Homeschooling

Isegoria links to an article at Salon about homeschooling.  Pretty good.

Situational Ethics

So, I was reading about Roman Polanski, and decided that the Divine Command ethics people have at least something right.

They assert that any ethics that doesn't come from God amounts to no ethics at all.  After a little thinking, this becomes somewhat more plausible than this Atheist had previously thought. 

It is no stretch to say that whomsoever has an ethical position is inclined to interpret the ethics of a situation massively in their own favor.  If this is true, then it is effectively true that someone who claims that ethics are situational has very nearly given themselves license to do anything they like.

Relativism falls the same way.

Only rules which give rather strict guidelines give an out.

To categorize ethical approaches.

Rule-based ethics (usually Kant-ish or Deistic) gives rules to follow.  It is comparatively easy to draw a line one can't cross (usually by drawing a closer line than needs be drawn, so that once one unequivocally crosses the line, one is blatantly wrong).

Values-based ethics (Utilitarianism or Egoism) give goals to pursue.  The line is "what are the effects".  This is subject to a truth-analysis, and thus hard to fudge.  Furthermore, most intelligent strains of utilitarianism or egoism go to rule-based, which makes them pretty close (functionally) to deontological rules.

I've already said that Relativism, and Situational ethics are (given human mental/moral frailty) effectively the equivalent of no ethics.

Unfortunately, I'm having a hard time reconciling my personal preference of Virtue Ethics (Buddhists, Aristotle, etc.) with what I seem to think would result: (effective freedom from ethics).

------
The second piece of this puzzle is that people (despite massive cognitive self-favoritism) are basically good/friendly.  Particularly in commercial economies, where benefits are obviously primarily from buying and selling, people don't tend to like to mug/beat/kill one another.  The virtues of commercial (shopkeeper) culture are the virtues of getting along with other people.  Of course, there are sociopaths, but the basic person on the street is (with biases) awfully friendly/helpful.

So at least that part of the argument from God's ethics fails:  People don't need God's law to run around not killing one another.  Most people wouldn't anyhow.

But the original point is pretty stable.  Without fairly firm rule-ish stuff about what to do/what not to do, one acts effectively a-morally.  However, since most of us are human, and we live in commercial culture, this amorality is not likely to lead to particularly bad effects in general.  However, it is interesting the extent to which the Divine Command folks criticism actually holds water.

Bad Law

In the comments a while back, I suggested that if I got 1 constitutional amendment (as per an old Volokh post -- rules: It can't be contrary to the common preferences right now, meaning you don't get to abolish the 16th) for free, I might have to choose the 3-page (amended to 1000 word) limit to laws passed by congress.  New evidence continues to suggest that I'm basically in the right place.

Transformations -- the book

Reading Grant McCracken's book, Transformations, was a transformative experience for me.  Imagine a Zen master, replete with the knowledge of the ages, suggesting to you that identity is an illusion.  Now imagine that a Harvard Business School master of anthropology and marketing took the Zen master seriously, and decided to study the topic. Suppose this demi-god decided to focus on the history of identity construction from pre-historic through Madonna and Robin Williams...and then wrote a book about it that educated through example.  My head is still spinning... 

I'd summarize, but to summarize this book (unlike so many more) is to lose most of the value.  The flavor of the book and the examples, the examples, the examples give so much more than I can present in between 100 and 6000 words that a summary is almost offensive against the richness of the book.  It's like saying: Moby Dick is about a guy chasing a whale.

My tiny attempt (existing only to entice my reader to read this book):

People have evolved the notion of the self over the course of history.  Whereas in the deep past, identity was thought to be stable, the postmodern approach justifiably rejects this, and allows a fluidity of identity.  And this is good, besides not being transient.  Let Grant open your mind to the dizzying array of identity transformation in 2010, and show the historical chain whereby this modern fluidity is nonetheless connected back to the tribal experience of stable self.  Along the way, your guide will, in passing, allow you to encounter every subculture in the modern world, and most historical ones as well.

Julian Simon

Part 3(?) of the series of most important ideas in Economics.

Julian Simon was a professor of economics, who believed that the world was running out of coal/oil/fresh water/etc.  However, he was a professor, and couldn't find the experimental evidence.  So he went out and collected the evidence.  Indeed, he devoted the better part of his academic career to collecting said evidence. After 20 years, his summary was that we're not running out of anything.  Indeed, he eventually published a very high-data, very low readability work (except first 2 chapters) called The Ultimate Resource.

His summary is effectively gospel in the libertarian circles, and I personally find to be a tremendously powerful critique of deductive reasoning.

His points are very simple.

Argument #1

1. Prices indicate a decentralized calculation of how expensive it is to get more vs. the desire for the something.  Example: diamonds are (now) expensive because everyone wants some, they only exist deep in the ground(for another few years), and the De Boers cartel massively restricts supply.  Shit (human fecal material) is cheap, because there's lots of it, easy to get more, and people want less not more.  "Value of a thing" is ENTIRELY determined by how easy it is to get the stuff vs. how much people want it.  This is especially true of natural resources (Water, oil, timber, etc.).
2. Prices are future-looking.  Texaco will make a metric crap-ton of money if it owns a bunch of oil, and everyone else runs out, and the prices spike to $5000/barrel.  If Shell wants to make money, it has to only sell oil if it expects prices to stay moderately stable for a long time, and hoard oil otherwise (technical details and mixed strategy omitted).  If it does anything else, it will be sued into oblivion by its shareholders.  Suffice it to say that the price of oil now takes into account everyone involved in the oil trade's future estimates of the price of oil as well (unless the people involved are all VERY stupid).
   
3. Therefore prices are a wonderful estimate of how easy it is expected (by the people who stand to make money on the transaction) to be to get more of some substance in the future, given all current knowledge.
4. Simon's book shows that the price (adjusted for inflation -- or in hours of work to buy 1 unit of the resource) of EVERY natural resource (Timber, Fish, Oil, Zinc, Molybdenum, Platinum, Clean Water, etc.) is and has been dropping for at least 500 years, nearly monotonically. 
   
5. If the price is dropping, that means that the available reserves (how much we can get to cost-effectively) this year vs. last year has been going UP more or less consistently for 500 years.   Examples:  in 1960, we had 452 Squintillion barrels of known oil reserves, which would last us (at 1.5 SqB/y ) 300 years.  In 2009, we have 9000 Squintillion barrels of known oiil reserves, which will last us (at 20 SqB/y) 450 years.  Which is why in inflation adjusted terms, it now costs us (on average) 6 minutes of work ($25/hr,  $2.50/gallon) to buy a gallon of gas, as opposed to 15 minutes, like it used to in 1960.
6. Ergo, we are likely to NEVER run out of ANYTHING.  
7. Indeed, the ONLY resource that we seem to be short of is ... PEOPLE.  We need more people in the world to make more ideas, so we can make resources get even cheaper.

Argument #2:

1. Should we do predictions based on past history, or based on an "expert"'s theory of what will happen.
2. Experts continue to think that we'll run out of stuff.
3. Various experts have been predicting this for 200 years, and have been wrong every time in the past 200 years. 
   
4. Data says that we are not/have not been running out of anything for 200 years.  Indeed, we have more of just about everything.  
5. Who should you believe ... Pointy-headed professors and professional alarmists?  Or data?
   
6. Aside: Contra hume, Bayesian statistics suggests that Point C indicates a clear answer.

Argument 3.

1. Aluminum is a beautiful example.
2. Aluminum's price went down a lot for many years.
3. Aluminum started being used for cans
4. Aluminum's price started to go up.
5. People started buying used cans to recycle the aluminum
6. The price went back down.
7. Ergo, you don't have to dig up more to have more of it available.

Julian Simon says that (a) you should rely on data, not pie in the sky "It must work this way" predictions.  (b) the price data all says that we're not running out of anything, and has said that for at least 200 years, and despite warnings to the contrary, we haven't.  (c) Natural resources are an ever-shrinking, ever less important part of the economy.  (d) That's not to say that a government can't cause massive starvation on purpose (see Russia, China) or on accident (see Africa).

I think Dr. Simon is obviously right, and it's a shame more people don't know about him. 

Weekend

Short list:

1. Seth Roberts on another his always unusual, and always informative self-experimentations.
   
2. Arnold Kling has an excellent (Macro-ish) book report up.
3. Scott Sumner posts also on macro.  Funny similarity to Kling's post in part 3.

So long as we're not giving up entirely on macro, I think that the Sumner position(same link) is the most coherent: This is exactly like the last 183 recessions we've seen, and everyone's acting like it's not. 

weight loss

SLD part N

I'm no thinner, 3-4 weeks in.
At the same time, I have no appetite to speak of. 
My weight is still oscillating around my original ~201ish weight. 
But it is very hard to eat.  I've been running ~1 meal a day for the last few days.  And unable to eat more for the rest of the day.  Strange.

A couple ideas

First, I was reminded of a post from a while back, wherein Arnold Kling tells us what Masonomics is (round 1 of N, where N is large).  In that post, he makes several interesting points, but one that is fabulous, and which is significantly at the core of the Public Choice economics profession: Methodological individualism.  In Arnold's words:

"...lose the we. When people use we in today's politics , they are doing two things.

1. Appealing to a moral entity that stands apart from and above John, Mary, or any other individual
   
2. Treating government as the embodiment of that higher moral entity"
   

 Arnold talks further, but this is a very important point that is nearly 100% lost in the political discourse of the day.  You and I, Bob and Sue, and Jose, Chizuko, and LaShawnda each have different goals in our lives, day-to-day and long term.  The "we" language that is common in politics obscures the fact that the government is trying to impose (or some people are trying to impose) the forcible will over the government on a number of people who do not all share the same goals and preferences.

Will Wilkinson today points at another major problem in public, but only narrowly identifies it.  In the post, Wilkinson identifies a fundamental problem in behavioral economics.  If the world doesn't move in the direction that a person thinks it should (rationality in the case of Behavioral Econ), the person, in a mighty act of hubris, accuses the world of being mistaken...rather than their analysis of the "should". 

Zen 101: In a contest of wills against "Is", you lose. (Clinton notwithstanding).

Public Choice Econ

It seems as if my understanding of the public choice econ critique should be devastating to progressives.  I am interested to know why it is not. 

My understanding:

In the case of indirect democracy, the playing field is tilted massively in favor of monied interests.

If a company stands to make $1B from regulation X (prohibiting some practice of their competition)...It is strongly inclined to make payments of up to ~$900M to politicians, their families, their friends, their golf games, their mistresses, etc.

While the payment can't be in cash...it can be close enough.  $900,000,000 is a lot of money.  You can buy a lot of politicians with that much cash.

Since we all know that politicians lie like rugs, we expect that regulation X will be packaged in terms of the latest craze (this month it's health-care).  So for instance, Walmart will support (and lobby for) employer mandate for healthcare because the cost to Walmart is much smaller than the cost to it's competitors, thus increasing Walmart's share of business.  See bootleggers and baptists.

Doesn't this decimate the case for congress passing laws of any sort? 

Do we have to ignore the fact that most of the laws are passed for special interests, and hope that the few laws passed that are not either special interest legislation, or legislation that does not place us in the negatively impacted minority are sufficiently good to make up for the massive cost of living increases created by the other legislation?  Is this even a tenable position.

I'm really confused.  How do progressives deal with government failure that is apparently endemic and necessary to the system, nearly impossible to fix once enacted (unlike market failure), and many times worse than standard market failure.

Shouldn't this critique (both experimentally and theoretically) have made big-government progressivism a dinosaur by now?  No Stalin in the comments.

Incentives question

Yesterday, I said "Any system in which the payer, the consumer, and the decider are three different people is fundamentally broken and unfixable".  I was talking about Education.  My listener quickly cited healthcare.  I should have added the caveat of "in interactions between strangers".  Are there any cases where I'm wrong?

Health Care MDCLXVIII

NYT confirms that lower lifespans in US are NOT related to the Healthcare system.  Indeed, in most ways our system is better.  Lifestyle (we're richer, fatter, smoked more last century, etc.) explains about 150% of the difference in health outcomes vs. other countries.  Once early lifestyle-type deaths are removed from the picture by dying, old people in the US live longer than old people elsewhere, due in no small part to a better health system that handles cancers a lot better, and other diseases somewhat better as well.  This is not to say that our insurance-dominated system isn't atrocious...just that there are mitigating factors, and that the common trope that our system gives worse results is simply not true.
HT: Instapundit

Hormesis II

Isegoria supports the hormesis hypothesis, by linking data.

Geek Game II: interviewing

So...status interactions are good to study, but how do you use it in the real world?

When beginning to look at the world from a "game"/status point of view, life becomes very interesting.  However, it takes a while to learn to apply it.  First real application (by proxy) a few days ago.  A friend asked me for technical interview advice.  After much hemming and hawing, I realized that game would work.

The point of game is to elevate your own status sufficiently (usually via social tricks) so as to be able to get what you want ... because people respond to monkey status clues.  Once people act like you're high status, you get more. 

So my line was: increase your relative status.  But this is geek-world interviewing for an IT position.  How do you win status in an IT interview?  Ask hard technical questions about what they are doing.  It isn't (usually) required that you can answer the questions.  However, by asking the interviewer questions that they find hard to answer (assymetricity tricks...interviewers have not prepared for the interview, so they usually can't answer a lot of side-ranging questions -- What technologies do you use.  Followed by why did you use X rather than Y, which is newer/more standard/more complex/more edgy).  The business of asking questions frequently also distracts the interviewer, so they become impressed with your technical knowledge without your having to answer much of anything. 

Not sticking to the interview format of they ask you lots, then they ask if you have questions is also highly advantageous.  When you control the tempo effortlessly (don't push too hard here), you have higher status...and since it's an intellectual discussion (about tech)...you have a higher intellectual status ... usually higher than the interviewer.

In this instance, it worked very well.  I hope to hear more reports of intellectual game.

High geek Game

I find it interesting that despite sometimes fumbling about in non-geek circles, the men I know who inhabit the higher reaches of the intellectual pyramid (folks who think +3Sigma IQ folks and the average professor are just dense) have effectively none of the difficulty with attracting attractive women that the standard geek crowd is used to.

Oddly, I have a theory.  When you reach an intelligence level that is sufficiently high, a person gets used to being the smartest person nearby.  This, unfortunately, leads to a bit of good-natured dismissiveness when interacting with other peoples' ideas.  However, unlike the lower reaches of mid-high IQ (say, top 10% of CalTech undergrad), there is effectively never any need to prove oneself good enough.  It is obvious to the posessor and everyone else.

So what happens?  The greater alpha geek develops alpha characteristics in the geek world:  Moderately intellectually generous, fully the owner of any intellectual conversation they are near, and just the right level of condescension to girls to put accidental status games in place.   Since many women like intellectual pursuits, it's not hard to find a case where the intellectual game can be overwhelming.  Even with the 160+ IQs that we expect from this crowd, they play in the man-ho space very easily.  If they escape the confines of geekery, they become very dangerous.

Weekend omnibus

1.  Masonomics: Tyler talks, Arnold, Tyler, and Peter Boethke respond.
2.  Sight Enhancement:  Isegoria links.
3.  On not liking real solutions.  I comment in that thread.
4.  Seth on properly accepting limits to knowledge.  See also the intro to his linked paper.
5.  Health Care Mankiw analogizes beautifully.  Kling references Ezra Klein pseudo-agreeing.
6.  Sumner on Swiss democracy:  Direct democracy avoids many public choice problems.  Long.  Good.
7.  The macro debate continues.  Tyler meta's it up (links), comments near topic, and then sides with Falkenstein

Romer, Freidman III, Moldbug

There is a very wide agreement (in the libertarian space) that social democracy in the US and most of Europe is something of a failure.  Without going into the topic of whether that's true (see this post), we should examine solutions a bit more.

No one in the libertarian space is interested in the conservative response to this failure: strong leader.  What then can be done? 

It seems as if, in the modern space, there are 4 distinct, moderately well-listened to positions.

1.  Devolution of power.  Everyone in the libertarian space is for this.  Less central government control.  Abolish the 13th Amendment, enforce the incorporation clause of the14th vigorously, and gut the commerce clause.  Allow states proper differences.  If California and New York want to be bankrupt socialist states with Marijuana legal, but tobacco illegal, they should be allowed to be, so long as they can't tax the folks in Texas to do so, or get bailouts from the Texans.  If the Texans want to permit backyard howitzers, again, that should be the business of Texans, at least until they're all dead.  Free travel between citizens of the states, and watch what comes out.  As it is, there's a massive problem of not being able to escape, as much as one would like, the stupidities of ones ideological opponents, and thus being stuck with big fights, rather than little disagreements.

The difficulty, of course, is that this is roughly impossible.  Politics flows to centralize power, not distribute it.  The libertarians suggest, rightly I think, that if you devolve power, the places that have the most tinkering and government will become blatantly less good places to live quickly.  Not only will there be less power as we decentralize, but then the less-regulated states will do even better economically, heightening the fall of politics as a solution.  Therefore, no way no how, never gonna happen.  Hence the other solutions. 

2.  Menicus Moldbug:  Privatize the government.  Specifically, make government a public corporation that has moderately absolute rights inside a particular sphere.  No way in heck this is going to happen, but an interesting thought experiment.  Basically, the line is that there is no line of accountability between the decision maker (voter or politician) and the results of their policies, and therefore the policies suck.  Specifically, democracy gives power to people with low/no accountability and hence near-necessarily has atrocious public choice outcomes.  A public corporation is built in order to have the accountability very clear.  Adopt the model.  Either Menicus or one of his disciples should correct me here if I am unfair.   Unlikely in the extreme, but a good thought experiment.

3.  Patri Freidman:  Can't save existing societies...go build a new one that floats.  Only way to get the results we would like.  Thinks that the natural line of floating societies will trend libertarian, but sees the results of these experiments as very good.  If the scientologists or the flat earthers want a seastead, they should be allowed to show us all why their model is better than ours.

4.  Paul Romer:  We have no evidence of previously working systems like Patri's but we do have evidence of experimentation working in the past.  Hong Kong.  Swamp, where Britain leased the land for a long time.  British rules turned it into a comparative Paradise, compared to the rest of china.  Let's repeat that.  Experiment with different rule-sets, and see what comes out.   More likely to happen than Patri's.  Less likely to be radical. 

Education + testing

Tyler links to a study about learning retention.
One more nail in the coffin of the idea that multiple-choice/short answer tests are relevant to anything useful.

In defense of Obama on Race

Recap:
So...I grew up in California.  I'm properly socially dense for a geek, so I didn't see any racism going on.  Then I moved to Houston...and saw racial mixing of a kind that California just doesn't have (outside of colleges).  Going back to California...the lack of racial mix, and the unpreparedness of some folks to interact with other colors was surprising.  But not horrible...just noticeable and surprisingly different from the nonchalance of Houston.  Austin, a bit later, was better, but not as good as Houston.  And visits to North Carolina and Atlanta have been marvelous like Houston.

And then I moved to Chicago.  In Chicago, my experience is that you can't meet 3 people of different race than you without encountering a situation that is racially tinged.  Indeed, the racial tint is so standard here that it becomes next to impossible, even when the situation is not racially tinged (rare -- usually interacting with a white person from elsewhere), to not see racial forces at work.  This from every black person I've talked to about the topic in Chicago as well as my new personal awareness.

So...In addition to electing a politician who comes from the most crooked city in the country...we also elected a politician from the place with (according to others I talk to) worst racial tensions in the country. 

All Obama's (proxy) charges of racism?  In America, they're mostly false.  In Chicago, he'd be right, significantly, on all counts.  As an aside, by all accounts, Hawaii is impressively racist (Native Islander) as well.  So maybe we can give him a little break on intentions.  Hawaii race-relations + Chicago race-relations would mess up Ghandi.

For all the fools...

Who thought that learning to use a sword wasn't a useful skill.
HT Chain through Isegoria.

Macro Polo

Causes Of The Crisis
Kocherlakota
Sumner
Kling
Falkenstein

Falkenstein wins decisively (not about what is true, but about what is known to be true) with:

"When I got back into banking after graduate school around 1994, the large regional bank I worked for had over 10,000 employees and 1 economist, whose main job was public relations, not advising internal decision making, and this was a typical use for an economist. A few years later, they got rid of him. Macroeconomists are demonstrably not helpful to those institutions that could use economic expertise. Macroeconomists know a lot of stuff, just not anything useful."

McCracken on education

Grant McCracken writes about the impending doom of the university.  Ok.  he doesn't really talk too much about its thorough impending doom, but that's from looking narrowly.  I like to talk about the impending doom.  We're already seeing smaller schools eaten by the online education empire.

He lists assumptions, ending with:
"
We will continue to need a university, or someone, to certify students have completed their degree requirements, and perhaps how they did. 

Then the question becomes:

5) what's the best way to do accreditation?
"

Problem is we already have folks in this space:

CLEP tests, GRE Subject tests, etc.
And it, I think thoroughly, misses the main ideas in education heterodoxy.

1. School is NOT about learning.  Hansonian concern/status signalling is big.  Caplan-style dilligence/intelligence/conformity signalling is big.  Networking for future jobs is big.  Learning content is tiny.
   
2. Learning is NOT about listening.  Learning is about doing with feedback.
3. School has an awful large babysitting component, even at university level.
4. 
   

This says...no amount of courseware/lecture is sufficient to MOST of the goals of education. 
What you need is

1. A feedback system (graded homework?  Aretae-style reactive software?  Apprenticeships) for learning
2. An assessment system (software?  CLEP? Projects)
3. Motivational assistance (major issues when learning solo are insufficient incentives like deadlines to finish)
4. A method of showing status (gold-plated tests?)
5. A method of doing networking with "the right people".
6. A method of testing for dilligence/conformity.
7. A method of testing for intelligence.

If the university/school system is to be broken, it won't be by online courseware, because the online stuff simply doesn't address ANY of the important factors in education.  Grant mentions only 1 (assessment).  Rather, if you're going to crack the education mafia's stranglehold on systemic structure, you have to sneak in sideways, and take over some important parts that they don't consider important.

Intelligence testing and Assessment are the hardest places to get in, because of massive resistance.  Educators know that if you own assessment, you own the curriculum.  Bald intelligence testing threatens the entire enterprise of schooling.

Rather, the places where the system should crack is in feedback systems, which are currently atrocious, or in motivational systems, which bear far more on the educational enterprise than the actual business of teaching does. 

I'm betting (working) on feedback and tracking systems, personally, with a minor in assessment/motivation. 

Back to McCracken.
Here's my future history of education:
2009:  Small, poor-name-recognition schools start being absorbed into the online juggernaut, as it stops making sense to attend schools that are not big name schools.
2025:  Nameless colleges are all but dead.   Big name schools for Athletics, Big name schools for Academics, Big Name schools for partying...smaller, non-virtual schools closing doors monthly.  Financial crisis as the $ of undergraduates makes a huge difference.
2030:  Homeschooling + Alternative learning software conspire to make education at a high-school level (Maybe younger as well) GENERALLY recognized as being distinct from attending school. 
2040: ????? post education-singularity

Diet progress.

Fascinating results so far.

I'm no smaller yet...yo-yoing weight with a +/- of about 3 pounds per day.
However, my hunger response is massively  changed at 1.5 weeks in.

I just don't seem to be getting hungry.  I'm eating a tolerable breakfast, putting 400 calories of sugar water and oil, and then eating dinner.  I am stuffed.  My stuffed response though, is interesting, and lags eating by a half-hour or so at the moment.  I now tend to eat dinner (or breakfast), and then 30 minutes later feel bloated.

I am rarely hungry..only actual hunger I have felt in a couple days is mornings before anything I eat/drink.

However, My taste buds are feeling deprived.  I want tastes.  And I'm just not getting enough taste.  Gum is keeping me less agitated during the day, but I still just want flavors, and mouth activity.  Very interesting to observe. 

Patri Rants, I approve

Link:
"
I find the hubris and violence of progressivism to be deeply offensive. Not that conservatives are any better, but they aren't in power. For every doctor killed by a fundie there are probably a hundred thousand dead Africans killed by American protectionism of our unions against imported textiles and agricultural products. Plus our "aid" that props up their dictators.
"

On science

Eric Falkenstein, referenced recently by Robin Hanson, and at other times by Isegoria, had a long discussion about science.

Roughly, Science is complicated, and anyone (esp. non-scientists) saying "the consensus is" is mostly trying to shut off debate, and should be ignored.  See AGW (attempts to shout down dissent), and Falkenstein's links to astronomy's attempts to explain planetary oddnesses are an asteroid's worth of riot. 

So...next time someone says...Econ isn't a science, or Consensus is....think about this article.  Also good for post-modern anti-science rhetoric.

Menicus Moldbug

I disagree at a pretty fundamental level with Menicus, though find his analysis usually penetrating, and always much more long-winded than even myself.  He and I come fundamentally from the same places and appreciations (software, libertarianism, appreciation for conservative values, even if disliking them, etc., etc.), and I've been having a hard time finding the point of disagreement.  However, he has ever so nicely laid out his core theory in a ginormous omnibus post or four. Which I have excerpted tiny pieces of post 1 here in order to present my point of departure (minor, but essential).

He argues that all 3 political systems of the mid-20th century (Nazi-ism, Communism, Western Democracy) were Orwellian states whose core is to use control of the media and the education system to propagandize the population.  No argument.

He argues that effectively, the progressive ideal is a continuation of the Protestant Reformation, and that it qualifies under any reasonable definition of a religion that doesn't exclude either Buddhism (no god) or Scientology (no supernatural).  No argument.

He argues that this (democratic) system has a inevitable, uncorrectable pull to the progressive left, that is built into the system itself, regardless of that being good or bad.  Also true.

And then he goes all public choice/organizational organicist on us...Progressivism wants power, and shared power, and organizations try to grow.  Duh.

He decimates Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent by pointing out:
"If anyone is in an obvious position to manufacture consent, it is (as Walter Lippmann openly proposed) first the journalists themselves, and next the universities which they regard as authoritative. Yet, strangely, the leftist has no interest whatsoever in this security hole."

And he outlines the key point of part 1 of 2 with:
"This architecture of government - theocracy secured through democratic means - is a single continuous thread in American history."
and
" We live in an actual, genuine, functioning if hardly healthy, 21st-century Puritan theocracy."
and
"Other than that, you have no rational reason to trust anything coming out of the Cathedral - that is, the universities and press. You have no more reason to trust these institutions than you have to trust, say, the Vatican. In fact, they are motivated to mislead you in ways that the Vatican is not, because the Vatican does not have deep, murky, and self-serving connections in the Washington bureaucracy."

Of course, he spares no love for conservativism either:
"I once teased the infamous Larry Auster, proprietor of View from the Right - the Web's most thoughtful hard-line conservative - that his blog should be called VFR1960, because he sides with the right in every conflict after 1960. Before 1960, however, VFR could be accurately renamed View from the Left. Larry, bless his soul, didn't like that at all. But it still happens to be true."

<EDIT> From the comments, Mr. Auster informs us that the commentary about him was later retracted.  I think the point about conservativism in general stands, regardless its (lack of) correctness. </EDIT>

Conservativism is the popular positions of 50 years ago (university positions of 100 years ago), while progressivism  is the popular university positions of 10 years ago.  If we knew they were getting better, rather than just left-er, that might be comforting.

Final thoughts:
"Therefore, since we cannot trust our existing beliefs, we need to look at the areas in which our Universalist "educations" may have caused us to misperceive reality, reassess our beliefs, and compare the reassessment to the orthodox or received truth. If we see discrepancies, we confirm the Orwellian interpretation. If we see no discrepancies, perhaps the Cathedral is just a truth machine after all."

I think that most of what he says here is semi-obvious to anyone not sitting in the mainstream of political thought.  I thought that this was mostly standard doctrine for the people who disagree heavily with both Progressive and Conservative positions.


However he point of disagreeement is somewhere in the middle of the first installment, and I pull it to the end here to point at what I cared about when I started reading:


"On the other hand, it is also quite easy to construct a very clean value system in which order is simply good, and chaos is simply evil. I have chosen this path."
Here I disagree.  It's not that I don't empathize with the position, or think it might be good/better for an awful lot of humanity.  It's just that it violates my core aesthetics: The best you can hope for is to surf the tsunami--control/order is but a comforting illusion, and the attempt at imposition causes HUGE problems.

Explaining the poor

Unsurprisingly to opponents of HNU (Human Neurological Uniformity -- They're just like us, only with different skin or dangly bits, and {accidental} culture is the only difference), a paper has come out pointing out that in general, poor folks are neurologically different than less poor folks.  However, this does not say whether poor creates that difference or that difference creates poverty.

There is substantial evidence on personality that suggests that personality creates wealth (your conscientiousness and your willingness to postpone gratification are two of the highest correlates of income out there...better than base IQ), but it may ALSO be true that the conditions of poverty alter motivations to prefer immediate gratification (not hard to believe).

Transaction costs and Agile.

Transaction costs are a rather substantial area of study in economics. 
Among other things, they are used to explain:

1. The modern wage-slavery firm (transaction costs of interacting with independents is substantially higher than transaction costs if you hire, pay regularly)
2. The existence of social justice concerns (only in the absence of transaction costs, do we see the assignment of rights to have almost no impact to final distribution -- Coase Theorem).
3. The massive variation in percentage of household work done by homeowners in Sweden vs. US. (In Sweden, the cost of transacting with another person to do housework  is huge due to tax reasons, so it is cheaper for the Swede to work less, and fix her own roof, while in the US we work more and hire someone -- ditto the Mexico/US distinction).

I propose another explanatory feature of Transaction Costs.

Definition: Agile is a development methodology in which the business group(s) are required to work closely with the development groups.  In Agile approaches, fast-paced cyclical processes which expect changes (which I like) replace formal sign-offs and careful planning that attempts to prevent change. 

If a company has less-than-ideal cross-group teamwork, then effectively any interaction between the teams constitutes a transaction cost.  In the case of even moderate transaction costs, one will work to minimize the transaction costs, rather than to maximize other efficiencies.  Hence, the siloed firm naturally slips into a Waterfall lifecycle due to sophomore (not sophomoric) economics.  Indeed, this would imply that one (the only?) way out of the waterfall trap is to attack the transaction costs semi-directly.  Incidents:

1. The Scrum practice of daily standups (which forces a transaction, hence massively reducing the cost of an additional unit of transaction).
2. The XP practice of colocation (put developer, business, testers in 1 room, without cube walls, hence massively reducing the {transaction} cost of finding a team-member), 
3. The XP practice of pair-programming (2 developers, 1 keyboard, massively reducing the {transaction} cost of developer idea/expertise transfer)
4. The Agile practice of the sprint/release cycle (which forces a transaction at the end, thus allowing renegotiation of the terms of following transactions, and reducing the cost of re-aligning the project to the appropriate direction).
   

This is not to say that all the practices are ideal (for the XP-haters out there  :-)    ).  However, transaction costs are a massive impediment to getting stuff done...and Agile is directly attacking them with at least several of the practices. 

Hormesis

Ya know how drinking a glass (or 8) of water a day is good for you, and drinking NO water each day is (largely) bad for you?  However, it's also true that if you up your intake to 8 gallons in a day, you're likely to die. 

How many other substances do we know of where lots is horrible, none is bad, and a moderate amount is better?  This feature of <EDIT>bodily response to</EDIT> substances is called hormesis and my favorite example is radiation: some people need more radon in their basements.

Seth Roberts today references cell-phone radiation hormesis, and also links to a prior post talking about saccharine and dioxin hormesis.

So...a lot of stuff is like water.  None is bad, a little is good, and a lot is bad.  One could easily take this too far, so I will confine myself to saying...gosh...Aristotle gets smarter every day.

Rand

Will corrects the anti-Randians, on their facts.

Borlaug explaining wheat allergies

Not what he's trying to do, but does an awful good job of saying: Wheat didn't exist for the ES Environment.

Here

Money quote:

"
Reason: A lot of activists say that it's wrong to cross genetic barriers between species. Do you agree?

Borlaug: No. As a matter of fact, Mother Nature has crossed species barriers, and sometimes nature crosses barriers between genera--that is, between unrelated groups of species. Take the case of wheat. It is the result of a natural cross made by Mother Nature long before there was scientific man. Today's modern red wheat variety is made up of three groups of seven chromosomes, and each of those three groups of seven chromosomes came from a different wild grass. First, Mother Nature crossed two of the grasses, and this cross became the durum wheats, which were the commercial grains of the first civilizations spanning from Sumeria until well into the Roman period. Then Mother Nature crossed that 14-chromosome durum wheat with another wild wheat grass to create what was essentially modern wheat at the time of the Roman Empire.

Durum wheat was OK for making flat Arab bread, but it didn't have elastic gluten. The thing that makes modern wheat different from all of the other cereals is that it has two proteins that give it the doughy quality when it's mixed with water. Durum wheats don't have gluten, and that's why we use them to make spaghetti today. The second cross of durum wheat with the other wild wheat produced a wheat whose dough could be fermented with yeast to produce a big loaf. So modern bread wheat is the result of crossing three species barriers, a kind of natural genetic engineering.
"

On second thought, read the whole thing.   Really quite good.

Grand Unified Theory of Skill Development

As per my 2 obsessions, Education and Cyclicality, I think it's appropriate to look into education theory and see how to do things right.  I have, in the past, discussed the conflict between IQ-centric explanations of things and practice-centric explanations.  I think I can answer the question now:

Assumption:
When looking at skill, we care about what you can DO, and other factors don't matter.  How do we predict what you can DO?

Theory of cyclical process improvement.

1. Do skill
   
2. Evaluate successfulness
   
3. Figure out why result happened
   
4. Change something
   
5. Repeat

Art theory of Education:


Most of learning to do is learning to see.




Fundamental Theory of Education:

90%+ of skill is effective practice
90%+ of practice is motivation



If my model is correct, then we should be able to predict success in skill simply.

To the extent that a skill is well-defined, low variation, then hours of practice determine skill rather well.  Most of the effectiveness comes from seeing the unusual cases, handling them.  Training can be developed to manage most unusual cases. 

To the extent that a skill is poorly-defined, high variation, then intelligence highly mitigates the effectiveness of the practice.  If you practice a high variation activity, you need lots more hours of practice to manage the variance. If you don't have enough practice, you simply can't adequately see to make the decisions necessary. Intelligence substitutes for effective training, as you manage to understand more and more of the complex choices you need to make. 

Predictions: 

Musical skill is not likely to vary much by intelligence, compared with hours of practice, even though a major component of intelligence is the capacity to choose to practice instead of doing something else (deferring gratification).

Athletic skill is likely to vary more by intelligence in higher-randomness sports.  Basketball, hockey, football  (some positions?), combat sports are sports where the ability to see what is happening, and decide what to do is at a premium.  Baseball, soccer, track and field are less varietal, and thus variance by intelligence should be lower. 

Controversial claim:
Math (and Chess) taught well (through Calculus) is a low intelligence requiring activity.  Follow the darn steps.  Practice.  But math is taught so poorly (and chess often not at all) so much of the time that it appears to be a high-intelligence activity.  After elementary school, the quality of effective instruction drops precipitously.

The evolutionarily informed libertarian critique

Of...everything by the inimitable Robin Hanson ... while talking about something else.  Money quote:

"The problem is that evolved cooperation instincts reward supporting behavior that most people feel is cooperative, and not what is actually cooperative.  In novel situations, where our ancient instincts and simple rumor mills are poor guides, ordinary folks can be quite mistaken about which actions help vs. hurt everyone.  In this case our “cooperative” instincts can make it much harder to share info about what actually helps or hurts.  In contrast, if it is accepted that we will each act selfishly, cooperating selfishly via exchange and contract, we can more easily rethink and relearn what actions are actually helpful in our new changing world."

QOTD

Goes to a book, so it's not QoTD for the quotee, just for me:

The anthropologist Grant McCracken, writing about the category of people who (unconsciously) try to live in Flow states, usually via activities such as extreme sports which require such states:

The swift self asks, "Am I rooted?"  The answer to this question is often "no", and under the influence of the right Hollywood movie or current therapy, the swift self will make a brave, sometimes tearful effort to "put down roots" and "reconnect" to the world.  This lasts two and a half weeks, usually.  The moment the swift selves catch their breath, they are off again, indifferent to the comforts and securities of stasis.

At the moment, having come to the conclusion that the elegance of Sowell's categories comes largely from Hayek (after reading 3 other books all citing most of the interesting parts of Sowell in Hayek's work in the '40s ) , I have demoted A Conflict of Visions to a moderately good book.  My new "Best book I read this year" is McCracken's Transformations.  And I'm not done reading yet.  The level of difference of analysis...the level of "I can't do that analysis" is really impressive.  And it doesn't matter if he's right in any statement he makes, the learning to think bit is marvelous.  As an aside, Hayek is approaching (p = 30%) the "Most important thinker of the 20th century" in my judgement. 

Words are not sufficient.

A man who saved a quarter billion human lives has died.  What good he did for the world is unimaginable.  250,000,000 PEOPLE!!!!!!!!  And he may be the least well known Nobel Peace prize winner.  Eat some grain (bread?) in his memory.

He nearly singlehandedly built the path that made Erlich wrong. Reverence is too little a word.

Diets and weight

I'm 1 week into the diet pattern I'm chasing (Shangri-La).
A couple things I've noticed.
Weight varies massively day-to-day.
I've been +/- 3 pounds in a day. 
When one uses the restroom, when one eats/drinks, residual water on the body when weighing after showers all make BIG differences.  (lost 0.2 pounds in 30 seconds -- on a reliable digital scale that gave the same result 3 times in a row -- by drying off a second time after my shower). 
I have gained a pound by drinking a pint of coffee (1 pound of liquid).  I have lost as much in the restroom.  Very interesting.
For people with stable routines, (wake up, toilet, shower, coffee, toilet again, scale), this might be a good way to capture trends.  As it is right now, my day-by-day weighing exhibits more variance than trend.

On the other hand, my food intake now seems almost entirely captured by taste-desiring, not by hunger.  I have felt stuffed to the gills more times in the last week than I have been since marathon thanksgiving-ing with 4 different families.  And that's eating less than normal.  More than once, the idea of eating more has been really really distasteful at dinnertime...when I haven't eaten since breakfast.

Seth Roberts suggesting that one nibbles taste-ful long-lasting gum to allow the mouth something to do seems to be on the mark.

QOTD

In pictures

Links

1. Everyone in the blogosphere knows about ACORN now, but just in case you were negging the conservative focus on the group before the election.
2. Arnold Kling continues to impress with his cultural centrism. Then David Henderson follows up with real honest anti-elitism that 99 in 100 college grad's can't feel.
   
3. Robin Hanson blogs, unusually, about the ever so elegant economic thought process, but conceals the fact until the end.
4. Myth-Busting about Michael Jordan.  Corrects a myth I have personally promoted.  Doesn't change my point.
5. Tyler Cowen in NYT gets hardcore on government solutions in a Public Choice direction:  Government in healthcare problems are the same as the Government in the financial sector problems.
6. Will Wilkinson references a new blog that suggests that Hayek made the same (roughly) claim about Political Economy's failure as Krugman's theya culpa (phrase from Alex Tabarrok)...in 1974.  Hayek was, contra Krugman, suggesting that humility in government intervention was a good policy, rather than that his interventionist direction was right.
7. Stiglitz (3rd econ nobelist referenced in this post) says bailout/etc. made things worse.

Word of the Day

Sprezzatura
"The art of concealing art with art."

As cited by Grant McCracken in Transformations

Memories and Tears

A year and a bit ago, my wife had a late-term fetal death (7+ months) due to a blood clot in the placenta.   I occasionally run smack dab into thoughts of the baby we almost had, and the senselessness of his death brings me to tears, just as when I write this.  But it is appropriate at times...and 9/11 is one of those times...to mourn the senselessly dead, regardless any politics associated.  I can't say I ever quite let the tears fall.  But they ain't far off.

Macro Might not be Voodoo

Scott Sumner argues that what is currently taught in standard modern econ textbooks says that the crash should have happened, given Federal Reserve policy.  If so, I might have to back off.my voodoo claim.  Of course, I'll also have to learn Macro for a couple months.

Appreciating Borges

What does one do when one has too many ideas to implement, and one thinks that most of the ideas are worth doing?  I think Borges had at least one solution as a writer.  Write reviews of the books that you don't really have time to write, but which might well be interesting.  Were I a writer with a pinky-full of Borges's skill, I might do the same here.

Instead, I lay out an outline (See what reading Grant McCracken does to me):

D'Aulaire's book of American Myth:


Myth of Native American utopia
Myth of the first Thanksgiving
Myth of George Washington
Myth of the Settler
Myth of the '49er
Myth of Horatio Alger
Myth of the Single topic civil war.
Myth of Robber Barons + Myth of the Golden Age of Capitalism
Myth of FDR
Myth of Historical Freedoms
etc.

Style notes:

Every myth must be presented stylistically as a Myth.
There shall be no snarking on the Myth, just a (mildly outsized) representation of the myth.


Goal...skewer as many historical fictions as possible, many sides of the aisle, by labeling them myth, while not solving them.

Grant McCracken

I am formally convinced that Grant McCracken, whose blog I occasionally read, and whose book  I am reading now could write for 100 pages on the act of defecation, and be interesting the whole damn time.  The man is brilliant.  Think Tyler Cowen, but who didn't have to worry about all the chess, economics, and math, and could spend his entire prodigious intellect observing human patterns.  Seeing through his eyes, as you do reading his books or posts is unreal.  And the sense of wonder, dare I say awe, that he manages to infuse his writing with is is nearly incomprehensible.

Happiness against Caplan

Scott Sumner here cites Bryan Caplan here and here noting that the material standard of living in Denmark is notably less than what we like here, and thus casting aspersions on the "Happiest place on Earth" label.  Caplin here of course makes a persuasive argument that the Human Development Index (happiness measure) "is basically a measure of how Scandinavian your country is.,  followed up by Wilkinson's usual excellence.

I would like to at least defend moderately the Danes.
Sonja Lyubomirsky wrote a book on happiness in the not too distant past.
Among the most powerful results in the book was the notion of how happiness is gained.

Roughly, the modern research consensus says:

50% of how happy you are is genetic/early environment and you can't do a darn thing about it.
40% of how happy you are is your internal choices (how you CHOOSE to look at things).
10% of how happy you are is your circumstances.

While this may be somewhat exaggerated, it's probably not too much so...and if so, means that Denmark can indeed be a more happy place than even a lot of other places with much better circumstances.

Scott Sumner

If you don't read his stuff when he posts, it's probably because you don't think Economics, and especially Macroeconomics is very interesting.  However, since I claimed that Macro is voodoo, I've been reading a lot of what he has to say.  This post of his, though, is not about econ much at all.  It just does a great job of cutting into the middle of a lot of the whole left-libertarian thing.

Roughly, Singapore, Denmark, and Switzerland all do some things really really well, but they're different things.

Denmark has (properly) a great deal of concern for the weak.
Switzerland has removed a lot of rent-seeking from politics via (mostly) direct democracy.
<EDIT>Singapore </EDIT>is run by incentive-aware economist-bureaucrats, and has REALLY good policy.

All 3 are reportedly marvelous places to live in innumerable ways.  And one of our main meta-problems in society (determining direction) is that ALL 3 of these paths are good for almost everyone, and it is not obvious that any 1 is net better than the other. 

As they say, read the whole thing.

Dr. Long on Left-Lib

In an extended article, he first gives us a study in which people fail to build new categories, and then applies this to political theory...in his case explaining why left-libertarianism is constantly misunderstood, but applying equally as well to Megan McArdle or any other non-conforming semi-centrist who gets good insults from all sides, as a stooge of the enemy.
He also enumerates the left-libertarian feature-set:

1. Big business and big government are (for the most part) natural allies.
2. Although conservative politicians pretend to hate big government, and liberal politicians pretend to hate big business, most mainstream policies – both liberal and conservative – involve (slightly different versions of) massive intervention on behalf of the big-business/big-government elite at the expense of ordinary people.
3. Liberal politicians cloak their intervention on behalf of the strong in the rhetoric of intervention on behalf of the weak; conservative politicians cloak their intervention on behalf of the strong in the rhetoric of non-intervention and free markets – but in both cases the rhetoric is belied by the reality.
4. A genuine policy of intervention on behalf of the weak, if liberals actually tried it, wouldn’t work either, since the nature of government power would automatically warp it toward the interests of the elite.
5. A genuine policy of non-intervention and free markets, if conservatives actually tried it, would work, since free competition would empower ordinary people at the expense of the elite.
6. Since conservative policies, despite their associated free-market rhetoric, are mostly the diametrical opposite of free-market policies, the failures of conservative policies do not constitute an objection to (but rather, if anything, a vindication of) free-market policies.

I think that the left libertarian needs to believe all these things...and roughly equally strongly.  Hence, one should mistrust Microsoft nearly as much as one should mistrust the Federal Government (though fear them less for their not having guns).  And one should find conservative politics as objectionable as liberal ones, though perhaps with better rhetoric.  Note however, that the left libertarian roughly believes that the conservative rhetoric (if applied) would lead to the liberal goal, but that the liberal rhetoric, if applied, would necessarily fail.  Since conservatives don't ever follow their rhetoric, though, it's no biggie.

SLD Thoughts #47

Item 47.  Shangri-La diet works by my favorite mechanism:  Feedback loops.

We already know that most people who succeed on a diet (long term) try 6 diets before they find one that works.  Also, most people who succeed on a diet weigh themselves daily (to get feedback).  The interesting thing about the diets I like such as Paleo, Shangri-la (I neglected to mention IF, which I also like a lot) is that they're highly feedback based.  Eat while you're hungry, pay attention to your hunger.  If you eat only when hungry, and edit behavior to impact hunger, you do real well.  FWIW, all the Zoneys that I talked to, who were excited in that space in the early noughts, were more focussed on their feedback-based analysis of their own bodily states (eating X makes me more tired 3 hours later) than with the diet, though they said all sorts of nice things about the diet.

Feedback systems in action.

Rambling thoughts on Shangri-La Diet #3

Finished the book again last night.

Remembered that the end (supporting science) is the best part.
Several different studies cited.

#1 Rat study:  give rats calories with no taste (tube to stomach) and unlimited food (at other times), weight drops like a rock.  With taste concurrent with calories, weight increases.

#2 Rat study:  the difference between new and familiar foods on appetite is massive.  Rats given saccharine water for a week to familiarize...then put in a cage where saccharine-water and calories went together balooned.  Rats with no exposure to the saccharine-water, put in the same environment either stayed the same or shrunk.

#3 Similar studies on humans.  Calories w/o taste to stomach (tube) dropped weight like a hot potato.


On other note...
Shangri-la theory inclines one to believe that vegan diets should drop weight well.  It is very hard to get high taste-high calorie content out of vegetables.  If you are not a mcdonalds fries/taco bell bean burritos\pepsi kind of vegetarian, you just shouldn't be able to get enough calories associated with strong tastes.  Lots of vegetables should decrease your appetite.

My visit to Russia was marked by my eating large quantities of low-taste, high GI foods (Potatoes, especially).  Also where my greatest weight loss happened.  And it wasn't for being hungry. It should be true that mostly unflavored mashed potatoes (not butter, salt, pepper, sour cream) should be fabulous for losing weight.  High GI, low taste.  I'll try next week.  Eat 1 unflavored (maybe mashed, maybe sliced) microwaved potato one or two days, see what happens to my appetite.

SLD also explains that Paleo-diets should also work:  No refined sugars, no cheap carbs = no high calorie-count, high taste foods.  Banana/peach probably the highest calorie/taste thing you can find.  Most high cal stuff (lean meat, nuts) are slow digest.  Most high taste stuff (Fruit) are low-ish calories, and only medium speed digestion.  And you have to eat a lot of low-taste, low-speed, low-calorie food like vegetables.

<EDIT>
Actually, thinking on potatos.  If Seth Roberts is right, we should be able to suppress appetite by adding random flavorings to cubed, microwaved potatoes (not red/baby -- too flavorful).  High GI food with low flavor that can get random taste added.  Ditto white rice (Seth himself does this with sushi). 
</EDIT>

Brutus quotes Murray Rothbard

Very clear:
"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a "dismal science", but that it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance."

Wilkinson quoting himself, brilliantly

He writes:

"Many people seem to think that a government’s emphasis on measurements like GDP indicate a kind of collective affirmation of materialist goals, encouraging a narrowly materialist attitude at war with more exalted values. But this is simply a mistake. The very function of money is to serve as a neutral medium of exchange. It is a shape-shifting embodiment of almost any value. The same $100 can be spent on a prostitute or donated to an HIV/AIDS clinic. The relative value neutrality of money is precisely why the measurement of per-capita wealth is well suited to pluralistic liberal societies; it doesn’t beg many questions about competing conceptions of the good life.  Money can’t be converted into  anything that someone might value, but it is of the nature of money to be convertible into a phenomenally broad range of values. Societies with high levels of average income and wealth are societies in which people have more resources at their disposal to achieve their aims, no matter what those aims might be, which is why it should be no surprise that, other things equal, people with more money are more satisfied. By measuring GDP, household wealth, and the like, government is not affirming one set of values over others. It is, in fact, embodying an ideal of liberal neutrality by measuring something that is valuable in varying degrees to all of us."

An alternative view on triangular politics

Could it be that instead of being concerned about policies per se, people instead promote policies that work to give their group more adherents?

For instance, a libertarian would assert that eliminating a large amount of zoning law, placing a <EDIT>lower cap on regulations applicability, based on </EDIT> company size (don't apply to companies with < 10 employees), voucher-style education, and a negative income tax ( edgy libertarian here ) are the top 4 government activities that could help the poor.

HOWEVER, all 4 of those activities lead the newly self-sufficient entrepreneurs, and newly government-free students to be significantly more libertarian than the current system. And therefore, would be opposed by liberals.

Similarly, a conservative would argue (like I did yesterday) that the known science of the poor is simple.  Re-criminalize divorce, end the marriage tax, and de-incentivize (via AFDC) single-parenthood and the welfare (health and wealth and emotional stuff) of the poor will be massively improved.

HOWEVER, all these lead to stable, larger families, which are well known to be more conservative than liberal (number of children = strong predictor of conservativism).  And therefore would be opposed by liberals, and many libertarians. 

My imagination fails.  What might a liberal argue that should increase the libertarian or conservative core value, but increase the liberal constituency, so that the libertarian/conservative needs to oppose it?  And are my arguments fair?

Citizens United and triangular politics

As many legally aware folks know, Citizens United created a film that was completed during last year's election cycle.  The film was titled Hillary The Movie, and was shockingly about Hillary Clinton.  Unfortunately, according to campaign finance law, the movie could not be advertised, without incurring a felony on it's corporate producer.  This would be mildly interesting, except that the case hit the Supreme court, and oral argument ensued.  One lawyer listening reported that it looked as if the court was getting ready to overturn the last 2 decades of campaign finance law. 

Some folks like this, some folks don't.  Instead of doing anything else, I think I am inclined to argue the position from 3 sides.

1.  Libertarian:  Hell yeah.  The first amendment protects freedom of speech, and was especially intended to protect political speech.  Campaign finance crap is explicitly prohibited by the first amendment to the Constitution under any which reading you choose to give it.  Go away McCain-Feingold, and even Austin.  Clearly this is a liberty violation.  Clearly this violates the constitution.  Where is the question here?  Oh, and it doesn't work real well anyhow.  Loopholes get around it anyhow.

2.  Conservative:  Yeah.  The constitution says freedom of speech.  It's part of the history what made America great, even the speech we disagree with.  And limiting corporate money allows only groups that we disagree with to have voices.  Media and wonks and professors, none of whom are prohibited from talking give an unflinchingly liberal spin on everything (90-what percent of reporters are registered Democrat?).  To abolish this would at least eliminate some of the massive unfairness promoting the liberal agenda.

3.  Liberal:  No way.  Corporations are concentrations of wealth for the already powerful.  To whatever extent the corporations are allowed to participate in the political process, it will be diminishing the voice of the poor.  Since the purpose of government is to protect the poor, it is a VERY bad idea to let monied interests go back to tinkering with the political process even more than they do now.  We would end up with a president from JP Morgan.

Counterpoint:

Libertarian:  No.  Corporations spend money in elections only to pass regulations that are beneficial to the corporation at the expense of every other entity in the country...and especially, they lobby to eliminate competition.  While public choice says they will massively influence the course of government now, we can at least try to limit it.

Conservative:  No.  Things have been working well the way they are.  Despite the massively liberal trend in the media, alternative voices have come up (talk radio, blogs), which are much more effective, and much better financially than ANY of the troubled leftist media outlets.  We have been prohibiting corporate finance in elections for nearly 20 years now, and we have a working, stable system.  There is no reason to change that now...and between fox news, talk radio, cable TV, blogs, etc, and the failure of the traditional media, conservative voices will own the talk media (news + print) soon.

Liberal:  Yes.  Slippery slopes suck.  At what point does it become ok to legislate for the prohibition of political speech.  Should we jail Michael Moore if he airs an Anti-Bush documentary when Jeb runs for president?  Or Jenna?  Clearly, though we have little objection to prohibiting corporate contributions, we do have an objection to allowing the powerful in government the right to decide who may say what politically.  Shrub certainly might not have been trusted to leave Kos alone if he'd had the power. 

Is this fair?

Exercise, HIT

Since I'm blogging on diet, I may as well talk exercise too.

I don't think there's anywhere near the same degree of consensus in exercise as there is in diet.  However, for much of exercise, there are a few common themes.

1.  4 45 minute walks per week max out your cardiovascular benefit (risk of heart attack, etc.).  More does not help, and sometimes hurts.
2.  Training for sports, etc: Training is 90% (endurance) conditioning, Conditioning is 90% running.
3.  Practice doesn't transfer very well even between similar activities (Throwing a baseball vs. a football). 
4.  Bodybuilders are very frequently genetically gifted, and frequently their routine has nothing to do with how buffed they are.  May help or may hurt their net ripped-ness.  See Myostatin, Belgian Blue, and Hercules Baby

From exercise research, I eventually got to:
5.  HIT, was originally developed by Arthur Jones, same guy who built Nautilus: "exercise should be brief, infrequent, and intense."
6.  HIT rocks for the modern lifestyle because of the first 2 items (from #5).
7.  HIT is rarely followed, because they're not kidding about item 3. 
8.  Almost all of the HIT stuff either starts or refounds itself with an evolutionary-physiological explanation
9.  HIT Varieties that I'm familiar with
    A.  Mentzer's Heavy Duty
    B.  Hutchins' Superslow     especially articles written by Doug McGuff
    C.  Art DeVany's evo-fit
    D.  Crossfit
10.  Roughly, they all suggest that humans are a lot like lions.  Some short fast HARD work, some rest.  None of this long, 45 minute, workout stuff.  None of this every day crap.  Mostly none of this cardio stuff.  Unless it's for fun.  Sprint, don't run.  Lift lots, not long. 
11.  My favorite explanation is:  In order for your body to do the work necessary to be fit (which is physiologically expensive), you have to convince it (feel like) you're going to die if you don't.  And then you have to let it rest long enough for the body to do that work of healing/improving.

My preferences are:
I don't like endurance work, and don't do it.  I do ride my bike to work (almost sprint-y), and run with kids.
When I was lifting, I was doing superslow, 1x/week for 30 min, building muscle mass.

Right now, I'm not really exercising, because I'm first chasing weight, and after will worry about fitness.

Fundamentals

I have a THEORY of change.
It goes like this:

1. Figure out the results you want.
2. Figure out how to measure the results.
   
3. Measure stable state
   
4. (Optional) look at theory
   
5. Try something new to change the results you're getting.
6. Measure new state
7. Determine whether to continue, revert, extend change.
8. Usually goto D
   

For all changes this is how to get good results.
Cheap measurement is high value.

QOTD

"With any book, whether you like its attitude or not, the first questions are what the book gets right and what we can learn from it." -- Tyler Cowen -- a perfect explanation of why he is magnificent.

On Marriage and Divorce

This seems like an awful stable meme now.

Contra a new hedonic marriage model, the new theory slowly drifting through the blogosphere, and I suppose the greater intellectual circle is:

Marriage is mostly for rich people to give their kids greater advantages.

See here: Hymowitz points out, “Virtually all—92 percent—of children whose families make over $75,000 are living with both parents. On the other end of the income scale, the situation is reversed: only about 20 percent of kids in families earning under $15,000 live with both parents.”

Or, I suppose Kay Hymowitz's book:"In a world in which divorce rates are nearly fifty percent, only 10% of students in elite colleges come from divorced families."

Or Waite and Gallagher's book.

Or related, divorce hurts you: "Divorce or the death of a spouse severely damages a man or woman's long-term health even if they remarry, research shows."

Or this: Married couples have higher incomes, longer lives, better health, less violence, less alcohol and less poverty.

Rough new consensus:

Marriage is good.  Divorce is bad.  If you have kids, divorce is very bad.  Rich people act this way, poor people don't.  This goes a long way towards explaining the rich/poor gap. 

If I were to try to explain a little...

An awful lot of research pushes personality traits as even more important than IQ in impact on your life.

IQ makes a difference...and among the most important parts of IQ is impulse control.  Indeed, I think there's research suggesting that impulse control has a HIGHER impact on lifetime earnings than does IQ.  But so too does the Big-5 personality trait conscientiousness, and the psychological term: self-efficacy (domain specific self-confidence).  

I assert that education, hours worked, and marriage stability are all three linked strongly to both conscientiousness and impulse control (and therefore IQ).  Since all three are linked, and known to be genetic, then parents marriage stability will be highly correlated with childrens' success.

Time to run some adoptive studies to see if the correlation is family dependent, or purely genetic...or is it already in Harris's book?

Inequality

Really nice article detailing why inequality exists and is increasing.  All economics, some genetics, not much new, but if you need a 'fresher, or don't know the stuff, you might find it interesting.

Money quote:

"Given the other forces driving inequality, there may be less that government can do than one might hope."

I think the guy is unimaginative.  If you want more equality, fixing patent law would go a long way, as would pro-self-employment policies.  Though it might indeed decrease the rate of innovation as the expected reward dropped.  And neither of those is likely to pass because both fly massively in the face of entrenched interests.

Consequences of Core Values

Going with the Core values theme that I've been pushing.
<EDIT>Stability/Continuance,</EDIT>Equality/Fairness, Liberty/Freedom are roughly the three core values of the Conservative-Progressive-Libertarian triangle.

What can this tell us about coalitions, without referencing public choice politics.

1.  Libertarians should tend to join with conservatives almost universally to oppose new law that is being pushed by the progressives (for the purpose of increasing equality), because new law is bad.

2.  Libertarians should tend to join with progressives almost universally to support repeal of bad old law. 

3.  Progressives and Conservatives should join together to oppose increasing the scope of the market, as favored by Libertarians, unless the conservative thinks the restriction is new.

There should be a lot of room for progressives and libertarians to work together on the local level, in getting rid of stupid old laws, police money-making schemes, etc.  Given political realities, I am not sure this is a reality.

There should be a lot of room for libertarians to convince progressives of policy directions, if the rhetoric focuses on negative impacts on the poor.  Indeed, to the extend that libertarians want to talk to progressives, we need to put our energy into explaining the impact of our policies on the poor.  IF we wish to be convincing, and IF a policy is bad for the poor, we should trumpet this as the most important feature:

The liberal-tarian alliance might ought to adopt the slogan:

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."--Anatole France

Indeed, I think this may well be the best path to libertarian acceptance: the incessant drumbeat of how government policies negatively impact the poor.

Macro 2

More support for me on Macro.

Will wilkinson hops on the voodoo bandwagon.
More thoroughly, John Lounsbury references both Krugman and the Dirk Bezemer paper that found that 12 economists HAD successfully predicted not only the crash, but roughly it's timing and causes as well (Krugman was not one of them).

Unfortunately, it does not seem as if, contra Lounsbury, Krugman's explanation of the problem, and Bezemer's identification of common differences for forecasters of recession line up real well.

Bezemer identifies 5 features of good models:
(a) the circular flow of goods and money,
(b) a separate representation of stocks (inventories, wealth and debt) and flows (goods, services and funds),
(c) explicit modelling of the financial sector as distinct from the real economy, so allowing for independent growth and contraction effects from finance on the economy,
(d) non-optimising behaviour by economic agents in an environment of uncertainty, and
(e) accounting identities (not the equilibrium concept) as determinants of model outcomes in response to shocks in the environment or in policy.

I guess Krugman got (d) right.

Summary of 2 diets referenced

Since I commented on Shangri-La AND Paleo, I should at least explain the 2.

1. Shangri-La theory is:

Appetite = Strong, known tastes + high GI foods at same time.

Pop(soda) is therefore the worst food in world. Drink some, the taste is always the same, and the calories go directly into the bloodstream. It should increase your appetite significantly. Candy, Fast food, are all the same: High calorie, strong taste, always the same.

High taste, lo calorie foods might be good unless you eat them with other foods regularly, in which case, it's bad. Diet soda drunk with a meal is almost as bad as regular soda. Away from a meal is fine.

</THEORY>

So eat high calorie, low taste foods, and your appetite will drop. By observation, sweet doesn't count as a taste.

So, high calorie, low taste oils (Extra Light Olive Oil?) and sugars (sucrose, fructose, etc., preferably in water for good other features) are good, as is nose-clipping to prevent the smells (which comprise most of tasting) from getting to you.

If you consume lots of calories (100-400) of these low taste foods, your appetite should drop like a rock. When you eat, you should get full fast. Allow at least 2 weeks to see effects.

Don't eat more than 400cal/day of taste-free calories, which is ~3TBSP sugar in water (I use 1 Liter or more), and 2 Tbsp ELOO. Learning to drink oil takes a bit. Start with 1 tsp, and work up.


2. Paleo-
People are obviously evolved. The evolutionary environment in which people evolved is most likely the best guess on what people are adapted to eat. Therefore let's look archeologically at what people ate.

Archeological evidence is very strong.

People ate lots of lean meat (only meats today that are actually lean are shellfish, turkey breast, maybe pork loin + game meat) and Lots of unprocessed fruits, vegetables. Some other stuff in small amounts (nuts, eggs, honey)
People cooked at least some.
People didn't eat most foods that require cooking, or domesticated animals.
Most grains, most beans, potatoes, dairy products, refined sugars, etc.
So eat MOSTLY from the lean meat, fruits and vegetables.

Claim: Turns out that doing this, you get full fast. So long as you stay in this space

Diets

A few weeks ago Megan McArdle blogged about weight loss. And so I've been thinking since, and with her summary and my other research/opinion, I will now do an omnibus diet post.

What we know (mostly indisputable, per science):

1. Your weight loss/gain is all about calories in - calories out.
2. Exercise doesn't work to lose weight. It makes you healthier, but not thinner (with caveats).
3. Almost all diets don't work, and when they do, they're temporary.
4. Diets occasionally work -- most common feature of working diets is that the dieter kept trying things until they found something maintainable. Average count for successful diets that kept weight off for 5+ years: 6 diets tried. AVERAGE.
5. Dieting people have starving peoples' brains.
6. All willpower activities are basically doomed to failure if you do it alone. Social proof (peer pressure) is required for willpower to work.
7. The increase in weight in the 1980s-2000s is ENTIRELY due to eating MORE stuff.
8. It is well known that you can lose a lot of weight very fast by a combination of group activity, calorie decrease, exercise, increased water consumption. The weight comes back, though not as fast, as soon as you stop the routine.
9. Moderately overweight people ( 25 <= BMI <>=30).
10. Calorie restricted folks live longer (Calories = 70% normal ==> lifespan/healthspan =120% normal). Even starting late in life, this works.
11. If you can form a habit, you can follow it.
12. If you're naturally thin, you're either lucky or nuts (high willpower). Mostly, both metabolism and willpower are unevenly distributed.

<EDIT>
13. Insufficient sleep increases weight.
</EDIT>


What I think:

14. The weight-loss problem is ALL about how to not be hungry, unless you've got 1337 willpower or sizeable incentives.
15. There are only a very few paths even discussed to not being hungry
A. Seth Roberts shangri-la diet.
B. Paleo- /related diets.
C. Drugs.
D. Excessive water consumption.
E. Habit-creation (get used to eating only at certain times).
F. Portion size (you get hungrier if there's a bigger plate).
16. If one wishes to lose weight fast, the quickest path is probably Seth's.
17. If one wishes to keep weight off over time, you need a habit-creating diet that you can stay on.
A. the best path for me is probably Paleo-leaning, (and I think healthiest)
B. vegan clearly works, IMO mostly because you get moral motivation as well.
C. raw foodist works because you just can't get many calories...you need habit here, and harder to start, I think.
D. Any other crazy diets that assist with motivational aspects, and eliminate calorie options probably work well also.
18. This should work even better if one has other people doing this at the same time to provide a support network.
19. An alternative path is incentives (promise to donate $500 to ELF if I am not dropping 1lb per week until new year). Not exciting to me, but violating #6 is moderately incentivising.

This morning, I was 202.2, 57+ pounds above my exiting high school weight. I've gone up and down a lot since high school (belgium: 2 months +20 pounds; Russia: 5 months -30 pounds, superslow: +15 pounds) I have put on muscle mass since, but I need at least 30 pounds down, with a preference for more.

Having said all that...I'm starting Seth Roberts' appetite tweaking approach today. I will weigh myself most mornings, and see if I can't keep a weight log. Any of my 6 readers want to join me in this?