Sophistpundit

The End of Sophistpundit

2011-10-15T18:15:00.001-04:00

In a little more than a month, it will have been seven years since I published the first post on Sophistpundit. The name was an homage to the Greek sophists, and to the blog Instapundit. I did not really know what a "pundit" was. I was 19.

Even then, I knew the name sounded pretentious. And the first posts I wrote were exceedingly pretentious themselves. I felt very self-conscious about this at the time, so I added a disclaimer in the sidebar of the blog--that it, and I, were full of shit, and shouldn't be taken seriously. The disclaimer didn't help--I still took myself too seriously.

On top of those posts where I took myself super seriously were times when I was profane and outright childish. I was excessively into politics, and obsessed with the topic of media bias. After the elections in Iraq in 2005, my obsession shifted to democratic movements around the world; at a time when they were popping up in places like Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Lebanon.

I also attempted to work my way into the blog ecosystem, hosting the Carnival of the Vanities and attempting (unsuccessfully) to create my own.

The fact that I started it so many years ago is good and bad. It's good, because I've learned a lot along the way, and I've improved my writing by doing a lot of it. It's bad, because the same year I started the blog I responded to the end of a relationship by writing a lot of terrible poetry (no I will not link to it--Google it if you must). And because I documented many of my thoughts at a time in my life when I was as immature as one would expect a college kid to be. On the other hand, some of the things I wrote pretty early on I'm still quite proud of.

At a certain point my perspective shifted from a college student who thought of himself as a member of the citizen media to a college graduate who wanted to have a place he could point potential employers. I decided that sending them somewhere with a name like "Sophistpundit" was probably not the best strategy. So I started Cloud Culture, where I would write about the industry that I wanted to work in--along with some things that may have been tangentially related but that interested me. This approach payed off in its second year by helping me get my current job.

The more I think about it, though, the more I feel like it's time to move on from this whole approach. From Blogger blogs, from .blogspot or .wordpress domain names. From sites that have titles as though they were publications of old, whether a quirky title like "Sophistpundit" or a vanilla one like Cloud Culture.

My friend and former classmate Eli Dourado simply created a website at elidourado.com with information about him and his work with a blog attached. The blog doesn't have a name. The site's name is simply his name. Recently, I started to think that his approach made a lot more sense than creating something like Cloud Culture.

And it makes more sense than continuing Sophistpundit. For as much as I love this blog for the sheer amount of time that I've put into it, the kind of writing that I've been doing here lately I could put would be fine on a site that I pointed potential employers to.

So from now on the kind of writing that I would have done at Sophistpundit or Cloud Culture will go on adamgurri.com.

Both of the old blogs will remain up. I'll be exporting the data and backing it up, as well, to make sure they never simply disappear.

Farewell, Sophistpundit.

Elizabeth Warren and Storytelling

2011-09-24T15:24:00.000-04:00

The above image has gone viral lately. I've seen it crop up on Tumblr, on Google+, on Facebook, and on Twitter. The quote is from a recent event, but I haven't been able to find out who the first person to put it on an image was.

Political debates, as with all conversations and discussions, are fundamentally about storytelling. The Warren quote is an example of very effective storytelling. It touches on a number of topics that are particularly hot right now and have been for some time--the roles of government and the market, how progressive our income tax ought to be, is individualism compatible with being a member of a community, and so on.

But it doesn't come off as a response. Indeed, the problem with many of the critiques of the Warren quote that I've seen is that they often come down to a list of what's wrong with it. A list isn't going to be put on a picture and get passed around the social web.

Three Stories

Warren's story is a simple one--anyone who gets rich in America is riding on the backs of the taxpayers, who paved the roads they trade along, educated the workers whose skills they rely on, and keep thieves, vandals, and murderers from taking what's theirs and their life.

The equal and opposite libertarian story, which I have heard many times in the circles I frequent, is that governments ride on the back of the wealth created by private, voluntary actors in the market. In this story, the existence of roads, public schools, and police forces is owed to companies like Microsoft, which create wealth for the population which is translated into government revenue in hundreds of thousands of ways.

The Hayekian story is that, indeed, no one ever gets rich alone--every individual is a small part of a gigantic system of production and trade that requires more information to keep going than any individual--or government--is capable of obtaining. No denying that public infrastructure can and in many cases does contribute to facilitating this system--but these contributions are but a very small part of the whole.

Rhetoric

The reason that Warren's quote has been passed around so much is clear. It is a concise summary of what one segment of the population believes--that the rhetoric of wasteful and over intrusive governments is wrong, that it misses the important and central role that government must play.

Whoever put it on an image was clever--for images have a rhetoric of their own. Having a face next to a quote humanizes it, and in the picture Warren looks wise, calm, and reasonable. Here is no zealout--just an intelligent, experienced public servant.

Our problem is not going to be that we're in our daily me silos, or filter bubbles. When I follow Jeff Jarvis on Twitter because I'm interested in his opinions about media and the internet, I don't get to filter out all the opinions he expresses on politics or anything else along the way.

No, our problem is going to be that a lot of people are just wired to respond to challenges to the stories they subscribe to with hostility.

I'm one of those people--taking a step back and being reasonable are learned responses for me, and I haven't learned them particularly well. I believe it is important but belief is not always easy to turn into action.

For most people, who see things not in terms of stories but in terms of literal truths opposing untruths, it's even harder to see the point of being reasonable. I am cautiously optimistic that the saturation of stories that new media has created will push more and more people to see their nature a little more clearly. Time will tell.

Hanging with the Evil Dead

2011-08-07T21:59:00.002-04:00

I have watched Army of Darkness at least half a dozen times. It's just at the level where they can water it down enough to put on TV, so that's where I first found it. It was years before I found out it was sort of the third of a series of movies that began with The Evil Dead. My fiancée was out of the apartment for a little while one Saturday so I decided to rent it from Amazon's Instant Video store, fire up our Roku Box, and watch it. A couple of months later I got around to watching Evil Dead II. The contrast between the three movies was really striking.

Warning: here there be spoilers.

Watching Army of Darkness did not give me the right set of expectations for what watching Evil Dead would be like. The former is a campy action-adventure flick that does not take itself seriously. The original Evil Dead is a straightforward, no punches pulled horror movie.

Other than an extremely awkward scene involving a girl and some trees, I really liked Evil Dead. It used every single horror movie cliche that you can imagine without shame, and it worked. Sure, it meant an inordinate amount of time was spent on characters steeling themselves to open a door to see what was on the other side, but it was well done. When I got a text message about two-thirds of the way through the movie, I jumped like ten feet in the air.

There's not much plot to this movie. Some kids--presumably college kids--go to a shack in a remote corner of the woods for vacation, and learn that it used to be the home of an archaeologist who was working on translating and ancient book he discovered in some ruins. He had dictated his translations into a recording, which they play, thus unleashing the evil forces upon them. The influence of H. P. Lovecraft on Sam Raimi, the writer and director, is obvious, and from the next movie on the book is openly referred to as the Necronomicon.

Evil Dead is what you might call a zombie movie with a Lovecraft twist; arcane knowledge conjures up demons that possess people and makes them look like distorted, monstrous corpses. Bruce Campbell's character, Ash, fights for his life as his friends and girlfriend are picked off and turned one by one. One of the signature techniques of the whole series is the camera taking on the point of view of the demonic force, which rushes towards the cabin and the characters from deep within the woods.

In the end Ash destroys the book and the sun comes out and he seems to have made it out OK. But then the camera rushes him from the perspective of the unseen force and the movie ends on an uncertain note.

Evil Dead II is kind of a misnomer. It isn't really a sequel by any stretch of the word, other than the fact that it was chronologically made after the first one. But it doesn't pick up where the last one left off--it reboots the whole story.

It starts in the same place as the last one--a couple of young kids heading to an abandoned shack in the woods. This time it's just Ash and his girlfriend. Within ten minutes the recording has been played, the demon's summoned, the girlfriend's possessed, and Ash kills her. Then we get to where the last movie ended--we watch from something's point of view as it rushes at Ash. He gets knocked around and then possessed, but then the sun comes out and he's OK again (which makes me think--gee, too bad you killed your girlfriend so hastily!)

There is a lot more plot in this movie. The backstory behind the book, and its discovery, is explored further. The daughter of the guy who found the book arrives at the cabin with her boyfriend(?) and a local guide and his wife. The interaction between them is therefore a little more complicated than the group of friends slowly being picked off in the first movie; when they arrive they think Ash is just a crazy guy who's murdered the old couple that had lived there.

This movie is definitely the bridge between Evil Dead and Army of Darkness. While the storyline bears more resemblance to the former, Evil Dead II has a lot more of a sense of humor than its predecessor. Ash also rises above being the scared victim to become a chainsaw-wielding badass. While the prior movie's Ash was gradually worn down by the circumstances, Evil Dead II Ash takes on a pulp-hero tone early on when he tells his undead girlfriend "you're going down!"

There were moments that straight up made me laugh in this movie. It was very surprising to come from the first one to this one, but it was clear how they eventually ended up with the next movie.

In this movie they mention a story in which a hero who falls out from the sky destroyed the evil back in 1300, and they show an illustration with a guy who clearly has a chainsaw. The way they defeat the demon is by summoning it, and then opening a portal which they send it down. Ash gets sucked down the portal too, ends up in 1300, and kills the demon. Various armored knights that are there celebrate him as a hero.

Returning to Army of Darkness after seeing the Evil Dead movies was interesting.

The discontinuity with the previous movie is not as dramatic as between Evil Dead 1 and 2. They reused the footage of the portal opening and sucking up Ash and his car. The only difference is they basically ditched the very last scene of the previous movie, as Ash begins the movie by being taken prisoner.

Army of Darkness takes the humor of the previous movie to far greater lengths, to the point of cornball. No horror is left--the scenes that are reminiscent of the Evil Dead movies are self-parodying. I watched this movie for the first time when I was a lot younger, and I admit that this time around I found the slapstick routines a bit tiring.

Still, this is a very fun movie to watch. This time Ash is a big-mouthed, unwilling, and often bumbling hero, trying to get back home and fighting to save the world along the way. There are about a hundred cliche pulp-hero one-liners that emerged from this movie. That is the kind of movie that it is.

Compared to the first two movies, this movie is all plot. I'm more interested in the contrast between the three, so I'm not going to go into it too much here. But this could really could not be more different from the first two.

Some Parting Thoughts

It's hard for me to say which of these movies is my favorite, because they are so different from one another. I think I like the first and last between than the middle one, because each is very pure--one pure horror and one pure pulp. Evil Dead 2 tries to straddle the line between and isn't as memorable for it, I think. Which isn't to say I didn't like it--at times I found it even more funny than Army of Darkness.

Finally, Campbell and Raimi have been talking about an Evil Dead remake for years, and there are apparently some fans who think this is sacrilege. That is hilarious to me--the Evil Dead series has no continuity whatsoever. They already made a remake--and it's called Evil Dead II. There exists a sort of continuity between 2 and Army, but it is not perfect.

I wonder if, in an age of Netflix and iTunes and Amazon's Instant Video Store, people are more demanding about continuity than they used to be. Evil Dead was no box office success, so it's unlikely that most of the people who saw Evil Dead II had seen it. Similarly, five or so years passed between the second movie and Army of Darkness, so the people who saw it in the theaters may have just taken the recap on face value and either forgotten how the previous movie ended exactly, or never seen it in the first place.

I don't see this as a bad thing, though--I hope that more directors and writers will rise to the occasion and create extremely long, unbroken storylines that span many movies or many seasons.

UPDATE: Apparently Evil Dead II really was intended to be a true sequel, but they had too much trouble getting the rights to the original footage.

Stories We Tell Ourselves During Tragedies

2011-07-23T15:50:00.002-04:00

The Myth of Reason

2011-07-10T16:07:00.001-04:00

One question they like to ask around the GMU econ department is what your most absurd belief is. A little while ago Eli offered the idea that elections don't matter as his. More recently, Scott Sumner admitted he was unable to answer this question.

Though Eli may cite another out there ideas of mine, my most absurd belief is that there is no such thing as reason.

I am sympathetic to the arguments made by David Hume, F. A. Hayek, and others, that the power of reason is much more limited than rationalists think it is, but my opinion is slightly different. I don't think there is such a thing as reason at all, as the term has traditionally been used.

The idea that we have this thing called reason that we use to arrive at truth--even a limited grasp of the truth--is one of the many stories I just don't subscribe to. I can see why the story appeals to intellectuals--it gives an almost spiritual significance to the activities they engage in.

For the story of reason extends far beyond mere arrival at an accurate description of reality. The story certainly includes subject matter in the hard sciences and attempts to describe reality--but it also includes things like moral choices and public policy. It has become a cliché to say that when people like Richard Dawkins talks about moral matters and invokes reason, he sounds more than vaguely religious--but in my opinion the cliché is true.

A brief version of my alternate story goes like this: human beings process information at a much lower level than the tradition of reason implies. We communicate this processed information in the form of a story, and then come to believe that we arrived at our conclusion by following the logic of that story. But that's backwards--the story came after the conclusion.

To the extent that our stories contain aspects that more or less accurately describe some part of reality, this is because the underlying information processing system in our brain is not bad, and also because modern society has large scale processes for highlighting more accurate stories for particular subject matter. The fictional character of Reason plays no part in it.

Would you agree that this is my most absurd belief?

Confession of a Story Hoarder

2011-07-02T23:25:00.000-04:00

I meant it before when I said that stories are my religion.

I love stories. I soak them up, from every possible genre. I find them in writing, I listen to recordings, and I watch films and animations.

And I watch people living their lives around me. I talk to them, and when they share their stories--stories about themselves, about and told to them by people they know--I eat it right up. I'm the kind of person who forgets to bring a lunch, or where he parked his car, or a dozen other details that are extremely useful to remember.

But I will never forget your story.

I watch people talking to one another and telling stories, and they're not even realizing they're telling stories. They argue with one another and think that they're just trying to reveal a manifest truth, when in reality they are just crafting a story for bottom lines they already believe in. Even alone, when we try to explain something, we do it by telling ourselves a story, sometimes several stories to see which one sits the best with us.

There is nothing wrong with this. This is what it means to be human.

Sometimes stories are pretty damn good at explaining--a scientific theory is after all just another kind of story.

When I say that something is a story I don't intend to cheapen it. I think some people believe that if everything is a story then it must be empty, meaningless.

I believe the exact opposite--stories are meaning. To say they are meaningless, from this perspective, is almost incoherent.

I respect people with faith in a creator--to me there's a certain appeal to believing in one, grand storyteller who penned the great story of the universe, and all the subplots held within. But that's not my story--I subscribe to the materialist story, for better or worse. I think that our propensity for storytelling was arrived at through evolution.

I think you cannot appreciate what it means to be human without recognizing that we are all storytellers; that we tell stories to ourselves and one another a thousand times a day. Being human is about telling, and learning, and living stories.

The Storyteller Within

2011-07-01T22:43:00.000-04:00

In the 1960's a technique for helping patients with extreme cases of epilepsy was developed--the corpus callosum, the body of nerve fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain, was cut, splitting the brain in two.

Michael Gazzaniga used the opportunity to study how the two regions of the brains responded, when isolated. The experiments famously demonstrated, among other things, that the left brain specialized in articulation. When the right brain was shown a picture that the left brain could not see, and the patient was asked to describe what they had seen, they were unable to. However, the picture was perceived--when a set of instructions were presented to the right brain, the patient would go through with them.

This is where it gets really interesting.

When reading the following passage, keep in mind that the right brain is connected to the left eye, arm, and hand, and vice versa.

On one occasion he flashed a picture of a chicken claw on the right, and a picture of a house and a car covered in snow on the left. The patient was then shown an array of pictures and asked to point to the one that "goes with" what he had seen. The patient's right hand pointed to a picture of a chicken (which went with the chicken claw the left hemisphere had seen), but the left hand pointed to a picture of a shovel (which went with the snow scene presented to the right hemisphere). When the patient was asked to explain his two responses, he did not say, "I have no idea why my left hand is pointing to a shovel; it must be something you showed my right brain." Instead, the left hemisphere instantly made up a plausible story. The patient said, without any hesitation, "Oh, that's easy. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed."

-Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis

Somewhere in our left brain resides the storyteller that is a big part of what distinguishes us as human beings.

Haidt continues:

This finding, that people will readily fabricate reasons to explain their own behavior, is called “confabulation.” Confabulation is so frequent in work with split-brain patients and other people suffering brain damage that Gazzaniga refers to the language centers on the left side of the brain as the interpreter module, whose job is to give a running commentary on what-ever the self is doing, even though the interpreter module has no access to the real causes or motives of the self’s behavior. For example, if the word “walk” is flashed to the right hemisphere, the patient might stand up and walk away. When asked why he is getting up, he might say, “I’m going to get a Coke.” The interpreter module is good at making up explanations, but not at knowing that it has done so.

Human beings can come up with a story for anything, often with nearly no effort.

What we call consciousness is merely a storyteller; riding atop the more automatic processes of the brain and the rest of the body and spinning narratives along the way.

Western philosophers have often considered consciousness to be a sign of man's rationalism, when in fact it was the crucial component on a storytelling animal.

Arguments as Storytelling

2011-06-27T20:00:00.000-04:00

A recent New York Times article made a bit of a splash among the social science and philosophy circles recently. It chronicled some French cognitive scientists who theorize that reason evolved purely "to win arguments."

“Reasoning doesn’t have this function of helping us to get better beliefs and make better decisions,” said Hugo Mercier, who is a co-author of the journal article, with Dan Sperber. “It was a purely social phenomenon. It evolved to help us convince others and to be careful when others try to convince us.” Truth and accuracy were beside the point.

Psychological biases are so mainstream right now that most of the people I follow weren't very shocked or outraged by this notion.

Still, there were people who objected to the idea. Over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians, Andrew Cohen wrote:

Still, some of us genuinely argue–with ourselves and others–to get to the truth. Does anyone really deny this? Some might, but what is the evidence? Wouldn’t this require some claim of false consciousness for those of us that see ourselves as pursuing truth?

In the comments, I responded:

[W]e may tell ourselves that we are seeking truth, but somehow we always manage to do it within the confines of pre-existing beliefs, ideologies, and traditions.

I had a short back and forth with some commenters after that, but a question occurred to me: if I don't think that arguments are going to lead me to some manifest truth, then why do I argue?

Of course I've talked about some of the ethical reasoning behind this before, but that's just an exposition on the morality of it. Sure I do believe I can learn from discussion, though by learn I mean something far vaguer than arriving at definite truths.

Before coming out and saying why I continue to engage in arguments, I want to propose the following:

Any attempt to explain why people engage in arguments about politics, morality, science, or anything, needs to also be able to explain why people argue about sports.

My dad and I have a lot in common--I grew up in a household where he discussed history, philosophy, politics, and human nature on a regular basis.

One thing I did notice, though--he seemed to get equally, if not more, impassioned when discussion the Washington Redskins as he got when talking about politics or the meaning of life!

I was not very into sports for most of my life, but as I have increasingly seen more sports blogs, articles, and TV, and heard more sports radio, I've noticed something striking. Sports commentators engage in discussions in exactly the same way as pundits in any other subject matter. They bring in points of reference--past events, statistics, etc--they try to reframe their arguments to appeal to people they know are inclined to disagree.

I challenge you to compare discussions between ESPN pundits with discussions between, say, Matthew Yglesias and Will Wilkinson. This is not meant to disparage any of these parties--I'm merely making the point that argument is argument no matter where it occurs.

Here are some aspects of argument that run across every subject, include sports:

People get emotional about their arguments. When they are calm, it's clear that they're making an effort to appear reasonable.
Arguing almost never changes anyone's mind.
Arguing almost never has any impact on the subject matter being argued about--a fans' private argument is about as likely to change his team's choices as my private arguments are likely to change government policy.

So why do people bother?

A big part of it must be that some people enjoy arguing.

I know that I do. I always have.

And I think everyone has something they enjoy arguing about, even people who don't like arguing most of the time. Whether it's about their team, or their favorite TV show, everyone has fun arguing about something.

Because arguments are just another excuse for us to tell stories to one another. Stories we find interesting, or novel, or stories that we believe in very deeply. We are storytelling animals, and the particular activity we call "arguing" or "discussing" is just one very specific way in which we express our nature.

The reason that our arguments align with our pre-existing beliefs, ideologies, traditions, and sports teams is because those things are all the higher level narratives that give context to the specific stories we want to tell.

That's my story anyway, and I'm sticking to it.

Of Stories and Loss

2011-06-12T14:22:00.001-04:00

Stories are my religion. I see them everywhere, in everything.

Humankind has been called the moral animal and the rational animal, but in truth we are the storytelling animal. People have been telling each other and themselves stories to entertain and explain for as far back as recorded history. Recorded history itself is a body of stories in its own right.

Bards and minstrels told stories that served primarily to entertain, but often also to immortalize some event or figure. These days we explain all pre-modern mythology as merely stories that people told themselves to try and understand the mysteries of the world, but modern science itself is composed of a body of stories.

After all, just because something is a story does not mean it is entirely or even mostly make-believe. Most of the stories humanity trades in are simply perspectives on experienced events. We turn them into stories to try and understand them--we ask ourselves, what caused this event to happen? We do it to entertain. We do it to give the event meaning.

My father is fond of saying that a family is an ongoing story, whose main characters change with each generation. We mourn when our loved ones’ part in that story comes to an end, and celebrate the weddings and births that ensure its continuance.

I lost my Aunt Mari this past week. It was a shock to all of us who loved her; no one had expected it.

The speakers at her funeral, her closest family members, did their best to tell her story. Each one had seen a different part of it, experienced it from a different angle. Each one had a different experience with Aunt Mari that had personal meaning to them. We all learned something that we hadn't known about her.

She was a woman with a powerful faith in God, but almost no one--myself included--had realized this. My cousin Isabel, one of the few true believers among us, read a selection of poems that my Aunt Mari had written to express her passion for the divine. She gave my Aunt Mari’s faith a voice, something that the rest of us were not equipped to do.

I have seen my Aunt Mari, along with my Uncle Jim, and the rest of my immediate family that lives in the area, nearly every Sunday for my entire life. Yet I still feel like there is so much I never learned about her; parts of her story that I will now only ever be able to get from secondhand accounts.

I wish more than anything that her story did not have to end so soon, when she could have had many more years of life ahead of her. But one thing I do know is that the Gurri family story was immensely enriched by her part in it.

Preliminary Thoughts on Agenda Setting and Market Forces

2011-04-09T16:06:00.000-04:00

I've been mulling over the contrast between agenda setting explanations of media behavior over other possible explanations that are grounded in basic economics.

I've been thinking about two subjects in particular: first, how the small number of stories that dominate reporting are selected. Second, the overall partisan bias in particular newspapers.

Agenda setting provides a clear story: editors in a newspaper have their own ideology and political beliefs, and will choose what stories to cover based on what makes that ideology and those political beliefs look good. Or, if you like, they support a specific political party and they run stories that make that party look good or the opposing party look bad. The slant of the newspaper is independent of the beliefs of the readers, and while it may not change readers' mind, it will frame the way that particular issues are discussed.

A simple microeconomics story would be that newspapers are merely responding to the desires of their readers--both in the stories they cover and in the partisan or ideological slant they may adopt. The issue of influence isn't one that economics has a clear story for, but in so far as there is a direction of causation, it flows from the readers to the publication, and not the other way around.

I'm still not sure where I fall on this, but I'm leaning towards the latter modified a bit by the former--publications may in fact influence how an issue is framed, but they are only able to do so because their readers like the way that the publications frame issues. It's a little awkwardly conceived, but I'm still processing the issue.

This paper (PDF) attempts to address the economics-based story but fails to do so. First off, from the very first paragraph of the introduction they reveal their own bias:

News provided by the mass media are the most important source of information on public aﬀairs in modern democratic societies. Hence, media outlets play a fundamental role in keeping the public informed on the decisions of their political representatives as well as on issues and events that are relevant to public decision-making.

As someone with some exposure to public choice theory, I do not buy into this old style progressive era story at all. But let's put that to the side.

The study has a novel approach; drawing from a large sample of newspapers, they first calculate the propensity of the editorial boards to endorse Democrats or Republicans. Given the propensity they find, they then seek to see if there is any correlation between party endorsement and how news is covered, in particular economic news.

From the abstract:

We investigate whether there is any signiﬁcant correlation between the endorsement policy of newspapers, and the diﬀerential coverage of bad/good economic news as a function of the president’s political aﬃliation. We ﬁnd evidence that newspapers with proDemocratic endorsement pattern systematically give more coverage to high unemployment when the incumbent president is a Republican than when the president is Democratic, compared to newspapers with pro-Republican endorsement pattern.

This is an interesting result, and I respect their approach. They don't try to compare actual coverage to some fake objective "right" level of coverage. They compare the level of coverage of papers who tend to endorse Democrats to the level of coverage of papers who tend to endorse Republicans. A meaningful metric, I think.

The authors argue for an agenda setting based interpretation of the data. In order to do so, they address the idea that the papers may be catering to, rather than influencing, their readers. Their methodology for looking at this, however, is flawed.

Their proxy for readership's party preference is the voting record of the geographic area the readers are in. There is no way around it--that is an awful proxy. By that logic, the National Review's readers in Massachusetts could not possibly be conservative because everyone knows that Massachusetts has a heavily Democratic voting record. It's absurd--there can be Republican leaning readers in heavily Democratic areas, and vice versa.

The study presents an interesting statistical question: is there a correlation between the partisan tendency of a paper's editorial board, and how its economic news is covered given the party of the incumbent?

The question of whether causation flows from the paper to the readers they influence, or the readers as the market being catered toward, is an identification problem. It's a case where you have to be a scholar rather than a scientist. I'm glad to see that this paper attempted to approach the problem, but their methodology was simply silly.

I'll continue to think about this subject; any suggestions on what I should be reading would be highly welcome.

Debating Prediction Markets

2011-04-08T22:48:00.001-04:00

The Body of Scholarship

2011-04-03T16:49:00.000-04:00

There's a study that's making the rounds that found that 0.05% of Twitter users account for about 50% of the content that gets attention on Twitter. I decided to read it, thinking it would make for a good Cloud Culture post--in my Monty Pythonesque genre of "NO ONE expects the power law distribution!"

The thing is, I read the study, and suddenly felt like it deserved more thought than I had intended to give it. The methods they employ are really very clever. They are aware of the potential problems those methods have and attempt to either compensate for them, or at least justify the usefulness of the information that comes out of them after those problems have been taken into consideration.

More to the point, I felt I was looking into a world that I had not properly explored, something much larger than my personal ideas and the little reading that I have done. There was terminology I'd never seen before--in this case the Two Step Flow Theory of information--that there is a whole literature behind.

In short, I felt I had just peaked into an academic school that had a body of scholarship going back decades before I was born. I had a similar feeling when I was first introduced to the world of academic economics a few years ago. Just like that instance, I felt inspired to try and familiarize myself with the terrain a little more both to learn some things as well as out of respect for those who put in the time and effort to create the body of scholarship in the first place.

At my father's recommendation, I also went and read this other study (PDF). I then went and looked for the papers cited in both studies to see which were available online--quite a few of them are, and I intend to get to most of them.

My natural inclination is snark and know-it-all-ism, but I really do believe that a serious scholar should approach a subject with humility. I am no scholar, but have long aspired to be. When you look upon a body of work that is so much larger than any one of the scholars who contributed to it, it's a lot easier to be humble about what it is that you could possibly add to it.

The Hobgoblin of Small Minds

2011-03-19T12:45:00.002-04:00

Jonathan Haidt's The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail (PDF) is one of the great works of moral psychology. In it, he attacks the notion that we arrive at moral judgments by devising rational arguments. Instead, we have emotional responses to particular situations which we then attempt to come up with reasons to justify after the fact.

He opens with an example which illustrates how this works in practice:

Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least, it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide never to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that? Was it ok for them to make love?

Haidt goes on to say that people's immediate response is that it is wrong. When asked why, they will come up with reasons, such as the risk of having a child. When it is pointed out that the example is crafted in such a way as to imply that no child will be had, they come up with other reasons, and when they run out of reasons, they simply reply that "it is just wrong."

Haidt's point is that, whether we admit it to ourselves or not, "it is just wrong" is the starting point for all moral arguments. We feel, emotionally, that something is wrong before we have produced any articulated reasons to justify the feeling.

When I read this, I knew that someone, somewhere would be committed enough to a rationalist view of morality to argue that Julie and Mark's relationship, as constructed, is not immoral. Thanks to my friend Ajay, I have finally found that rationalist.

The Committed Consequentialist

The rationalist is Tauriq Moosa, and one has to admire his commitment. In his post responding to Haidt, he not only defends Julie and Mark's incest, but various examples of euthanasia, necrophilia, bestiality, and cannibalism as well. While I believe his rationalism is as ill-founded as any version of rationalism, it's rare to find someone who does not shrink away from the unpleasant implications of an argument they believe in.

Moosa is a consequentalist; he believes that the consequences of an action are the basis for its morality or immorality. To Moosa, there is no universal argument against incest--only arguments against specific instances of incest which contain a high risk of producing a child with a genetic defect. Take away the bad consequences, as Haidt's example deliberately does, and you take away the argument against incest. In his words:

It should be obvious, therefore, that I find nothing morally wrong with Julia and Mark’s action. After all, it was consensual and they acted – as far was know – autonomously. This has implications, which must therefore be accepted: that incest is not therefore wrong or right by definition. It would be unhelpful if we defined incest as ‘the wrongful sexual interaction between close and related family-members’, since the argument still needs to be made as to why it’s wrong in the first place. Just defining something as wrong and working from that assumption is to take a Straw Man and put him in a circular argument.

If this is the case, we must ask the following: If a sexual interaction between two consenting adults occurs, with no harmful ramifications to others, should we prevent them from doing it?

He proceeds to make similar arguments in circumstances where someone consents to have their body used for sex after they are dead, thus presenting a case where necrophilia isn't immoral. Then another where the person consents to have their body eaten after death, thus presenting a case where cannibalism isn't immoral. His argument is that rational argument demonstrates that there are many such cases where our feeling of repugnance is not justified.

Bad Consequences Are Just Wrong!

There are a number of problems with Moosa's argument, chief among them the problem with all consequencialist arguments. I've written about this elsewhere, but the whole premise of consequentialism makes no sense.

Consequentialism aims to provide us with a clear criteria for determining good actions from bad actions. If an action has good consequences, it is good; if it has bad consequences, it is bad. The problem is that consequentialism provides us with no criteria for determining which consequences are good or bad. All consequentialist moral philosophies must therefore smuggle in concepts that are assumed to be good or bad in and of themselves.

Moosa does just that:

It seems in many instances, we let the repugnance of eating other people or having sex with animals or siblings overshadow what should be of general moral concern: autonomy, harm, rights, and so on

(...)The repugnance factor clouds our judgement. Murder is wrong because, in almost all cases, it creates greater suffering for the victim; or perhaps it violates someone by treating them as a means to an end; or you lower their dignity.

We are not presented with reasons why "autonomy, harm, rights" or "suffering" or lowering someone's dignity have moral gravity.

Moosa's argument does not contradict Haidt's description of how morality works in practice; instead it provides us with another example of it. Whether you're looking at consequences or actions in and of themselves, moral arguments boil down to something that someone feels is just wrong (or right).

Rationalism Demands a Foolish Consistency

Looked at from this perspective, Moosa's argument boils down to the claim that if you believe X then you must believe in a consistent, universal application of it. This is a version of Kant's categorical imperative, something that I think all rationalist arguments ultimately boil down to. Lest you think I am putting words in Moosa's mouth, here is what he himself said:

The overarching thread that links bestiality and necrophilia and cannibalism – and all manner of repugnant cases – is that we must be consistent in our evaluation. And we need to apply our critical view even to cases we assume are a given: like murder. Being consistent shows that we do in fact have good reasons for applying the term murder to cases like Ted Bundy, but can’t apply that same term to doctors in Belgium. Unpacking our reasoning can help clarify views we find repugnant and not allow the repugnance to cloud our judgement and condemn unnecessarily those who do not deserve it.

So whether intentionally or not, Moosa is saying that causing suffering or violating a person's autonomy are just wrong. From there he goes on to say that if you believe that, you must apply it universally to all situations even if you find the situations repugnant in and of themselves. He is calling for us to hold ourselves to categorical imperatives.

Putting to the side now the fact that Moosa's "good reasons" are accepted for no more substantial justification than Haidt's study subjects accepted that incest was wrong on its face, I take issue with the insistence on the part of rationalists that morality be something with an internal logical consistency.

As I have written, I think that rules of morality are more like rules of grammar than physical laws. We are born with an instinct that is informed by the particulars of the community and culture we are born into. The instinct, Haidt's "emotional dog", emerged through biological evolution, and the rules of behavior in a particular community emerged over time in response to conditions encountered by generations of people in that community.

I reject the notion that these rules of behavior be anything other than rules of thumb. They did not emerge through logical formulation, and should not be expected to have some over-arching logical consistency. Moral rules, like rules of grammar, often have as many exceptions as cases that perfectly fit the rule.

Moreover, there is no criteria for determining which rules or values ought to be applied universally to the detriment of others. Our principles often conflict--say a dedication to freedom of speech but also a dedication to minimizing suffering. No one likes someone who is rude, or someone who aggressively insults someone who already had low confidence to begin with. But many share the belief that the law should not restrain someone's ability to be rude or insulting, in spite of the fact that it may cause suffering.

Those of us who believe freedom of speech trumps the desire to minimize suffering do not do so for rational reasons. Putting someone in jail for being rude simply feels just wrong.

What Rationalist Arguments Amount to

Moosa presents rationalist arguments as an alternative to emotional response for determining what is right and wrong. As I have demonstrated, his "good reasons" for believing something is wrong always boils down to something--be it a principle or a specific outcome--which is not justified rationally.

What rationalist arguments like this really amount to in practice is latching onto some specific subset of things that many people believe are just right or wrong on an emotional level, and then tacking onto them the argument that those things need to be applied consistently and universally. The demand for consistency is itself desired for nonrational reasons--consistency feels just right to many people, particularly the philosophically inclined.

That is all there is to it--rationalism in practice fits neatly into Haidt's framework, with some version of the categorical imperative included as one of those things the rationalist feels is just right.

Life in the Ideological Long Tail

2011-02-13T13:03:00.001-05:00

So only a handful of narratives dominate the stories being told across various media. A narrow set of perspectives dominate whatever field you may find yourself in. What's an outlier to do?

The fact of the matter is that nearly all of us have ideas that are at odds with the minority of ideas that make up the majority of what is talked about. At the head of the tail there is a huge volume of similarity, but the rest--the long tail--is a huge volume of heterogeneity. We all live in both worlds--there is a lot we hold in common and a lot that distinguishes us from the typical.

As such, everyone has something that dissatisfies them about the prevailing narrative or consensus. The source of their dissatisfaction is usually not entirely idiosyncratic--normally it is shared by a minority of other individuals. How large these minority groups are varies over time and with the issue in question. A larger minority of people favor complete free trade than favor free banking. Each idea occupies a different position along the long tail, but neither are at the head.

For those issues that one feels strongly about, life in the long tail is surely frustrating. Every news story that touches it will explain the facts through the lens of the dominant narrative. If the narrative ever changes, the odds that it will change to more closely reflect the one you have accepted is very slim. After all, the long tail is, as its name implies, quite lengthy. For every niche group attempting to change the narrative, there are many others, smaller and larger, doing the same. The odds are against your particular group prevailing.

So why bother?

First, though it's unlikely your particular perspective will wholly prevail, it is not impossible. The narrative does change. The characteristic that distinguishes an open society from a closed one is that the head of the tail is always contestable. Everything at the head of the tail today began its life in the long tail; many things in the long tail today are destined to rise to the head in the future.

Furthermore, a successful rise to the head can happen fairly quickly. If you change just one person's mind, it increases the odds that yet one more person beyond that will have their mind changed--even if only by a fractional amount--and that increasing probability can quickly compound to the point where a large number of people move closer to your position in a relatively short period of time. So while the odds of success may be low, the expected return of pushing for a particular set of beliefs may be positive.

Finally, it has long been my belief that discussion, conducted respectfully, is good for those who engage in it. It is a valid way to participate in civil society. That is especially true when conducted publicly online, where it can be found by others and serve as a point of reference long after the discussion itself has ended and the participants have moved on.

I think it is possible to live with contentment in the ideological long tail, if you can come to terms with it.

Contestable

2011-02-12T10:39:00.000-05:00

It is not uncommon to hear cries of monopoly when one firm overwhelmingly dominates a particular industry.

Yet the quantity of firms is not really a good indication of how competitive an industry is. To begin with, the cause of the single firm's prominence may be legitimate economies of scale rather than any barriers to entry for potential competition. Or, as Edmund Burke put it:

A tradesman who has but a hundred pound capital, which (say) he can turn but once a year, cannot live upon a profit of 10 per cent. because he cannot live upon ten pounds a year; but a man of ten thousand pounds capital can live and thrive upon 5 per cent. profit in the year, because he has five hundred pounds a year. The same proportion holds in turning it twice or thrice.

In other words, there are times when we are all made better off by having one big firm that takes a much smaller percent of the wealth produced than would be possible if it was divided up into multiple firms of equal size.

So the question is not whether or not there are a lot of firms in an industry. The question is whether or not the market is contestable.

In a contestable market, firms are price-takers even if they appear to be the only one of consequence in the industry. That is, the firm cannot raise the price above the market rate and expect to maintain its advantageous position. There are low barriers to entry, so even if there are only a few other very small players--in fact, even if there are no other players at the moment--the dominant firm behaves as if there were ferocious competition, because to do otherwise would be to risk losing its position to new entrants.

Take Google's AdSense network as an example. Google shares a certain percentage of its revenue with the publishers who put up AdSense. This is an area that clearly benefits from economies of scale--the more publishers Google can get to display AdSense, the more advertisers will want to spend to be a part of the network, the more money that AdSense pays, the more publishers will want to display it, and so on. The end result being that Google takes a tiny cut from billions of transactions, minimizing the cost it adds while maximizing the efficiency of the industry.

The end results being that the vast majority of ad network money is going into and coming out of Google's AdSense, because it has more advertisers and more publishers than any alternatives by an enormous margin.

Does that mean that Google has an ad network monopoly? Not at all. This market is completely contestable. For one thing, there are a few small alternatives around. If Google started offering publishers less than the market rate, any of these other networks could quickly swoop in and offer it to them. If Google persisted in stubbornly charging too much, one of these others would eventually become its successor.

There are some industries, like computer manufacturing, where competition is easy for all to see. There are a number of firms clearly working as hard as they can to stay ahead of one another. In other industries, competition may be invisible but no less relentless.

That is the essence of the theory of contestable markets first articulated by William Baumol.

Bias as a Side Effect of Power Law Distributions

2011-02-11T07:26:00.002-05:00

I came to this blog in November of 2004, in the last year of teenagedom, very concerned with media bias. The Dan Rather memo scandal made blogging cool for me, made it something I wanted to be a part of. There was this established old guard and these cool little upstarts that were taking down the big guys. And they weren't one sided, either--before Dan Rather, they had been responsible for bringing attention to the speech that ultimately torpedoed Trent Lott's Senate leadership.

I was reading books like Bernard Goldberg's Bias and calling the New York Times glorified toilet paper.

Then I grew tired of politics, and stopped paying attention to political news and commentary altogether. Oh things would bubble up to catch my eye--that's the nature of the social web, things that are being talked about a lot are unavoidable. But I mostly focused on other things--philosophy, economics--and media yes, but media from a very different perspective.

Recently, I've come to realize that in the interim, many of my views have matured and outright changed. I still share the enthusiasm for new media with my younger self, but I feel that I have learned a lot since then.

I touched on this in my recent post about narratives. I talked about what I've always felt was the problem:

This is a big part of what I have always disliked about that species of content that has historically been called the news. There is always one narrative, and it is rarely more than skin deep.

But then admitted that I've come to understand that "it really couldn't be any other way." The reason? Narratives in the news, like nearly all human affairs, follow a power law distribution.

A conversation on academic bias that I had today got me thinking even more specifically about how what I have learned about power laws applies to the subject of bias which had been of such great interest to me a few years ago.

Remember how power laws form.

power laws arise when gaining one of the unit under consideration increases the probability of gaining yet another unit, and that additional unit increases the odds of gaining yet another, and so on.

Let's consider how this might happen in academia.

The people who are already professors mentor and bring in those who will become professors. So the entrance of a professor with one point of view increases the odds of another professor of a similar point of view being brought in, and the entrance of that next one increases the odds that yet another will--and so on. Exactly the set of circumstances that bring about a power law distribution.

So the fact that a small set of perspectives dominates so overwhelmingly in certain areas shouldn't surprise us, any more than the fact that a minority of blogs account for an overwhelming majority of blog traffic should surprise us.

That's not to say that you have to be happy with what perspectives dominate, nor with what narratives are making the rounds. But there isn't like a big conspiracy to keep one perspective in the majority in particular places--the mechanics of human social interactions just make this narrow outcome practically inevitable.

The joy of freedom--especially in the era of new media--is that we can do our part to add to or challenge the established narrative and perspective. As Hayek argued, "The argument for democracy presupposes that any minority opinion may become a majority one." The perspectives that dominate in places like the professional media and academia were once in the minority themselves, and their prominence is entirely contestable.

These days I'm a lot less concerned with bias and a lot more interested in participating.

Thomas Sowell on Incentives and the Knowledge Problem

2011-01-29T19:23:00.000-05:00

Collective decision-making, whether through democratic processes or through top-down commands, involves people making decisions for other people rather than for themselves. The same problem of inadequate knowledge afflicts both these processes. To revert for a moment to central planning as a proxy for surrogate decision-making in general, when central planners in the days of the Soviet Union had to set more than 24 million prices it was an impossible task for any manageably sized group of central planners, but far less of a problem in a country with hundreds of millions of people, each making decisions about the relatively few prices relevant to their economic transactions.

Incentives as well as knowledge are different. There are far more incentives to invest time and attention in decisions with major direct personal consequences to oneself than to invest similar amounts of time and attention to casting one vote among millions in decisions that will affect mostly other people, and whose effect on oneself is unlikely to be changed by how one's single vote among millions is cast.

-Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society

Narratives, Big and Small

2011-01-22T19:31:00.001-05:00

A couple of years ago, a company came out with some data on iPhone app usage. They found that less than 5% of users still used an app 30 days after they had downloaded it.

Tech blogs picked this up and the story went viral. A narrative emerged across all of these sites--this was all about short attention span. Wow, those iPhone users sure are frivolous; they download tons of apps and stop using them in less than a month. The narrative had such traction that even the Onion got in on the action.

I thought this narrative was childish, and said so at the time.

But narratives, by their nature, are simplistic. And as trivial as the particular story may seem, it was then that I realized that old and new media were a lot less different in at least one regard than I had really understood them to be--in spite of the larger number of places that might cover a particular story, one narrative still overwhelmingly dominates how that story is told. Power law dynamics apply.

This is a big part of what I have always disliked about that species of content that has historically been called the news. There is always one narrative, and it is rarely more than skin deep.

But in fairness, it really couldn't be any other way. There are various levels of interest you can take in a particular subject. The deeper you go, the more narratives there are to choose from, and the more detailed and nuanced they are.

What we call news is really spectator-level stuff. All people really want is the bite-sized version, because they themselves are not, say, an iPhone developer or a political fundraiser, or someone else to whom more detailed information would be useful. They aren't getting news in order to inform their choices, in other words; they're getting it because they find it interesting.

Then you have enthusiasts--say a history buff. A history buff may not actually be using the information for any practical purpose; they aren't going to be writing any academic papers, or making policy decisions informed by history. But they are interested in stories of the past, and are willing to put extra effort into trying to understand them.

Yet among history buffs each subject will be dominated by a small number of narratives. Again, power law dynamics apply--it may just be a different set of narratives than the ones that dominate among those less interested in the subject.

And it may be different from the narratives that dominate among those even more interested in the subject. For instance--someone with a glancing acquaintance of history may have heard that the stock market crash of October 1929 was what caused the Great Depression. A history buff may have some notion that the Smoot-Hawley tariff had a role. Economists, on the other hand, have largely accepted that the contractionary policy of the Federal Reserve played a huge role.

So there are narratives that dominate every level.

As I said, I really used to hate this fact. especially at the spectator-level. But I think I've made my peace with it. Once you accept that the power law is the shape of human interactions at every scale, this pattern becomes a lot easier to accept.

Besides, the fact that one narrative dominates doesn't mean that there is no conversation. If anything, the economy of narratives facilitates conversation by giving a lot of people common points of reference to start from.

Moreover, no narrative can sit on its laurels. As with everything, a minority of people will adopt different narratives, each of which has the opportunity to become mainstream, though most will not. So if you don't like the one that's dominating the subject matter you're interested in, just do what I do--write about it. Present an alternative. Sure, odds are your alternative won't gain traction. But you can put it out there; something most people didn't have the means to in the past.

That's how old and new media are different--there's room for a lot more narratives than there used to be. The fact that only a handful of those will ultimately dominate is how they are the same.

The Scale of Community

2011-01-15T16:39:00.000-05:00

In a way, all scholars are part of one grand community. After all, the work being done in a journal of psychology may be of use to someone writing for a journal of sociology, and work being done in a journal of chemistry may be useful to either or both.

In general, however, scholars tend to stick within their own academic schools; for reasons of specialization as well as simple historic circumstances, an economist is more likely to read and be read by other economists than to read or be read by psychologists. Someone in the economics department at Harvard is more likely to consider someone at the the economics department at Stanford his peer than someone in the history department of his university.

Even the academic schools are not uniform; within economics there are people who focus on microeconomics and those who focus on macroeconomics. There are specialists in industrial organization, development, the economics of the law, and many more. Each of these sub-fields represents a group of scholars who are reading one another more than they are reading the work of other scholars in the broader field of economics.

Then there are those who have banded together because they hold a minority position within the field. The Austrian School of economics sets itself apart from the mainstream of the field by some of its theories and its rejection of the more mathematical approach that most of the field has adopted. Then there are a subset of this group who have focused on a theory of free banking that is rejected by many who consider themselves members of the Austrian School; even still the group is large enough so that individual scholars are able to build off of one another's works.

There is no progress without community, and community can form at surprisingly small scales. An individual working in isolation is a rarity in history, whether you are talking about scholarship, art, or hard science. Just a handful of individuals can be much greater than the sum of its parts.

Obamacare

2011-01-02T12:51:00.001-05:00

UPDATE: It's been pointed out to me that my argument may not hold in the case of the extension. Writer Adam Potthast offers a more interesting explanation for the dramatic increases: next year there will be price controls put in place on how much insurance companies can increase their rates.

I haven't really written much of anything about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act since its passage, for a couple of reasons. First, it's not like I've read it--tomes of similar length are difficult to finish when they are on extremely interesting subjects and written in the most elegant of prose. A series of specific health policies written in deadly-dull legalese is not something I can pretend I'm going to make it through without killing myself somewhere in the middle (or more likely, towards the beginning).

Second, because I haven't read it, I can't really say how much different it is from what came before it. A lot of free-market types have been tearing their hair out about the new law but Russ Roberts rightly observed at the time that what came before it wasn't so great from a free-market (or just a basic functional) perspective, either.

Still, when I am told that the cost faced by the company I work for to continue with the same health insurance plan has increased 25% for reasons directly related to the new law, by someone at the company whose job it is to be familiar with the matter, it gets my attention.

I don't know the details, but I can speak to one specific example of what may be going on in general.

One change that has received a lot of attention is the mandated extension of coverage of dependents until the age of 26.

One can easily understand the rationale: if you're between 22 and 26 and you don't have a job that provides health care insurance, it's very costly for you to get it. Either you or possibly your parents have to eat the extra costs; costs that are much greater than they were when you were 21 and could remain under your parents' coverage. The magic policy solution: extend the coverage you had when you were 21 until you are 26! Think of how much money that will save you or your parents!

Here's how everyone who isn't a 22-26 year old or the parent of one gets screwed by that.

There are additional risks and costs associated with covering additional people; that's simply the reality of insurance. Before the new law, those costs and were borne in some way by the 22-26 year olds themselves or someone who was close to them. Now that they are swept into the umbrella of coverage of other people, insurance companies cannot charge them specifically, so they have to increase the costs to everyone in order to have enough funds to cover the new people.

It works like this: parents of 22-26 year olds start covering them with the insurance they get through work. In order to cover the additional costs, the insurance agencies start charging higher prices across the board, which is paid mostly by employers. Employers end up paying more to get the same level of coverage for their employees, meaning they have less money overall. So things like raises or bonuses or hiring new people suddenly become less plausible considerations.

In short: parents of 22-26 year olds have been given a legal mechanism for imposing the cost of covering 22-26 year olds on everyone else.

It may seem like the 22-26 year olds, and possibly their parents, are still the winners here, but this is a negative-sum game: enough new rules like this one and everyone ends up worse off.

As I said, I haven't read the law, so I can't comment on whether this rule is characteristic of all of the new rules. All I can say is that the more rules like that there are in the law, the higher the cost of health care will be.

Storyteller

2010-12-04T16:38:00.000-05:00

Over the Thanksgiving break I had a great conversation with my friend Peter. He talked about how, at a certain point, he decided that he would give acting a shot, but within a limited time window. If he couldn't make it work by a certain point, he would just be satisfied with the fact that he gave it an honest try.

I told him that I was grateful that my passion has always been writing, because writing doesn't require the strict schedule that rehearsal for a live production of any sort--be it a play, dance, or even filming for a TV show or movie--would demand. I can have a regular career and there will always be time to give writing a try on the side.

Storytelling is a craving, a constant desire that has been with me for my entire life. Dave Stroup wrote a great post about the desire to tell stories that had me thinking about this again. When I was a little kid, I had approximately one million action figures of various sorts, all of which became actors in my epics and action stories.

These days most of my storytelling is done through the written word. Over the last six years I have written an enormous amount of nonfiction. By comparison, I have written only a paltry amount of fiction. This bothers me, because I really love fiction.

The problem is that I have invested a lot into my nonfiction writing--I have done so much of it that comes like second nature to me. Meanwhile, because I have not written very much fiction, I find it difficult to start, so I don't do it, and then I do more nonfiction instead. End result; it continues to get easier to do the latter and harder to do the former.

Case in point: I tried to start on a story, got frustrated, and ended up writing this post instead.

Immediately after talking to Peter, I began to think about how little fiction I have written. I've written the occasional short story, but very rarely.

I did write a book, once. It was years ago and it isn't very good, but I'm still proud that I did it. This was while I was still in college. I sketched out where I wanted each part of the story to end up in a general way, then confined myself to a small room for a week or more and did nothing but write. I could do that back then--it was summer, so I didn't have classes, and I didn't have a job at that point.

I think that I could write a much better book now. I have grown up a lot since then, and the experiences give me, I would hope, a more realistic idea of how people behave and what it's like to be anything other than a 20-year-old jobless college student commuting from his parents' house.

I have also listened to a lot of science fiction, fantasy, and horror in podcast form. Every writer I've ever respected has said that if you want to write well, you need to read a lot. As a byproduct of having a sizable commute in the digital age, I have ended up getting exposed to more genre fiction in the past two years than in the ten years before that.

So here's my plan: I want to make 2011 the year that I finally write another book. Over the course of the last week, I've started sketching it out. I don't see myself getting to this before the end of the year, though--my life is a little more hectic than it was five and a half years ago (to understate matters). But I want to do this. I need to bring fiction writing into my life in a serious way. That's the kind of person I want to be.

The Terrible Old Man

2010-11-26T11:42:00.000-05:00

You can read the original story here.

I really like this animation. Beyond the fact that it is well done, it also takes a very specific interpretation of the story that I enjoy.

Not all of the lines of the story are read--little things like describing the robbers knocking on the door and the Terrible Old Man's yellow eyes at the end are simply shown.

The part where the bodies are hanging in front of the driver is nowhere in the original story, but it works very well. And the scene at the end with the three bottles with the robbers' names on them is just a nice touch on the animator's part.

Who Decides?

2010-11-19T21:48:00.000-05:00

Today I witnessed a very interesting discussion on Twitter about the Wal-Marts that are going to be opening in DC. I put it together after the fact using Storify, and it will be embedded at the end of this post.

The thing that interested me about the discussion was how all sides were so clearly weighing the trade-offs. They talked at length perceived costs and benefits of Wal-Mart's entry.

In the whole discussion is an implicit understanding that all of life is trade-offs. Those who defended it did not claim that there were no costs; the one most staunchly arguing against it did not claim that it was completely without benefits.

A lot of the time I feel like people's primary focus in these policy-level discussions is deciding what the correct, situation-specific balance of trade-offs is. Only there is no correct balance--costs and benefits are based on personal values, not something out there in nature.

For me, the more important question is not whether the benefits of letting Wal-Mart into DC outweigh the benefits, but who decides whether or not Wal-Mart or anything else is allowed to open up stores in DC. The people who get to decide that are going to make their own judgment call on the trade-offs, and what I think on the subject will matter not at all.

The question of who decides is always crucial. Whether it is a politician, an appointed judge, or a neighborhood association, the incentives faced by the individuals involved are very different.

To return to the subject of the last post; the question is not how intrusive we are willing to let airport security measures become in order to guarantee some level of safety. The question is who decides what the security measures should be. Answering that question can give you a sense not just of what the measures will end up being, but how effective they will be and at what cost.

Obligatory TSA Rant

2010-11-18T18:19:00.058-05:00

If you haven't read this yet, or some summary of it, you should. Especially if you live in the US.

I have to admit that after reading it, I wanted to punch someone in the face. Few things really get under my skin like the TSA does.

I realize how frivolous that may seem, given all the many real and more serious problems there are in the world. But there it is.

My last semester of grad school I took a class called transportation policy. It was taught by a lawyer and focused primarily on the legal angle. He brought in a lot of guest speakers, one of which was the chief council of the TSA.

This little troll of a woman assured us that there was absolutely, positively no way that the data from the full body scanners would ever be stored. To no one's great surprise, that turns out to be a lie.

She and others like her lecture us on the necessity of these increasingly intrusive measures. But there are a few things about this assertion that piss me off.

First, after 9/11 every incident that has provoked an increase in invasiveness have been cases where attacks were not successful. Passengers did the job that security failed to do, and to show their gratitude for doing their job for them TSA proceeded to punish passengers with yet more intrusion.

Second, Israel faces way more attempts at committing acts of terrorism on a daily basis than the US does, and has for much longer--yet they don't need full body scanners or crotch-groping. The idea that these measures are all done because of their effectiveness and efficiency is a joke.

But you know, that's not even the worst part. If the problem was just that they were unreasonably overcautious, it wouldn't piss me off nearly so much. The problem is their attitude.

TSA officers expect us to act like sheep and get vindictive when we do not. They take offense to any joke made during the whole uncomfortable process, and punish us for showing any spirit.

Of course the TSA isn't the only problem--until recently I would have said that the border guards were worse. When Michael Yon refused to tell one what his income was, they handcuffed him. In my transportation policy class, I also met two council from the US Customs and Border Protection and asked them about this incident. They defended the actions of the agent as completely reasonable.

We are citizens of a free nation, and we are not sheep. My income is none of your damn business. Letting you touch my crotch should not be a prerequisite for traveling by airplane.

Stop acting so goddam entitled and all knowing when all you're doing is passing off bureacratic ass covering as necessary security measures.

/rant

Six Years

2010-11-16T08:00:00.099-05:00

Another year of blogging gone by.

When I started Sophistpundit, blogging took up a considerable amount of the time I spent online. These days, it's a pretty small minority of that time, even with the additional blog I've picked up along the way. Beyond the fact that I am enormously more busy than I was as a lazy undergrad, the web has also changed a lot in six years.

Back in 2004, if I saw something I thought was interesting and I wanted to share it, my blog was the main way for me to do that. Whether it was simply linking to it with minimal comment, embedding an image or video, or including a longer commentary on something, this blog served all of those purposes.

Nowadays, I actually share a lot more than I did back then. But I do it primarily through other, more social tools--Google Reader, Twitter, and Facebook. On the latter, I can get even more specialized by sharing in a group that I created specifically for that purpose.

So the blog has become primarily a tool for longer form writing, something I'm not really going to be doing every day, much as I love it.

Here are some of the essays written over the last year that I'm proudest of, in no particular order:

It's been a very eventful year for me outside the web, as well. As the previous decade came to an end, the new one began with a record-breaking amount of snow in the DC area.

I finally, finally finished grad school and left the world of classes, professors, papers, and exam. I got a new job. I contemplated awkwardness and anxiety, and the kind of person I can become.

All in all, a very good year. Thanks to those of you who have visited my little corner of the web from time to time. I still get a lot of satisfaction from having this outlet for my writing, and I don't see that changing anytime in the next year or the next ten years.