Knighthhoods and the like - a reconsideration

Call me slow, but for a long time I couldn't see the UK honors list as being anything more than an anachronism and a bit of an old-boy's club, a way for the elite to pat each other on the back with an occasional sop to the working class (e.g. John Lennon).

I've changed my mind.

They offer powerful and influential individuals an incentive to act in the nations interest rather than purely in their own.

Absent this, the constraints on self interested behavior are only ones conscience (which seems often to be  malleable and idiosyncratic), and, to a lesser degree, social approval (which sufficiently large sums of money allow one to ignore). 

I think that makes them fairly useful.

A very short paper on decision making

Introduction

March [1] suggests two competing "logics" of choice; a logic of consequence and a logic of appropriateness. I argue here that this categorization scheme applies well to the Washington establishment and beyond.

Literature

In the best tradition of Rupert's fake news station, no prior literature will be mentioned. To pay attention to earlier work is too constraining and time consuming. 

Theory

Proposition 1: Republicans are more likely than Democrats to use a logic of appropriateness, while Democrats are more likely than Republicans to use a logic of consequences.

Methods

A detailed ethnographic study spanning 10 years and 9 months was carried out. A grounded theory-building approach was employed [2]. News broadcasts, televised interviews with politicians, and subject behavior in the two Houses of Congress (CSPAN) were scrutinized. Statements were eventually coded "0" for "makes no sense whatsoever / defies all logic" and "1" for "I can follow that line of reasoning". 

Results

Table 1 presents the findings.

	Dem	GOP
"Makes no sense"	Some	LOTS
"I can see some logic there"	LOTS	Some

The results may include some rounding errors.


Discussion

Decision making using logic of consequence is more cognitively demanding (like chess) than a logic of appropriateness that relies more on identity/situation recognition (like snap). A logic of appropriateness enables faster decision making which, in stable environments, is advantageous from a species standpoint. Speculating as to how we got here, one might reasonably posit a population ecology-based explanation [3]. Natural selection during the post WWII period of economic growth and fairly stable, though not uncontested, world order favored this mode over a logic of consequence. It is manifest in visceral judgments, a lack of nuance, and extreme simplification (us vs them, good vs evil, right vs wrong - the use of just two categories reduces cognitive load).

Furthermore, because it doesn't rely on strict consequential logic, but pattern matching heuristics, the possibility of contradictory positions is allowed for, since internal consistency is not central to this cognitive scheme. For example the Norwegian mass murderer, Anders Breivik, "cannot be a Christian", according to William O'Riley, (despite the former's claims acting in the name of Christianity) while terrorists from say Afghanistan or Iraq must ipso facto be radical Muslims. Or, supporting organizations channeling funds to the IRA to buy explosives and guns is perfectly acceptable while supporting terrorist organizations, specifically Hezbollah, is not.

Limitations

Clearly, as with any study of this kind, generalization is an issue. The central question is: Are members of congress representative of the population? I suspect not. Moreover, there may be a sample selection bias. Statements such as "Anybody foolish enough to invest their money with the United States Government knowing our condition deserves to lose their money” (Mark Williams, Talk Show Host, Author and Public Speaker, talking about buyers of US Treasury securities), or "The American people are looking for someone who will say no. I will be that person… I won't raise taxes. I will reduce spending. I won't vote to raise the debt ceiling. And I have the titanium spine to see it through." (Michelle Bachmann, Minnesota (R-MN)), have a higher salience, at least for this researcher, that may lead to an over-sampling of statements lacking in carefully articulated reasoning. Nevertheless, this sampling bias is not necessarily more problematic for one or other category on the other dimension and therefore may not invalidate the findings.

Conclusion

Although data collection has spanned a number of years, the study was not designed longitudinally to establish causality; therefore we can only speculate as to the reasons for what we see. Nevertheless, given the rapidly increasing pace of change [4], species that have evolved to be increasingly well fit to their environments in periods of stability may be most vulnerable to radical discontinuities. 

While a follow on study might shed additional light on this question, currently a lack of state university research funding, a consequence of cuts in state and federal spending on higher education, a declining tax base, ever higher proportions of low wage US jobs, if and when they are created (e.g. unemployed HP engineers now working as WalMart greeters), high unemployment, a falling stock market, a collapsed housing market and depressed real estate prices, low consumer confidence, and general long term economic decline, mitigates against a more extensive sampling.


References

[1] March, J. G. (1994). A Primer on Decision Making: How Decisions Happen, Free Press.

[2] Glaser, B. J. and A. L. Straus (1967). The Discovery of Grounded Theory. Chicago, Aldine.

[3] Hannan, M. T. and J. Freeman (1977). "The Population Ecology of Organizations." American Journal of Sociology 82(5): 929-963.

[4] Rumelt, R. Personal Communication, 1994

The (long) tail wagging the donkey

To an outsider (me) this is what the current Washington distribution looks like. The graphic is based on the same diligent research and fact chekcing as that employed at Rupert's fake news station.

  

Strange but true...

I had assumed that running code in a guest OS rather than native would result in a fairly heavy performance penalty. This, then, was a pleasant surprise:

# of cores	Native / Guest	Multi processor directives	Execution time (secs)
1	Guest	Top level loop	76.4
4	Guest	Top level loop	20.1
4	Native	Top level loop	19.8
4	Native	Matrix multiplication subroutine	23.0

The same code runs only 1.5% slower in the guest than it does running native.

Also interesting: putting the multi-processing directives into particularly intensive sub-routines (like matrix multiplication) but not in the top level program does generate a substantial improvement, not that different from multi-processing at the top level with no MP in the subroutine. (Of course this assumes the program calls this
routine frequently...) My concern was that the overhead of flipping into and out-of the MP environment when MP subroutines are called frequently would negate its benefits - but at least in this case it appears not to be a problem.

So if I identify the routines that are called frequently and  are particularly intensive, I can improve performance in the subroutine libraries and not have to worry when coding the main routine. (Of course I probably should have written more efficient code to begin with, but that's another story).

Just a thought - contingency legislation

We re repeatedly held hostage (metaphorically) by politicians who say that unless we do X, then Y (generally catastrophic) will occur. When it doesn't there is always a contingency-based excuse: "it would have happened had there been less Z".

We need a different approach, one that creates accountability ex-ante. So how about this... The example is in the context of the current deficit / budget negotiations.  The discussion is highly simplified and stylized (to use the economists phrase) for the purposes of illustration.

Republications assert that reducing government spending without raising tax rates or closing exemption loop holes will reduce uncertainty. This will spur firms to invest and create jobs in the US - which will increase tax receipts. So while spending falls, revenues rise and the budget will soon be balanced.  

Democrats argue that this probably won't happen; employers haven't shown any interested in creating (expensive) US based jobs when they can get the same work done abroad for pennies on the dollar.

Suppose one crafted legislation that said we'll do A which is predicted to lead to Y within time T. If by time T, Y hasn't happened, we'll do B. In this example, this might be: "We will cut spending and leave tax rates unchanged for 24 months. If by then unemployment hasn't risen, the conjecture that lower tax rates stimulate growth and job creation is shown to be invalid, at which point we will go to Plan B, namely closing tax loop holes and letting the Bush tax cuts expire".  The contingency, B, would require a 2/3 majority to repeal or nullify, so that only when a super-majority agrees that neither plan is working could the 'experiment' be undone.  

There are clearly a hundred and one reasons why this might not work, but I'm just a little tired of politicians making untested assertions about causal relations that are at best spurious, and often  based on claims of association or data that are completely false (such as the economy grows when tax rates are lowered, or that tax rates and the tax burden has never been higher when tax receipts as a percentage of GDP are at an all time low).

As I write this I can see how the two statements may be reconciled, but that is a testable hypothesis. And I've not heard anyone citing such a study...

Rhetorical conundrum

Yesterday I heard one politician (and this person was far from alone) complaining that Congress should pass the balanced budget amendment because government should work more like the private sector and live within it's means.

What a bizarre statement.

No company I know of has a provision in its articles of incorporation limiting the amount it can borrow to a proportion of its revenues. Indeed, were business to be forced into making such a provision there would be howls of "government interference". Business has the flexibility to borrow as much as the market see fit to lend it. When markets think a company is over extended, its paper is downgraded and its cost of borrowing rises.  Currently the same is true for states and nations.  A balanced budget amendment to the Constitutions makes government less like the private sector, not more.

What this really says about Washington, is that there is a realization that politicians can't trust themselves (let alone each other). This is not unpredictable, since they seldom have 'skin in the game' in the long term, and those that do are adept at avoiding and diverting accountability.

If nations were to be treated like business they would be left to go bankrupt were there to come a point at which they could no longer service their debt. Market discipline would then prevent those profligate spenders from raising any additional debt and they would be forced to live within their means. (Some economists have suggested that Greece should do exactly this rather than suffer through more IMF imposed bailout conditions).

The reason, which Washington seems to understand, that this won't work is that those who rack up the spending often aren't around to answer for the consequences (any more that those who pushed for the deregulation of the finance industry were required to answer for the 2008 meltdown).

Plus ca change

OS/2 Warp 4 now seems to install without too much drama under VMware Player 3.1.1 and VMWare Fusion. So now I have OS/2 on my Mac. But that's another story. Here's my first app: Word 5.5 which I think was released in 1993. 

 And this  is Word from Office 2003: strikingly similar... 

Apparently, Word 5.5 was re-jigged to match the Word for Windows 3.11 layout. And that's a good thing, I think. I know where stuff is (and by the same token is one reason I'm not going to move to Office 2007).

Built-in obsolescence

Livermore-Pleasanton's firehouse has the worlds oldest continuously operating incandescent light bulb. Two thoughts crossed my mind. The first was that when the new curly fluorescent light bulbs were being promoted, one selling point (to justify their higher price) was that they lasted much longer than incandescent bulbs. But clearly that's not because incandescents inevitably fail sooner, but rather because that was a design choice manufacturers made. Of course they might respond that to make bulbs that lasted 100 years would be so expensive that no one would buy them. But clearly they once did, and the total cost of ownership for the Livermore bulb must be lower than had it been replaced annually with cheaper less well made bulbs.

A broader point is that we have come to accept built-in obsolescence. Indeed it was a phrase I heard my parents use fairly frequently as they lamented a general decline in product quality, but it's one you hear less and less often. We simply take it for granted. The DVD burner I bought in 2008 stopped working properly last year, resolutely refusing to give back the disk unless it was poked with a sharp object, and while frustrating, I didn't think it at all unusual.

I wonder what the world would look like if we only bought things that lasted? (I still wear the Grensons I bought for $130 in 1986 and I expect them to outlast me). How much economic growth is attributable to product replacement? Would China's economic resurgence have been possible without our appetite for ever cheaper 'disposable' (often supposedly 'durable') goods?

Computers!

Yesterday my desktop Internet (or internet to the younger generation) connection was running very slowly, about 1/6th it's normal speed. Some diagnosing narrowed the problem down to the onboard LAN adapter on the motherboard. MSI's suggestion was to reinstall the OS; while I greatly appreciate their willingness to support end users this really wasn't the problem. So I ordered an Ethernet (ethernet) adapter card which will arrive on Monday. For now I have a 6 gigabit DSL line that to all intents and purpose, looks like dial-up.  In the mean time, I decided to install the new DVD burner. The last one, only 3 years old, decided 18 months ago that it would only open if encouraged, forcibly, with a paper-clip; after a while this gets a bit tiresome. But here's the odd thing. After installing the new burner, my ethernet adapter is working just fine! Actually physically disconnecting the power seems to have corrected the problem. (Joel suggest it was a temperature problem, a really interesting idea but one that ultimately seems not to have been the cause). So today I'm feeling a little better about things in general. Daft how something so minor and affect ones  general mood. 

Why Netanyahu is worried

The spat about 1967 borders seems somewhat overblown; while the Republicans seized on it because it gave them political fodder, Netanyahu's reaction seems out of proportion. The real reason, for which this was simply a proxy, is the current administrations shift towards supporting democracy even when the governments that come to power may be antithetical to US (and Israeli) interests. Netanyahu is worried, and rightly so, that this imperils Israel's security, particularly when it maintains such an intransigent stance in the peace process. However, he probably also understands that even if he were to adopt a more conciliatory approach, given his past rhetoric and history and the negotiating table, the Palestinians won't trust him an inch. As the Northern Ireland peace process showed, rebuilding trust takes time and commitment; and Israel seems to have neither.     

How to fill the knowledge worker gap?

Ben Bernanke argued in a speech today at the "Conference on New Building Blocks for Jobs and Economic Growth", that the government needs to play a role in promoting R&D and expressed concern that in the US government support for R&D and particularity basic science has been declining while in developing countries such as China and India it has been rising.

He also noted that government policies to promote R&D are not restricted to issues of funding but have implications for immigration policy and education policy.

Education

I was educated, for the most part, in Britain where subject specialization begins at 16, and the last two years of high school are devoted to at most four subjects, generally in science (in may case, math, physics, chemistry and biology), languages, humanities or the arts. At university the courses offered as part of the physics program I followed, in common with most British universities, were all related to aspects of physics or math; the only non-physics course I took was an elective in macro-economics.

It was not until I started teaching in the US that I began to gain and understanding and an appreciation of the liberal arts model. That being said, while I have sympathy for the aims of liberal arts education, I do wonder whether it is generating the trained workforce the country needs to support its economy. Although I do believe that an education in heterogeneous subject matter may improve innovativeness, I am also concerned that we may be creating population that is 'jack of all trades and mater of none'.

Immigration (Make, buy or rent?)

If we can't fill the shortage in knowledge workers by growing our own, then, runs the argument, we should adjust immigration policy to ensure that students are encouraged to study here and remain here once they graduate. It seems to me that a flaw in this argument is that for many (though clearly not all) the only reason they stay in the US after getting their education is a lack of opportunity in the countries from which they come.  As China and India's economies grow, and opportunities there for knowledge based work increase, the disincentives to retruning home will diminish and knowledge workers will again be in short supply in the US. As importantly, as China and India's educational establishments continue to grow in reputation, fewer and fewer students will see the need to get their higher education abroad, and the US' ability to attract and potentially retain knowledge workers will decline still further.  

Ultimately, until we make as good if not better use of our own intellectual potential relative to other countries, there can be no long term solution to the knowledge worker problem.

Death of a Terrorist

At about 8:30 this evening, I heard the news that Osama Bin Laden had been killed by US special forces in Pakistan. In the hour before President Obama gave his statement to the press, CNN showed a crowd growing in numbers in front of the White House. CBS reported that a crowd had assembled in Time Square. The images of singing, cheering and the waving of flags seemed oddly reminiscent of the celebrations in many parts of the Middle East after 911.  I imagine that the horror and outrage felt by hawks and doves alike almost 10 years ago here at seeing those scenes of people half a world away cheering when the Twin Towers fell, will likely be mirrored tonight by moderate Arabs watching Americans cheering outside the White House and in Time Square.  While Bin Laden was seen by most - including me - as a terrorist, and few in the West will morn his death, there is still something unseemly, vulgar and frankly rather un-Christian in cheering when any human being has been killed.

The events also gave me cause to wonder whether other things might have been done to make his killing seem less like vengeance.  For example, might he have been tried in absentia in a civilian court in the US or better still at the International Criminal Court in the Hague?  At least then his death would have more than simply a kind of old testament 'eye for and eye' moral legitimacy. It would also have signalled that terrorists are criminals rather than warriors, which robs them of their status as heroes in some people's eyes.

Bin Laden's death won't necessarily prevent others from pursuing his and Al Qaeda's goals; indeed if he is now comes to be revered as a martyr and a saint by his supporters violence may escalate. But the event does serve to remind us that as humans beings we are all fairly close to the savagery of our not to distant forefathers, something that unites us all, even while ideology divides us.    

The Airline Industry

I'm not an expert on the airline industry, but then by his own admission, neither is Nicholas Calio, President and Chief Executive Officer, Air Transport Association. Listening to his speech today, I was struck by a couple of things. First, he noted that the airlines have not been making money for a very long time. He pointed to, among other things, over burdensome regulation as one of the causes but, despite his plea for a dispassionate analysis, didn't comment on the obvious issue of the difficulty of tacit price coordination in high fixed costs industries. This of course is a predictable consequence of deregulation, which was intended to increase competition and drive down prices (which it did). That, I thought, was what the free market was all about?

The other comment I was struck by was his observation that some countries view air transport as "strategic". However, he didn't mention that those countries generally have state owned or state supported operators. He also called for a "public-private" partnership which sounds good until you realize that wants wants is for tax payers to fund capital investment in the companies he represents. Looks to me rather like privatizing the gains and socializing the losses. Of course if gains were to be shared, for example by equity investment by the government, there would be cries of "government takeovers of the airlines" from the tea party loonies. But there are those, and I suspect Nicholas Calio is one, who are happy to sup from the public trough but want to be free for oversight, accountability, or sharing the gains with taxpayer who have assumed the risk the private sector and its investors were not prepared to make.

Are we there yet?

"In today's politics, the pressures are so intense, the criticism so brutal, the targeting so arbitrary, that we are in serious danger of creating a situation where 'normal' people feel inclined to walk away, leaving the manically ambitious and the weird in their stead". Tony Blair, A Journey: My Political Life, Knopf, New York 2010 p487

Photo: GETTY

Perhaps we've been there a decade already? I'm not saying, just asking...

The Federal Budget 2011: Two Pie Charts

Source: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy11/pdf/budget.pdf

Keeping me awake

I woke up last night to hear Bill O'Rilley indignantly berating the president for appointing Jeff Immelt to head up his Council on Job Creation and Competitiveness. Since Jeff Immelt is a businessman (the CEO of GE) one would have thought Fox would be pretty happy. But it turns out the reason for O'Rilley's outrage was that GE's US tax bill was effectively zero. What to me seems rather strange is that Fox News consistently calls for a lowering of the corporate tax rate as a means of creating jobs - yet when one corporation reaches what logically would be Fox's nirvana of zero corporate income tax, they profess displeasure. The scale and scope of Fox News' hypocrisy continues to astound me.

The first shot

The first shot fired in a revolution by those seeking to change the existing regime likely changes the course of history. In revolutions that are achieved by peaceful protest and the force of popular opinion (such as the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia or recent events in Egypt) those leading the movement are committed but not violent. When peaceful protest is insufficient (as for example in Lybia) and protest turns to the taking up of arms, those leading the uprising are likely to be those most comfortable with the use of violence and lethal force. They may often be fanatical. If the revolution succeeds, those in charge after an armed insurrection are likely to be quite different in character from those who might have been in power had violence not been necessary. One foreign policy implication is that if one wants a moderate government be the outcome of a popular uprising, pressure must be brought to bear before the struggle turns violent.

More on faith

Tony Blair (yes, him again) was asked if his faith guided him in difficult decisions. He answered that his faith in god in the values He stood for was always in his mind but he didn't ask God in prayer what the minimum wage should be. In interesting contrast to those leaders who ask God for answer to specific problems and claim that He tells them what to do...

It got me thinking if I had this kind of faith. And I realized that I have (or had) two: one was in the usefulness and importance of data and reason in advancing knowledge; the other was in the inherent goodness in human nature, that at some level everyone wants to do the right thing. Oddly the realization that I had always had this kind of faith in human beings' acting (broadly) in line with Judeo-Christian values, the kind of faith that Tony Blair talked about, came at exactly the same time that I understood that my faith was misplaced. I no longer believe that people are inherently good.

I do believe Gerry Cory's notion that we as a species have evolved with two competing sets of impulses; ego and empathy. But I'm less convinced than Gerry that the we are driven to maintain a balance between the two. My fear is that under threat, society, supported as it is by empathy, might collapse as the world degenerates into Hobbsian ego-dominated chaos. 

Faith is everything

In a speech given at De Anza yesterday, Tony Blair said that faith will play an increasingly important role in world political affairs. He was talking about the rise of radical Islam, the tension between Arabs and Jews framed as a religious struggle for holy lands, of the many religious groups in China and reflecting also on the Troubles in Northern Ireland between Catholics and Protestants. 

But faith is not just about which god one believes in; faith is about believing in things that cannot be proven. Faith may, for example, be about the power of markets to cure all ills, or the ability of government to improve society; neither is definitively demonstrable. My faith is in the role of science as the best means we have of approaching true knowledge. "My religious faith is better than yours" is an unresolvable and therefore pointless statement; but that also makes it impossible to talk about issues when positions are based in faiths, whether it be the power of science vs religion in general, or in the power of the market s the role of government. Ideology in politics is as divisive and dangerous as it is in religion.

Speaker building postings have moved

I have moved my postings on my speaker building project to phase-n.blogspot.com. It was getting too dull for anyone not interested in such trivial pursuits. 

Our Electoral Sohpie's Choice: a Darwinian Perspective

I have often wondered whether our elected representatives really believe the things they say. Some seem, to me anyway, so implausible, so divorced from common sense, that my initial conclusion was that they must have been persuaded to adopt the views of the interest groups who paid for, and will be paying their campaign expenses. This made me uncomfortable, since it suggests a weakness of will, a lack of spine and integrity, of honor and commitment, values that seem increasingly rare.

There is however an alternative, slightly less depressing explanation. Given a very large number of heterogeneous candidates, those whose views most closely correspond to the largest funding sources will be elected. This model doesn't require that elected representatives adopt the views of their funders, merely that they are selected as "most fit", in a Darwinian sense, to the political environment and the resources it makes available.

Of course, the net result is the same. Electoral issues are defined by campaign donors and the views of those who we elect represent a Sophie's choice between the interests of two sets of opposing funding groups.

I imagine, not quite what the framers of the constitution had in mind.

On the Flaw of the House

Actually, by my count there are 10, so make that 'flaws'.

[Michelle Bachmann's speech against a carbon tax made on the floor of the US House of Representatives in April 2009]