Reality is complicated

In Reality has a surprising amount of detail John Salvatier explains that there are a lot more details involved in doing things than we generally expect.

It’s tempting to think ‘So what?’ and dismiss these details as incidental or specific to stair carpentry. And they are specific to stair carpentry; that’s what makes them details. But the existence of a surprising number of meaningful details is not specific to stairs. Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.

You can see this everywhere if you look. For example, you’ve probably had the experience of doing something for the first time, maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were. Then you got more practice and then you told yourself ‘man, it was so simple all along, I don’t know why I had so much trouble’. We run into a fundamental property of the universe and mistake it for a personal failing.

If you’re a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really it’s that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddliness when you’re new, and in programming you do new things more often.

You might think the fiddly detailiness of things is limited to human centric domains, and that physics itself is simple and elegant. That’s true in some sense – the the physical laws themselves tend to be quite simple – but the manifestation of those laws is often complex and counterintuitive.

...

Before you’ve noticed important details they are, of course, basically invisible. It’s hard to put your attention on them because you don’t even know what you’re looking for. But after you see them they quickly become so integrated into your intuitive models of the world that they become essentially transparent. Do you remember the insights that were crucial in learning to ride a bike or drive? How about the details and insights you have that led you to be good at the things you’re good at?

This means it’s really easy to get stuck. Stuck in your current way of seeing and thinking about things. Frames are made out of the details that seem important to you. The important details you haven’t noticed are invisible to you, and the details you have noticed seem completely obvious and you see right through them. This all makes makes it difficult to imagine how you could be missing something important.

That’s why if you ask an anti-climate change person (or a climate scientist) “what could convince you you were wrong?” you’ll likely get back an answer like “if it turned out all the data on my side was faked” or some other extremely strong requirement for evidence rather than “I would start doubting if I noticed numerous important mistakes in the details my side’s data and my colleagues didn’t want to talk about it”. The second case is much more likely than the first, but you’ll never see it if you’re not paying close attention.

The most dangerous animal in Australia - the horse

In Forget spiders and snakes, horses are more likely to kill you, study of Australian coronial data shows Loretta Florance writes that:

More Australians have been killed by horses in recent years than all the country's venomous creatures put together, a new study by Melbourne University researchers has found.

In the period 2000 to 2013 there were 74 deaths from horses, 26 from sharks and 19 from crocodiles. Over the same period there were 27 deaths from stings (bees, wasps, etc.), 27 deaths from snakes and 5 from ticks and ants.

By contrast, there were nearly 5,000 drowning deaths and almost 1,000 from burns.

The rise of the expert blogger

In Nate Silver and the Ascendance of Expertise Bora Zivkovic writes about the rise of the expert blogger.

It seems beer is becoming more popular in Asia

At least according to the BBC: Beer in Asia: The drink of economic growth

The effectiveness of tin foil hats

Tin foil hat as according to Wikipedia.

Nationalism, militarism and the hatred of difference

Adam Gopnik has written an interesting article A Point of View: Don’t mention the war?

It's time to stop invoking Hitler and the Nazis in arguments about everything from censorship to birth control - but we should never stop heeding the lessons of World War II

He has several things to say, but one I want to highlight is his attempt to explain how nationalism (and it's different from patriotism), militarism and the hatred of difference was behind the evil acts of the Nazis.

But I'm always haunted by the simple words of the historian Richard Evans towards the end of his good book, The Third Reich at War, where he said that we should always remember that what happened was not some act of Satan - though Satanic acts took place - but the result of the unleashed power of long latent traditions of militarism, nationalism and the hatred of difference. It was the force of three ever-living things, braided together like hissing, poisonous snakes around a healthy tree.

The danger is that each of these things is not necessarily evil on first appearance, and each seeks a new name in new times.

The old distinction between patriotism and nationalism, made many times by many people, has never been more vital to our mental health than it is now - as vital for the health of the country as the distinction between sexual fantasy and pornography is for the health of a marriage. Patriotism, like fantasy, is a kind of sauce, a pleasing irrationalism that is part of what makes us human - and saucy. Nationalism, like pornography, is a kind of narcissistic addiction that devours our humanity.

Patriotism is a love of a place and of the people in a place. As GK Chesterton understood, it becomes more intense the smaller the unit gets, so that it was possible for him to feel more patriotism for Notting Hill than for Britain.

Nationalism is the opposite belief; that your place is better than everyone else's and that people who don't feel this way about it are somehow victimising you.

He goes on to write:

Just as nationalism is the opposite of patriotism, not its extension, so militarism is an emotion opposed to the universal urge to honour soldiers for their courage. Militarism is the belief that the military's mission is moral, or moralistic. That the army can be used to restore the honour of the nation, or to improve our morals, and that a failure to use it to right every imagined affront is a failure of nerve, rather than a counsel of good sense.

After 9/11, in the US we suffered from a plague of militarism of this kind, again mostly from sagging middle-aged writers who wanted to send someone else's kids to war so that the middle-aged men could feel more manly in the face of a national insult. Militarism is not the soldiers' faith that war can be conducted honourably, but the polemicist's belief that war confers honour.

Hatred of difference - notice I carefully did not say racial hatred, or religious hatred. Hitler hated Jews because of their religion, and because of their race, but he hated them above all because of their otherness.

He uses as a modern example of this hatred of difference the argument of someof "the impossibility of assimilating Muslims in my adopted country of France" and compares that to similar arguments against Jews in France over a century ago.


In the article Gopnik also discusses Godwin's Law and the Fawlty Towers "The Germans" episode with Basil Fawlty telling people not to "mention the war" when they had German guests. The relevance of this discussion can be seen in his concluding remarks, remarks that I think are worth reproducing:

This is a question in which after a half-millennium of religious warfare, the results are really all in. If we accept the Enlightenment values of tolerance, coexistence and mutual pursuit of material happiness, things in the long run work out. If we don't, they won't.

So, from now, when we evoke Godwin's Law, as we ought to, I would like to propose Gopnik's Amendment to it. We should never believe that people who differ from us about how we ought to spend public money want to commit genocide or end democracy, and we should stop ourselves from saying so, even in the pixelled heat of internet argument.

But when we see the three serpents of militarism, nationalism and hatred of difference we should never be afraid to call them out, loudly, by name, and remind ourselves and other people, even more loudly still, of exactly what they have made happen in the past.

We should never, in this sense, be afraid to mention the war. We should say, listen: you've heard all this before - but let me tell you again just what happened in the garden the last time someone let the snakes out. It is exactly the kind of lesson that history is supposed to be there to teach us.

Read the article.

Literacy success and chance

In Unflowered Aloes Tom Bissell has an interesting essay where he discusses how it's only by chance that the work of some of America's greatest writers is still around. Which raises the question, how much has been lost?

Misogynists on the Internet

In Dear The Internet, This Is Why You Can't Have Anything Nice Helen Lewis has written an interesting article about the abuse and harassment of Anita Sarkeesian after she wanted to investigate the depiction of women in video games:

A Californian blogger, Anita Sarkeesian, launched a Kickstarter project to make a web video series about "tropes vs women in videogames". Following on from her similar series on films, it aimed to look at women as background decoration, Damsels in Distress, the Sexy Sidekick and so on. Her pitch is here:

Sarkeesian was after $6,000 to cover the cost of researching the topic, playing all kinds of awful games, and producing the videos. Seems reasonable, doesn't it? Even if you don't like the idea - or don't believe that women are poorly represented in games (in which case, you would be wrong) - then isn't it fine for other people to give money to something they believe in?

Except some kind of Bastard Klaxon went off somewhere in the dank, moist depths of the internet. An angry misogynist Bat Signal, if you will. (It looks like those charming chaps at 4Chan might have had something to do it.)

Lewis then goes on to document some of the harassment, including defacing Lewis' Wikipedia page and abuse comments on her Youtube video.

The history of family life

George Monbiot, in Kin Hell, looks at the history of the family and finds that it "has been wildly misrepresented by conservatives".

“Throughout history and in virtually all human societies marriage has always been the union of a man and a woman.” So says the Coalition for Marriage, whose petition against same-sex unions in the UK has so far attracted 500,000 signatures. It’s a familiar claim, and it is wrong. Dozens of societies, across many centuries, have recognised same-sex marriage. In a few cases, before the 14th Century, it was even celebrated in church.

Monbiot also writes:

 The belief that sex outside marriage was rare in previous centuries is also unfounded. The majority, too poor to marry formally, Gillis writes, “could love as they liked as long as they were discreet about it”. Prior to the 19th Century, those who intended to marry began to sleep together as soon as they had made their spousals (declared their intentions). This practice was sanctioned on the grounds that it allowed couples to discover whether or not they were compatible: if they were not, they could break it off. Premarital pregnancy was common and often uncontroversial, as long as provision was made for the children.

The nuclear family, as idealised today, was an invention of the Victorians, but it bore little relationship to the family life we are told to emulate. Its development was driven by economic rather than spiritual needs, as the industrial revolution made manufacturing in the household inviable. Much as the Victorians might have extolled their families, “it was simply assumed that men would have their extramarital affairs and women would also find intimacy, even passion, outside marriage” (often with other women). Gillis links the 20th Century attempt to find intimacy and passion only within marriage – and the impossible expectations this raises – to the rise in the rate of divorce.

Edit 17/05: When Same-Sex Marriage Was a Christian Rite.

Why the best in drama is coming from TV

Edward Jay Epstein in Role Reversal: Why TV Is Replacing Movies As Elite Entertainment looks at why TV is now producing the best in elite entertainment:

Once upon a time, over a generation ago, The television set was commonly called the “boob tube” and looked down on by elites as a purveyors of mind-numbing entertainment. Movie theaters, on the other hand, were considered a venue for, if not art, more sophisticated dramas and comedies. Not any more. The multiplexes are now primarily a venue for comic-book inspired action and fantasy movies, whereas television, especially the pay and cable channels, is increasingly becoming a venue for character-driven adult programs, such as The Wire, Mad Men, and Boardwalk Empire. This role reversal, rather than a momentary fluke, proceeds directly from the new economic realities of the entertainment business.

It's all down to the economic model of HBO apparently.

Better off more likely to cheat

Rich people more likely to take lollies from children: study cites a study in the USA that shows that:

People from wealthy backgrounds are more likely than poorer people to break laws while driving, take lollies from children, and lie for financial gain, a United States study says.

The article also reports that:

Even Dr Piff, who has studied the impact of wealth on people's morality and charitable giving in the past - finding that rich people tend to give less to charity than poor people - was surprised to see them taking sweets from kids.

"I was astonished," Dr Piff said. "On average, people in the upper rank condition took two times as much, so it was a pretty sizeable effect."

Also, in that particular study, researchers conditioned some of the subjects first to think of themselves as of a higher social rank by asking them to compare themselves to others with less.

The exercise showed that people could be trained to think more highly of themselves, and that they would in turn act with more greed and less ethicality, demonstrating that status drives greed.

"We also got them to increase their likelihood of saying 'I'd do all these unethical things,'" such as keeping the change without saying a word if a coffee shop cashier returned them too much money.

Split second decision making in sport

The article In the blink of an eye looks at the decision required in the high speed sports like cricket, baseball and tennis.

So what sets such batsmen apart? It is tempting to assume that they simply have better visual reaction times than the rest of us and can pick the ball up quicker. But according to “Wait”, a new book by Frank Partnoy, that is not the case. The book is about general decision-making in life, but contains a chapter on “super-fast sports”. It concludes that the best batsmen are no faster at “seeing” than their less successful colleagues, or even many amateurs. Whether you are Virender Sehwag or a village-green clubber, it will take you around 200 milliseconds to react to the ball. The best batsmen are set apart by what happens in the next 200 milliseconds, which the book calls the preparation stage. This means deciding on the shot, moving into the correct position and swinging the bat. (The third stage, hitting the ball, accounts for the last 100 milliseconds.) And here the margin between us and them is miniscule: “A cricket batsman who is just fifty milliseconds slower than an average professional—in other words, someone who is slower by just a fraction of the time it takes to blink—simply has no chance of competing with the pros.” Quoting Peter McLeod, an Oxford professor, the book goes on: “Their skill, it seems, lies in how they use the information to control motor actions once they have picked it up, not in the more elementary process of picking it up.”

The mythology around Anzac

Paul Daly wrote a very interesting essay Anzac: Endurance, Truth, Courage and Mythology. It looks at the mythology around Anzac day and those Australians that served in war. Well worth reading.

Dynamic Capitalism vs the Welfare Sate

There's an interesting article in The Fiscal Times, The Choice: Dynamic Capitalism vs. the Welfare State, comparing the economic performance of the US vs Europe during and after the GFC.

There is an implied tradeoff here. In the U.S. system, workers have less protection and hence more insecurity than in countries where protection is more prevalent. In return for giving up security, there are two promised benefits. First, it is argued, economic growth will be higher. With less government interference, lower taxes, and unions all but absent, the economy will be free to reach its growth potential.

Second, the economy will be more stable. If a big shock hits the economy, the U.S. will be able to reestablish full employment in new, productive, high-paying jobs much faster than countries with greater social protections and the flexibility inhibiting institutions that come with them.
If these two benefits are large, then trading security for dynamism, flexibility, and higher growth will be more than worth it. So has the economy lived up to these promises?

The article also notes that most of the growth in income in the USA over the decade preceding the GFC was in at the top.

In terms of economic performance (or at least unemployment) tt seems that the USA was middle of the road - it did better than the southern European countries but worse than the northern European countries.

With such a mixed outcome, it’s difficult to support the claim that the free market approach that began in the 1970s has lived up to the promise of a more dynamic, flexible, faster growing economy. And the case is even harder to make when the fact that the deregulation of the economy that helped to produce the housing bubble is factored in.

Interestingly those European economies with the highest levels of social welfare have had the least problems with sovereign debt whilst those with lower levels of social welfare (think Greece and Italy) have fared the worst.

A larger welfare state did not lead to a sovereign debt crisis, but it did lead to substantial protection during the recession and much better performance than in the U.S.

The author of the article suggests that the USA has room to improve in this area.

Increasing creativity

Jonah Lehrer has written an interesting article in the New Yorker titled Groupthink. He first debunks the myth that brainstorming aids creativity. Instead he argues that people are more creative when they are brought together as a group and allowed to argue and debate. He cites a study by Brian Uzzi "a sociologist at Northwestern, has spent his career trying to find what the ideal composition of a team would look like". He then goes on to look at the success of Building 20 at MIT:

The fatal misconception behind brainstorming is that there is a particular script we should all follow in group interactions. The lesson of Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right—enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways—the group dynamic will take care of itself. All these errant discussions add up. In fact, they may even be the most essential part of the creative process. Although such conversations will occasionally be unpleasant—not everyone is always in the mood for small talk or criticism—that doesn’t mean that they can be avoided. The most creative spaces are those which hurl us together. It is the human friction that makes the sparks.

Edit 13/6/2012:  Isaac Chotiner writes a less than complementary review of Lehrer's book Imagine.

Michael Pascoe on the Greek tragedy

Last year Michael Pascoe wrote an interesting article on the economic crisis in Greece The Greek tragedy - shoot the chorus. Ever so often I go looking for it so I can send it to other people. As I can't find where I've referenced it before I'm going to do so here so hopefully I can easily find it in the future.

Interesting article on middle class welfare

At The Conversation Gerry Redmond and Peter Whiteford have written an interesting article For richer or poorer: the delicate art of messing with middle class welfare. It notes how well targeted Australia's family assistance programs are, especially compared to other countries. They note that:

The main reason why family payments go to middle income and some higher income families is that we have generous base rates of payment for lower income families and we try to not withdraw them at too high a rate in order to avoid disincentives to work. Correspondingly, if governments wanted to substantially cut “middle class welfare” they would need to either cut benefits for lower income families or increase effective tax rates on middle income families through a tighter income test (or both).

Matt Cowgill has posted an interesting graph on Twitter that shows how "'middle class welfare' in Australia has changed - not as much as you'd think".

High density more cost effective for cities than urban sprawl

Emily Badger, in The Simple Math That Can Save Cities From Bankruptcy, looks at how some cities in the US are finding that regenerating their downtown areas can be financially advantageous.

We tend to think that broke cities have two options: raise taxes, or cut services. Minicozzi, though, is trying to point to the basic but long-buried math of our tax system that cities should be exploiting instead: Per-acre, our downtowns have the potential to generate so much more public wealth than low-density subdivisions or massive malls by the highway. And for all that revenue they bring in, downtowns cost considerably less to maintain in public services and infrastructure.

Barbienomics

Barbienomics is the term coined for the fact that, although Barbie dolls are made in China, most of the value is captured by others (Mattel, who owns the intellectual property, the retailer, logistics). There are several interesting articles on the topic:

China's Barbie Doll Economics
Barbie and the World Economy

Barbienomics: the reality of manufacturing

US conservatives are less trusting of science

Kevin Drum reports in Chart of the Day: Conservatives Don't Trust Science as much as they used to. I wonder if the same holds for Australia?