5-26-12 Hodgepodge

Happy Memorial Day!

Travel and family obligations may cause posting to be light and irregular over the next week, particularly the early part.

Weekend Reading

"Because the best indicator of the market is the market itself, the logical approach toward mitigating uncertainty is to position oneself to follow the trend, not fight it." -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "How to Tame Market Uncertainty" at SmartMoney

"Almost a quarter-century of clinical experience has convinced me that hypnosis - as it's usually understood - is a fraud." -- Michael Hurd, in "Fraud or Fantasy?" at DrHurd.com

"If you value your lives, don't be fooled by their health care Newspeak. Otherwise, you may soon be getting your medical care from Dr. Orwell." -- Paul Hsieh, in "Dr. Orwell Will See You Now" at PJ Media

Five Years Ago Today

I posted the following quote about lying that a reader had helped me locate:

The essence of a con-man's lie," [Ayn Rand] began, "of any such lie, no matter what the details, is the attempt to gain a value by faking certain facts of reality."

She went on: "Now can't you grasp the logical consequences of that kind of policy ? 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. But this is the kind of war no one can win. If life in reality is a man's purpose, how can he expect to achieve it while struggling at the same time to escape and defeat reality?"

And she concluded: "The con-man's lies are wrong on principle. To state the principle positively: honesty is a long-range requirement of human self-preservation and is, therefore, a moral obligation." [bold added]

Coincidentally, I was reminded of this quote while reading part of Individual Rights and Government Wrongs during a flight yesterday. Describing the psychological torture that comes with the life of a con man, author Brian Phillips notes the following:

[A] reporter tells of comments made by Bernie Madoff: "'It was a nightmare for me,' he told investigators, using the word over and over, as if he were the real victim. 'I wish they caught me six years ago, eight years ago.'"

Interestingly, another figure brought up in this part of the book, Barry Minkow, made a similar admission -- and yet still did not change his ways.


Heh!

A Christian predicts that questions about the existence of Mohammed will doom Islam, and some press organ in theocratic Iran is claiming that a new discovery will do the same to Christianity. People who want to be fooled -- I mean, "have faith", as my creationist college roommate once put it as he thumped on his Bible -- don't give a damn about evidence. On one level, it amuses me to see people who should know this so thoroughly brainwashing themselves that they can make such claims with a straight face.

--CAV

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Sierra Nevada Hoptimum

Sierra Nevada, one of my favorite breweries, has produced another outstanding beer, Hoptimum. (I loved their Rye IPA, when I discovered it in January.)

I found it on the shelf at my local beer emporium last week and bought a four-pack. Allowing my sense of smell to recover fully from a mild cold, I was rewarded yesterday evening with its rich aroma and well-balanced taste.

From the brewer's description:

A group of hop-heads and publicans challenged our Beer Camp brewers to push the extremes of whole-cone hop brewing. The result is this: a 100 IBU, whole-cone hurricane of flavor. Simply put -- Hoptimum: the biggest whole-cone IPA we have ever produced. Aggressively hopped, dry-hopped, AND torpedoed with our exclusive new hop varieties for ultra-intense flavors and aromas.

Resinous "new-school" and exclusive hop varieties carry the bold and aromatic nose. The flavor follows the aroma with layers of aggressive hoppiness, featuring notes of grapefruit rind, rose, lilac, cedar, and tropical fruit -- all culminating in a dry and lasting finish.

Perusing the rest of the description, I was surprised (although I shouldn't have been) to find that the recipe employed a favorite hop variety of mine, Simcoe. I must also say that the "hophead" illustration (top right) used on the bottles is ingenious. I can't think of a label I like better.

I really hope that by "Limited Selection", the brewer means that this will reappear on occasion. It would be a shame for this to be a one-off. If any passer-by knows one way or the other, please leave a comment.

-- CAV

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Measuring Self-Awareness

Over at Slate is an interesting interview with Dylan Evans, who has coined the term "risk intelligence", which really turns out to be a kind of self-awareness regarding what one does and does not know.

[Risk intelligence] is the ability to estimate probabilities accurately, it's about having the right amount of certainty to make educated guesses. That's the simple definition. But this apparently simple skill turns out to be quite complex. It ends up being a rather deep thing about how to work on the basis of limited information and cope with an uncertain world, about knowing yourself and your limitations.

In my limited exposure to the concept, it seems to be mis-named, and I would guess it might be because the author does not regard absolute certainty as possible for philosophical reasons.

Intrigued that someone seemed to be attempting to measure a quality I have often thought others to be lacking in, I took the test. Here is the writeup of my results.

The RQ score ranges from 0 (low RQ) to 100 (high RQ). Your score is 79.57. Such a score is high. Risk intelligence can be measured by calculating something called a "calibration curve". The red line displayed to your right is your calibration curve. A perfect calibration curve would lie exactly on the blue diagonal line, so the area between the curve and the diagonal would be zero. Nobody is perfectly calibrated, but people with high risk intelligence come very close to this ideal.

By now, you may have realized there is an easy way to game this test. If you always select the 50% category unless you are pretty certain that a statement is true or false - and if the test contains equal numbers of true and false statements - you will score very highly, perhaps very near 100.

What did I find myself doing during the test? I considered why I agreed or disagreed with a given statement -- or thought I had no basis for doing so, for the questions I realized I knew nothing about. In doing so, I usually ended up with some rough estimate of how confident I was in my (dis)agreement, as well as what else I would need to know to be more sure one way or the other. This was really an attempt to use a percentage as a metaphor for what I thought my level of knowledge about a topic was, rather than an actual estimate of a probability.

Based on past experience, I think it is possible for people with this kind of self-awareness to appear to be less confident than they actually are. This can happen when one communicates his level of uncertainty poorly (or too conservatively) or when one is dealing with someone who lacks this form of self-awareness (and hence equates certainty with confidence or views admitted uncertainty with suspicion). I can even recall doing the former while in the latter situation quite a few times when I was younger. (This ultimately culminated in me being ignored after correcting someone I absolutely knew to be wrong! Fortunately, the stakes were low.)

-- CAV

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Commands for Everyone

Over at RealClear Politics is a David Harsanyi column that comes excruciatingly close to showing the reader why state regulation of the economy is wrong. Harsanyi takes as his point of departure the recently-mounted legal challenges of various Catholic institutions to the ObamaCare contraception mandate. Harsanyi perceptively likens the mandate to various measures by theocratic conservatives to impose their morality on others through the law.

And then comes this gem:

Perhaps the Catholic Church, which often seems to back economic "fairness" rather than market freedom, will be more sensitive to the intrusions of the state in economic choice. This episode exhibits how economic freedom is intricately tied to all other liberties. When the state creates virtual monopolies through regulatory regimes, it also gets to decide what is moral and necessary and compels everyone to act accordingly.

Harsanyi unfortunately chose to focus his column more on how state economic controls are being used to impose left-wing moral dogmas. While this is true, the real problem is that whoever gets to decide what the "public good" in such a scenario is will be in a position to force his norms (right or wrong) onto everyone else, abrogating individual judgment wholesale. (Furthermore, the problem is only most pronounced with state monopolies. In truth, any state intervention in the economy, however slight, is informed by some kind of normative judgment, and so represents the forcible imposition of the judgment of some over that of others.) It is notable that Harsanyi holds that religious freedom is limited by public health concerns (as opposed to the individual rights of others): I suspect that this is why he ends up not questioning state intervention further than he does.

Rather than merely serving as a cautionary example of what a state takeover of a sector of the economy (or an industry, or a company) means, the ObamaCare contraception mandate is really an example of why all government economic controls are threats to individual freedom and, as such, contradict the proper purpose of government.

-- CAV

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More on CTA Bullying

Last week, I commented on an article about the abuses of the California Teachers Association (CTA). That article, which appeared in the Orange County Register, referenced a much more detailed article in City Journal by Troy Sendik. At the time, that article had not yet been published to the Internet, but I noticed this morning that it is now available. Here are a couple of samples.

First, we see part of how the CTA defeated a ballot initiative it first spent exorbitant amounts of dues money to block (although it still succeeded in delaying it for two years):

In 1993, Prop. 174 finally came to a statewide vote. The union had persuaded March Fong Eu, the CTA-endorsed secretary of state, to alter the proposition's heading on the ballot from PARENTAL CHOICE to EDUCATION VOUCHERS--a change in wording that cost Prop. 174 ten points in the polls, according to Myron Lieberman in his book The Teacher Unions. The initiative, which had originally enjoyed 2-1 support among California voters, managed to garner only a little over 30 percent of the vote. Prop. 174's backers had been outspent by a factor of eight, with the CTA alone dropping $12.5 million on the opposition campaign.

Second, we see details about the role of the CTA as an ATM for left-wing political causes:

Cannily, the CTA also funds a wide array of liberal causes unrelated to education, with the goal of spreading around enough cash to prevent dissent from the Left. Among these causes: implementing a single-payer health-care system in California, blocking photo-identification requirements for voters, and limiting restraints on the government's power of eminent domain. The CTA was the single biggest financial opponent of another Proposition 8, the controversial 2008 proposal to ban gay marriage, ponying up $1.3 million to fight an initiative that eventually won 52.2 percent of the vote. The union has also become the biggest donor to the California Democratic Party. From 2003 to 2012, the CTA spent nearly $102 million on political contributions; 0.08 percent of that money went to Republicans.

There are aspects of the analysis I disagree with, especially the premise that public education can be "saved", but this does not detract from the great value of the article as a catalog of abuses by the union, all made possible or exacerbated by poor government policy.

-- CAV

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Trade as a Government Favor

Matthew Yglesias reports that the state of Washington is, in his words, about to "partially legalize home cooking". He elaborates:

Details vary from place to place, but the standard legal rule in the United States is that if you want to bake some cookies in your house then you're free to do so. You can also give the cookies you baked to friends, family, and neighbors. You can bring the cookies in to work to share with coworkers. You're also free to exchange the cookies in a wide range of contexts. You can use them as your contribution to a pot luck, for example. But what you typically can't do with your cookies is trade them for money. If you have a bunch of fresh baked cookies but need some money, and someone else wants to give you money for cookies, you're out of luck. You baked the cookies at home, not in a commercial kitchen. [bold added]

Yglesias seems to think this is a good thing:

Absent the terrible economy this probably wouldn't be a big deal one way or another, but with things being what they are these kind of barriers to gainful employment matter a fair amount.

I disagree. What Washington is doing is worse than nothing. As pervasive as government regulations are, it's a no-brainer that home cooking is far from the only thing that would get someone into trouble for the crime of doing it at home and accepting money for it without the government's blessing. In other words, this story demonstrates that, for all practical purposes, it is illegal to sell things in sufficient quantities to earn a living in the United States.

What Washington (and every state) needs isn't a laundry list (beginning with cookies) of things we serfs are allowed to sell, but a repeal of every law that bars such trade. Fraud and negligence are already (properly) illegal, and such organizations as Underwriters Laboratories and the Consumers Union (despite the frequent shilling by the latter for more government controls) show that safety and quality standards (not a proper concern of the government, anyway) will not go out the window without people being forced to comply.

What we need from our government is not permission to sell cookies, but protection of our individual rights, including the right to trade with others. Washington's move is deceptive: It further entrenches the opposite premise.

-- CAV

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5-19-12 Hodgepodge

On the Road

Traveling. Late to bed and early to rise. Baby wide awake at 4:30 a.m. and counting. This short post is going to be it for today. Comments and email will probably have to wait until tomorrow.

Weekend Reading

"The detachment and indifference to the underlying asset is actually a major benefit in that it permits one to learn the patience and market psychology of how to trade, including the basics of money management and controlling risk" -- Jonathan Hoenig, in "Forex Teaches Trading Without Training Wheels" at SmartMoney

"It isn't the past alone that shapes us. It's our ideas and attitudes." -- Michael Hurd, in "Get Past the Past!" at DrHurd.com

"The result of producing, saving, and investing is not the miser's life nor the cartoonish life of Mr. Scrooge but the life of earned success, supreme comfort, and guilt-free happiness. 'Austerity' seems much too harsh a name for this kind of wonderful life." -- Richard Salsman, in "Fiscal Austerity and Rational Morality" at Forbes

Another False Dichotomy

The Salsman piece is the first of a series of three that look to be required reading. Arguing that "the debate needs a moral dimension and would benefit much from applying a rational morality", Salsman notes that a false dichotomy, between prodigality and aesceticism, is undermining the real debate we need to be having, about the size and scope of government. It is interesting to me that, before reading the piece, I'd never considered the full (and wrong) implications of the term "austerity", and yet now, these seem obvious.

-- CAV

Updates

Today: Minor format edits.

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