My Whereabouts

I write this from Burgos, Spain, which I have reached after much hardship. I don´t have time to write about it because there are 4 minutes left on the internet thing and I don´t feel like paying for more. I can´t even find the appropriate apostrophe. So that´s life in Spain. I must find a grocery store.

Friday Funny?

Today’s xkcd is inscrutable.

On a related note, why are there a hugely disproportionate number of Hungarian geniuses? Could it be related to the fact that their language is impossible?

Religion on Bloggingheads TV

Bob Wright and Tyler Cowen have a very interesting bloggingheads discussion on religion. Here are two highlights:

[from 27:30]

Tyler Cowen: Do you believe in God?

Bob Wright: [..] Not in the sense that people mean the term “God.” [..]

I do, as I guess you know, think there’s evidence of something you could call purpose unfolding through the history of life on earth. [..]

I guess one thing I wind up saying is that, um, well I draw this extended comparison with believing in electrons, you know? … Electrons may not exist, some scientists think they don’t, one thing we know from quantum mechanics is that they’re inconceivable, you can’t accurately think of an electron. And yet, conceiving of them in an an undoubtedly simplistic way, in a way that surely falls short of the true picture, is useful and it allows us to build computers and so on, and we consider that a kind of intellectual validation of, kind of, believing in electrons.

I wrestle with the question of wh- and this kind of goes back to William James and his pragmatism. [..]

If you believe as I do that there’s a kind of a moral order manifest in the unfolding of life, and if you say “Well, I want to align myself with the, kind of, axis of that order.” And I don’t know what the source of that order is, but thinking the source of that order as being a divinity or something, or even thinking of it as an anthropomorphic thing, that’s helping guide you. If think th- if conceptualizing the source of that order in a way that is surely unsatisfactory, surely not accurate, helps you more closely align yourself with that moral axis, and live a better life, I say well maybe that’s a kind of intellectual validation of God.

[40:30]

Bob Wright: What is a definition of religion that defines you as religious?

Tyler Cowen: I think all people hold on to some set of propositions, which they do not subject to rational scrutiny in the same way that they subject their other propositions to rational scrutiny. Furthermore, I think people use those propositions to socially bond with other people, and they tell themselves self-deceiving stories about how the whole picture fits together. In that sense of religious, I think all human beings, including myself, are religious.

There is a lot of stuff in this talk that I would have liked to have been smart enough and clear-thinking enough to formulate for myself.

The two excerpts I chose correspond roughly to two things that I believe:

1. Working backward through why you believe what you believe, you will reach a dead-end faster than you think. Put another way, your axioms start at a higher level than you think they do. When we’re talking on the level of “the search for truth,” atheists don’t distinguish themselves from theists by strict adherance to logic and provable propositions.

2. Belief in God and religion can be viewed as a strategy for getting what you want out of life if what you want is to act in a way that you think of as “right.” I have no objection to the claim that some people are basically satisfied with themselves in this regard and don’t suffer from akrasia (weak-willedness). But, for myself, I think you would have a very hard time convincing me that I would not be better off, in the sense of becoming a happier and more satisfied person, by moving more towards religion and away from atheism, regardless of whether atheism is true.

Discussion Questions

More like questions that I might want to think about, or remember having thought of, in the future.

1. From what framework and with what assumptions would you be able to argue that suicide is undersupplied by the market? e.g. Can the expected value of QALY be negative for a rational person who is capable of the act?

2. Why is fiat currency worth anything? Also, would it be sensible to interpret housing and other bubble-prone durable goods as fiat currencies? If I knew what a Schelling point was, I’d probably be thinking of something like that. What I am thinking about is the term “store of value” and the coordination of production over time.

Obsession

Last Wednesday, I quoted the following puzzle:

Ken and Bob find themselves in possession of three blank-sided dice. These are ordinary cubic dice, with six faces each.

Ken writes the numbers from 1 to 18 on the sides. No number is repeated. Each side of each of the three dice now shows a number from 1 to 18.

Bob then chooses one of the three dice. Ken chooses one of the other two. The third die is discarded.

The two men then play a game of dice war. The war consists of a hundred “rounds.” In each round, first Ken rolls his die, then Bob rolls his. The man with the highest number showing on the topmost face of his die, wins the round.

Whichever man wins the larger number of rounds, wins the war.

Question: If both men followed the strategy that gave them the best mathematical chance to win this war, what would the numbers on the dice look like?

Some people have actually found my site by searching for the puzzle, so I’ll go ahead and post the solution.

I don’t know what happened with that dice puzzle, but somehow my feelings about it progressed from utter disdain to obsession (accompanied by disdain). Real geniuses would be able to put the problem in an easy-to-conceptualize format and solve it. Sadly, I’m not a genius, so I had to find another way. I determined that if I was to have any chance of solving it, it would have to be through the brute force of the computer.

One problem: I don’t know how to write computer programs! At least, I didn’t know how to write programs when I first started working on this problem. But, I thought, I don’t have anything to do anyway, so if I have to learn Python to solve this problem, then that’s what I’m going to do.

So I spent a couple days learning Just Enough Python(TM). The result is far from pretty, but it is, I am fairly confident, accurate.

Ready? The Three Dice are… 

1: [1, 2, 9, 14, 15, 16]
2: [3, 4, 5, 10, 17, 18]
3: [6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13] 

No matter which die you choose, I can choose a die that has a 58% chance of beating it on any given roll. Is there any reason we should have known in advance that those would be the best dice? I have no idea. Like I said, finding this solution involved brute force, nothing else.

Alright, here’s the program that will deliver that answer. It compares 2,858,856 sets of dice, and takes about 3 minutes to run on my computer (Hey, that’s 15,883 sets per second!). Right-click or whatever to download it. To view or run it, you’ll need to change the extension, because it’s not really a jpg, it’s a .txt or .py file:

P.S. The two-word phrase you could google to find a discussion of problems like these was “Nontransitive dice“

The Wire vs. Oxford English Dictionary

Pedantry about the English language is dangerous territory, because when you engage in it, you are almost certain to be wrong. The writers on The Wire decided it was worth the risk, and, not surprisingly, they turned out to be wrong. Observe:

Shorter OED, 6th Edition: 

evacuate verb

[..]

6. verb trans. Remove (inhabitants, inmates, troops), esp. to a place of safety from a place that has become dangerous.

P.H. Gibbs I am in charge of a continent of nurses and nuns just evacuated from the Belgian front. T. Gunn During the Blitz I was evacuated to a school in the country.

The part that really irks is the follow-up, because while I’m more than willing to believe that writers really do engage in such ridiculous pedantry, I’m annoyed to see it falsely vindicated.

(Un)Certainty

From John Derbyshire (best not to ask why I was reading this article) comes the following puzzle:

Ken and Bob find themselves in possession of three blank-sided dice. These are ordinary cubic dice, with six faces each.

Ken writes the numbers from 1 to 18 on the sides. No number is repeated. Each side of each of the three dice now shows a number from 1 to 18.

Bob then chooses one of the three dice. Ken chooses one of the other two. The third die is discarded.

The two men then play a game of dice war. The war consists of a hundred “rounds.” In each round, first Ken rolls his die, then Bob rolls his. The man with the highest number showing on the topmost face of his die, wins the round.

Whichever man wins the larger number of rounds, wins the war.

Question: If both men followed the strategy that gave them the best mathematical chance to win this war, what would the numbers on the dice look like?

I post it because it’s a mildly interesting puzzle, but mainly as an example of how even my strong intuition can be wrong. When I first read it, I was convinced that there was no way Ken could give himself an advantage. When I say convinced, that means that I would have been willing to bet something like $10 on it. Even as I was thinking that, though, it occurred to me that people generally don’t write puzzles to which there is no solution. So I kept working on it. I haven’t actually found the solution, but I’m somewhat convinced that the bulk of the interesting insights that can be gained are gained from thinking about the puzzle, not in actually finding the unique solution.

As far as I’m concerned, the true puzzle is this: What two-word phrase should you google to find a discussion of problems like this one?

Trusting the Government

I am currently skimming a copy of the book Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. One of the interesting themes in the book is government credibility, which is of course very important in negotiations. After the revolution was put down with the help of Soviet tanks, the Communist government of Hungary explicitly and publicly promised the leader of the revolution, Imre Nagy, that they had no intention of putting him on trial for his actions. As he left the Yugoslavian embassy where he had been given asylum, Hungarian officials promptly kidnapped him, put him on trial, and had him executed.

Also interesting is the role of the United States in the attempted revolution, which is to say its lack of a role. Apparently dissidents in the post-Gulf War Iraq didn’t know their US History, because then they might have been familiar with the support that the United States provides to groups it incites to revolt. In the 1950s, the United States used Radio Free Europe to encourage Hungarians to rise up against the communist government, and then did nothing to help when the Soviets came in to crush them. Hungarian intellectual Jósef Köböl had this to say:

When … America finally spoke… it was a message of condolence. Of course no Hungarians expected a nuclear war on their behalf but probably we believed too deeply political rhetoric in elections campaigns that we weren’t supposed to take seriously. The wrong was partly our fault for twisting words. It was partly America’s fault for thinking that words can be used loosely. Words like ‘freedom’, ’struggle for national independence’, ‘rollback’, ‘liberation’ have meanings. If America wants to flood Eastern and Central Europe with these words it must acknowledge a responsibility for them. Otherwise you are inciting nations to commit suicide. (p. 296)

Where I Stand on Health Care

I’m not going to defend insurance companies or really anybody else involved in American health care, but I don’t think they are significantly more evil than people in other industries. The CEO of Walmart (or some corporation you don’t hate) may be an evil bastard, but his evil bastardness doesn’t get free rein, and that’s mainly because he is afraid of losing customers. In other words, most CEOs profit from giving customers what they want.

Medicine is a different story. No market is entirely free, but here are some reasons why the market for health care is even less free than other markets:

1. The Supply of Doctors and Medical Licensing

It is illegal for you to provide health care without a license from the government. The economic theory on monopolies, cartels, and unions is pretty unambiguous about the consequences of such a situation. Supply is restricted and the price is higher than it would otherwise be. Easy.

2. The FDA

In More Sex is Safer Sex, Stephen Landsburg points to research showing that the net cost of the FDA, which is measured in pain and death, is… well, I don’t remember the number, but really high.

3. Patent laws

Patent laws are defensible in theory as a spur to innovation. The empirical question is whether that incentive is sufficient to justify the inefficiencies created by patent laws. A new book by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine suggests that the theoretical defense of patents has scarce application to the real world.

4. Tax breaks for employer-provided health care

The current tax regime subsidizes employer-brokered, insurer-funded health care (or, equivalently, taxes non-employer provided, individually paid-for health care). This might not be so bad except that insurance companies use this to their advantage by using this subsidy as a kind of lever. What I mean is, they negotiate with hospitals so that people who walk in off the street pay something like 4-5 times as much for health services vs. the insurance companies’ “renegotiated” rates. Result: it’s nearly impossible to pay for your own health care; you must have insurance.

5. Regulations on insurance companies

This one is somewhat counter0-intuitive, because regulations ought to restrict the excesses of insurance companies and protect consumers (don’t laugh, I haven’t made my point yet). But actually, #4 wouldn’t be so bad if there were free entry into the health insurance market. But, for insurance companies as for medical providers, there is a welter of rules and regulations governing what they must and must not provide, what they can and cannot charge for, etc. The counterintuitive thing about rules and regulations like these is that they actually reward large companies by providing economies of scale. If you are an individual thinking of starting your own insurance company, it’s going to be really hard and expensive for you to do all the compliance-related stuff you’re going to need to do. So you’ve got a barrier to entry, and we’re back to point #1.

This post was occasioned by me listening to about 15 minutes of Bill Moyers’ special on health care. What I’ve been hearing so far is a lot of complaining about how insurance companies are too greedy and congress doesn’t care enough about people’s health care. Those complaints are way off base. I don’t know what single-payer healthcare would look like in the USA, so it’s hard for me to say whether it would be better or worse than the system we already have. Our current system is terrible, for the reasons mentioned above, and more reasons that I couldn’t think of off the top of my head. But my rather vague impression is that you are unlikely to improve a problem caused by excessive regulation and monopolies by means of more regulation and monopolies.

Staying on the Right Level

Something that I definitely do too often is accuse people of not making any sense. It’s neither very specific nor very convincing, so whenever I say it, I regret saying it. One example of a person who I have claimed doesn’t make sense was Elizabeth Warren, a law professor who is also apparently the chairman of the committee that oversees TARP funds.

Here is Elizabeth Warren talking to Adam Davidson on the Planet Money podcast #40 (thanks to Thomas for the link):

EW: The American middle class is under assault. They are getting the wrong end of a great big financial deal, overall. This is a generational shift. I’m not talking about TARP, I’m not talking about anything else. 

[..]

EW: We can’t do anything about the American family until this crisis is over? This crisis will not be over until the American family begins to recover. This crisis does not exist independently…

AD: But that’s your crisis. That’s, that’s a…

EW: No, it is not my crisis. That is America’s crisis. If people cannot pay their credit card bills. If they cannot pay their mortgages…

AD: But you are not in the mainstream of views on this issue. You are n-.. you are…

EW: What? That if they can’t pay their credit card bills, the banks are gonna do fine? I — well whose, who are you looking at?

AD: The… you can–

EW: Who says a bank is gonna survive if the Amer- Who is not worried about the fact that Bank of America’s default rate has now bumped over 10%. That’s at least the latest data I saw. So the idea that somehow we are going to fix the banks and then next year, next decade, we are going to start worrying about the American family it just doesn’t make any sense, the pieces don’t add up.

Elizabeth Warren makes sense, but her point of view is extremely wrong. More wrong than most people who are wrong.

Here’s why: she has a mental model of reality that she believes in so strongly, she thinks that its parts are actually real and manipulable objects. On Overcoming Bias, they’d say that she is mistaking features of her map for the actual territory.

A slideshow on this subject gives the great example of a 2-D cross-sectional depiction of a human digestive system, which shows a tube running from the mouth, down all the way through a human body to the anus. The space alien asks: So how do humans keep from falling apart, since there is this huge gap between the two halves of their body? The alien doesn’t realize that the drawing, while accurate, isn’t reality. We don’t and shouldn’t worry about keeping the halves of our body together.

To jump slightly via analogy, this is pretty much why I have stopped bothering about what “government” does or what would happen under “anarchy.” Looking at Eastern Europe, Africa, Russia, China, and the United States, it’s clear that how a society functions is a product of a huge number of factors. The concept of “government” can actually be somewhat informative about many of these factors, but it is improper to think of government as a low-level factor in this. Describing a country as a “democracy” is a shorthand and imprecise way of describing many of its low-level features. But you don’t get a change in the situation on the ground by changing the government.

And so we come to Elizabeth Warren, and Thomas, who agrees with her. I am convinced that they are mistaken about what are the manipulable features of a society. “The middle class” is not a territory-level phenomenon, it is a feature of the map you use to interpret the territory. Thus, talk about helping “the middle class” sounds good but doesn’t have any consequences in the real world. Thomas said that in the argument featured on Planet Money, it is as if they are speaking different languages, and I think the reason for that feeling of disconnect is because Elizabeth Warren isn’t talking about anything real. 

So, she doesn’t actually make no sense but she’s wrong in a really fundamental way. As I’ve been typing this, I’ve been trying to think of an analogy, and I finally came up with it.

Elizabeth Warren’s car breaks down, and she takes it to the shop. The mechanic says that her engine is broken, and she needs a new engine. Elizabeth Warren insists that you can’t worry about fixing the engine because what she really needs is a working car. To which the mechanic says, “Huh? I’m proposing this repair which will cause you to have a working car, but  ’a working car’ is a description of that object, not an object in itself. I can’t give you ‘a working car,’ because there is no object that is ‘a working car’ in the sense that you mean it.” This causes Elizabeth Warren to cry, because I’m sexist. But hey, the mechanic is a woman, so you’re sexist, too.

I’m done with this for now. As usual, I’m not very happy with these ramblings. I feel like I’m correct, but unless I think through what I’m trying to say properly, it’s going to be hard to know. I do strongly sense that I’m right, even though I haven’t proved it at this point. So, when I have occasion to think about this subject again, I’m going to make such a convincing argument that it will make your head swim (spin?).