Koch Talks iPhones and Web Apps

Starting with a somewhat misinformed rant, PPK has been organizing his thoughts and opining on the roll of web versus native apps on mobile technologies such as the iPhone. It's quite good throughout - I think it's going to be the most insightful and interesting set of posts from a blog I always read anyway. Please do check out the PPK blog here.

I think I'll add to the conversation when I have a bit of time, but my current thought is that there are only two real reasons for the App Store:

1. To guarantee payments to coders. This will end the same way DRM on music did - deal with it. The problem isn't "pirates," it's producers pricing themselves out of the market.
2. To guarantee that your apps don't corrupt your phone. To this end, I wonder if we will see a network of 'app reviewal companies' that provide downloads at cost that have been checked in the same manner that Apple does now. Regardless, I wonder just how sandboxed the environment for apps currently is and what that means for security...

That's Not What She Said!

Kevin Bartz shows a simple chart of bill length versus support in the House:



Of course the increasing variance is a good reminder that successfully adding pork in exchange for support is actually a more difficult task than one might imagine. Additionally, I'd like to see the same chart with all resolutions, not just those that passed. I suspect that the effect would be even stronger in that case, but I'm not sure...

Tell 'em Taleb!

Nassim Taleb has a working paper, Common Errors in the Interpretation of the Ideas of The Black Swan and Associated Papers

The point of The Black Swan is that both empirical knowledge (i.e. extrapolating statistics) and a priori theories fail in the tails and it is vital to "robustify" against it using the concepts of "the fourth quadrant". The point has been garbled by members of the economics establishment that claim mistakenly "we know that" and "we know about fat tails" or "power laws". This is both wrong and not my point. The paper presents corrections to the misperceptions.

I'm looking forward to reading it.

Loaded Questions

Good surveys avoid loaded questions, it's why you never ask questions like "How many jobs did your received stimulus money help you to create or save?"

Markets Versus Government: Gay Rights

Here's a clip from the Daily Show at the Gay Rights parade in DC. At 1:02 you'll see the common argument about gays and shared medical benefits (spoiler alert: they want them).

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Queer and Loathing in D.C. - Radical Gay Agenda
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Here's an article from 2005 - 92% of Fortune 500 companies offer shared benefits for same sex partners. In fact, every company I've worked for has done the same.

So why the hell are people saying we need more of a government who won't even grant them the basic freedoms their employers offer?! And why do these same people want less of the free markets that granted them these privileges??

Talking Your Way to Happiness (or Worse!)

Olivia Judson, evolutionary biologist/my imaginary girlfriend, has a fun opinion piece where she reflects on the feedback effects of facial expressions and how this might intersect with language. In short, we know that making the face associated with an emotion can subsequently trigger the emotion; we also know that some sounds force muscle contractions more inline with some expressions than others. So is it possible that some languages bias cultures to certain feelings? If "eee" makes you smile, do "e-heavy" languages create a happier, more friendly culture?

The broader idea has been found in a number of conceptually related experiments. Botox may actually alleviate depression; thinking about sex engages the "sex brain" and makes men more likely to take risks; frame effects are everywhere - they even create problems in comparing Likert's to percentiles in surveys. Only the first of these has that super cool physiological-to-psychological twist, and perhaps only the last has wide-reaching cross cultural implications.

But what if she's right? Suppose that we had definitive evidence that the English language biased people to be more depressed, or more violent. What if it made us happier than others?

We feel comfortable injecting ourselves when "chosen" behavior has negative consequences. Consider what happened when studies showed that too much venting or physically venting anger can actually increase the likelihood of subsequent violence: Counselors altered their approaches (if needed) and those that didn't could have been sued or worse. And schools employ said counselors, effectively on retainer to ensure that our knowledge of psychology is adopted by as many individuals in the generation as possible.

So would we force ourselves to switch languages if English made us violent? Should we force others to adopt English if it was found to be the least violent language? What if the effects were small, and what if they were very large?

It's the stuff of late night dorm discussions, and admittedly, it's late. But what I really wonder is this: do regulated and "certified" (whatever that is) organizations have too much authority? One of the things that I like about markets is that they allow for decoupled actors to independently succeed and fail - ultimately allowing better strategies to emerge. In research the same is true. I'm not sure that it is for the APA, the AMA, etc.

The Title Alone is Reason to Read It

Why Love Has Wings and Sex Has Not: How Reminders of Love and Sex Influence Creative and Analytic Thinking

by Forster, J., Epstude, K., Ozelsel, A.

This article examines cognitive links between romantic love and creativity and between sexual desire and analytic thought based on construal level theory. It suggests that when in love, people typically focus on a long-term perspective, which should enhance holistic thinking and thereby creative thought, whereas when experiencing sexual encounters, they focus on the present and on concrete details enhancing analytic thinking. Because people automatically activate these processing styles when in love or when they experience sex, subtle or even unconscious reminders of love versus sex should suffice to change processing modes. Two studies explicitly or subtly reminded participants of situations of love or sex and found support for this hypothesis.

Family Guy Wants an Emmy

They really, really, want an Emmy.

Wonkish, Again

Krugman is at it again. This time complaining that the "rich man" doesn't understand what life at the bottom is like. Oh, tell us PK, noble progressive:

Digby catches some of the talking heads saying that we’re all dependent on the stock market for our retirement. Which leads to the question, what do you mean “we”, rich man?

From here, sources of income among the second quartile of older Americans, that is, from the 50th to the 75th percentile:

Even in this group — which is above median, although not at the top — Social Security accounts for more than half of income. (It’s the great bulkof income among poorer retirees). Asset income is, by comparison, trivial.

That would be swell, if, of course, even a freshman econ student couldn't see the problems here. First, 22% from pensions - those tend to be, uh, invested... Woops.
Second, we are often dependent on the stock market, even if we aren't at the time of retirement. 401k's, pensions, mutual funds, and just about every form of savings or contribution commonly used for retirement rely on the stock market.

Now why is this important? Because PK knows this, I assure you. This is nothing more than ideology corrupting knowledge. And it's shameful.

Biophysical Economics

"Neoclassical economics is inconsistent with the laws of thermodynamics."

One metaphor clashes with another, sure. But, then again, the metaphors of quantum mechanics are inconsistent with those of pretty much every other field. I suppose everything is wrong now.

Read the absurdity at your own risk.

Brilliant Means of Tying Textbooks to Blogs

Please, do check out the Mankiw Blog Map, which ties blog entries to chapters from "[the author's] favorite text book."

The rough idea is one we suggested as a group project at the Edlab (Meety was the ultimate winner). The broader purpose being to drive learners to relevant and engaging material associated with a text. In doing so, learners can pursue new ideas, develop a greater grasp of the ideas being presented in the text, and find something personally relevant in each chapter - hopefully increasing motivation.

There are some good lessons and questions that come from this project. First, the question:

Can we automate this process? I'd suggest tagging chapters with topics and starting with an initial seed of blog entries. Then, iteratively build out the listings using machine learning which uses a two dimensional proximity algorithm, rooted in semantic analysis and network distance defined by links.

And the lesson:

My proposal (two or three years old at this point), jumped right into the uber-techy solution. But CENGAGE Learning is a bit more business savvy than I am (or, hopefully, just than I was at the time). Their work limits the scope but greatly reduces the initial investment. By paying people to tag and associate chapters from a single text and a single blog (both of which are quite popular), they pay less to assess latent demand. And then, should they find that demand exists, they can move forward accordingly. Really, a much better strategy. Kudos!

Sweet Slithering Jeebus...

Introducing LOLPython

Google Goes Even on Likert Scales

I've been in a number of arguments over the years with people who insist that Likert scales must have an odd number of points (usually 5 or 7). But there's nothing wrong with even-point scales, at least when the situation calls for it. I like them when you have a need to force the respondent to "take a side," when you want to avoid the cognitive misery of neutral responses, or when neutral responses don't really make sense. The classic example, for me anyhow, is the VALS survey, which uses a four point scale. Another example I came across a while back was the "Reasons for Living Inventory" - which, interestingly, shows that a primary reason given for not killing oneself is concern over what others will think (in case you thought we stopped being social animals even after death!). But Google's recent survey on Google Squared uses a 10 point scale. A few to many items for my taste, but kudos for being so even-handed!

Generating Amazon Images

Nat Gertler uncovers an interesting (though, in hindsight, unexpected) twist in Amazon's image API. All images are dynamically grabbed via url parameters which allows you to do some very fun and weird things.

Nobel Prize: Scratch and Win Edition

Greg Mankiw goes Shaw-esque with his editing of an AP story:

LONDON — The surprise choice of first-year graduate student Quintus Pfuffnick for the Nobel Prize in Economics drew praise from much of the world Friday even as many pointed out the youthful economist has not yet published anything in scholarly journals.

The new PhD candidate was hailed for his willingness to tackle difficult problems, his commitment to improving the economic system, and his goal of bringing efficiency and equality into harmony.

Professor Paul Krugman of Princeton, who won the prize in 2008, said Pfuffnick's award shows great things are expected from him in the coming years.

"In a way, it's an award coming near the beginning of the first year in grad school of a relatively young economist that anticipates an even greater contribution towards making our economy a better place for all," he said. "It is an award that speaks to the promise of Mr Pfuffnick's message of hope."

He said the prize is a "wonderful recognition of Pfuffnick's essay in his grad school application."

The full post is here.

Update: Angus notes that "President O had only been in office for TWO WEEKS when the nomination deadline for the Peace Prize arrived." Yikes!

Either Congress or NBC, You Decide

Since the House returned for its fall session on Sept. 8, it has stuck around to vote on a Friday just once: to approve a 5.8 percent increase in Congress’s own budget.

Configuring Commands in Cocoa Apps

The folks from TextMate, have a nice blog showing how to configure key commands for Cocoa apps - something that's quite necessary when using my favorite editor on Snow Leopard.

Meta-Selection

Paddy writes a Python script called the Otter Algorithm. Basically, it's a genetic algorithm where fitness is defined as the closeness to a pre-defined string.

Besides my love of Python, I thought this was interesting because Paddy had to change the original "Weasel Algorithm" to make it work. Could be a due to a bug, but he solved it by increasing the mutation rate. My question is, is this an application of Fisher's Fundamental Theorem? The issue being that his solution never converged, though perhaps this is a case of very low rates of mutation - with no room for "gene" interaction - converging to a net 0 rate of selection...

EDbarrassment

I'm going to starting adding entries of the title of "EDbarrassment" to gripe about the poor quality of education and higher ed. Today's winner comes from Mind Hacks:

For any individual study you can validly say that you think the estimate is too low, or indeed, too high, and give reasons for that. For instance, you might say that your sample was mainly young people who tend to be healthier than the general public, or maybe that the diagnostic tools are known to miss some true cases.

But when we look at reporting as a whole, it almost always says the condition is likely to be much more common that the estimate.

Vaughan gives two examples - both of downward bias and never gives an example of upward, or positive, bias. So, it appears, our PhD holding "research psychologist" (I'm not sure I'm keen on that title) has never heard of statistical bias... Yikes!

UPDATE: I should clarify, the author is complaining that media outlets seem to have an obsession with studies which may under-report values. He finds this troubling because he sees errors, between studies, as being randomly distributed. Something a first year doc student should know better than.

G'Day Ladies

The folks from TheSpark and SparkNotes have a dating site called OkCupid which posted this interesting text analysis of initial emails on a dating site. It's definitely worth reading in full (and it's short and fun, not actually a research piece). I found the most interesting points to be:

1. Less common greetings fared better (e.g. "Howdy" versus "Hello")
2. Men who self-efface get more responses.
3. Referencing atheism improves your response?!

I wonder if the first is really just an artifact. There chart seems to show that introductions that do really well are actually those that show some interest in the other person (e.g. "How are you," "how's it going," etc.). But the third?! I would have never guessed that. I'm actually somewhat surprised as I see religion as a very noisy signal, but perhaps it's less so for the unique case of atheism...

Obviously, none of this is highly scientific, but it's thought provoking and amusing throughout nonetheless.

Gaydar: Yer Doin It... Quite Well Ackshuly

I'm fascinated by SNA but this takes the cake:

Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. The two students had no way of checking all of their predictions, but based on their own knowledge outside the Facebook world, their computer program appeared quite accurate for men, they said. People may be effectively “outing” themselves just by the virtual company they keep.

The only disappointing aspect of the story was their professor who claimed:

“That pulls the rug out from a whole policy and technology perspective that the point is to give you control over your information - because you don’t have control over your information.”

That's absurd. You still have control over your information - just as you do with what clothes you wear, your manner of speech, etc. People have remarkable intuition for social matters and before anyone jumps on the "we've lost control" bandwagon, we need a baseline. I'd venture that these ten guys had pretty much "outted" themselves in every other social context too.

How to Create a Popularity Algorithm

Here is an interesting article reviewing popularity algorithms on the web. Some parts are better than others, but overall quite good.

My initial thought is that there is little to tie in from psychology as the scale of the problem is too large. But, it's Sunday morning and I'm too tired to really think about this.

Rewriting History

I've been meaning to put up something about this for a while but it kept slipping my mind. Until I happened across a wonderful graph.

Elizabeth Warren and others have taken to revisionist propaganda, stating that:

This really is the big question. To start that question in 1792. Okay, a young country, George Washington is in his first term and we have a credit freeze. There is a financial panic. Every ten to fifteen years there is a financial panic in our history. Just look at it. And there is a big collapse, trouble, people lose their farms, wiped out, until we hit the Great Depression. We come out of the Great Depression and we say we can do better than this. We don't have to go back to this type of boom and bust cycle. We come out of the Great Depression with three regulations. FDIC insurance. It is safe to put your money into banks. Glass-Steagall. Banks won't do crazy things. And some SEC regulations. We go fifty years without a financial panic, without a crisis. And then...

Really?! 50 years? No busts?

Note that the columns are not in order chronologically.

The entire transcript from the Daily Show interview is here. It's incredibly, incredibly annoying. (Though, of course, I will always love the Daily Show.)

"Pottyhead" is Allowed

Under section 370 of the House Rules and Manual it has been held that a Member could:

• refer to the government as “something hated, something oppressive.”
• refer to the President as “using legislative or judicial pork.”
• refer to a Presidential message as a “disgrace to the country.”
• refer to unnamed officials as “our half-baked nitwits handling foreign affairs.”

Likewise, it has been held that a member could not:

• call the President a “liar.”
• call the President a “hypocrite.”
• describe the President’s veto of a bill as “cowardly.”
• charge that the President has been “intellectually dishonest.”
• refer to the President as “giving aid and comfort to the enemy.”
• refer to alleged “sexual misconduct on the President’s part.”

Well I suppose it's been an uneventful year and congress needs to keep itself busy. Or wait, perhaps it's been an incredibly eventful year...

HT to Politico

So Many Possible Tangents

Why exactly are the majority of scholars studying inequality so pessimistic about it?

I think there's quite a lot to ponder in those words. More here.

It Was NOT an Overreaction

I've been watching commentators rail Republicans for their outrage over BHO's address to children. This week, Bill Mahr argued that we need to call stupid people stupid. And I support that, wholeheartedly. However, this isn't one of those cases. Some of the critics are just nuts, of course, but the initial outrage was to a proposal for student activities that was subsequently changed from:

Write
 letters 
to
 themselves
 about 
what
 they
 can
 do
 to
 help
 the
 president.

To:

Write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short‐term and long‐term education
goals

That's a big change! Way beyond the claim of "unclear language," given by the White House. Allegedly, the issue was that the gov wasn't clear about what they wanted from students. So when they said "to help the president," they meant, you know, "to help themselves." Because that's a vernacular issue I'm sure we all run into.

If you're a social psychologist, and you read the initial draft of this document, I suspect you were reminded of some wonderful stories of Chinese prison camps. At least I was. But maybe I read too much Cialdini...

An Open Challenge to Media Companies

I've been working for NBC for a few weeks and due to an oddity of some sort, I'm sharing my office with a couple of copy editors. They're very nice and I'm enjoying their company; both for the jokes and the different perspective into working for NBC. Much of what happens at work and what we talk about isn't fair game to post openly, but it did start a chain of thought I'd like to share.

It's no secret that people steal content (although the best websites for it often are), but various institutions have shown that users will access content legally if given the opportunity. I believe iTunes, Amazon digital downloads, Hulu and others have all taken a chunk out of piracy.

Here are some random thoughts regarding payments for movies:

1. Use the HSX to assess the value of movies before they come out. Then allow viewers to buy movie tickets at their market (perhaps only for the first 2-3 weeks the movie is out). This would be an interesting pricing mechanism that may ease the "flop effect." After all, if a movie is only worth $2 and it has to stay in the theater for contractual reasons, why not make $2 instead of 0?

2. Allow for "donation payments" much as open source software does. If you like this movie and didn't directly buy it, you could go so a simple website and pay what you felt it was worth. This would probably need to be marketed as a method of addressing issues with NetFlicks and other similar providers, but clearly the hope is that people will contribute something for content they've acquired illegally.

3. Allow higher cost rentals while the movie is still in theaters. In my circle, it's a repeated point of complaint that obtaining access to a movie legally must be done through a theater. So why not allow rentals? Off the cuff, you could imagine a typical rental costing $5, so charge $7 and give the theater $1 as a severance payment!

Reality Hurts

Your result for The Brutally Honest Personality Test...

Crackpot - INTJ

20% Extraversion, 67% Intuition, 73% Thinking, 53% Judging

People hate you.

Paris Hilton hates Nicole Richie. Lex Luther hates Superman. Garfield hates Mondays.But none these even rates against the insurmountable hate, people have for you.

I mean, you're pretty damn clever and you know it. You love to flaunt your potential. Heard the word "arrogant" lately? How about "jerk?" Or perhaps they only say that behind your back.

That's right. I know I can say this cause you're not going to cry. You're not exactly the most emotional person. You'd rather spend time with your theoretical questions and abstract theories than with other people.

Ever been kissed? Ever even been on a date? Trust me, your inflated ego is a complete turnoff with the opposite sex and I am telling you, you're not that great with relationships as it is. You're never going to be a dude or chick magnet, purely because you're more concerned with yourself than others. Meh. They all hate you already anyway.

How about this- "stubborn?" Hrm? Heard that lately? All those facts which don't fit your theories must just be wrong, right? I mean, really, the vast amounts of time you spend with your head in the clouds...you're just plain strange.

*****************

Take The Brutally Honest Personality Test at HelloQuizzy

Goverment to Levy a Tax and Take a Percentage of...

your penis. No, seriously. If spending other people's money is inherently corrupting, what's the effect of control over their genitalia?

And leave it to those with unchecked power to forgo reality:

Experts acknowledge that a new circumcision policy is unlikely to have a dramatic effect in HIV infection rates, as most adult men are already circumcised. Additionally, scant evidence exists to prove circumcision protects homosexual men from getting HIV.

79 percent of adult American men are already circumcised, according to public health statistics, though circumcision of newborns has dropped to about 65 percent in recent decades.

Predictability Matters

1. Motivation relies on predictability. Predictability is necessary (though not sufficient) for instrumentality, one third of the expectancy model of motivation.

2. Incentives rely on predictability. This, I would argue, is really an extension of the above, but for the economists out there, I quote Smith (and indirectly, Hume):

The uncertainty of taxation encourages the insolence and favours the corruption of an order of men who are naturally unpopular, even where they are neither insolent nor corrupt. The certainty of what each individual ought to pay is, in taxation, a matter of so great importance that a very considerable degree of inequality, it appears, I believe, from the experience of all nations, is not near so great an evil as a very small degree of uncertainty.

3. Predictability is deeply important internally as well. Some have argued that individuals with weak attractors in the dynamical system which describes their mental state are more prone to suicide due to the psychological pain of instability. Although said researchers do not point to this data, I note that borderline personality types, schizophrenics, and those with bipolar disorder are all vastly more likely to commit suicide than those with even severe depression.

4. Predictability stabilizes societies. The second (and undervalued) root of law is to disincentivize retribution. By putting the power to punish into the state, victims and those close to them are barred from seeking vigilante justice, which leads the victims of said justice to seek justice... leading to tribal feuds in a vicious cycle. Knowing, a priori, that the transgressor will be punished prevents this cycle.

5. I argued in my last post that predictability of household events matters for child development. It is, however, a huge leap to go from short term incentive analysis to long term developmental effects. And I'm not ready to jump that canyon.

At the Margin: Child Abuse

Today, someone told me that there was research showing that childhood emotional abuse was a better predictor of negative life outcomes than physical abuse. I nodded, after all, I had a hypothesis about this long ago looking around at those I grew up with.

But I spent some time today Googling and just couldn't find this magic article. Instead, I found paper after paper suggesting that the type of abuse was an inferior predictor to degree. (Here's a more readable, and ungated, summary.)

Of course, perhaps this still fits my observations. One could imagine that emotional abuse is more likely to be used with greater frequency and perhaps greater severity; if, for no other reason, than frequent and severe physical abuse tends to draw unwelcome attention from neighbors and Child Services. Additionally, frequency may say something about parental stability and thus the child's learned ability to predict outcomes of social interactions. And predictability matters...

Fighting for Common Sense

Jeff Monson has always been one of those people I'm interested by. I wouldn't call him a hero, but I'm always impressed by him and enjoy watching him fight. Recently, I happened across an interview with him that had a line I just couldn't resist sharing:

CRITICAL BENCH: If you could fight at Wrestle Mania and challenge 3 people, in a full contact fight who would you choose and why?

Jeff Monson: McCain, Obama, and Hillary Clinton because hopefully the people would realize we can do just fine without anyone in charge of us.

Excellent, just excellent. Although I wouldn't interpret this literally, I think Jeff makes (intentionally or not) a larger and very important point: there is no such thing as doing nothing. We have been inundated with claims, be they about health care, the economy, or Iraq, that "doing nothing" is not an option. But not having a centralized plan executed by task forces simply means that individuals will act. Someone always, always, acts. In fact, everyone acts - even when they're not given credit.

If we don't have a single payer option, individual buyers and entrepreneurs will development new innovations (regulations permitting, of course). If we don't bail out companies, liquidation will eventually occur for some while monies and investments are reallocated. If we didn't invade Iraq, we could have traded with them, making both of us richer and them less likely to harbor ill will to the United States. (On this last note, I'll have to remember to post some literature on the horrendous, and they are truly horrendous, effects of economic sanctions.)

There is no such thing as doing nothing. The absence of centralized planning only allows for more individual action. Said actions will be highly varied, often public or have public results, and from this order will emerge. Some call it markets, some call it emergence, some just call it the creation of social norms. But it's never been centralized and worked.

One of them looks very perplexed

Man + Baby + Photoshop

More on manbabies.com

Geithner: Victim of Geithner's Policies

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Home Crisis Investigation
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Joke of the Day

Green = Blue

Seriously, the green and the "blue" colors are actually both green. This is an area of psychology I've never dabbled in, but seems like it could be highly related to many common theories of group behavior, stereotypes, and comparative judgment. I'll add it to the "to do" list...

Reading and Writing... Why is it so Disorganized?

There's a "new" site (it seems to have come out of beta in 2008) called BookGlutton which allows users to discuss books as they read them. I like the idea, but I have a few complaints with the site that I hope they address moving forward:

1. Design. Yikes. It's pretty ugly and could use some real UI focus.
   
2. I would love to see a simple html/js widget that could be installed on any site or blog. Just a nicely styled badge that says "I'm discussing War & Peace at BookGlutton"
   
3. The API exists, but is very limited. I'd like to see some serious functionality here, including the ability to tie groups to other sites and projects. Over course this leads me to:
4. There doesn't seem to be private groups. Admittedly, I haven't yet made an account, but I would love the ability to create private reading groups, keep notes along side discussions, and, for nonfiction, be able to do some tagging and create "section summaries.

I'm still mulling over an idea for a tool to facilitate self-directed learning at the university level. A central location that manages publication feeds from the journals in your field, allows you to keep notes in a way that's more visually satisfying than lines of text, and helps create a network of ideas/theories/data and their relationships. Thanks to BookGlutton, I would now want to add private groups for reading and discussing articles. That piece, I think, is more productive for students than for researchers. But it does help create a user base that will grow with the product, and I'm always partial to the student's perspective :)

Thoughts?

Framing Axiomatic Logic

In my last post, I talked a bit about logic and how framing can be used to create a highly persuasive, but incorrect, argument. It was encouraged by this post from Krugman's blog. Notice how he quickly suggests that "rational" (read: good or correct) people must be consistent (by the way, neither the economic nor the game theoretic definitions of rationality require this) and then moves the focus (frame) to marginal utility. It all seems overwhelmingly scientific - until you correct for your native biases that is.

For anyone who's interested, I responded with:

As usual, this post takes an unscientific and highly biased framework, and carries out its logical implications to suggest truth. It precludes the possibility that perspectives may change with time. If one holds a constant position - perhaps more likely, a constant position inline with Krugman’s views - then, this post makes sense. Otherwise, it’s illogical and ideological. Nothing more.

One reason perspectives may change, and a darn good one in my view: Some may favor Keynesian measures but are worried that the particular implementation is more harmful than alternatives - alternatives which cannot be discussed until the money train is slowed down. Propping up companies that are suffering from greater problems than just reduced aggregate demand (see: GM), using the funds to eliminate risk from companies and investors who should face the costs they’ve rightfully accrued, not directing revenue to states who will be forced to raise taxes otherwise, tying government money to dangerous policies that mandate how businesses are run: these are all reasonable worries. And they are all policy problems that can’t be predicted by economic modeling (at least entirely).

These are the problems one must assess after action has been taken and must use as data when creating an opinion about further action. Economics is a tool - it does not mandate how policy is actually implemented.

I swear, I'll get back to technology and psychology now!

Illogical Logic - The End of My Musing on Economics

A problem that I see many people encounter is applying logic where it doesn't belong. This may seem like an odd argument (especially from someone with a math background), but one must appreciate what logic really is. When deductive logic is used in an argument, it typically takes the form of:

X is true. Y is true. This implies Z. (Ok, this is somewhat inaccurate, but it's easy to follow.)

Unfortunately, this isn't actually what's happening at all. The real argument looks more like this:

I have a set of assumptions (axioms), call them A, which I hold to be true without further proof. Also notice that X and Y seem to be true. A, X and Y together imply Z.

The trick is that the argument is framed to focus attention on X and Y - and thus to shift the debate towards these claims - which, for a skilled debater, are either obviously true or highly unpopular to refute (e.g. Medicare is great, the terrorists hate our freedom, etc.). And in a good, read misleading, argument, X and Y are accurate while A is riddled with errors. It's highly effective because the assumptions are implicit, and everything that is explicit appears highly logical, cogent, and authoritative. I am, for the record, found of arguing that Scalia falls into this trap quite often.

So where does logic have no place? I would argue that it is extremely difficult or even impossible to apply hard and fast logic to situations where A (our assumptions or axioms) must be biased. Sadly, this means that pure logic has less of a role in psychological phenomena. We truly fail to see the world "as it is" and this is revealed in numerous cognitive biases. These biases lead us to create a false set of axioms, but deduce logically from them. Each step seems precise, yet each takes us potentially further from truth.

But the real moral of the story is that I've really gotten carried away and have spent too much time reading, talking, and writing economics. Hopefully this blog will make a return to my true interests and skills: technology, psychology and, occasionally, mathematics. Over the next few weeks, I hope to make some time to read up on cognitive biases in consumer psychology and share some thoughts.

FYI - A quick search finds a Wikipedia page dedicated to maintaining a list of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases, and though I didn't read through them carefully, I noticed that "choice paralysis" was conspicuously missing... When I'm not feeling like such a mooch, I'll make an account and add it.

Wonkish

Greg Mankiw points to the same Heritage article that I referenced a few days ago - and I'm pretty happy to see Mankiw link there. Of course, I pointed out that Heritage is always biased, and Mankiw notes this only means that Medicare "may not" be cheaper. He doesn't sound convinced by any means. The only original words in his post are "Maybe not" and a thanks to Craig Newmark - not exactly gospel.

But, as usual, this didn't stop Paul Krugman from throwing a fit. So what's wrong with that? Well, he wants us to compare Medicare to Medicare Advantage, with the bizarre claim that Medicare Advantage is "free market" health care. It's not. It never was. No one wanted it to be.

Medicare Advantage is a bizarre venture whereby the government gives grossly large sums of money to select "private" insurers accompanying a set of stipulations regarding how business is done. Some of these regulations may be great policies that are ensuring better care for the elderly. But the glut of rents is nothing more than a market distortion. One that allows for absurd outcomes like this: "The agency said 27% of Medicare Advantage plans have fewer than 10 enrollees." I'll keep this simple, there's a reason that you'll never find an auto insurance plan that has only 10 enrollees, let alone almost 1 in 3.

I agree that Medicare Advantage is inefficient. I even agree that it's probably worse than public Medicare. But it's a niche market highly distorted by government and lobbyists. To suggest that its failure reveals anything about free markets is amateurish, lazy and, well, wonkish.

Wonderful Comparison

Corporate marketing doesn't explain very much about teen substance abuse. There are as many kids who use marijuana once a month or more as there are who smoke cigarettes that often. When was the last time you saw an ad for cannabis?

More here.

Hilarious

Old, Grizzled Third-Party Candidate May Steal Support From McCain