The Oort Cloud Archives

The Omnivore's Hundred

2008-09-06T14:03:00.002-04:00

In a pathetic effort to resuscitate our moribund blog, I have copied the list "The Omnivore's Hundred here. Robert found the list on the blog "Cosmic Variance" (whose author copied it from the originating blog, "Very Good Taste). The idea here is to bold the items you've eaten and strike through items you would never consider eating. Well, I am italicizing my "no way" list. If I have been too lazy to keep our blog active, then I am certainly too lazy to mess around with HTML.

If you're interested in keeping the discussion going, copy and post the list to your own blog as well.

The list below reflects my food journey; Robert has items that I cannot include, which he may append later. Such are the perils of the joint blog.

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare (There are certain things I like raw. Flesh is not one of them.)
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects (Well, not on purpose. This is not how I choose to demonstrate fearlessness.)
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk (Does its cheese count?)
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads (Sorry, I just can't get past what they are.)
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

So, I have 57 out of 100. I really enjoy Indian food, but was surprised by the number of dishes that made this list which I have not tried. Well, at least I made up for it with the booze and Southern junk food.

As ever, these sorts of lists are less interesting as guides in and of themselves, but rather as mechanisms for provoking conversations about the topic which the list addresses. The AFI puts out its Top 100 best American films so that I can say, "Citizen Kane? Really?!" And all the librarians and English professors who consistently rank Ulysses as the best novel of all time? You're damn liars and you have never actually finished the book!

Off to find more lists!

Bloggin' ain't easy

2008-04-08T17:53:00.002-04:00

Looking at our anemic blog, I laugh thinking about how I made this big pitch to Robert to start this project in the first place.

A few months ago, my friend Diane suggested that one of the things that would make blogging difficult is that writing is work. Not just in the "it takes effort" sense, but that academics are constantly writing lectures, tests, articles, chapters, books, conference papers, commentaries, etc. The idea of writing in one's free time, as a leisure activity, can seem downright counterintuitive.

My friend Eric has a blog in which he limits his posts to 100 words. I completely empathized with him when he explained that one of his biggest obstacles to blogging regularly is the need to tell the "whole story" -- including all the relevant background information, having a cogent introduction, argument, and conclusion, following lines of thought to their utter completion.

This has stopped me from writing many times. I want to comment about one of Obama's speeches, the impending recession, the sad state of higher education, or even the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica, but I feel like I have to explain too much to get my point across. Many a discarded post began with something along the lines of "First, let me explain..."

I think Bill the Cat said it best when he said, "Oop. Ack."

So I am going to take another stab at blogging. I want our site to be more active. Hell, I haven't told half the people we know about the blog because I wanted it to be fully operational before springing it on the public. (Like the Death Star, but with words!)

Farewell, Gary Gygax. We'll miss you.

2008-03-05T08:36:00.003-05:00

Gary Gygax has died. Gygax was one of the co-creators of Dungeons and Dragons, and like many gen-X nerds, D&D was a big part of my youth. In fact, I think it's fair to say that I spent more time reading his words than I spent on any other single author to date. Gygax's books were more than just game rules. They were intelligently written, clever, and funny. They provided an outlet for exuberant teen-aged imaginations, and they served as tangible evidence that there were people like us "out there" in the grown-up world.

I formed my closest friendships over D&D, and I still keep in touch with those guys, more than 20 years later. I'm not saying those friendships wouldn't have formed without D&D, but 1200 hours (by my best estimate) of imaginary adventures together can't help but to have deepened the bonds between us. For that, Gary Gygax will always have my gratitude.

I never had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Gygax personally, but from what I know of his public persona, I like to think that he's enjoying a well-earned rest in Arvandor, or maybe the Happy Hunting Grounds. Wherever he is, we'll miss him.

The Price of Garbage

2008-02-11T21:46:00.000-05:00

My good friend Piet responded to my old post on solid waste by recounting the waste reduction scheme used in Switzerland. In a nutshell, it involves making residents pay a per-bag charge to have their garbage hauled away. The results are that people make a serious effort to reduce the amount of garbage they produce and that the costs of providing trash service are imputed to users according to how much garbage they actually produce. It is a beautiful example of how prices act as signals to influence behavior.

It's so beautiful, in fact, that I wonder why we don't take advantage of price signaling more often. Consider, for instance, all the cities that are experiencing water shortages. Typically, water is provided as a public utility with prices set by local government. If the local government can't provide enough of it, why not charge more? Ideally they would set the marginal cost of a gallon of water at whatever level that would allow them to provide adequate water infrastructure. You could mitigate the effect on the poor by subsidizing usage up to some reasonable level, but after that everybody pays the actual cost for the water they use. The net effect should be that people with large lawns or otherwise wasteful habits would either cut back, or they would fund the construction of greater capacity. Either way, the problem would be solved, and local governments would not be in the odd position of begging people not to buy the product that government itself is supplying.

Similar arguments apply to other utilities that are stretched for capacity. By having people pay for the actual costs of providing those utilities we could fund upgrades and encourage conservation all at the same time. It, too, would be a beautiful thing.

The Onion News Network

2008-02-11T21:01:00.000-05:00

The Onion takes on voters' number-one issue this election campaign, and it's about time, too. (Not work-safe, but if you're at work you shouldn't be reading blogs anyhow. Get back to work you slacker!)

Prediction Markets This Morning

2008-02-11T08:31:00.000-05:00

I was feeling optimistic for the first time in a while about Senator Obama's chances for the Democratic party nomination, so I headed over to Intrade to see what the prediction markets were saying. I was a little surprised when I saw the following prices:

Hillary Clinton as Democratic nominee: 29.9
Hillary Clinton as General Election Winner: 21.5

This means that the Intrade market thinks that Clinton has a 29.9% chance to secure the Democratic Party nomination and a 21.5% chance to win the election. To see why these numbers are surprising, consider the following equation:

P(2) = P(2 | 1) P(1) + P(2|~1) P(~1)

That is, the probability of Clinton being elected is equal to the conditional probability of her winning in the event that she gets the nomination plus the conditional probability of her winning in the event that she doesn't. Since we know that she almost certainly can't win the election without getting the nomination, we know everything in the equation except for P(2|1). If we plug in the numbers we have from Intrade and solve, we find that the market's estimation of Clinton's chances of winning the election if she gets the nomination is 0.215 ÷ 0.299, or about 72%.

This seems amazingly high to me, in light of the fact that Clinton has not had a commanding lead in head-to-head polls. Moreover, McCain is trading at about 32% to win the general election, which suggests that one or both of them are overvalued (since 32% + 72% = 104%).

In practical terms this suggests that there is an opportunity for arbitrage in these markets. If a market were showing 32% and 72% for two mutually exclusive outcomes, for instance, you could bet against both of them for $96 and be guaranteed of winning $100, for a risk-free gain of $4. In practice this never happens because traders quickly recognize such absurdities and arbitrage them away. Unfortunately, I can't find a similarly sure-fire strategy for hedging irrational conditional probabilities. There are some strategies with positive expectation values, to be sure, but all of them have some scenarios in which they generate a loss (unlike the case above). This could mean one of (at least) two things:

I haven't looked hard enough (entirely possible, since I have a lot of other stuff to do).
I've botched the analysis (wouldn't be the first time).
Prediction markets can support irrational values for conditional probabilities implied by related (but independently traded) claims.

Thoughts?

I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

2008-02-04T21:15:00.000-05:00

Pulling together my last post took a lot longer than it should have. Not that I spent a tremendous amount of time thinking about what to say; even a cursory reading should give the lie to that theory. No, it took a long time because I had a miserable time finding that infernal article on the satisfaction poll. There is no reason why this sort of task should take so long. It is a relatively simple and well-posed question. I'm looking for "that article I read a while back that contrasted poll results with widespread concern about the economy."

The problem is this: even after all this time, search technology still sucks. I couldn't remember exactly who wrote the article or how long ago, but I was able to capture the concept of "an article I read" by searching within Google Reader. Still, searches within that fairly limited set turned up a whole lot of nothing. The ultimate cause of the failure seems to have been that Professor Roberts was talking not about people's "concern" or "worry" about the economy, but rather their "alarm" over the subject. I doubt that I would ever have thought of that. I finally found it by scanning through my shared items (which you can also sample in one of our sidebar widgets, by the way) by hand.

This absurd state of affairs persists every time I have to search, whether on the internet or on my local disk. If I can remember a few key words, or better yet a complete phrase, I'll do all right, but if all I can remember is the gist of the piece, or a concept, it's pretty hopeless.

I'll be the first to concede that this is a fiendishly difficult problem. I certainly don't have any promising ideas, or I wouldn't be wasting my time telling our entire readership what they both already know: it's hard to find anything useful on the internet. And as excited as I am about getting specially targeted ads, just for me to ignore when I read my email, it just doesn't get at the fundamental problem: the "Information Superhighway" is really more like a trackless desert.

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

2008-02-04T20:41:00.000-05:00

I noticed in the Washington Post today that pessimism about the economy is at its highest in 17 years. However, I can't help wondering how much of this sentiment reflects real weakness in the economy and how much is a reaction to the news media's endless predictions of DOOM! If you tell people ghost stories for long enough, eventually they'll get scared, and we've been telling some wicked ghost stories.

Every day we're served up a feast of statistics cataloging the latest terrifying trends. It's messing up the stock market, doncha know, and politicians tell us we need stimulus (and change!), and we need it fast, lest the DOOM! overtake us. Perversely, it seems the best way to get economic news with some perspective is to include the word "doom" in your search terms. Apparently professional doomsayers don't actually like to use the d-word. Go fig.

Meanwhile, last month I found this Gallup Poll on personal satisfaction in an article on Cafe Hayek. How to reconcile pervasive pessimism with general contentment? Apparently, people are pretty satisfied with their own lives, but they figure, what with all that DOOM! going around, that everybody else must be having a pretty rough go of it.

Siegel on the Stars and Bars

2008-01-31T13:32:00.000-05:00

My good friend Mike Siegel takes on the Confederate Flag in South Carolina

Mike makes two observations:

(1) Even if the Civil War wasn’t “about” slavery, the issue was so entrenched with the war, the distinction is academic. Without slavery, there would have been no war.

(2) It doesn’t matter if blacks’ offense at the Confederate flag is rational or not. The flag is supposed to represent all the people of the state. If some fraction finds the flag offensive — whether their offense is reasonable or not — it should be changed.

It's pretty hard to argue that the Civil War wasn't about slavery, especially in South Carolina. Consider the following snippet from South Carolina's Articles of Secession:

[p17]
The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows:

[p18]
"No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."

[p19]
This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made. The greater number of the contracting parties held slaves, and they had previously evinced their estimate of the value of such a stipulation by making it a condition in the Ordinance for the government of the territory ceded by Virginia, which now composes the States north of the Ohio River.

This is the first substantive issue raised in the document, and it recurs throughout. To me, that says that it was the most important issue on their minds.

On the other hand, I don't think that the display of the confederate flag today is about slavery or even racism. I think it stems more from the fact that all people, regardless of their station in life, want to believe that they are descended from distinguished and honorable forebears. I expect there is no history so infamous that the descendants of the perpetrators will not try to whitewash it, or failing that suppress it.

I'm generally sympathetic to this impulse. It seems unjust to hold people responsible for events in which they had no say. However, distorting the historical record is the wrong way to deal with the problem. The right way involves a frank admission of what happened in the past, a recognition that we are not our ancestors, and a resolve that we will be better than they were. That, however, is a lot of verbiage, so maybe we need a name for the concept that is a little punchier, something like "Truth and Reconciliation". It has kind of a ring to it.

That said, I do have to object to the "whether they are reasonable are not" comment. Surely what we mean by an "unreasonable" objection is that it should not be heeded. If not, then I wonder, what exactly is the difference between a reasonable and an unreasonable objection? Furthermore, rejecting any standard of reasonableness when "some fraction of the population" objects to something seems like bad policy. Surely there exists a fraction that is too small or an objection that is too wacky to merit serious consideration. The point is that that's not the case here. Trying to weasel on whether or not the objections are reasonable only weakens the argument.

Seven. Billion. Dollars.

2008-01-24T15:04:00.000-05:00

Hold that number in your mind for a minute. Try to visualize it as, say, a stack of $100 bills (apparently about 7.5 km, in case you were wondering).

Now, there's this bank in France, see. And the bank employed this dude, you see. He was about 30 years old, and for some reason I imagine him having a goatee, but I confess that's just my own embellishment. So, you'll never guess what this dude did. Get this, he lost over $7 billion for his employer. Whoops. How does a 30-year old goatee-guy get hold of $7 billion without somebody, you know, asking him what he plans to do with it. I can't even get a measly $10k for new research equipment without navigating a labyrinth of forms and approvals, and I don't even have a goatee.

Sometimes You Even Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Doesn't Blow

2008-01-24T08:00:00.000-05:00

I'm not a big fan of January. It's cold, the sun goes down before I leave work, it's cold, there's salt all over the roads, and most of all, it's really, really cold. The one good thing about January, however, is that organizations like the American Astronomical Society and the American Meteorological Society hold their annual meetings, and for a brief time science gets to be in the news without being pressed into service as a foot soldier for politics.

This week's AMS meeting saw the publication of a study indicating that warmer oceans could reduce the number and intensity of hurricanes striking the US. This result is contrary to the conventional wisdom that warmer sea surface temperatures (SSTs) will result in more and stronger hurricanes. The culprit, it seems, is wind shear. Wind shear disrupts tropical cyclones, and the study finds that higher SSTs produce more shear; thus, fewer cyclones. One particularly interesting feature of this study is that it is based on observational data, rather than on climate model calculations.

If this study is borne out, then it will add an interesting new dimension to the climate debate. In practice it is unlikely that any climate change will be unambiguously good or bad; rather, there will probably be some who are helped and some who are harmed. This, then, is where the future of climate research lies: not in pointless debates over whether or not climate change is happening, but in serious study about the likely effects, for good or ill, of the change that is always happening.

We're back

2008-01-22T22:55:00.000-05:00

It's amazing how much catching up there is to do after a measly two weeks away visiting the family. I finally managed to slap together a post tonight, and I've got a couple more things I want to write about when I have time; I think Jennifer does too.

Until then, um, well, Happy New Year?

The Daily Show - Wait and Switch

2008-01-22T22:11:00.000-05:00

The Daily Show takes on lobbyists. Apparently there is a law afoot (for now, still just a bill) that would prohibit lobbyists from hiring people to wait in line for front-row seats at meetings of committee meetings and the like. My question: who wins and who loses if this bill passes?

First, let's set aside the notion, compelling though it may be, that lobbyists are anthropomorphic pond scum bent on buying out our government. There are good causes, and there are bad causes, all of which have lobbyists. For example, I once met a lobbyist for the National Science Foundation. I presume we can all agree that we're in no danger of the government selling out to… the government.

In fact, consider this: there are 300 million people living in this country. With only 535 members of the two houses of Congress, that's roughly 600,000 apiece. If a legislator spends all day, every day, 365 days a year talking to citizens, never stopping to sleep, that would give us each about 50 seconds a year to make our concerns known--to just one member out of 535. Clearly, we can't all go up to Capitol Hill and make our concerns known. What we can do, however, is to get together with a bunch of like-minded people and hire a spokesman to go up to Capitol Hill for us and tell our concerns to as many Congresspeople as will listen. That is, we could hire a lobbyist. In this sense lobbyists perform a valuable service. Without them, only a select few would get to express their views to the Congress, and I have a hunch that it wouldn't be you and me.

It's not a perfect system, I concede. People with more money can hire more and better lobbyists. Some lobbyists engage in questionable practices, if not out-and-out bribery; however, sadly, it's the best we've got.

But, we were talking about the effects of the new (proposed) law. It turns out that you have to wait quite a long time to get into these meetings where you can get on with educating legislators, expressing concerns, and whatnot. And it turns out that good lobbyists are in demand, so they command shockingly high salaries (as anyone who has competed in the housing market in the DC area will ruefully tell you). Consequently, having them wait around in a queue for the legislators to show up is a tremendous waste of money. Better to hire a bike messenger (or even an "unemployed puppeteer") at much less cost to wait while the expensive guy does something productive (inasmuch as the deadweight losses associated with influencing government can be considered "productive" -- work with me here).

So, what happens if you can't hire cheap placeholders for the line? Well, then you have to have the actual lobbyists do it, which means that each one accomplishes a lot less in a day. Equivalently, lobbying gets a lot more expensive. Who loses from this (apart from the placeholders themselves, of course--apparently the pay is pretty good)? At the margins, every cause will consume less political lobbying, but for interest groups who can already can afford to do only a little bit, that marginal decrease translates to a huge reduction in their effectiveness at influencing policy. Conversely, well-funded interests may at the margin get fewer hours of face time with legislators, but will overall be more effective due to reduced competition from other interests.

Conclusion: Congressmen Cohen's bill, however well-intentioned it may be, will probably have the effect of concentrating influence in the best-funded special interest groups while driving niche interests out of the political process.

Sometimes You Do Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows

2007-12-15T22:33:00.000-05:00

I found this story (found over at Cafe Hayek) about the emergency management strategies of big box chains to be unspeakably cool:

Along with traditional measures, such as wind speed, rain levels and satellite images, McDonald relies on hurricane-tracking software that uses 12 models to predict whether potential storm tracks lead toward Wal-Mart stores or warehouses.

Moreover:

In some cases, retailers have become so deft at handling emergencies that local governments turn to them. Washington state recently assigned an administrator to coordinate with the private sector in emergencies. Schortal of Home Depot said he had a get-to-know-you conference call with the woman a few weeks ago.
"Next thing you know, we're texting each other and exchanging calls for the real thing," he said.

Waste

2007-12-15T10:00:00.000-05:00

Last weekend Jennifer and I went to the Sugarloaf Craft Festival, where among other things, we bought a couple of hats from an outfit called The Mouse Works. As we were cutting the tags off our purchases we noticed that as a result of the owner's efforts to be environmentally friendly, he generated just a single bag of garbage in 2004. Naturally, the first thing I wanted to know was, what was in that bag? Was there a single event sometime during the year that generated the unrecyclables, or did he accumulate them steadily over the course of the year? It seems strange to me that he was able to get so close to zero waste without reaching exactly zero. It's a bit like the fine-tuning problem in cosmology.

I think solid waste is a more serious problem than people realize, and certainly more serious than some environmental issues that get a lot more play in the media. Part of the problem here is that solid waste disposal is heavily subsidized in most places, so throwing stuff away is ridiculously cheap relative to the actual costs of operating a landfill. It's those rotten old negative externalities again.

We generate about a bag and a half of garbage per week, which seems pretty good relative to our neighborhood. I suspect there are quite a few things that we throw away that actually could be recycled, if only we knew the exact rules for what the recycling company will and will not take. As it is we only recycle the obvious cans, plastic, and glass. Maybe we should start experimenting. We also tend not to recycle things that would require extensive washing before we could put them in the bin. It's not obvious to me that running trash through the dishwasher so that we can recycle it is a net win, environmentally speaking.

As part of my research for this post I conducted an informal survey of our solid waste generation habits (i.e., I pawed through the trash until Jennifer told me to stop). The number one component seems to be junk mail. A lot of that could be recycled (and there is a lot more that we do recycle), but I was under the impression that glossy paper and envelopes with cellophane address windows don't recycle. Maybe it's time for a little experimentation at curbside pickup time. The other big component is packaging, mostly cardboard and cellophane. If we got rid of those two, then we could probably cut our trash output to 1/3 or 1/4 of what it is now.

Now, if you will excuse me, my wife tells me I have a year's worth of garbage (by mouse works standards) to take out.

Free Trade and Fair Trade on EconTalk

2007-12-04T21:46:00.000-05:00

This week's EconTalk sees the return of my favorite guests, Mike Munger, to talk about Free Trade and Fair Trade. Munger has the best quote of the podcast (arguably any podcast) when he says, "I'm a big coffee drinker. Sometimes I apply it topically."

Apart from Munger's offbeat sense of humor, the interview is one of the best discussions I've seen in a while of the mechanics of how trade creates wealth for the parties involved and why attempts to channel extra wealth to one of the parties through Fair Trade premiums don't always work out as expected. They also address the common misconception that trade is a zero-sum process in which nations compete to capture as much as they can from a fixed-size pool of jobs. It's well worth a listen, if you have 58 minutes to spare.

Old-time futurism

2007-12-04T06:40:00.000-05:00

Alexander Rose, from the Long Now Foundation points us to an article from the Ladies' Home Journal, published in 1900: "What May Happen in the Next 100 Years." Some of the predictions seem remarkably prescient, such as "Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance" or "Wireless telephone and telegraph circuits will span the world." Others, comically wrong ("Everyone will walk 10 miles a day"). A few are just bizarre, especially the author's obsession with gigantic food (peas as large as beets, strawberries the size of apples, and "One cantaloup [sic] will supply an entire family." WTF?)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the author is most accurate where he is extrapolating from well established technologies of the day. Predicting that the telephone, telegraph, and railroad would all get better is pretty safe. His population forecasts are pretty good, but they are a bit high because he failed to predict the drop in fertility rates that accompanied industrialization. He does less well with technologies like aviation, which had not yet taken hold, vastly underestimating their prominence. Technologies yet unimagined in 1900, such as transistors and integrated circuits, are completely absent from his predictions, and when it comes to cultural trends he is all over the map.

Contemporary futurists can take some lessons from these predictions. Incremental improvements to existing technologies are easy to predict, but tend to underestimate the scope of technological progress. The real revolutions will come from new technologies not in common use today. Some of them, like aviation in 1900, may be right on our doorstep. And people will remain as stubbornly unpredictable as ever.

There is one thing, however, that I feel pretty confident about: no giant fruits and vegetables, ever. You can take that one to the bank.

Virtually Everyone is Sincere, but They Still Can't Agree

2007-12-02T09:39:00.000-05:00

Over at EconLog, Bryan Caplan makes a discovery:

Since the publication of my book, I've been meeting a much wider range of people.
...
What have I learned? Primarily, I'm more convinced than ever that virtually everyone is sincere.

This is not terribly surprising to me. Robert Heinlein said it a long time ago: "Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend," and he doubtless ripped that off from somewhere else much older. So, if we're all sincere, why do we disagree so vehemently, particularly about issues of politics? Caplan continues:

Even when you've got undeniable facts on your side, your opponents probably think that those facts don't matter...

I think Caplan is on to something here, but I think he doesn't go far enough. Often you won't even be able to get your opponents to agree on the facts in question. What fraction of taxes are paid by "the rich"? Does the Canadian health care system make people wait a long time for treatment or doesn't it? These are strictly positive questions that should have answers that everyone can agree on. Yet, when you listen to people argue about the issues surrounding these questions, often their versions of the facts are so different that if you didn't know better you'd conclude that they must live in two very different countries.

Even if we could agree on the facts, there would still be plenty of room for disagreement over the normative aspects of the problem, but if you can't agree with your opponent over the basic facts surrounding the problem, then the argument probably isn't worth having in the first place.

Children and Opportunity Costs

2007-11-25T00:48:00.000-05:00

In our ongoing debate on whether IQ is an anti-survival trait, my good friend Mike opines that having children might enhance career prospects.

I have no idea if having children actually reduces someone’s future earnings and career prospects. You *can* make a case in the opposite direction — that having children gives greater work motivation, forces better time management and has a positive social impact leading to better career prospects.

In my experience, based on numerous examples in both industry and academe, having children seems to reduce workers' willingness to travel or work long hours, both of which are potentially career limiting, at least for some kinds of jobs. Moreover, for women the taking maternity leave can have additional deleterious effects on their careers. A woman's job may be held open until she returns, but whatever project she was working on will generally march on, meaning that she will have to relinquish any leadership position she might have held. When she comes back to work she must either rejoin the project in a non-leadership role or find a new project. The final result is often a significant career setback.

On the empirical side, Phillip Longman (PDF, audio) cites some data that might shed some light on the situation. He summarizes:

Today, in the United States, only four percent of adults say
they will be satisfied if they never have children, according to a
recent Gallup poll. And among those who have reached middle
age without producing children, the vast majority express regret.

So, evidently people think that having children is costly enough that they can't have as many as they would like, which is evidence enough for me.

Finally, I spoke of opportunity costs. Foregone career opportunities are one sort of opportunity cost, but there are others. The direct costs of child rearing and the indirect costs of lost leisure time are significant, and they cause people to put off starting a family "until they can afford it," and it's distressingly common for that to turn out to be "never."

Editor's note: This post was actually by Robert, but a SNAFU has caused it to display as a post by Jennifer, and we can't figure out how to fix it. Can you tell we're new at this?

Robert's Reading List: Halting State, by Charles Stross

2007-11-24T16:22:00.000-05:00

I just started Halting State, by Charles Stross. I'm only a few pages into it, but the plot is shaping up to be about a heist in a virtual world. Apparently, a bunch of orcs with a dragon in tow for muscle have knocked over the central bank in the virtual reality game operated by a start-up company in ~~London~~ Edinburgh. The story opens with our protagonist, a police sergeant, interviewing the company executives about the crime. The executives are quite distressed over the matter, acting as if this theft could jeopardize the fledgling company. It's not yet clear whether these dire consequences are because the virtual currency is freely convertible, like in Second Life, or because the company has spent a great deal of effort to develop a realistic economy which now stands to be disrupted. Anyway, our hero. . .

Wait a minute!

A bunch of virtual characters residing on a company's server walked into a virtual bank residing on the same server and stole a bunch of virtual money by debiting it from the bank's account and crediting it to their own (after beating up the virtual guards and, one imagines, blowing the virtual vault virtual door). Does anybody else see this as just a bit too much analogy between virtual worlds and the real one? Why does the bank in a virtual world need an actual in-world location where the money is stored? That's necessary in the real world, since (some) money is made up of physical tokens that must be stored someplace when they aren't in use. Even in the real world this isn't strictly necessary; a bank could in principle just print off the bills (which are just placeholders for the "real" money recorded in the bank's ledger) as necessary, but this turns out to be impractical. Neither of these concerns apply in a virtual world because money in most virtual worlds works like debit accounts; you can complete a transaction anywhere, any time with no need for "physical" banks and currency tokens.

An even bigger head-scratcher is that the entire caper occurred within servers that are owned and controlled by the company that was victimized. They watched the whole thing occur in real time. Why not boot the offending characters from the game when you realized what they were doing, rendering them unable to complete the theft? Failing that, the backend database that stores the game data almost certainly has the capability to reverse transactions as necessary, so why not just have your sysadmins put the gold back where it belongs?

Charles Stross is my favorite contemporary writer; I've enjoyed everything of his that I've ever read, and I don't doubt that he will come up with something that will make all of this seem reasonable. However, for the moment this seems like an instance of a trope that I've seen a lot lately (including an episode of Numb3rs from a couple of weeks ago). Virtual worlds emulate certain aspects of reality, but they don't simulate reality in every detail. Right now, they can't simulate every detail because the computational power isn't there, but even once they can there is no reason to assume that they will. Many aspects of reality are the way they are because in reality we can't conjure objects into or out of existence whenever we want to. Those features don't have to carry over into virtual worlds, and where they are inconvenient, they won't. I don't expect to see virtual banks that can be robbed in future virtual worlds any more than I expect to see virtual landfills to hold all the virtual gewgaws that players no longer want. They don't add anything to the game (unless the game is a cops-and-robbers sim, of course), and, unlike in the real world, they aren't necessary.

What price, voting?

2007-11-21T10:12:00.000-05:00

At the Freakonomics blog, Ryan Hagen asks, Is it Smarter to Sell Your Vote or Cast It? A recent poll asked students at NYU whether they would sell their right to vote either in the next election or in perpetuity for a variety of proposed compensations. It turns out that over 60% of them would sell their 2008 vote for a year's tuition, and around 50% would sell their vote in perpetuity for $1 million.

What is a vote really worth? The poll questions seem to concentrate solely on the supply side (i.e., what would students sell their votes for, irrespective of whether there is anyone actually willing to pay that), which would suggest that we're trying to get at voters' personal valuation of their voting rights, all else being equal. So, let's assume that this opportunity is being offered to me only. The effect of my individual vote on the election's outcome is for all practical purposes nil, so from the standpoint of influencing the results of the election it is worth nothing. However, I do derive some personal satisfaction from voting that, on reflection, I'd value at a few tens of dollars; $50 would be a reasonable estimate. So, I should be willing to sell my vote for anything more than $50 (although I'd try to get the best price I could, of course). To sell my vote in perpetuity I'd want the discounted value of all of those future $50 votes. At first blush I might want some sort of risk premium, in case there might be some election in the future that I really want to influence, but since my probability of successfully influencing such an election is so small, that component is basically negligible. Depending on what discount rate you assume, that works out to about $2000 (assuming only one vote per year; if you include primaries and such it could come to several times that). Considering how many people voluntarily abstain from voting for no compensation at all, that seems like a reasonable number.

If we consider the possibility of the same deal being offered to everybody, then it gets a little harder to calculate a reasonable price. It's not too difficult to come up with our buying price for such a scenario. One or another candidate is bound to favor policies that will either cost us money directly or eliminate some benefit that we previously enjoyed. With a little work we could attach a value to those policy differences. To use myself as an example, my interaction with the government is primarily through taxes, but some policies might affect the costs of things I use. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the present value of the benefit comes to $20k (although the fact that I would have a hard time telling you which side provides the benefit suggests that the number is actually much smaller than that). Suppose it takes about 5M votes to change the results of a large election. Then we're looking at about half a cent per vote. Clearly vote buying isn't a good strategy for little old me. For someone more entangled with government the total would be higher; someone standing to gain a billion dollars from having his candidate elected should be willing to pay $200 per vote in our example.

Clearly a rational selling price should be higher than the buying price, but how much? The total benefit from the preferred candidate winning provides an upper bound, since that price fully compensates the seller for having the unfavorable candidate win, but should he be willing to accept less? That depends on the probability that the seller and others like him will actually change the results of the election through the sale of their votes. For example, if you think there are 10:1 odds against your vote sale affecting the election, then you might be willing to accept $2000 for your vote. The exact odds calculation depends on who's buying and what their motivation is, but something in the $1k - $10k range seems plausible. One of the commenters at the Freakonomics site opines that the bid-ask spread in vote-buying is likely to be large. Evidently, this is borne out by our analysis.

For selling your vote in perpetuity in this scenario, risk comes to the fore. You may be fairly confident that the value of this election to you is small, but what about all future elections. What if Dr. Evil decides to run in 2024? In this case the risk premium you would have to assign is large enough that the practical answer is "not at any price".

My takeaway from all of this is the result that although the right to vote is precious to residents of a democracy, the act of voting itself is of little value to us. This result seems curious, but it makes a kind of sense. The right to vote ensures that in a broad sense candidates are aligned with the will of the voters in a way that they generally aren't in nondemocratic governments, so voting rights serve a useful purpose. Once that is established, however, the purpose of democracy has been served, and actually going to the polls to vote serves no further purpose.

Time to get my blog on...

2007-11-10T20:42:00.000-05:00

Robert and I have talked about blogging for quite some time, but between work and the wedding, we haven't really had time. I hope we can change that soon.

I'll admit, I fear that blogging might be similar to keeping a journal -- something that sounds like a great idea for a creative outlet, but quickly becomes one more thing to put off doing.

I do keep a blog for my Western Civ classes at George Mason University and I have been pleased with it as a tool. It saves time and paper to be able to communicate with my students via the web. I am currently composing a post that is titled (in my head) "Why your papers sucked..." I hope that it will be an easier dose to swallow by reading it in a blog than by me devoting a third of the class to a stern lecture.

But anyway...

I know that one of the reasons that Robert and I wanted to blog together is because we have these incredible conversations that can touch upon any conceivable topic and we wanted to share some of that with our friends and family. It is not uncommon for the two of us to ponder what the human species will be like in 5000 years or to muse about what a Kucinich vs. Paul campaign would look like in 2008, but those conversations can be a little more difficult to start with others. In this forum, we hope that you will be able to see our often complementary and sometimes competing viewpoints, while we hope to see what our friends and family think about a range of esoteric topics. Maybe it will change the way we talk (verbally and virtually) with others.

I hope, too, that the blog allows us to keep people informed about what's going on in our lives. I know that I can be too busy to call, but I still find time to read my friends' blogs, Live Journals, Twitter accounts, etc. I like to keep up.

As for "The Oort Cloud Archives" -- well, it's astronomy and it's history. It has something to do with our wedding rings and with a great day in a North Carolina park. And it makes us laugh.

Cheers!