as her point of departure the question of whether the New York Times was wrong to interview Jerry Sandusky, the former Penn State assistant coach who stands accused of numerous instances of sexual abuse of boys and adolescent men. Roiphe doesn't really address the question on ethical or political grounds, but she does demonstrate that, in her words, "the interview is valuable and certainly news."

Specifically, the interview shows just how far a sustained habit of evasion can shape someone, psychologically, even to the point of helping someone get away with horrible crimes for quite a long time.

At one point in the interview, he says, "In my mind, there wasn't inappropriate behavior." And one gets the sense that on some crazy level that may well have been true: In his mind, he may not have been abusing little boys. This is striking because if there is any story that the rest of the world sees in black and white, it is this one. There does not seem to be any moral ambiguity, any subtle shading toward gray, and yet to the child molester himself he may have done nothing wrong. Father Bruce Ritter, for instance, founded Covenant House in the '70s to shelter runaways and homeless kids, whom he claimed to be rescuing from a life of prostitution. Over a dozen of these kids later accused him of sexual improprieties. Sandusky may also believe that he was helping the boys from his organization, the Second Mile -- that he was devoting his energy to save them.

...

Likewise Sandusky says: "They've taken everything that I ever did and twisted it to say that my motives were sexual or whatever." He may, in truth, not believe that his motives were sexual; he may believe, like many pedophiles, that the physical relation flowed naturally or organically from the situation, from his fatherly affection for these boys. He says that the physical part of the relationships "just happened that way," as if he were not the active, dominant, responsible adult; his syntax itself transforming him into a passive participant, into someone just going along with things. It's fascinating to watch in action this trick of the mind, this way the mind makes a man bearable to himself.

...

If the pedophile actually believes that he is exceptional, that the sexual act he is engaged in is not a violation, that the ordinary world cannot understand the purity and exquisiteness of his motives, this does not make him less terrible or disturbing. (It may, in fact, make him more terrible and disturbing.) It does, however, explain a little how these men are not caught, or caught sooner, and how they create around themselves so effective and convincing an aura of innocence and good intentions. The best liars, of course, believe their own lies.

Be that as it may, even the psychological self-destruction caused by this astounding degree of evasion doesn't exempt someone like this from culpability. Assuming guilt, if Sandusky were unaware that what he did was considered a crime, he wouldn't have felt the need to conceal his actions. Conversely, Sandusky could have abstained from such acts entirely and attempted to make the case, as incorrect as that would be, that the law should be changed. (In the process of the latter, he might have discovered why, on a moral level, it is as wrong to have sex with minors as it is with non-consenting adults.)

The self-inflicted psychological problems of someone this evasive notwithstanding, men have free will: That is, they have the choice to face reality or not, and since there are no contradictions in reality, that choice is always there, on some level. The very fact that a serial child molester covers up what he does demonstrates that he knows, and always has, the following, at bare minimum: It is illegal to have sex with people under the legal age of consent. That fact alone raises a whole host of issues that such a person must actively choose to ignore. A warped psychology may make it easier to do so, and to get away with the crimes, but it doesn't excuse the crimes or the evasion at all.

-- CAV

Wrong Question

2011-12-06T03:30:00.001-06:00

Matt Drudge links to a news story about what could be a series of covert military attacks against Iran, and whose headline is, "Has the War with Iran Already Begun?" The headline borders on sensationalism in this day and age, with its pacifistic -- and misplaced -- concern for civilian casualties during war. (The blame for all casualties a country fights in a war of self-defense lies with the aggressor.) However, this headline is anything but perspicacious. Iran started a war against the United States when it stormed our embassy and took hostages over thirty years ago, and invited war long before that, when it nationalized the oil fields of British and American countries sixty years ago.

Were it true that America is fighting back, the proper headline would be more like, "It's About [insert expletive here] Time!" However, I would find such a headline premature, absent an unequivocal condemnation of Iran, a declaration of war, and something quite a bit more impressive than the kinds of pinprick strikes that will leave its evil regime in place, undeterred, and able -- in any way, shape, or form -- to continue waging its barbaric war against the West.

What the headline ought to ask is this: "Why Beat Around the Bush?" As Ayn Rand once indicated, we have had the right to invade Iran for decades.

Dictatorship nations are outlaws. Any free nation had the right to invadeNazi Germany and, today, has the right to invade Soviet Russia, Cuba or anyother slave pen. Whether a free nation chooses to do so or not is a matter ofits own self-interest, not of respect for the non-existent "rights" of gangrulers. It is not a free nation's duty to liberate other nations at the priceof self-sacrifice, but a free nation has the right to do it, when and if it sochooses.

And, yes, we have ample reasons, related to our national self-interest, to do just that.

Sadly, our current administration, like the one before it, does not regard national self-interest as a legitimate reason to exercise its military might, which could lay waste to any Middle Eastern "power" in a very short time.

Stay tuned for wishful official "intelligence estimates" that Iran hasn't enough nuclear capability to do anything sufficient to outrage the West -- what would that take, anyway? -- and more of the same raving denouncements of America and earnest preparations for war by the Medieval barbarians of modern Persia.

-- CAV

--- In Other News ---

Right Target, Wrong Reason: OWS squatters have come to Washington, but are still making redistributionist demands. Given their propensity to use the ground as a latrine, the first image in this pictorial, of copies of the U. S. Constitution lying on the ground, is unintentionally apropos.

Farhad Manjoo makes part of a case that needs to be made against modern culture when he notes that, "You're as much to blame for Facebook's privacy woes as Mark Zuckerberg." I agree with his pithy advice to apply a sort of bedroom window test to anything you may contemplate posting there. And this beer cozy might help, too!

Clint Dempey's lone goal yesterday was the difference as Fulham beat Liverpool, and with it, he broke Brian McBride's record as the highest-scoring American player in the EPL.

Updates

12-7-11: Corrected a typo.

One Missing "If"

2011-12-05T04:48:00.001-06:00

Reacting to the latest embarrassing release of emails among climate scientists, a writer at the Orange County Register notes the flimsiness of their "scientific" case:

What they have is a theory that things are getting warmer, which may or may not be true. Then they take a leap in logic that says things will continue to get much warmer, even though the purported cause of this warmth, greenhouse gas emissions, have escalated for 15 years while temperatures have remained flat or even declined.

Then they take another leap that presumes warming is harmful, even though it makes growing crops easier, and life less expensive in cold places, and more CO2 in the atmosphere is a boon to agriculture. Then they presume man can reverse all of this by using windmills and solar panels, which no one will buy unless someone else subsidizes them, and even then must be backed up with conventional, C02-emitting energy plants for when the sun doesn't shine and wind doesn't blow.

This is a chain of so many "ifs" it's amazing so many people have bought in to it. Until, of course, they are asked to sacrifice their own prosperity and comfort. Then, as they are discovering in Durban, that's enough of this nonsense.

These criticisms are all well and good, and Mark Landsbaum could have gone even further about the tenuousness of the theory behind anthropogenic global warming. Even if he had, though, he would not have gone far enough. To wit:

If the economy improves, decision-makers and the public will should use real science to decide whether mankind is superheating the Earth. And if so, what, if anything can or should be done about it. We hope someone will suggest weighing costs against presumed benefits.

The one thing practically nobody is questioning remains why (and really, by what right) the government should be in charge of "doing something" about AGW at all, presuming it were happening. There is no rational moral argument for the government to do so, and the proposal is highly impractical, as well.

The government can't know what is best for millions of individuals and it shouldn't deprive them of the property and liberty they need to promote their own lives and pursue their own happiness according to their best judgement. Perhaps the economy will improve, by finally becoming less centrally-planned, if people begin to realize that in time. By then, the threat of massive growth in central planning excused by AGW will be impossible to resurrect.

-- CAV

12-3-11 Hodgepodge

2011-12-03T04:26:00.001-06:00

Well, we're back in Boston from a combined Thanksgiving break/round of baby-related family visits. (Hmmm. Is anything for me really not baby-related anymore?) I'm running on fumes and the baby is completely off-schedule after yesterday's cross-country flight from the West Coast, so I'm going to make an abbreviated weekend post and leave it at that.

As of this moment, I'm debating between crawling back into bed or catching up on non-blogging matters once I hit "publish"...

Weekend Reading

"There's no egalitarianism in economics." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Not All Stock Trades Are Equal" at SmartMoney

"[W]hy should she trust you, knowing that you condoned and participated in [an affair]?" -- Michael Hurd, in "Is All Fair in Love?" at DrHurd.com

"Conservatives should grow up, cease their promiscuity in the GOP primaries, and take Article VI [of the Constitution] seriously." -- Richard Salsman, in "GOP Conservatives -- Not Romney -- Are the Real Flip-Floppers" at Forbes

"Despite this seeming contradiction, in both cases the government is really saying, 'We'll decide who can do what with your body.'" -- Paul Hsieh, in "Screening for Terrorists vs. Screening for Cancer" at PJ Media

My Two Cents

Reading the above columns makes me unable to resist adding a couple more comments. (1) Michael Hurd offers the best answer I have ever seen to what has to be a painful dilemma. (2) I regard Richard Salsman's piece as required reading for anyone considering whether Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney would be a preferable opponent to Barack Obama in 2012. For one thing, Salsman does an excellent job of explaining how atrocious Gingrich really is. For another, he is the first person to make me regard Romney as palatable in any way.

-- CAV

Updates

12-7-11: Corrected a typo.

Friday Four

2011-12-02T07:57:00.001-06:00

1. Sometimes, the best advice comes from those who have to fight against their own limitations to see what it is that seems to come naturally to many others. David Finch tells us how to give great Christmas gifts -- something he had to think about explicitly due to his "Asperger's-induced empathy deficit".

2. If -- among many other possibilities -- you like your TiVo, your Android smart phone or iPhone, or, in most cases, the non-Windows OS on your main computer, you are directly benefiting from "The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix" on a daily basis. I especially enjoyed reading about how early developers figured out how to get their bosses to sign off on developing their ideas despite the cancellation of a similar project earlier:

So [Ken] Thompson and [Dennis] Ritchie got creative. They formulated a proposal to their bosses to buy one of DEC's newer minicomputers, a PDP-11, but couched the request in especially palatable terms. They said they were aiming to create tools for editing and formatting text, what you might call a word-processing system today. The fact that they would also have to write an operating system for the new machine to support the editor and text formatter was almost a footnote.

Dennis Ritchie, who recently died, is, incidentally,the creator of the C computer language, so don't forget to thank him for the Internet (scroll down), as well.

3. The title sounds subjectivist, but the lesson, to account for the context of individual differences when offering advice to individuals, is anything but. Marco Arment, a recovering Mac fan-boy, has finally realized that, in some contexts, "Whatever Works for You", is actually legitimate advice. Drawing from somewhat similar experiences of my own, I will note that full recovery is marked by the realization, one day, that the kinds of choices others make that one once found irritating no longer annoy.

4. This browser start page serves as a nice reminder to focus when using the Internet.

-- CAV

On Being "In the Know"

2011-12-01T07:03:00.001-06:00

When I was young, I would sometimes encounter ads in such popular publications as comic books, Reader's Digest, or The National Enquirer that purported to help people achieve some type of goal by means of special knowledge that not everyone is privy to. Usually, these would have titles like, "Advice Your Stockbroker Doesn't Want You to Hear," or, "Score with Women Using Lance Conway's Exclusive Seduction Method."

You get the idea: It's not just that someone can benefit from learning specialized knowledge, but that this knowledge is, in some way, impossible for ordinary mortals to obtain without special insight -- or access to someone with such insight. One way to begin seeing that this un-integrated view of knowledge is wrong, at least regarding financial advice, is to ask a question like this: "If this guy is making such a killing, why is he wasting his valuable time giving seminars?"

It is no accident that the publications that carry such ads also feature a heaping helping of ads that look even more blatantly ridiculous, at least to an active mind. The fact is that it doesn't take psychic powers to see why a self-proclaimed psychic would feel the need to advertise in media consumed by people who don't really understand what knowledge is, or how to acquire it. Absent rational epistemological standards, the only alternative a mark -- I mean, a customer -- will see is uncertainty about everything vs. (essentially) mystical insight. Such minds are non-conceptual, and, therefore, not in the habit of checking claims against reality. Not all such ads are explicitly mystical, nor are most people consistent mystics, but that is the view of knowledge that infects the thinking of so many, and makes it possible for people to generate an income by pretending to know things.

An interesting article about the "mental gymnastics" required of someone with a high security clearance reminded me of those kinds of ads and the view of knowledge they embody and depend upon. There are some grains of truth to the article -- I would imagine that one would have to be on guard against arrogance, and ever-mindful of keeping secrets, for example. However, I disagree that having a high security clearance would necessarily lead one to adopt all of the attitudes the article implies.

That said, here is what reminded me of all those psychic ads I used to see:

In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to learn from anybody who doesn't have these clearances. Because you'll be thinking as you listen to them: "What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?" And that mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I've seen this with my superiors, my colleagues....and with myself.

... You'll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you'll become something like a moron. You'll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.

The author identifies a danger associated with having actual, concrete knowledge that others don't have, and becoming tired of the constant necessity of checking possible new knowledge against what one already knows. That's bad enough, but consider how dangerous this tendency could be to someone who only thinks he knows something and hasn't a well-developed habit of checking new information. Such a person will be even less likely to avail himself of the knowledge of others, however imperfect or incomplete. (Let me emphasize that this is not to say that just anyone is worth listening to.) As other passages from the story indicate, what those with high security clearances hear about isn't always true. In other words, succumbing to the arrogant, mystical-looking (to me) attitude that knowing something others don't impugns anything they might say only further entrenches any errors one might have made.

Whether someone willfully adopts a mystical view of knowledge or slips into functioning as if all knowledge isn't interrelated and accessible to all men, the end result is the same: He may think he is "in the know", but he increasingly doesn't really know what he's talking about.

-- CAV

Voter Discrimination in Guam?

2011-11-30T08:51:00.001-06:00

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"?

2011-11-29T08:08:00.001-06:00

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

2011-11-26T05:37:00.001-06:00

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

2011-11-23T04:18:00.001-06:00

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

2011-11-22T03:44:00.001-06:00

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

2011-11-21T04:05:00.001-06:00

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

2011-11-19T03:03:00.000-06:00

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

2011-11-18T03:59:00.001-06:00

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

Furedi on "Transparency"

2011-11-17T04:17:00.001-06:00

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

2011-11-16T03:58:00.001-06:00

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

2011-11-15T04:03:00.001-06:00

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

2011-11-14T04:15:00.001-06:00

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

2011-11-12T03:00:00.000-06:00

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

2011-11-11T03:59:00.001-06:00

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"

2011-11-10T04:13:00.001-06:00

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.

2011-11-09T04:48:00.003-06:00

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.

Creative Problem Solving
Shifting Your Perspective on a Problem
Directing Thinking and Debate
Education and Leadership
Creating Conversation and Empathy
Critical Thinking
Shifting Your Focus
Inspiration, Goal Setting and Action
Self-Reflection
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

2011-11-08T05:44:00.000-06:00

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, andmissteps 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

2011-11-07T04:14:00.001-06:00

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

2011-11-05T03:05:00.000-06:00

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

2011-11-04T03:33:00.000-06:00

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

2011-11-03T04:16:00.002-06:00

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

2011-11-02T04:26:00.000-06:00

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

2011-11-01T04:11:00.000-06:00

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 contradictioninto 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 outof context, i.e., apart from or against the total, integrated sum of one’sknowledge." 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

Perry: Down, Not Out

2011-10-31T03:30:00.002-06:00

Over at Slate, political handicapper John Dickerson questions the conventional wisdom that Rick Perry was positioning his campaign for a "scorched-earth campaign" against Mitt Romney when he recently brought in some new campaign advisors, and concludes that Perry likely has something else in mind:

In the 2008 Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton and her campaign tried to take down Barack Obama by saying it was "time to pick a president." In other words: End your dalliance with the person who makes you feel good and start thinking about who has the attributes necessary to handle the job. That didn't work for her, but the non-Cain candidates hope a version of that same mindset will eventually kick in and give voters second thoughts about Cain.

When that moment comes, a candidate like Perry has to be ready. Right now he's got some work to do. In that same focus group, when attendees were asked to compare Perry to a character from fifth grade, they said "bully." (If only they'd meant it the way Teddy Roosevelt did.)

I think Dickerson's reasoning is sound, except he may have a tin ear for what a closer examination of Perry's record as a religious statist might sound like to the Tea Party. For example, Dickerson thinks Perry should play up his record of legislating Christian morality.

Of course, since this is the GOP, such a problem might not stand out against the other candidates, or for an electorate that does not see the conflict between religion and our secular state. This would mean that, unfortunately, Dickerson's error would be rendered moot.

-- CAV

--- In Other News ---

Dave Kellog on the "joys" of both being a contrarian and being correct, when almost everyone else around you is wrong:

[B]eing a naysayer isn't fun work: for three years you sound like a whining, doubting-Thomas constantly on the back foot, constantly playing defense and then one day you're proven right. But there's no joy in it. And the naysaying doesn't help sell newspapers so you don't get much press coverage. And, in the end, all people remember is that "MicroStrategy was pretty cool back in the day" and "Dave's a grump."

Three cheers for those to whom truth is dearer than mere popularity!

Are the 2011-2012 Indianapolis Colts an eloquent, if very ugly, testimony to the greatness of Peyton Manning? Sports writer Bob Kravitz thinks so: "Dear Peyton: Every criticism I've leveled at you, I take it all back. It's now apparent you've been carrying a terrible team on your back for all those years."

Oh, great. Microsoft seems to have figured out a cute way to make it more difficult to install Linux on new computers. I am behind all efforts to persuade hardware vendors to make it easy to choose my own operating system, but will be vehemently opposed to any effort to coerce them (or Microsoft) to do so. There is a right to choose an operating system, but not to force someone else to make that choice easy (or even possible) for me.

10-29-11 Hodgepodge

2011-10-29T03:08:00.000-06:00

Yes, but ...

Judging by my In-box, an old chain email purporting to offer easy, life-saving advice has either made a comeback, or it never really went away. Regarding cough CPR, Snopes.com offers the following caveat:

If you knew exactly what you were doing, this procedure might help save your life. If, however, you were to attempt cough CPR at the wrong time (because you misjudged the kind of cardiac event being experienced) or went about it in the wrong way, it could make matters worse.

Here's some potentially life-saving advice: View all unsolicited medical tips, particularly from laymen, skeptically. Even advice that is good under some circumstances can be very bad when misapplied due to incomplete knowledge. The life you save or improve may be your own.

Weekend Reading

"When we dress up, we have the chance to 'act out' parts of ourselves that we normally keep private." -- Michael Hurd, in "The Psychology of Disguise", at DrHurd.com

"As protestors finally confront the corporations they so vehemently despise, their supposed enemies are revealed not as oppressors, but as everyday people; bar patrons, bank tellers, and restaurateurs each engaging in voluntary trade." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "In Defense of Corporations", at SmartMoney

My Two Cents

Hoenig's observations, along with the story below, make me almost glad the OWS protests are happening -- and getting so much undeserved media coverage.

OWS: No Freeloaders (!)

The OWS kitchen staff misses or scorns an opportunity to achieve real intellectual growth.

The Occupy Wall Street volunteer kitchen staff launched a "counter" revolution yesterday -- because they’re angry about working 18-hour days to provide food for "professional homeless" people and ex-cons masquerading as protesters.

For three days beginning tomorrow, the cooks will serve only brown rice and other spartan grub instead of the usual menu of organic chicken and vegetables, spaghetti bolognese, and roasted beet and sheep's-milk-cheese salad.

They will also provide directions to local soup kitchens for the vagrants, criminals and other freeloaders who have been descending on Zuccotti Park in increasing numbers every day. [link dropped]

If, as Ayn Rand once put it, "He who fights for the future lives in it today," these OWS protestors have just unwittingly issued a scathing indictment of their own cause.

-- CAV

Friday Four

2011-10-28T04:07:00.001-06:00

Watching The League is an order of magnitude funnier when your baby daughter is sleeping on your chest and you don't want to wake her. In fact, I'd say it's about as close to cutting up behind the nuns' backs in Catholic grade school as I've ever been since.

You're wallet's about to get thinner, again (but in a good way): Google has come up with a loyalty punchcard app that I hope businesses with loyalty punchcard programs will support. As a big fan of thin wallets, I already use an All-Ett and already have all my scannable loyalty cards on my phone in CardStar.

Over email some time back, Snedcat pointed me to a bizarre and strangely intriguing -- yet somewhat educational -- interview with Noam Chomsky, saying, "It's ironic that all the hip young hipsters worship such an utter square." Money quote from interviewer Jeff Jetton: "[T]he man has none of the animation, the expression that you'd expect from someone so closely affiliated with the field of linguistics." Money quote from Chomsky, in response to the question of whether he is a foodie: "Am I a… ? Meaning?" "Square" isn't the half of it: They should have titled this, "Interview with a Zombie."

My favorite English Premier League team, Arsenal, seems to be recovering from a horrendous start to its season, but this weekend's match against Chelsea will be a gut check at the very least. Curious at some point about why manager Arsène Wenger never really was on the hot seat, I read about him and learned that he's the "idol" of Billy Beane, of Moneyball fame, who admires his ability to recognize and build on under-appreciated talent.

A notable example was the purchase of Nicolas Anelka from Paris Saint-Germain for only £500,000 and his subsequent sale to Real Madrid just two years later for £23.5 million. This enabled Wenger to buy three players, Thierry Henry, Robert Pirès, and Sylvain Wiltord, who all played significant roles for the first team in the early 2000s. The sale also helped the club fund [its] new training centre at London Colney. [hyperlinks and footnotes removed]

Moneyball has, incidentally, been made into a movie, and at least two HBLers have strongly recommended it, one despite not being a baseball fan.

-- CAV

The Bullies in Charge

2011-10-27T03:49:00.000-06:00

Thomas Sowell notes that the current crusade against bullying in government schools fails to live up to its name, even under cursory examination:

The current media and political crusade against "bullying" in schools seems likewise to be based on what groups are in vogue at the moment. For years, there have been local newspaper stories about black kids in schools in New York and Philadelphia beating up Asian classmates, some beaten so badly as to require medical treatment.

But the national media hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil. Asian Americans are not in vogue today, just as blacks were not in vogue in the 1920s.

Meanwhile, the media are focused on bullying directed against youngsters who are homosexual. Gays are in vogue.

Sowell then goes on to note that, as with other past anti-discrimination policies, the focus of this latest crusade is on speech, and results in restrictions on what members of certain demographic groups can and can not say:

Women can say anything they want to men, or blacks to whites, with impunity. But strong words in the other direction can bring down on students the wrath of the campus thought police -- as well as punishments that can extend to suspension or expulsion.

Is this what we want in our public schools?

I was with Sowell until the last sentence: I think he should be asking, "Do we want government-run schools at all?" For one thing, a socialized educational sector makes parents powerless to take action to protect their own children. For another, government schools are inherently bad at preventing bullying.

Clearly, some "public" government schools fail miserably to prevent even the worst kinds of bullying, and so will some private schools. But, unlike today's feudal system, in which transferring a student out of a dysfunctional school is nearly impossible (for legal and economic reasons), a fully private educational sector would make any parent better able to withdraw his child from or altogether avoid schools with reputations for such problems.

Worse, and even setting aside the many well-intentioned, but discriminatory anti-discrimination laws we have on the books (which exacerbate this problem), government institutions are inherently bad at policing non-criminal behavior that may, in certain contexts, be objectionable. This is because the sole proper purpose of a government is to protect individual rights, which include freedom of speech, as Sowell notes.

In a fully private educational system, a school might properly decide to punish children for using epithets as insults or intimidation, since such behavior would detract from its mission to educate its pupils. Parents, aware of such rules, may judge whether the school is really fostering a good educational environment or is merely attempting to indoctrinate the children, and act accordingly.

But a public school is a government institution, and if it attempts to proscribe or prescribe behavior (outside of, for example, punishing or preventing actual crime), it is necessarily in the position, as a part of the government, of forcing these rules on its pupils (and on parents, whether they agree or disagree with them), and, in the process, violating individual rights. But schools, as educational institutions, clearly have to have some rules. Thus a bad precedent is set by the very fact that the government is running a school and has had to dictate rules from the outset.

Because of this precedent, choices like the following come up: protect Asian students from being beaten up by black students or raise the legitimate specter of Jim Crow by keeping a sharp eye on your black students; and watch out for your gay students or blanket-violate freedom of speech (in the name of having a legally-consistent policy). Such schools are damned-if-they-do and damned-if-they-don't, and which action they take (since the principle of non-initiation of force went out the window from the outset) will be a function of which political pressure group is in power.

Bullying happens any time large numbers of children are gathered together, but the best way to keep it to a minimal level (and train children out of it) is to get the government out of education. In a government education system, with its blurred boundary between proper rules and improper laws, administrators and faculty are placed in the position of bullies. What they do is not guided by proper principles of government or education, and so the best will be hamstrung and the worst unleashed.

-- CAV

The Real Luddites

2011-10-26T04:00:00.001-06:00

David Harsanyi very nicely demonstrates why leftists should try looking in the mirror when they feel the urge to demonize their opponents as "Luddites." Harsanyi takes global warming hysteria as his starting point, looks at the disdain on the part of many Demorcrats for the efficiency that technology brings us akong the way, and ends with the "occupy" squatters:

Luddites on the streets of Manhattan can demonize big oil, big food and big pharma all day long. They can decry profit as if Satan himself invented the notion. Yet when the multinational firm GlaxoSmithKline announces, as it did last week, that it has come up with the first effective vaccine for malaria, you can bet that it would never have happened in the system they propose. And if the vaccine is successful, the company will have done more good for the world than a million marches about the evils of capitalism could ever hope to produce.

What irks Robinson, Matthews and others like them is not that people do not accept "science," but that they won’t accept the statist solutions tied to that science. Moreover, a Luddite opposes capitalism. A skeptic only asks questions.

I like the way he disposes of two leftist non-sequiturs in his last paragraph: The statist solutions don't follow from the science, and disagreements with leftist dicta do not equal a rejection of science or technology.

--- In Other News ---

Via HBL and Amit Ghate are two amusing looks at the "occupy" squatters getting exactly what they deserve. The headline in the second sums it all up pretty well: "The Organizers vs. the Organized." Anyone with even the most tenuous contact with reality ends up becoming "The Man" when he attempts to impose any kind of order, like cleaning up the camps or getting the idiot drummers to stop at night to avoid alienating the very people they're allegedly trying to sway.

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror writes a rather benevolent piece on parenthood. I like his idea that, in a sense, "Children give the first four years of your life back to you."

Here's a cautionary tale about hiring, "How to Hire an Idiot", that applies more broadly to any human relationship, and which I'd summarize in the words of an old boss: "You get what you inspect." "He was a friggin VP of business development for a $100 million company! He must know what he's saying, right?" Judging other people is hard enough without allowing mere credentials to stand in the way of easily-obtainable data.

Updates

Today: Minor edits.

Stalled by Distraction

2011-10-25T05:02:00.000-06:00

The fact that I'm having "one of those mornings" reminds me of a short post I saw over at the Endeavour some time ago, in which John Cook notes that one of the best ways to "handicap intelligence" is "[w]ith interruptions." This is a point I've commented on indirectly before, and it is especially true for projects requiring a great deal of integrative effort, so much so that even a scheduled interruption can sometimes scuttle a day's work.

Regarding the former, Paul Graham once noted:

When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it. [bold added]

And why are the two pieces too small to do anything with? John Cook quotes Graham on that matter:

The danger of a distraction depends not on how long it is, but on how much it scrambles your brain. A programmer can leave the office and go and get a sandwich without losing the code in his head. But the wrong kind of interruption can wipe your brain in 30 seconds.

Distractions and interruptions are inevitable, and sometimes, as Cook notes, even beneficial. Among other things, they can force us to step back for a moment to see a problem from a new perspective, or allow our minds to work on something subconsciously for a while.

My brief reflection on interruptions inspires three nascent, related thoughts that I will, alas, be unable to pursue further at just this moment: (1) I have spoken in the past of "America's collective lobotomization by pragmatism." A mind needs not just the opportunity, but the correct method to function at its best. (2) I agree with Valery Publius that such social media as Twitter aren't to blame for the vacuousness of our current time. In addition, one choice many people make that does cause them to seem (or become) vacuous is to allow themselves to be distracted by such things on a continual basis. (3) Regarding how interruptions impact me, personally, I'm going to have to think back on grad school a bit: I had to work around lots of distractions then, and I'm going to want to start remembering what worked for me, pronto!

-- CAV

P.S. Gus Van Horn Turns Seven: Speaking of dropping the mental ball, today marks my seventh year of blogging. As I said last year:

Although most of my writing here is driven by my own curiosity, knowing that people come here expecting to see something new each day has helped me in a similar way to having a running buddy. So, thank you, regular readers! You have been great running buddies.

In addition to a good number of "regulars," I have had random people from the gamut of occupations -- Starbucks baristas, car salesmen, and entrepreneurs just to name a few -- chime in on discussion threads, always with something germane to add. Thank you, commenters and occasional visitors!

Over the years, this routine has led to my making many new friends and acquaintances, and reviving a few other, older friendships. In the process, I have: received many tips on potentially "blogworthy" material; batted ideas around in interesting email exchanges; and have had lots of advice about things I can also use away from the keyboard, like restaurant recommendations and advice on time management. ... Thank you friends and fellow bloggers!

I'll close by thanking my family for their support. This goes especially for my wife, who puts up with my routine day in and day out, and in very good humor, at that.

Thanks again!

Freedom Poverty

2011-10-24T03:49:00.005-06:00

Forbes contributor Patrick Michaels discusses an interesting phenomenon taking place in Europe: As the worldwide depression continues to worsen, various "green" government schemes are going by the wayside. The whole article is worth reading, but I wish to comment briefly on a couple of points.

First, I think that Michaels misses an opportunity to learn a little bit more from history when he opens with the following:

History ... repeatedly shows that environmental protection is a luxury good. When per-capita income reaches some threshold, the citizenry tire of opaque air and sleazy waters, various agencies and permanent bureaucracies sprout, and, as long as times are good, regulation is good.

...

This all splatters to a halt when economies go south. And the crash can be especially jarring if greenness is one of the causes. Thanks in no small part to the debacle in Europe, in a very few recent weeks, we have witnessed the great green crack-up.

Michaels is right that, in a sense, such regulations are a luxury, but he falls too easily into the trap of giving false credence to the idea that capitalism causes pollution. As a result, he wrongly concedes that such regulations are also, in some sense, a necessity.

Regarding capitalism's assumed deficiencies in the clean air department, Alex Epstein of the Ayn Rand Institute has pointed out that pollution couldn't become such a problem under a system in which property rights are properly defined and protected under the law:

Under a pure capitalist system, as described in philosopher Ayn Rand's works, everything is privately owned. As a consequence, nature is preserved only to the extent that it benefits man. Companies cannot dump waste into rivers at whim, because those rivers are the property of someone else. The same applies to any other form of pollution that is harmful to man -- nobody wants to pollute their own property, and no one is allowed to pollute anyone else's, so waste management is handled in a very clean fashion.

No massive tomes of regulations required; and such "luxuries" as clean air arise in the same way that the entire cornucopia of other capitalist luxuries arise -- as a consequence of men being barred from harming each other, and so free to make (and act on) their best judgement. It is hardly a coincidence that, as I wish Michaels had noted, pollution in the communist world was much worse in many respects than it was in the relatively free non-communist world.

The second point follows from the first. When a government is premised not on protecting individual rights, but on prescribing how people are to act, the misguided crusades of its officialdom can, and often do, become threats to the quality of our lives when they don't threaten our very lives. In this vein, Michaels provides us with an excellent example of a "luxury" we can do without:

Guess what? Electricity prices [due to mandated solar power subsidies (in Britain!)] have gone through the roof. The average U.K. household bill is a tad under $200 per month, and so the thermostat goes down. It’s pretty chilly there for much of the year, and a cold house has consequences. A study just came out today on the health costs of what they call "fuel poverty", commissioned by the Energy and Climate Change Secretary (don't we need one of those?), Chris Huhne. Bottom line: the chill from green taxes is now killing more Brits per year than car crashes. [bold added]

The biggest threat to our environment -- properly understood as the conditions, including freedom, that human beings require to live -- isn't "too much" government, but improper government. (You do need government to enforce property rights, for example.) The "energy poverty" seen in Britain is a real problem, but it is only a symptom of its underlying freedom poverty.

-- CAV

10-22-11 Hodgepodge

2011-10-22T03:21:00.000-06:00

FINO Republicans

Randy Barnett of the Volokh Conspiracy notes an unfortunate strategy taken by some Republicans in their quest for medical malpractice reform (at the moment, via an amendment tacked on to Obama's "jobs" bill).

Barnett first quotes Attorney Carrie Severino:

The law's own justification for its constitutional authority should be chilling to anyone committed to limited federal power. The bill’s findings state that health care and health insurance are industries that "affect interstate commerce," and conclude that Congress therefore has Commerce Clause power to regulate them -- even when it involves an in-state transaction between a doctor and patient, governed by in-state medical malpractice laws. Is there any industry that couldn't be found to have an effect on interstate commerce?

And then, after excerpting the from the amendment itself, Barnett adds, "Senate Republicans are claiming that Congress has power over the judiciary of the states because state courts are an activity that "affect[s] commerce."

In one fell swoop, this amendment would damage part of our system of governmental checks and balances, by threatening the independence of state judiciaries and erode the accidental protection of freedom in some states via "states' rights." (That said, I do not regard "states' rights" as a legitimate concept apart from individual rights.)

Barnett proposes Federalist-in-Name-Only (FINO) Republicans as a label for any Republican who supports such a measure.

Weekend Reading

"This false alternative ... arises from a misplaced confidence in government and the erroneous belief in a fixed quantity of available healthcare resources." -- Beth Haynes, in "False Dichotomy: ObamaCare or Let Them Die" at Townhall

"The FDIC is the single biggest pretext for government interference in the financial sector." -- Wendy Milling, in "Why FAS 166 and 167 Rules Are Wrong" at RealClear Markets

"It might take a little work and some concerted habit-breaking, but self-pity can be eradicated by affirming life and finding reasons to love it." -- Michael Hurd, in "More about Pity and Contempt" at DrHurd.com

"Even experts aren't exempt. When Apple went public, state regulators in Massachusetts, barred individual investors from buying the stock. The subsequent return has been over 15,000%." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "When Ignoring the Herd Pays" at SmartMoney

"Above all, successful entrepreneurship requires a spirit of independence – a willingness and eagerness to see things through one’s own eyes and unique values, to make controversial decisions and take bold actions that less-creative others perpetually doubt, question, or oppose." -- Richard Salsman, in "Steve Jobs and the Money-Making Personality" at Forbes

Calling Their Bluff

Amit Ghate embeds a video of a capitalist picketing one of the various "occupy" squatter camps with a sign advertising employment opportunities. Oddly enough, he is ignored or ridiculed most of the time.

How to Build a Usable Watch

As someone who regularly wonders whether manufacturers and software designers ever actually try using their products, I enjoyed this story about a class project aimed at making a usable watch:

It was, as you can guess, a disastrous user interface. Every button wound up performing multiple functions. Double-press. Press-and-hold. Press two at once. There’s no possible way you could master it without the 3-by-3 inch sheet of instructions in 2-point type.

Inevitably, setting a time -- either for the clock or the alarm -- involves a Sisyphean ritual of pushing in some tiny, painful little button and standing there, waiting, as the digital numbers crawl up or down toward your target.

So for one particularly diabolical piece of homework, I challenged my students to redesign the Wal-Mart watch. Make it easier to use -- without sacrificing any features, and with the understanding that every new button or control would add to the cost and mechanical vulnerability.

The homework generated quite a few good or, or at least interesting, ideas.

-- CAV

Observations of a New Dad

2011-10-21T03:33:00.000-06:00

Wisecracks about "Momma two-snaps" are far from the only humorous side-effects of having a baby daughter, and I am happy to see that my wife has been collecting some of my remarks. Yes, you could say, looking at the list, that the scatology has hit the fan. All I can say about that -- and I can't resist putting it this way -- is that, if you're not a parent, no explanation is possible, but that if you are, none is necessary. Without further ado, I present the list.

During a particularly ... eventful ... feeding: "She's putting on her own rendition of Blazing Saddles".
"Even Mr. Immaculate can't be clean around a baby."
After a succession of rather ... challenging ... diaper changes, I developed a shorthand term for what she seemed to be saving just for me: "the father lode".
The girl looks astoundingly like I did in my baby pictures, except that she has her mother's extremely fair skin and her eyebrows, so I call her "Mini-Me", or sometimes "female Mini-Me".
"Our lives revolve around a three-week-old alimentary tract."
"She's a future cheerleader since she's rooting all the time."
"She's a future basketball player since she's dribbling all the time."
Yes. Another changing-table gem: "What are you trying to do? Make a new continent?"
The baby seems to have inherited her mother's narrow nasal passages, so her breathing, especially early on, was very noisy. (This was very cute, so I recorded it. Now, she makes the noises mainly when she's happy or very interested in something.) I'd often refer to the "chicken noises" she'd make, and eventually came up with a motto for her, based on a very old cultural reference: "Keep on clucking."
Upon one of us getting her to sleep after some difficulty: "Children achieve divinity in sleep."
After a pre-handoff warning from the wife that "this might be a drooling proposition": "For babies, life is a drooling proposition."

And since I'm journaling Daddy Moments today, I'll make note of a few other things:

After yesterday morning's stroll, I returned, with our sleeping baby, to the dull roar of pressure washing at our apartment complex. As I'd hoped, the noise masked many of the usual sounds that would startle her awake on the way back in, like the creaking of the garage door as it opened. Without any "pre-startling", the elevator bell failed to wake her, and I got all the way up to the apartment with the baby still asleep! I parked the stroller, took off my jacket and hat, and ... immediately sneezed, completely waking her up.
The baby likes to people-watch, so for the late afternoon stroll, I took her to a large square nearby that is often crowded with tourists. Some foreign visitors spotted her and asked to hold her and take pictures with her. She's a pretty baby, and even has birthmarks (that will fade over time) that make it look like she's wearing eye shadow.
We've had a few really good laugh sessions lately. Once, it got to where it seemed like we were laughing at each other laughing. What gets me the most laughs at this point? Questions in general (especially if I shake my head side-to-side when asking them), certain facial expressions, and the name, "Tufts". (My wife thinks she may find s-sounds funny, generally.)
And, finally, here's an assortment of nicknames I've applied to her at various times and in various situations: "sport" (What I call her, for humorous effect, when she first wakes up and is still disoriented.), "formula breath", "baby Buddha", and "honey". Honey isn't really a nickname, but it's a term of endearment I never used until she came along, and I use it only for her.

People keep telling me that babies grow up fast, and that I should work to remember things like this. I am already beginning to appreciate this advice: I was momentarily saddened when I realized that I'd forgotten how I first made her laugh.

-- CAV

Nine up the Sleeve

2011-10-20T03:27:00.001-06:00

Via HBL, I have learned that Peter Schiff doesn't like the name of GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan.

Cain would replace the current system of income and payroll taxes with a 9% flat-rate personal income tax, a 9% corporate tax, and a 9% national sales tax. Great idea. Such a system would unburden businesses, provide a tax cut for most Americans, and shift taxation to consumption and away from income generation. This is exactly what our economy needs. But unlike our current corporate tax system, the plan eliminates the deductibility of wages and salaries from corporate income. The net effect is the creation of a brand new 9% tax on wages. When this fourth 9 falls from Cain's sleeve, many of his opponents will likely accuse him of cheating.

Schiff still sees merit in the plan, though. (That said, I am cautious about getting rid of tax loopholes, at least until there is real momentum towards restricting government to its proper scope.)

Even with its flaws, the 9-9-9-9 plan would create an economic windfall by lowering the top corporate rate to 9% from 50% (35% at the corporate level and 15% on dividends taxed at the individual level), and simplifying the tax code to reduce unnecessary compliance costs and the economically inefficient behavior that is created by perverse tax incentives.

Later, though, Schiff states that he favors cuts in spending to make a "real" 9-9-9 plan possible, by allowing the removal of the de facto new 9% earnings tax.

After hearing Cain's lightweight rivals make silly quips about pizza prices or flipping the digits upside-down, it's good to see a substantive critique of Cain's plan by someone who both favors a strong economy and knows what it would take for us to have one again.

-- CAV

Four-Letter Failure

2011-10-19T04:11:00.003-06:00

Tech blogger Thomas Park comments on the new ribbon application interface for Microsoft's Windows Explorer file browser. (I understand that their other applications will also have these silly, space-wasting ribbons.)

By focusing user research on low-level operations with the old system, and using that as the starting point for the redesign, you end up merely resizing, rearranging, and removing parts of the interface. You don't make the quantum leap, and you sometimes make things worse.

I'm reminded of a recent paper by Andreas Zeller, Thomas Zimmerman, and Christian Bird (the last two authors from Microsoft Research, ironically) titled Failure is a Four-Letter Word: A Satire in Empirical Research.

In the paper, the authors collect keystroke-level data in Eclipse and correlate it with programmers' errors. They find this data to be an excellent predictor, with the letters "i", "r", "o", and "p" guilty of the strongest correlations. Based on these findings, they come up with a cheeky solution for reducing programmers' errors: [a new keyboard without the offending letters].

All the telemetry data Microsoft used to guide its design decisions, and the impressive amount of effort that went into acquiring it, ended up being worse than useless due to bad analysis. (The "solution" offered in the paper is also, among other things, an amusing refutation of the idea that correlation implies causation.)

Poor thinking, at any step of the way, and even on a matter as relatively minor as the UI for one application produced by a software company can cause great damage. Here, Microsoft's reputation will suffer and its customers will be made less productive than they could have been, even if only by being distracted on a daily basis by a kludgey design or a loss of valuable screen real estate.

This example, although rather mundane, reminded me of, and helped me better appreciate the following story about philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand, related by Leonard Peikoff in his talk, "My Thirty Years with Ayn Rand:"

She knew too clearly how she had reached her ideas, why they were true, and what their opposites were doing to mankind. Nor, like Howard Roark, could she ever be tempted to betray her convictions. Since she had integrated her principles into a consistent system, she knew that to violate a single one would be to discard the totality. A Texas oil man once offered her up to a million dollars to use in spreading her philosophy, if she would only add a religious element to it to make it more popular. She threw his proposal into the wastebasket. "What would I do with his money," she asked me indignantly, "if I have to give up my mind in order to get it?" [bold added]

Ayn Rand, building on Aristotle, had created an entire philosophical system based on a realist metaphysics and a rational epistemology. To attempt to graft even one religious (i.e., arbitrary) element into it would have undermined her entire philosophy by treating the products of our imagination as if they had the same footing as evidence and logic. For the same reason that lying is a poor policy, so is treating as true the arbitrary: "Since all facts of reality are interrelated, faking one of them leads the person to fake others; ultimately, he is committed to an all-out war against reality as such."

Returning to level of the design decision, such a choice would have been like a Microsoft employee working on the new Explorer, having Park's insight about how to analyze the user data, but deciding not to speak up about it for fear of rocking the boat. In philosophy, though, either the kind of evasion needed to make such a decision, or its results will affect how one approaches problems, generally, and thus, barring a change of mind, it will manifest as similar types of error repeated over time and made across many areas of thought.

To allow even one whiff of the arbitrary into one's philosophical guidance system (or to "replace" it in a given act) defeats the entire purpose of having a philosophy, the former by systematically incorporating fantasy where evidence or logic is needed. Ayn Rand wouldn't merely have had to ignore what she knew to be true to accept this offer, she would have had to continue doing so from that day forward, even if only by not actually applying the philosophy as she would have had to begin to preach it.

Far worse than making an error is to make oneself unable to recover from one.

-- CAV

Pan Am, Revisited

2011-10-18T04:20:00.002-06:00

Via Instapundit and thanks, in part to a certain urchin of my acquaintance being uncharacteristically awake and alert during my usual blogging hours, I quickly bring your attention to some good counterarguments to the idea I recently entertained that government deregulation of the airline industry is the main cause of the "declining hotness of flight attendants", as Megan McArdle puts it:

As a libertarianish economics blogger, I would love if this story were true. But I'm skeptical. Stewardesses used to be subject to all sorts of extremely strict rules: they couldn't be married, couldn't gain weight, couldn't get pregnant, couldn't be much over 30. If you fire everyone who violates those rules, then yes, you will select for a much "hotter" group of women than the current crop.

You could probably still get a large group of young, hot women to take a job that involves free flights all around the world. But those jobs are no longer open, because airlines stopped firing all the old, fat parents. Thanks to a combination of feminist shaming, union demands, and anti-discrimination laws. Moreover, once they no longer fired people over a certain age, union seniority rules immediately started selecting for older workers, in two ways: layoffs are usually last hired first fired, and older people have a lot of sunk costs in terms of pension accrual and seniority, so they're less likely to leave. If you fly a major airline, you'll notice very few stewardesses in their twenties.

Later, McArdle does concede that deregulation may have hastened this process, but she is skeptical that the cost of hiring stewardesses like those of Pan Am is a big enough factor to cause (or even appreciably hasten) this change in the visible demographics of airline attendants.

Plausibility, congeniality to one's own cherished notions, and succinctness alone do not a correct explanation make: As McArdle shows us, all relevant factors must be unearthed and accounted for in one's thinking, first.

-- CAV

Cantor (Publicly) Joins Squatters

2011-10-17T04:26:00.000-06:00

The Financial Times reports that, unsurprisingly, Barack Obama supports what Ann Coulter aptly calls the "Flea Party." This isn't news, but perhaps the fact that GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor outed himself as an ally of the same is:

A top Republican in Washington dramatically altered his stance on protesters involved in Occupy Wall Street just one week after comparing the movement to "angry mobs". Eric Cantor, the Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives, told Fox News on Sunday that Republicans agreed there was "too much" income disparity in the country. "More important than my use of the word ['mobs'] is that there is a growing frustration out there across the country and it is warranted. Too many people are out of work," he said. [bold added]

Too much disparity? Does Cantor mean that the government ought to limit how much income someone can earn, or does he think it should limit how many people can earn large incomes? Either way, Cantor is wrong, and has disqualified himself as an opponent of Barack Obama and his confederacy of collectivist, street-squatting dunces. Had he any real understanding of capitalism, he would have immediately gone on the offensive, and noted that our "frustration" is due to improper government meddling in the economy, and that it will not end until such meddling lessens or ceases.

The fact that Bill Gates is wealthy and a bum is poor reflects both the consequences of their respective work habits and the fact that they live in a society that (still, sort of) protects the right of the productive to keep what they earn. (This is true, at least when the government doesn't wrongly redistribute wealth, but we set this aside since the occupiers' choice of Wall Street shows that they aren't protesting state redistribution of wealth, at least in principle.) This disparity thus represents a good thing, the misconceptions of Gates himself and other anti-capitalist tycoons to the contrary notwithstanding. If anything needs to be said about income disparity, it is that our country could stand much more of it.

The fact that someone like Cantor can so easily fold in the face of two words, "disparity" (with its ridiculous connotation that one man should not own more than another) and "frustration" (with its equally ridiculous connotation that people who support government programs and yet wonder why the economy is tanking are blameless victims) shows, to me anyway, an astounding degree of ignorance about (or, worse, indifference to) the issue at hand. It isn't like it's even moderately difficult to come up with solid reasons for income disparity to exist, or good examples.

At least we now know where Eric Cantor's loyalties lie: in the gutter.

-- CAV

--- In Other News ---

I'm with Eric Raymond: Ubuntu and Gnome have jumped the shark:

I’ll spell it out explicitly because there are a few non-programmers in my audience. User configuration data goes in plain text files, not binary blobs. There are many reasons for this, and one is so they can be hand-edited when the shiny GUI configurators turn out to be buggy or misdesigned. No programmer who doesn’t grasp this bit of good practice has any business writing a window manager, especially not on a Unix-derived system. The fact that this botch shipped in GNOME 3 tells me the GNOME system architects are incompetents who I cannot trust with my future.

Ugh. The new "Unity" interface is even worse than I found it to be upon briefly having to deal with it: It would appear that the same short-sightedness that led its designers to waste precious screen space on my netbook riddles all aspects of its design.

New Orleans Saints Coach Sean Payton deservedly makes sports writer Ryan Fowler's list of Week Six Studs:

While Jim Harbaugh and Jim Schwartz were playing ... in Detroit, New Orleans head coach Sean Payton kept his eye on the game as trainers attended to his shredded knee following a sideline collision. It was later learned Payton tore his MCL and broke his knee. He will have surgery Monday. That's stud.

As I've said before, he's my kind of coach.

Harry Binswanger recommends a book by Raymond Tallis, who has impressed me in the past. Here's an excerpt from the customer review by John Gillis on the Amazon page for The Aping of Mankind:

The book strikes me as having two basic goals:

(1) A withering critique of reductionists who believe:(a) that our great conceptual abilities as humans can be reduced to (is equivalent to) the neural firings in our brain. These he call neuromaniacs; and (b) those intellectuals who seek to minimize human differences from other animals by either anthropomorphizing animals or animalizing humans, in wrong ways. This phenomenon he calls Darwinitis. [However he is a committed Darwinian in the original meaning of the term.]

(2) A fascinating theory of human origins that involves explaining the origin of free will in humans, the origins of self-consciousness, the origin of conceptual development and language development, resulting from the nature of our entire body and its unique set of features. [minor edits]

I'm not sure when I'll get around to reading this, but it sounds like a must-read.

10-15-11 Hodgepodge

2011-10-15T03:00:00.000-06:00

Iran's Acts of War

Investor's Business Daily correctly calls Iran's attempt at murdering an ambassador on American soil and act of war:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Tuesday that the plot "crosses a line." We shall see. In the past our only reaction has been to draw another line. Iran has declared war, and unless we are prepared to secure our borders and act as if Iran has indeed crossed a line, the next plot may involve a dirty bomb rendering a major American city uninhabitable.

"These are acts of war," Pete Hoekstra, an intelligence expert and former GOP congressman, said of this latest plot and other Iranian actions, "and they need to be viewed and treated as such." [bold added]

Regarding the drawing of new lines, the folks at IBD not only aren't whistling Dixie, they're more right than they probably realize.

Weekend Reading

"[Children] also need to understand human virtues such as courage, reason, and strength of character and what can happen when someone exercises his own judgment in the face of opposition." -- Charlotte Cushman, in "Save Western Civilization: Defend Christopher Columbus" at The American Thinker

"For everyone, gay or straight, it's not necessarily the case that their final choice of partner can meet every single need they have." -- Michael Hurd, in "Look for Integrity First" at DrHurd.com

"Many of the world's most successful investors have endured losing streaks." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Getting Back in the Game" at Smart Money

"The anti-capitalists, environmentalists, and anarchists we see amid the 'Occupy Wall Street' rabble polluting Wall Street in recent weeks -- most of them core supporters of Obama -- don't mention that as a Senator and presidential candidate in 2008 Obama voted for TARP." -- Richard Salsman, in "TARP After Three Years: It Made Things Worse, Not Better" at Forbes

"Let us mourn the loss of Steve Jobs–but let us also use this as an opportunity to look in the mirror and question whether we have treated Jobs and others like him as they deserve." -- Yaron Brook and Don Watkins, in "What We Owe Steve Jobs" at Forbes

From the Vault

Members of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement would do well to consider how the whole premise of "occupation" would apply to their own lives, were total strangers inevitably to decide to "occupy", say, their own homes without permission. Four years ago today, I posted about a house that was "occupied" by some barbarians who were just literate enough to glean details of a party off the Internet.

Private property is a right that enables individuals to live and enjoy their lives. It astounds me that anyone could be so self-centered or foolish as to apparently not realize that their actions condone and invite real thugs to commit crimes against themselves and those they care about.

The Brain as an Imaginary Friend

The Oatmeal does it again! This may well be my new favorite.

-- CAV

Friday Four

2011-10-14T04:24:00.003-06:00

1. There is an amusing column in the Boston Herald about some Cantabrigians who came to "occupy" more of Boston than Principal -- I mean, Mayor -- Menino would permit them to, and ended up occupying jail cells instead:

Here's another lad, age 20, white non-Hispanic naturally, and he lists his address as 208 Lowell Mail Center, Cambridge. That’s a funny street address, no?

I Googled it and it came back to the Lowell House, on the campus of Harvard University. It's described on the Crimson Web site as a "lovely neo-Georgean building" with a tower that "contains a set of Russian Bells that come from the St. Danilov Monastery in Moscow."

Did I mention that "each suite has a 'private' bathroom." Unlike the Nashua Street Jail.

On a more serious and instructive note, I seem to recall, but not exactly where, off the top of my head, that Ayn Rand had noticed that, back in the sixties, many hippies were affluent and went to prestigious educational institutions.

Conservatives may like to laugh at leftists for being naive or merely immature, but many people this age aren't leftists and these protesters are well beyond merely clueless. There is much more going on here.

2. I always appreciate it when I read something that helps me better conceptualize a problem I am thinking about. Lately, I have become interested in what I'll call, for lack of a better term, the "online privacy debate". A security blogger adds what I think is a much-needed orientation to values by reframing the problem:

Currently privacy is conceptually the reverse. "What could it hurt to share x, y, or z?" we say, instead of "Why is the benefit of sharing x, y, or z worth the potential risk?" By changing the way the discussion is framed we see beyond the petty argument about if Facebook is really tracking you, and return to the real discussion of what information we give up and why.

Certainly, both being in favor of sharing everything, and being paranoid about sharing anything are ridiculous positions. Part of why each is ridiculous is that each discounts a different half of the cost-benefit analysis as less relevant than it is, if it considers that half at all.

3. I'll briefly recommend three beers and a tea I have enjoyed recently: Wachusett Green Monsta Ale, Great Divide Samurai Rice Ale, Great Divide Rumble Oak Aged IPA, and Tazo Cucumber White. I'm particularly looking forward to becoming acquainted with the other beers in Great Divide's lineup.

4. Dennis Ritchie, the man on whose shoulders Steve Jobs (and Linus Torvalds, and many, many others) stood, has died. Via HBL is a good article on the man in Wired magazine:

"Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX," [Rob] Pike tells Wired. "The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel -- that pretty much the entire Internet runs on -- is written in C. Web servers are written in C, and if they’re not, they're written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C. ...

"It's really hard to overstate how much of the modern information economy is built on the work Dennis did."

Even Windows was once written in C, he adds, and UNIX underpins both Mac OS X, Apple's desktop operating system, and iOS, which runs the iPhone and the iPad. "Jobs was the king of the visible, and Ritchie is the king of what is largely invisible," says Martin Rinard, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. [format edits]

We all owe this man a huge debt of gratitude.

-- CAV

The Pan Am Effect

2011-10-13T04:10:00.001-06:00

At Agoraphilia, Glen Whitman discerns, in the attractive stewardesses of Pan American World Airways fame, a side-effect of yesteryear's government regulation of air travel.

Prior to airline deregulation, which was passed in 1978 and completed over the next few years, airfares had been set by the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB). For many routes, those airfares were simply too high. As predicted by a simple supply-and-demand model, airlines were willing to offer more flights at these high prices than customers were willing to buy. Under normal market conditions, that would lead to falling prices. But since the airlines legally could not compete on price, they competed on quality instead. They offered better service, better food, and... wait for it... more attractive stewardesses.

With deregulation, it quickly became apparent that, "most people just wanted to get where they were going, fast and cheap," and so were not interested in paying extra for attractive flight attendants. Prices dropped and the appearance of flight attendants stopped being a selling point for airlines. The result was that the number of people flying at least once a year grew faster than the population, and numerous opportunities for work as flight attendants (beautiful or not) opened up.

Even when some improper government regulation appears to improve our lives in some small way, considering the larger picture (and conceptualizing the unseen side-effects) will inevitably show that the price for that apparent improvement is too high.

-- CAV

Update: Megan McArdle makes some pretty good arguments to the effect that other regulations, and not deregulation, may be to blame for this phenomenon.

P.S. I am told that there has been a problem with Twitterfeed, the service by which I auto-tweet my posts for the past couple of weeks. Specifically,Twitter has been taking users to my XML feed (and sometimes to the comments feed, rather than to the posts). I am now aware of the problem and hope to fix it, although my time to do so is very limited. Today, I am trying an alternate feed. If that doesn't work, I'll try something else on the next day's post, and so on until I find a working solution.

Thank you in advance for your patience. [Update: The new feed seems to have done the trick. Also, my thanks to "RussK" for informing me of the problem: I rarely am actually logged on to Twitter!]

Updates

Today: Updated the PS.
10-18-11: Added an update.

Ballooning Bureaucracy

2011-10-12T04:12:00.000-06:00

Via email comes the latest paternalistic government ban that shouldn't amaze, but does; and that would be too over-the-top to be usable in a work of political satire, but is making real news:

[B]alloons must not be blown up by unsupervised children under the age of eight, in case they accidentally swallow them and choke.

...

Whistle blowers, that scroll out into a a long coloured paper tongue when sounded -- a party favourite at family Christmas meals -- are now classed as unsafe for all children under 14.

The story has no word on how humanity managed to perpetuate for so long without such detailed instructions or, on a more serious note, whether anyone was becoming concerned that a government far-reaching and powerful enough to concern itself with such harmless activities might pose a far greater danger to life and limb.

-- CAV

--- In Other News ---

Note to self: Try ifttt already.

Heh. I guess Netflix has decided against "disrupting" itself, if it was even being that smart by splitting itself in half.

David Veksler has written a very intelligent post on "The Case for Evidence-Based Medicine", over at Truth, Justice, and the American Way (via Objectivism Online). I particularly like this quote:

[I]t is difficult to make firm conclusions in medicine. But when valid scientific principles are not followed, it is easy to conclude that no valid conclusion can be reached. In other words, you can't always be sure what's good for you, but you can be sure when someone is talking nonsense.

When someone makes irrational health claims, it does not mean that those claims are false. It just means those claims were not derived by rational (scientific) principles, and so we cannot [say] anything about their truth -- we can only ignore them as arbitrary. It is as if someone claimed [an] invisible, undetectable pink unicorn in the sky -- that which cannot be proven or disproved can only be dismissed. [minor format edits, hyperlink added]

Towards the end of his post, Veksler links to a good TED video by Ben Goldacre that has other good things to say against medical quackery.

Commuting, Revisited

2011-10-11T03:19:00.000-06:00

A few months ago, I took a brief look at the time costs of commuting. Yesterday evening, I ran across a similar analysis, by one "Mr. Money Mustache" that focused on the monetary costs.

[The] misconception about what is a reasonable commute is probably the biggest thing that is keeping most people in the US and Canada poor.

Let's take a typical day's drive for this self-destructive couple. Adding 38 miles of round-trip driving at the IRS’s estimate of total driving cost of $0.51 per mile, there’s $19 per day of direct driving and car ownership costs. It is possible to drive for less, but these people happen to have fairly new cars, bought on credit, so they are wasting the full amount.

Next is the actual human time wasted. At 80 minutes per day, the self-imposed driving would be adding the equivalent of almost an entire work day to each work week -- so they would now effectively be working 6 workdays per week.

After 10 years, multiplied across two cars since they have different work schedules, this decision would cost them about $125,000 in wealth (if they had for example chosen to put the $19/day into extra payments on their mortgage), and 1.3 working years worth of time, EACH, spent risking their lives daily behind the wheel*.

That’s EVERY ten years. And that’s with a commute that most Americans claim is "not too bad".

You’ll note that most 30-year-old couples today, about 10 years into adulthood, don’t even have $125,000 in net worth. And they probably drive around quite a bit in expensive financed cars, mostly as part of a self-imposed commute. These facts are directly related! [emphasis in original]

This is eye-opening, although, as comes up in the comments (and I've learned by living in Boston), many alternatives would come with other costs (e.g., higher housing costs) that would negate all or part of the money saved from not having to commute -- or even make commuting look like a bargain, financially.

What prompted me to comment on the post also turns out to have come up in its comment section: education. It occurred to me this morning that one thing driving many home purchases is the "quality" of the government schools to which the children living in a particular house will be subjected by default. The tuition (made artificially high by "free" government competition) for private education or the time for home schooling end up, for couples with children, having to be considered among the costs of the alternatives to long commutes. As one commenter notes:

[Nine] years later, my eldest daughter bought a small house in the same general area we had rented in. She has a five minute commute but she and her husband are going broke from house repairs, house payments, property taxes, property insurance and private school tuition to make sure that their kids get a good education. ... [minor edits]

I have not done exhaustive research on this question, but the very reasonable tuition of a school I have heard great things about would, alone -- and for a single child -- wipe out the savings realized by avoiding a long commute (assuming that could even be done in California, where that school is located).

It is also worth noting that many of the other things besides education that come into play regarding this question are due to bad government -- from the fact that so many otherwise affordable urban neighborhoods are crime-infested messes to the fact that taxes are often much higher in large cities -- particularly in "blue" parts of the country and the Rust Belt.

Commutes may be sucking the time and money out of our lives, but it is bad government that makes them into the path of least resistance for so many Americans.

-- CAV

Let's Do

2011-10-10T04:37:00.000-06:00

Reader Snedcat emails me a link to a type of article I would have otherwise ignored, but since it is particularly "good", I have decided to briefly comment on its main points...

After the passing of Steve Jobs, it was inevitable that, as a capitalist, he would be attacked, sooner or later, for his alleged moral flaws. At Gawker, an article titled, "What Everyone Is Too Polite to Say About Steve Jobs", does exactly that.

One thing he wasn't, though, was perfect. Indeed there were things Jobs did while at Apple that were deeply disturbing. Rude, dismissive, hostile, spiteful: Apple employees -- the ones not bound by confidentiality agreements -- have had a different story to tell over the years about Jobs and the bullying, manipulation and fear that followed him around Apple. Jobs contributed to global problems, too. Apple's success has been built literally on the backs of Chinese workers, many of them children and all of them enduring long shifts and the specter of brutal penalties for mistakes. And, for all his talk of enabling individual expression, Jobs imposed paranoid rules that centralized control of who could say what on his devices and in his company.

Since this article is written from the angle of bringing new information to light for readers who are assumed to agree with the author's implicit equation of altruism with morality -- I don't -- we will set aside that fact for a moment and look at the quality of this "information" by looking at a few of Jobs's alleged sins.

Jobs is called a terrible employer for saying things like the following (as quoted by Gawker from Fortune) during a half-hour "public" humiliation of a group of workers, which he finished by replacing its head:

"Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?" Having received a satisfactory answer, he continued, "So why the fuck doesn't it do that?"

"You've tarnished Apple's reputation," he told them. "You should hate each other for having let each other down."

Never mind that this was not really public, but occurred at a company meeting; that (even if it had been) any of his employees who did not like being made an example of was free to look for other work; that the answer to his question should have been so obvious as to have implicitly guided the thinking of this team and rendered such a meeting unnecessary; or that, perhaps Jobs had reasons to believe that his making an example of this team would serve his boss, the paying customer, best: A boss telling his employees that they are not doing what he is paying them to do is moral fodder for the likes of Gawker, on the grounds, I suppose, that it was harsh.

The great products this man churned out had to be created somehow. Part of that "somehow" is getting teams on the same page about what they are doing. Even if we grant that this wasn't the best way to deal with this situation, the fact is that Jobs harmed no one.

Jobs is condemned because, "Apple's success has been built literally on the backs of Chinese workers," and because he employed children as laborers. The alleged brutality of child labor and long factory shifts has been examined and found better than the alternative ad nauseam, but let's think about it again, anyway, by considering a column the economist Thomas Sowell wrote nearly a decade ago.

A recent front-page story in The New York Times was headlined: "In Ecuador's Banana Fields, Child Labor is Key to Profits." This is part of an ongoing orgy of indignation by the intelligentsia at low-paid labor in the Third World.

The question they never ask is: Compared to what? But people for whom indignation is a way of life seldom pause to compare the available options. Instead, they are ready to foreclose some of the options of poor people, who have painfully few options to begin with.

Buried on an inside page is the response of low-income Ecuadorians when their children were dismissed from the banana plantations, as a result of adverse publicity created by activists from wealthier countries. "They fired all the children, but the work they did helped us," an Ecuadorian mother complained.

In other words, the poor in Ecuador are now poorer, while the activists from affluent countries are triumphant. None of this is peculiar to this particular industry or to Ecuador. Whenever there is a World Trade Organization meeting, you can depend on affluent young people to engage in riots over such things as "sweatshop labor" in the Third World. [emphasis in original]

Andrew Bernstein refuted this anachronistic idea even more thoroughly five years ago in his book, The Capitalist Manifesto. But Bernstein and Sowell are hardly the first people to show that the animus against child labor is naive at best. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to consider what aspect of Jobs's decision to hire workers in China was worthy of moral condemnation, and why Gawker holds long-refuted smears against capitalism out as "fact." All I will add is that the betterment of his workers was not why Jobs hired them (nor is it why he should have), but it was a fortunate result of the fact that he traded his money for their labor.

And, finally, Jobs is damned for being "authoritarian" because of his company's vertical integration, and for practicing "censorship" because he limits what people can sell or display in his own store. If you don't like someone else limiting your choices -- I don't -- then take your business elsewhere -- Regarding Apple, I usually do. Unlike a government entity, Apple doesn't have the power to fine or imprison you simply for not purchasing products you don't like. If you want to see something, like gay porn or political ads, that Jobs doesn't permit in his outlets, go to another outlet: He can't stop you from doing what you want when you're not using his property.

Incidentally, this piece is remarkably bad on the issue of rights in general and property rights in particular: Jobs is damned for deciding what he'll give "floor space" to (or not), and yet if someone wants to subject his customers to smut or political hectoring, that someone is to be free to run roughshod all over Jobs's store, Jobs and his paying customers be damned. (Or should some third party dictate what iTunes offers?) Who's the authoritarian here? And, considering how this would work in practice, who's the censor?

There's more I could say about this smear piece, but I think I've done enough for now to show that Gawker is, in fact, doing the exact opposite of what it claims to be doing, which is to provide a "balanced" picture of a man -- who isn't, by the way, around any longer around to defend himself. And this is just the tip of the iceberg: The piece also uses altruism, a code of morality Ayn Rand eloquently argued is immoral and impractical -- and, as such, impossible to practice consistently -- to drag a man so many justly admire through the mud on the grounds that he "wasn't ... perfect."

This article kicked off its list of "lowlights" by stating the following, "After celebrating Jobs' achievements, we should talk freely about the dark side of Jobs and the company he co-founded." Yes. But let's really talk about them, rather than dropping all rational context and then slinging random facts around like mud, and hoping that common, but unwarranted emotional associations make cowardly accusations stick.

If we really do this, then we can even better understand why we admire Jobs, and what is wrong, on so many levels, with the thinking behind his detractors.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Minor edits.

10-8-11 Hodgepodge

2011-10-08T04:17:00.000-06:00

Who Inspires the Inspirational?

America has clearly lost a great and inspiring man (via HBL) in Steve Jobs. But who inspired him? The New York Times has a story on Polaroid's Edwin H. Land, who invented instant photography:

Both built multibillion-dollar corporations on inventions that were guarded by relentless patent enforcement. (That also kept the competition at bay, and the profit margins up.) Both were autodidacts, college dropouts (Land from Harvard, Jobs from Reed) who more than made up for their lapsed educations by cultivating extremely refined taste. At Polaroid, Land used to hire Smith College's smartest art-history majors and send them off for a few science classes, in order to create chemists who could keep up when his conversation turned from Maxwell's equations to Renoir's brush strokes.

Most of all, Land believed in the power of the scientific demonstration. Starting in the 60s, he began to turn Polaroid's shareholders' meetings into dramatic showcases for whatever line the company was about to introduce. In a perfectly art-directed setting, sometimes with live music between segments, he would take the stage, slides projected behind him, the new product in hand, and instead of deploying snake-oil salesmanship would draw you into Land's World. By the end of the afternoon, you probably wanted to stay there.

Read the whole thing.

Weekend Reading

"Call hypocrisy by its proper name, and treat it accordingly – in yourself and in others." -- Michael Hurd, in "Avoid Hypocrisy for Positive Change" at DrHurd.com

"In earlier generations, civil disobedience like the Montgomery Bus Boycott or women's suffrage movement used nonviolent protest to combat blatant violations of individual rights." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Occupy Wall Street: A Sad Display" at SmartMoney

My Two Cents

Hoenig makes three invaluable observations about the "occupation" in his column that I have seen nowhere else: (1) It certainly doesn't occupy the moral high ground, in marked contrast to past examples of civil disobedience; (2) It is sad; and (3) It is, nevertheless, quite dangerous.

A Snapshot of Confirmation Bias?

From a story on four strange Android phone glitches:

Users across the Internet dreamed up all sorts of fixes. Some claimed that there was a plastic film that needed to be peeled off the lens. Other were convinced that a good, solid cleaning of the glass with a lint-free cloth was the ticket. Still others said it was a hardware flaw. It turns out none of them were right, but it does illustrate the effect of confirmation bias for those obsessively cleaning the lens.

One fine morning a few weeks after the device launched, everyone woke up to a functional camera. A stealth OTA update? No, as it turns out, there was a date-dependent bug in Android 2.0 that would cycle every 24.5 days. So every few weeks, the autofocus would flip between working and not working. [minor edits, link to confirmation bias added]

Maybe, maybe not...

Following the second link above, I see that some people, inspired by things they read about the phones shipping with an oily film on their camera lenses, performed "experiments" that involved wiping said lenses. Although I am sure some of these people may have cleaned their lenses just as the date bug caused their cameras to (temporarily) start working, I wonder what they did twenty-five days later. Whether this was an example of confirmation bias depends, in part on the answer to that question.

Those who permitted confirmation bias to distort their view of reality would have gone on cleaning their lenses and insisting that their less-than-crisp snapshots were good; and those who did not would have admitted their mistake and started looking again for the correct answer.

Even the above depends on further context, for example, on what "green focus" means, and whether there was some objective way to know what level of image quality the camera should have produced. If the problem was subtle and "green focus" was an indication that could yield false positives on top of the focus bug, I am not sure the concept of confirmation bias could apply to the mistaken judgement that some people obviously made as to whether their cameras were working.

-- CAV

Friday Four

2011-10-07T04:37:00.002-06:00

1. A beer blogger discusses the impact of "Beowulf and Beer" sessions on J.R.R. Tolkien's creative work, and a commenter notes the following: "The pub that Tolkien and Lewis (along with the rest of the [I]nklings) drank at was called the Eagle and the Child[, and it was] just near Oxford. It was so influential that there are connections to the pub in the Shire township Mitchel Delving where the main pub/inn is none other than the Bird and the Baby."

2. Three-Dimensional Printing has come a long way since I saw a crude demo of the concept at a German science museum when I was in college. At the site 3D Printing, you can see video of a usable crescent wrench being scanned and printed -- and used to tighten a bolt about ninety minutes later. Wikipedia quotes The Economist on the process as, "mak[ing] it as cheap to create single items as it is to produce thousands and thus undermin[ing] economies of scale."

3. Having neither the time, the space, nor the money to indulge my childhood hobby of model railroading, I nevertheless enjoy seeing the occasional model train show or visiting a particularly well-executed train layout. This means that I must visit the Tech Model Railroad Club some time. Notably, the venerable club has made quite a few notable contributions to computer jargon, including the term hacker.

4. ls young Jozy Altidore of the United States Men's National Soccer Team finally living up to the hype? I certainly hope so, and this sounds promising: "Critics have quieted way down of late because the U.S. national team forward has been on fire since arriving at AZ Alkmaar in the Dutch league over the summer. Altidore has scored seven goals in 11 matches so far, three in league play and four in Europa League games."

-- CAV

This is what ...

2011-10-06T06:16:00.000-06:00

... a gang of clueless idiots looks like.

When you oversleep and your baby wakes up early, it's a quick post or nothing at all...

Yesterday, I was out with the baby and, shortly after noticing a motorcycle cop stationed on the corner of the street I was waiting to cross, I heard a din behind me. This is what I turned around to see.

The din turned out to be the highly persuasive beating of drums and chanting of, "This is what democracy looks like!" by something on the order of a hundred unkempt punks.

If these people had an ounce of sense, they would realize the supreme irony of their chant: While, yes, the preemption of intellectual debate exhibited by shouting and the show of intimidation by large numbers do visually give us a sample of what unlimited mob rule might "look" like, the fact that they were stamping and bellowing to their hearts' content with impunity was really what rule of law looks like. Mobs do not respect freedom of speech; societies with proper governments, or those that at least protect freedom of speech, do.

The demonstration reminds me of a few choice Ayn Rand quotes, but two seem particularly apt, given the fixation on the forcible redistribution of wealth from one percent of the population to the rest. Both pertain to the fact that wealth must be produced through rational, self-interested effort, rather than miraculously existing as some fixed "pie" that nobody owns.

First, stealing from the wealthiest is worse than futile:

In view of what they hear from the experts, the people cannot be blamed for their ignorance and their helpless confusion. If an average housewife struggles with her incomprehensibly shrinking budget and sees a tycoon in a resplendent limousine, she might well think that just one of his diamond cuff links would solve all her problems. She has no way of knowing that if all the personal luxuries of all the tycoons were expropriated, it would not feed her family -- and millions of other, similar families -- for one week; and that the entire country would starve on the first morning of the week to follow . . . . How would she know it, if all the voices she hears are telling her that we must soak the rich? [from "The Inverted Moral Priorities," which appeared in The Ayn Rand Letter]

Second, regarding "the rich," they are not only (surprise!) human beings, but our lives depend on them, as John Galt notes in Atlas Shrugged:

When you live in a rational society, where men are free to trade, you receivean incalculable bonus: the material value of your work is determined not onlyby your effort, but by the effort of the best productive minds who exist in theworld around you.

When you work in a modern factory, you are paid, not only for your labor, butfor all the productive genius which has made that factory possible: for thework of the industrialist who built it, for the work of the investor who savedthe money to risk on the untried and the new, for the work of the engineer whodesigned the machines of which you are pushing the levers, for the work of theinventor who created the product which you spend your time on making, for thework of the scientist who discovered the laws that went into the making of thatproduct, for the work of the philosopher who taught men how to think and whomyou spend your time denouncing.

The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power thatexpands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time. Ifyou worked as a blacksmith in the mystics' Middle Ages, the whole of yourearning capacity would consist of an iron bar produced by your hands in daysand days of effort. How many tons of rail do you produce per day if you workfor Hank Rearden? Would you dare to claim that the size of your pay check wascreated solely by your physical labor and that those rails were the product ofyour muscles? The standard of living of that blacksmith is all that yourmuscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden.

How many of these self-righteous, cowardly wanabe thieves own iPhones? Or have flown on jet planes? Or have had their lives saved by modern medicine? None of this would have been possible to the richest emperor before the Industrial Revolution, and yet they ignore all of this and whine about the fact that some people have more than others, without even stopping to think about whether they might deserve it, whether they may have a right to it.

I do not, of course, expect to penetrate the thick skull of anyone who would participate in this farce, but I do wish to underscore why it is vital not to give in to them one inch, morally or politically, and to briefly point out a thinker, Ayn Rand, whose ideas would greatly reduce the occurrence of such follies were her ideas better known throughout our culture.

-- CAV

Barrowman on Placebos

2011-10-05T05:00:00.001-06:00

Statistician Nick Barrowman takes a look at the burgeoning area of research into the placebo effect and questions its very premise. (HT: John Cook)

Suppose a clinical trial randomizes 100 patients to receive an experimental drug in the form of pills and an equal number of patients to receive identical pills except that they contain no active ingredient, that is, placebo. The results of the trial are as follows: 60 of the patients who received the experimental drug improved, compared to 30 of the patients who received the placebo. The drug clearly works better than the placebo.[1] But 30% of the patients who received the placebo did get better. There seems to be a placebo effect, right?

Wrong. The results from this trial provide no information about whether or not there is a placebo effect. To determine whether there is a placebo effect you would need compare the outcomes of patients who received placebo with the outcomes of patients who received no treatment. And not surprisingly, trials with a no-treatment arm are quite rare.

Barrowman further quotes from a meta-study of 130 trials in which some patients received placebos and some no treatment:

We found little evidence in general that placebos had powerful clinical effects. Although placebos had no significant effects on objective or binary outcomes, they had possible small benefits in studies with continuous subjective outcomes and for the treatment of pain.

Following this quote is an interesting look at a trial of an asthma medication in which placebos and non-treatment were compared with the medication, and two measures of improvement were employed: the patients' own ratings of improvement and a measurement of expiratory volume. A placebo effect showed up in the first measure, but not in the second.

Barrowman goes on to consider why the placebo effect has been getting so much attention lately, and, finally, the kind of rhetorical disadvantage skeptics will find themselves facing when they raise objections:

Curiously, however, in more scientific circles recent developments in neurobiology have also encouraged interest in the placebo effect. Advances in understanding of how the brain works have lead to research efforts to understand the mechanism of action of the placebo effect. This is more than a little odd, given the fairly sparse evidence for such an effect! An article in Wired Magazine asserts that "The fact that taking a faux drug can powerfully improve some people's health -- the so-called placebo effect -- has long been considered an embarrassment to the serious practice of pharmacology." Note that the article takes for granted "the fact" that the placebo effect works.

Indeed, the term "the placebo effect" itself is part of the problem. By labeling it as an effect, we lend it credence. Arguing against the placebo effect seems to put one at an immediate disadvantage. Hasn't everyone heard of the placebo effect? How could anyone deny such an established fact? [bold added, minor format edits]

I myself ran into (and blogged) the Wired article Barrowman links above some time ago. I recall finding attractive the idea that "mind hacks" could cure or mitigate some illnesses, at the time. Unfortunately, attractiveness, plausibility, and consistency with some widely-accepted belief are not the same thing as truth. (This is not to say that this tactic could never work; only that, if it can, the situations in which it can are probably much less common than one might wish.)

-- CAV