Mind ajar

I failed my resolution for the year 2012 by not changing a major opinion. This marks three consecutive years during which I've kept nearly the same world view, with all my new ideas coming as nothing more than refinements of previous ones.

Was my resolution for 2012 silly? I suppose so. I can't willfully change an opinion. Changing an opinion requires, in addition to an open mind, serendipity, and one can't force serendipity. But I also lacked an open mind. I've become set in my comfortable thoughts and theories.

It's impossible for me not to relate this to getting older. Most living things, as they age, become less adaptable and more adapted. What was once in an organism's youth a universe of potential necessarily collapses over time into a set of ever narrower possibilities. This brings to mind a metaphor, one of a crooked tree that was warped in youth due some pressing circumstance of the time, such as having to grow around the obstruction of a building or away from the shade of a bigger tree. After some years of thickening its trunk and branches, the tree's crooked shape becomes fixed, and the tree grows only by extending and hardening the basic shape it already has. Even if the building it grew around is later torn down or the tree whose shade it grew away from dies and falls over, the crooked tree retains its awkward shape until it too dies. To survive new obstructions, the tree relies on the adaptations it's already made.

The forward arrow of time can't be avoided, and it can't be undone, but neither is it wholly regrettable, for it's chiefly the unchangeable parts of ourselves that make us who we are. Nevertheless, I won't be the champion of a closed mind anytime soon: during 2013 I'll strive to be both adapted and adaptable. But as far as resolutions go, maybe I'll try something that's more within my control, such as being punctual or eating five servings of fruits and vegetables every day.

Reading log, 2012

Here's this year's list of books I read.

In addition to the books, I began reading a lot of magazines. This was born out of my increasing frustration with the poor quality of most free content on the Internet—as with such sites as the one you're reading now—which pushed me into a conscious willingness to pay for better content. Consequently, I bought a subscription to The New Yorker and to The American Scholar, which together average an issue a week and have kept me perpetually inundated with interesting material to consume. What's the mark of good writing? For me it's finishing a piece about a topic I wouldn't otherwise be interested in reading about. By that standard, both magazines are full of well written articles, and so this year I read with greater diversity, though that diversity isn't reflected in the following list.

• Stephen King
  Firestarter

• Keith Devlin
  The Math Gene

• Jane Austen
  Sense and Sensibility

• Paulo Bacigalupi
  Windup Girl

• Isaac Asimov
  The End of Eternity

• Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
  Dragon Wing

• Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
  Elven Star

• Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
  Fire Sea

• Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
  Serpent Mage

• Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
  The Hand of Chaos

• Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
  Into the Labyrinth

• Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman
  The Seventh Gate

• William Poundstone
  Prisoner's Dilemma

• William Poundstone
  Priceless

• Stephen King
  It

• Walter Tevis
  Queen's Gambit

How much oil does our country produce?

While I was in Houston, my dad mentioned predictions of the United States becoming the world's #1 oil producer within a few years. I laughed, for that contradicted what I had always heard: that the United States is a distant third in the world, behind Russia and Saudi Arabia, and our production has been declining since the early 1970's. Not so, my dad said. Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States are all very close in their production numbers, and with the current production boom going on in our country, we may very well become #1 soon. No, I said, Russia and Saudi Arabia produce about 10 million barrels per day, and the United States produces about half as much. Not at all, he retorted, the United States also produces about 10 million barrels per day.

We were at my uncle's house at the time, and it wasn't until later that day, after having burned through about a tenth of a barrel's worth of gasoline to return home, that we searched the Web to see who was right. What we found illuminated the obscurity of oil production statistics.

The first page we pulled up was the relevant Wikipedia article, List of countries by oil production. It has a chart clearly confirming what my dad said earlier: Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States are bang-bang-bang in oil production, with the United States producing about 9.7 million barrels a day. My dad was right. No way! I thought. I did my own search and found another page, one from the EIA (Energy Information Administration) showing the classic chart of declining production in our country. The units are different—the EIA chart is figured in barrels per year rather than barrels per day—but the result is vastly different even after doing the conversion. According to the EIA chart, the United States currently produces about 5.6 million barrels of oil per day. That's 4.1 million barrels shy of the figure in the Wikipedia article, and contradictorily shows I was right. What's going on?

There are two major differences in how the two figures are calculated. The Wikipedia article's more generous figure of 9.7 million barrels per day includes something called refinery gains, which is the increase in volume that naturally occurs when crude oil is refined into separate chemicals. Forty-two gallons, i.e. one barrel, of crude input gets refined into an extra gallon or two of output, and so some oil production accounting includes that gain as part of what a country produces, even when the crude oil that's inputted into the process is imported.

But the bigger difference in the 4.1 million barrels per day discrepancy is the inclusion of natural gas liquids. These are hydrocarbons, such as methane and propane, that are in liquid form at underground pressures but gaseous form at atmospheric pressure. Some oil production statistics include natural gas, and some don't. Whether it gets included or not determines whether the United States is a distant-third oil producer that's been on the decline for four decades or else is currently booming and subsequently closing the gap with the world's top two oil-producing countries.

This is something we all ought to consider whenever we hear politicians, economists, and business analysts casually tossing around oil production statistics. Whether natural gas ought to be included in oil production stats depends upon the context of what you're talking about. For example, natural gas is proving to be a great fuel for generating electricity cheaply, but you're not going to see cheap gasoline or airfare anytime soon because of a methane boom.

Houston trip recap: bike trails

I should write something to cap off my Houston trip, now that I've been back in Phoenix for a week. That something will be about bike infrastructure, and how Houston is putting in a lot of it.

Buffalo Bayou Trail, with the Downtown skyline in the background.

During the afternoon of the last Sunday I was in town, I had some time to kill, with the two constraints that (1) I was starting near Memorial Park and (2) I needed to make it to a friends' house in the northwest side of town by six o'clock, more than four hours later. Before setting out, I consulted a foldout map of the city's bikeways and got a notion to go Downtown and see its library branch, which began renovation just before I moved away in 2006, and maybe also tour around Hermann Park to the south. But what I ended up seeing most to my pleasure was something unexpected: a lot of construction signs, construction equipment, and freshly moved dirt—all part of the Bayou City's many efforts to create, extend, and improve its bike trails.

Excavators making things better for the future along the Buffalo Bayou Trail.

Some highlights. From Shepherd, just south of the I-10, there's the Buffalo Bayou Trail, which casually winds its way to Downtown. Most of this trail has been around for years, as this wasn't the first time I've biked it, but there are some new bike bridges crossing the bayou and some trail construction work taking place now. The result is a continuous path that goes from one end to the other without ever crossing a street except by underpass. By the way, tucked under the Waugh Dr bridge are thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats (click the link and search for bat colony). During the day you can't see them, but you can hear them squeaking, just like many of the bicycles passing below.

The signs on the Waugh Dr bat bridge caution to stand back during flight to avoid bat droppings and to never handle a grounded bat.

I noticed only after returning to Phoenix and studying maps that there's another, parallel east-west trail also starting at Shepherd and ending in Downtown: the Heights Bike Trail. Its west terminus at Shepherd is less than a mile away from the south terminus of the West White Oak Bayou Trail, which begins at the intersection of T.C. Jester and 11th St and continues to Antoine, north of Little York, if I'm to believe Google Maps. On my ride, I exited three miles sooner, at 43rd St, which has a continuous stretch of bike lane or wide shoulder westward out of the city, all the way to Bear Creek Park, which abuts my favorite trail, the Cullen Park Trail. I had the pleasure of riding through Addicks Reservoir and the Cullen Park Trail after midnight later that night, and it was spooky dark, with deer and armadillos snapping twigs and rustling fallen leaves to scramble away into the safety of the thick brush a few feet from the pavement. But I forgot to mention about the West White Oak Bayou Trail: Some of the underpasses are currently under construction, and I had to do some awkward bike-carrying across the I-610 access roads and an unfinished median to complete my ride. But soon the trail will provide a continuous, uninterrupted ride.

But I'm still too far ahead of myself. Earlier that day I discovered that the Downtown library branch is cerrado en Domingo. (Seriously, the sign on the door was in Spanish only.) So to Hermann Park I went. There's no dedicated trail that connects Downtown to Hermann Park; I used the bike route signs to stay on low-traffic roads. A Monday–Friday commuter might opt for the light rail to traverse the same route.

At Hermann Park, partially circling around it on the south and east sides, is Brays Bayou Trail. It's about twelve miles long, though I rode it for only one. It connects the University of Houston with Braeswood near the US-59, with plans to extend the trail at that western terminus along Keegans Bayou to Kirkwood. That's only a mile or so from the city limits of Sugar Land and two more from the elementary school I went to for grades one through three.

The newly finished and marvelous Bill Coats Bridge over Brays Bayou.

And of course there's the concatenated super-trails of Terry Hershey Park and George Bush Park. Together they connect the Sam Houston Tollway to Barker Cypress with a dedicated trail that allows for uninterrupted riding from one end to the other. I used it on five out of my six trips into or out town over the two-and-a-half weeks I was in the city.

A blog post is only so long, yet there are many more trails. This .gov page describes many of them, though not all. And there are many more without names, spanning short distances of a mile or so, that follow unnamed drainage ditches in the newer residential developments beyond the city limits. Those might be token bike developments, but they're more than I had growing up in a neighborhood built in 1980's.

Phoenix still holds an advantage over Houston in terms of bike friendliness, though with Phoenix's tepid pace of development these days, Houston is catching up fast. Nevertheless, I like to see a city—even one I don't live in—putting otherwise worthless land along waterways to good use for bicycling. Houston's chief challenge for bringing itself up to a 21st-century mix of transportation, like most other car-centric cities, is finding the will to put some otherwise worthwhile land to that same end to stitch together its patchwork of trails.

Houston trip: traffic signs

Best sign

Not only does the sign shown to the right prohibit motor vehicles, which is a happy result in itself, but (1) it warns of snakes and alligators and (2) does so as a legally required caution. As I note later in this post, the difference between a traffic law and a traffic warning is nil in the Lone Star State.

Worst sign

During my first day in town, on my way from the train station to my parents' house, I discovered that Memorial Dr is closed to cyclists for some portions between the I-610 and the Beltway.

The sign didn't offer legal guidance as to whether it was OK to ride my bike on the sidewalk, which is illegal in Arizona but of unclear status in Texas. Shame on me for not knowing all the laws in a state I'm visiting for a couple weeks.

Meta Honorable Mention

There's no sign as satisfying as a sign that warns about other signs. Second-most satisfying is a sign that regulates other signs, as shown in the photo to the right. Apparently, in Texas, all yellow warning signs must be treated as law. Maybe the state just didn't feel like painting all those yellow cautionary signs to white? Maybe the state ran out of white paint?

I remember learning how to drive as a teenager in Texas and feeling so relieved I didn't have to obey those pesky cautionary speed limit signs before sharp turns. But it turns out those are every bit as law as the regular white speed limit signs—as are other cautionary signs, such as BE PREPARED TO STOP and DRAW BRIDGE. Police officer: May I see your license, registration, and drawing of a bridge?

Where's Craig?

I have a map of the United States… Actual size. It says, Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile. I spent last summer folding it. I hardly ever unroll it. People ask me where I live, and I say, E6.

—Steven Wright

I'm in Houston, TX, at my parents' house. I got here via train, which I got on at Maricopa, AZ and rode for twenty-nine hours till Houston. There, at the Amtrak station in downtown Houston, I unpacked my bike, loaded my panniers, and rode westward for fifty miles to where my parents live, which these days is no longer in the boonies due to the ever expanding sprawl of the Houston Metro Area.

Here I am at my apartment ready to leave for south Chandler. This is the first trip I've taken that uses all four panniers simultaneously, even though I've owned the bags for three years. Even with two weeks of stuff, I had a lot of spare capacity.

This is the second bike-and-train trip I've taken from Arizona to Texas, the first one having taken place four years ago during Christmastime after I learned about the thrift and ease with which bicycle transportation integrates with train travel. That trip began with me leaving my studio apartment on a cool December afternoon, shortly before sunset. I rode my heavily loaded LeMond bicycle south out of Phoenix, and by the time I arrived at the train station in the city of Maricopa, nearly forty miles away, the cool afternoon had become a cold night. Nevertheless, even after all that biking I was still two hours early. The train was scheduled to arrive at about midnight, and the station didn't open until two hours prior. At first I waited out in front of the station in the frigid desert air, occasionally donning more shirts—cotton over polypro over wool over polypro—until I ran out of extra shirts and traded freezing outside for loitering inside the convenience store across the highway.

Amtrak has since changed their schedule. Nowadays the eastbound train leaves Maricopa at 6:40 in the morning. The new time eliminates the problem of waiting around in the cold like last time, but it presents the new problem of getting to the station early enough. I knew I would need an hour to check-in and fit my bike into its box. Also, I live an extra half-hour farther away from Maricopa and thus need more time to get there. I briefly considered the scenario of leaving my apartment at 1:00 in the morning for the longest and latest night-ride of my life. Next I considered leaving the day before and spending the night cocooned in a sleeping bag along the side of the highway somewhere between Phoenix and Maricopa. But I settled on the best possible option: staying at a friend's house in south Chandler and waking up in cozy comfort at 3:30. I even got fed quinoa and beef and Jack Daniels the night before, which is much better than being food for coyotes or other Sonoran carnivores.

The train ride was uneventful. I remember four years ago being sociable, talking to the other passengers and, well, having a lot of fun. This time I kept to myself: I read, I worked on Project Euler problems on my laptop, I sat in the lounge car and watched the scenery pass by, and I slept. When the train came to a stop in Houston, I was happy to get off and eager to begin my third and final bike ride of my trip to my parents' house.

Cheap wine

I'm a fan of cheap wine. I've had some tonight, in fact—a glass of the cheapest chianti sold at my neighborhood grocery store. At $6 for a 1.5 liter bottle, it's as cheap in unit cost as Three Buck Chuck. At double the size, the bottle will last Laura and me several weeks. It won't go bad during the time the bottle is open because the wine starts out that way. Every glass delivers on the thrifty promise of cheap table wine.

There's an XKCD comic on the subject of cheap wine. To me, that comic isn't funny so much as it's factual commentary about American life. A lot for what passes for culture and refined taste in these United States is little more than collective failure to resist corporate mass-marketing. This isn't blame; it's tough to tell the difference between what's a commercial and what isn't. Take something like the Food Network. Is there a single minute on that channel that isn't an ad for something? Consume enough of that kind of television, and you're sure to start believing that there's something deficient with your food and drink, that you're missing out on something better. Even if it were true, why would you want to believe it?

The best-tasting food I ever eat is whatever I happen to eat after a long bike ride. I'm talking about the length of ride that goes on for most of a morning, where I burn thousands of calories, and bonk, and that for the last hour or so I can barely navigate home through the thick haze of an incapacity to think of anything other than eating. Hunger is the best flavor-additive, and I'm sure a peanut butter sandwich that ends a huge calorie deficit is a finer food than anything anyone eats at a gourmet restaurant that same day. What a deal.

I drink cheap wine but ride expensive bicycles. That's a quirk of how I allocate my resources. Everyone's different and has unique preferences. But for those of us of limited means, a good universal strategy is to figure out what's important to us and to not waste our life trying to obtain more than that. And to not let others convince us of what's important.

The ultimatum game

Here's more following from Priceless, the book I'm reading by William Poundstone.

*

An oft-repeated experiment showing that rational self-interest can be a poor predictor of human behavior is the ultimatum game. In this game, there are two players. The first player is given some money and must split it between himself and the other player. The second player then decides either to accept the first player's offer, in which case both players keep their allotted portion, or else the second player rejects the deal and both players get nothing.

For example, suppose the purse to be split is $10. The first player decides to keep $7 for himself and offer $3 to the second player. If the second player accepts the deal then the first player gets $7 and the second player gets $3. Else, if the second player rejects the deal, then both players get $0.

If both players are rationally self-interested—that is, if each player wants to obtain as much money as possible—then the first player will keep most of the purse for himself, and the second player will accept any nonzero offer. So an example of a rational split of a $10 purse might be, say, $9 for the first player and $1 for the second player. And both players would feel happy with the result, for each player got something out of the deal. But this isn't what usually happens when real people play the game. What often happens is the first player makes an even or near-even split—e.g., $5 to each player—or else the first player makes a heavily uneven split—e.g., $9 to the first player and $1 to the second—and the second player rejects the deal, turning away free money.

These results have held up across a multitude of variations of the game, including one variant where the two players never meet each other and remain anonymous and another variant where the players' roles as either first or second player are deservingly decided through a skillful challenge, such as answering a trivia question. Even so, players tend to turn down free money. What's going on?

One theory is that the ultimatum game as played in the laboratory is skewed by small purses, where small monetary amounts collide with players' sense of fairness. As a first player, even if you could get away with a $7/$3 split, you might feel guilty for doing so and would instead offer an even split. Or as a second player, you might find that $3 isn't worth the feeling that you were taken advantage of, so you might reject it. But what if you played with a $100 million purse? Would you, as the second player, reject a measly 1% offer of $1 million for pride? Unfortunately, no grants for playing with such large sums have been made available to psychologists to study the problem.

However, according to the Wikipedia article for the ultimatum game, the game has been played in Indonesia with a purse size equivalent to two months' average income for the country—that would be analogous to $7,000 in the USA—and the results were similar to what goes on with small sums. Many of the offers were even splits or near-even splits, and of the heavily uneven offers, many were rejected by the second player, despite that player having turned down several weeks' worth of income to do so. If the ultimatum game is skewed by a sense of fairness then fairness is worth more than just a few dollars.

Special announcement

I asked Laura if she will marry me, and she said:

Yes.

Like a new bike

The summer before I left for my first year in college, my parents bought me a new bike. It was the first bike I ever got from a bike shop, and it may have been the cheapest one in the store: a $300 GT hybrid made of the softest steel money can buy. I know the steel was soft because sometime during my sophomore year I broke the fork. Strange thing. I don't remember how or when I broke it; one day I got on my bike and it rode funny, so I stopped, got off, and looked at it closely and saw that the gentle curve of the fork was no longer gentle.

I loved that bike. I rode all over San Antonio my first year in school—downtown, midtown, uptown, the missions, and lots of trips to stores all over. I still think of that year of casual city riding—sans helmet, sans bike pump, sans stiff-soled bike shoes, cotton everything—to gain perspective on what a namby-pamby cyclist I am these days, with all my special gear and special clothing. And the helmet thing. I got my first bike helmet when I bought my first road bike—a LeMond Tourmalet—presumably because you need to wear a helmet to ride a real bike. A few years prior, during freshman year, I came within inches of leaving my brains spilled all over a sidewalk along W Sunset Rd when, cruising high speed down a small hill, I jumped the curb to avoid a car that had pulled out from a driveway, directly in front of me—this was before I broke the fork—narrowly missing a telephone pole that was smack dab in the middle of the sidewalk. That collision with either the car or telephone pole would have been a big mess, but no near-miss was going to make me wear a helmet back then.

Anyway, I still remember what my dad told me soon after we came home from the bike shop with that GT hybrid bicycle: A bicycle never rides as well as when it's new. I nodded in agreement at the time, for my shiny new bike rode a lot better than any of the old, rusty bikes in our garage. And for years afterward I continued to nod agreement, first as the condition of my GT steadily worsened, then later as my LeMond road bike suffered too from my negligent ownership. When I bought that road bike, I also bought my first pair of bike shoes, my first pair of bike shorts, my first on-the-road bike pump (a Zefal frame pump), and my first helmet, so I was equipped to deal with some on-the-road kinds of problems—namely sore feet, chafing, flat tires, and injurious impacts to the head. But I lived for two years in San Antonio and four years in Houston before I once oiled the chain or lubed anything else on that bike, and I never replaced the tires or did any other maintenance. Actually, that last sentence is a lie: I once oiled the chain in 2005 or 2006 with WD-40, which is worse than never oiling the chain.

But I have a point here. And that's that I no longer nod in agreement to my dad's wisdom about new bikes riding best. An old bike will ride as well as a new bike so long as you maintain it correctly. Carefully maintained (and crashes avoided), a bike will give you that new-out-the-store feel for many years. I would write more about this, but today I finished some maintenance on my bike and I'm eager to get to bed early to be able to wake up in time for the Friday Morning Ride tomorrow.

Being a “free man” costs a lot of money

Never before in the United States, we're told, has having a college education been more important for finding a good-paying job. Yet on the other hand, many Americans are critical of the traditional four-year college plan, questioning whether college is worthwhile—if maybe too many kids are going to college these days. Together, these two points of conventional wisdom suggest that many people nowadays think it isn't worthwhile to have a job that pays well.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I am college educated and have done well from it. I went to a traditional school for a traditional four years using a traditional all-expenses-paid-by-my-parents financial plan. I got a degree in computer science, and since then the job market has been, on average, good for people who aren't afraid of computers. So I can't say that my life would have been easier and more materially profitable if I hadn't gone to college. Probably it would have been neither.

But college for me ended eleven years ago. I recently looked at estimated expenses for my alma mater and discovered they've nearly doubled since I graduated in 2001. It's the same story as everywhere else: college costs are steadily growing faster than inflation, and middle-class people are eating the costs. So when is college no longer worth it?

Though this is a subjective question, there's an important objectivity to it; a college education may be assigned a monetary value just as any annuity may be. Suppose a degree allows you to earn $X more per year than you would earn without it. Further suppose your degree costs $Y in direct expenses, plus the opportunity cost of having missed $Z of income for four years while you're busying going to frat parties and playing intramural sports. How much money is that degree worth? For a sufficiently small value of $X combined with sufficiently large values of $Y and $Z, a college degree is worth a negative amount. That is, it pays back less than what it costs to obtain.

All exponential trends fail eventually, and rising college costs will prove no different. However, I wonder if maybe the biggest factor that will cause this trend to fail will be college becoming a (perceived) negative-returning investment for too many people. That is, many people will stop trying to get into college, satisfied instead to take lower-paying jobs indefinitely or else to scrap a good income the old-fashioned way, by learning a trade and running a business doing it. Not that either of these alternatives leads to a cushier life than what follows from muddling through tests and writing clutter-filled papers for four years at an esteemed university, but the universe can be an uncaring place when it comes to one's personal problems.

I pity parents of children today and the education decisions they face. In the next few decades, many families and their would-be college-bound kids will opt out of taking on a lot of debt, instead forgoing college and a better chance of working a higher-paying job in order to come out ahead by earning less. But lost somewhere amidst the dollar figures and stigma of class status of this decision is the subjective, intrinsic value of a good education and the habit of thinking critically about the world.

“Quiz time!” Recap

Last week's Quiz time! post about the Allais Paradox generated the most diverse and on-topic set of reader comments for a JEC post in awhile, so today I'm going to recap.

What I neglected to mention in last week's post is that a lot of people answer A-B-A or A-B-B rather than one of the two rational sets of answers, A-A-A or B-B-B. One explanation for this phenomenon is a psychological effect called the certainty effect.

The certainty effect happens when a person assigns a premium to a certain outcome for the sake of certainty. For example, imagine you have a 100% chance of winning $1 million. Now imagine your chance of winning decreases to 90%. How much worse do you feel at 90% than you did at 100%? Now further imagine your chance of winning decreases to 80%. How much worse do you feel at 80% than you did at 90%. Many people feel the change from 100% to 90% more acutely than they do the change from 90% to 80%, and they're willing to pay a premium for it. A common rationale is that the 100% chance is a sure thing while both 90% and 80% aren't sure things. Nevertheless, the decrease in probabilistic value from 100% to 90% is the same as the decrease from 90% to 80%. Objectively, if we were playing only the odds, we wouldn't favor certainty for the sake of certainty.

But should we play only the odds? There's more than one way to look at it.

Firstly, there's subjectivity in any chancy game. As last week's first question showed, some people would prefer to keep a sure $1 million, while some people would prefer to give up one of those percentage points to gain 10 percentage points of chance of doubling their winnings. But if you were strictly playing the numbers, then you would always pick the 10-for-1.

\[ (89\% \times \$1 \text{ million}) + (10\% \times \$2 \text{ million}) = \$1.09 \text{ million} \]

But to many people, the extra $0.09 million isn't worth risking $1 million—no matter what the odds are. They value winning differently than, say, a billionaire who likes thrills.

However, though we expect different people to value risk differently, we might expect everyone to be consistent with respect to their own risk valuations. But often this isn't the case, and that's what the three questions in last week's post together show when people say they would tolerate a 1 percentage point smaller chance of winning only when that decrease is from 11% to 10% and not when it's from 100% to 99%. That's akin to saying that sometimes the extra $0.09 million is worth risking $1 million for, but sometimes it isn't.

Is there a good reason to waver on that choice?

Presidential Election 2012

In fifteen days We the People of the United States will vote to elect our National Hood Ornament for the next four years. Today's blog post constitutes, I hope, my only direct political commentary about that upcoming election.

I don't care who you vote for. I don't care whether you vote based on an informed decision or an uninformed decision. But I would like to convince you to vote for the candidate whom you would most like to see win, regardless of whether that candidate hails from one of the two major political parties or else is a third-party candidate who has no chance of winning.

The core of my argument is that you have no good reason not to vote for a third-party candidate, should you feel inclined to do so. Don't be afraid of throwing your vote away. By voting for either Mr. Romney or President Obama, you're also throwing your vote away, so you may as well vote for the candidate you think best represents you.

As to why you'll be throwing your vote away regardless of whom you vote for, that's revealed by a moment's consideration: your vote will not be a tie-breaking vote. You won't tip a majority of the country's electoral college one way or the other. You won't be as Kevin Costner was in the movie Swing Vote. Your vote won't matter, at least not in the sense that voting for one candidate is worthwhile and voting for another candidate is a waste. These are probabilistic facts made certain if you reside in a non-swing state, as most Just Enough Craig readers do.

So vote for whom you like. And keep in mind that though We the People don't choose which two political parties sit atop the ballot and receive ample free coverage in the news, we do influence which issues the two major parties talk about and which they ignore and do nothing about. Despite all the bitter disagreement between the Republicans and the Democrats, those parties agree more than they disagree, and every vote that is thrown away on a third party gives more incentive to both the Republicans and Democrats to do something about those ignored issues in order to capture a third party's votes.

It's an election of percentage points. Don't be a captive constituent.

Quiz time!

Quiz time! Don't worry, there are no wrong answers. But please think about and answer each question in turn, before moving on to the next question.

Question #1: Which of the following would you prefer to have?

(A) A 100% chance of winning $1 million

— or —

(B) An 89% chance of winning $1 million, a 10% chance of winning $2 million, and a 1% chance of winning nothing?

Question #2: Which of the following would you prefer to have?

(A) An 11% chance of winning $1 million and an 89% chance of winning nothing

— or —

(B) A 10% chance of winning $2 million and a 90% chance of winning nothing?

Question #3: For this question, imagine there's a box in front of you. You have no idea what's in the box: It could be something good, such as a billion dollars; or it could be something bad, such as a poisonous spider; or it could be something neutral, such as a used pencil. With that in mind, which of the following would you prefer to have?

(A) An 89% chance of winning whatever is in the box and an 11% chance of winning $1 million

— or —

(B) An 89% chance of winning whatever is in the box, a 10% chance of winning $2 million, and a 1% chance of winning nothing?

---

If by now you suspect these are trick questions, you're right. While there's no wrong way to answer the questions, all the questions taken together have only two rational sets of answers: all A or all B. Any mixing of A and B answers leads to a contradiction. Here's why.

The first question is entirely based on preference: would you rather have the sure thing or take a small risk to go for a bigger gain? There's no correct answer.

Question #2 phrases the same question differently by removing an 89% chance of winning $1 million from each choice. However, for many people who answerA to Question #1, the same choice seems too prudent for Question #2. Why increase your chance of winning by a mere percentage point at the cost of giving up half the winnings?

Question #3 shows the similarity between the two previous questions by replacing the missing 89% chance with a mystery box. The box shouldn't affect your answer because both the A and B answers give an identical 89% chance to win the box. So you should decide which answer to pick based on the remaining odds: an 11% chance to win $1 million versus a 10% chance to win $2 million—the same choice in Question #2.

However, the contradiction is that the same reasoning works for Question #1, too. To see that, imagine that Question #1 were phrased as follows:

Question #1-B: Which of the following would you prefer to have?

(A) An 89% chance of winning 1$ million and an 11% chance of winning $1 million

— or —

(B) An 89% chance of winning $1 million, a 10% chance of winning $2 million, and a 1% chance of winning nothing?

Question #1-B is the same as Question #1, and it's also the same as Question #3 but with the mystery box replaced with $1 million. Therefore, based on the similarity we already established between Question #2 and Question #3, all three questions are asking the same thing with the one difference of what's being offered at an 89% chance: $1 million, nothing, or a mystery box. And the 89% chance shouldn't affect your choice in any of your answers, so therefore you should choose the same answer for all three questions.

If you live on Planet Rational.

These questions make up what's called the Allais Paradox. I've lifted it from another William Poundstone book I've started reading—this one called Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It).

Stag hunt, deadlock, & the sickle cell anemia–malaria game

In last week's post, inspired by William Poundstone's book Prisoner's Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb, I owned up to my years-long mistake of calling social dilemmas in general prisoner's dilemmas, and I described a distinctly different social dilemma called chicken. Today I'll describe two more dilemmas from the book.

Stag hunt

The stag hunt is like prisoner's dilemma but with mutual cooperation given the greater good. Here's the payoff table. (Again, like in last week's post, lower numbers are better.)

	Cooperate	Defect
Cooperate	1, 1	4, 2
Defect	2, 4	3, 3

Because in the stag hunt everyone is best off cooperating, there should in theory be no dilemma: the rational choice is to always cooperate. But that only happens on the make-believe planet inhabited in the minds of renown economists, the place where everyone is rational. In the real world the situation is more interesting because cooperating with an irrational player who defects causes you to end up with the worst possible result: a low score of 4. Thus, there's a preventative incentive to defect—just in case your opponent is thinking the same thing.

This makes stag hunt more of a tragedy than prisoner's dilemma and chicken. Whereas in those two games the players are victims of circumstance, the problems born of a stag hunt are self-made owing to a lack of trust.

A good real-world fit for a stag hunt meltdown is nearly any kind of financial bubble, whereby reason is subordinate to greed and fear. I heard more than one person in Phoenix saying after the housing bubble popped that they felt they had to buy a house during the run-up in prices because they feared otherwise becoming forever priced out of the market. This thinking follows the defect before they do destruction of a stag hunt.

Deadlock

The weakest of the four social dilemmas is deadlock.

	Cooperate	Defect
Cooperate	3, 3	4, 1
Defect	1, 4	2, 2

When I read Poundstone's book and first saw the payoff table for deadlock, I tried without success to imagine what this scenario describes. I should have taken a hint from the book's title: Deadlock describes nearly any attempt by two countries to agree to reduce their nuclear arsenal. Cooperation is equivalent to going along with the agreement, and defection is equivalent to breaking the agreement—presumably in secret. In such a scenario, the best outcome for any country is to secretly keep their arsenal while the other country dismantles theirs. Second best is mutual defection, in which case that country at least maintains their nuclear privilege over the have-not countries. The worst outcome is going along with the agreement when the other country defects, in which case there's still a threat of nuclear annihilation and now the country with a dismantled arsenal has no counter-threat.

As its name implies, deadlock leads rational players to always defect, just as in prisoner's dilemma.

Sickle cell anemia and resistance to malaria

So of the four games I described—prisoner's dilemma, chicken, stag hunt, and deadlock—which best describes the conflict inherent in the genetic mutation that leads to increased resistance to malaria but also to having sickle cell anemia? As you may remember, the conflict is symmetrical: any parent having (a single copy of) the mutation benefits from increased malarial resistance, but children of two parents both possessing the mutation may end up with sickle cell anemia.

Imagine the game as being played between the parents, with each parent choosing either to cooperate by not having the mutation or to defect by having the mutation. Here's the payoff table.

	Cooperate	Defect
Cooperate	3, 3	2, 1
Defect	1, 2	4, 4

As I've assigned the values, the best outcome for an individual is to have the mutation but one's mate not to have the mutation. But the second best outcome is switch roles so that one's children still have a chance at getting one copy of the mutation. Mutual cooperation is third best, and mutual defection, which leads to the possibility of children with sickle cell anemia, is worst.

So it turns out the sickle cell anemia–malaria game doesn't match any of the four social dilemmas I described. Indeed, I'm not sure whether it's strictly a social dilemma at all. In an iterated version, the best course would be to take turns cooperating and defecting while the other player does the opposite. In a one-shot version—which is how the game must be played in real life—the dilemma is over choosing who gets to defect, with the loser still getting the second best outcome. Because a sole defection beats mutual cooperation, this game may lack an ingredient necessary for it to be considered social.

Prisoner's dilemma & chicken

I recently finished reading William Poundstone's book, Prisoner's Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb, so I've got game theory on my mind, and that's what today's post is about. My apologies to reader Jill, who'll stop reading about…now.

Prisoner's dilemma

For years I've called any social dilemma where there exists a conflict between the good of the group and the good of the individual a prisoner's dilemma, but this is wrong. In the language of game theory, a prisoner's dilemma is a specific kind of social dilemma, and the other social dilemmas have their own names.

What all social dilemmas have in common is two or more people deciding, independently of others, whether to cooperate or to defect. In each dilemma, defection brings about a reward for the defector and punishment for the cooperator, though mutual defection is an undesired outcome. Prisoner's dilemma is the best known of the dilemmas because it's the most brutal: defecting is always the better choice for the individual despite mutual defection being undesirable. As a decision table, it looks like this.

	Cooperate	Defect
Cooperate	3, 3	1, 4
Defect	4, 1	2, 2

The way to read the table goes as follows: in each cell, the first number represents the payoff for the player whose choice determines which row to use, and the second number represents the payoff for the player whose choice determines the column. Each payoff is ranked from 1 to 4, with higher numbers being better for that person. For example, if the row player (Player 1) defects, and the column player (Player 2) cooperates, then we follow the defect row and the cooperate column and see that Player 1 is rewarded with a 4 (top score) and Player 2 is punished with a 1 (lowest score).

As you can see from the table, a prisoner's dilemma player is always better off defecting than cooperating even though mutual cooperation beats mutual defection. To see this, imagine you're Player 1, so you must select a row. Player 2 has already made their choice, though you don't know what that choice is. Should Player 2 have decided to defect, then you ought to select the best cell for you in the second column. Your choices are to cooperate and score a 1 or to defect and score a 2, so you're better off defecting. Whereas, should Player 2 have decided to cooperate then you should select the best cell in the first column. Your choices then would be to cooperate and score a 3 or to defect and score a 4, so again you would be better off defecting. The dilemma here is that Player 2 will likely arrive at the same conclusion and thus defect, too. Therefore, in a prisoner's dilemma two rational players will both defect, bringing about a score of 2 for both players. Whereas, two irrational players might have both cooperated and each scored a 3.

That's prisoner's dilemma. What are the other dilemmas?

Chicken

Another dilemma is called chicken. Here's its decision table.

	Cooperate	Defect
Cooperate	3, 3	2, 4
Defect	4, 2	1, 1

Chicken gets its name from any number of popular uses, one being a game where two people each drive a car straight at the other to see who swerves out of the way first. The winner is the macho player who doesn't swerve (score 4) and the loser is the coward who does swerve (score 2), though the catastrophic event here is if both players win, in which case both macho drivers are dead on impact (score 1).

Chicken is a useful scenario for describing a situation whereby everyone involved needs someone to commit to a sacrificial action, but everyone has incentive not to be that person. One example is stopping a well armed and suicidal hijacker; someone needs to stop the hijacker for the good of the group, but individually the best course of action is for someone else to be the hero. In some ways this is worse than the prisoner's dilemma because with prisoner's dilemma there's a fixed rational choice—always defect—but in chicken there's no fixed rational choice: sometimes a player is better off defecting and sometimes they're better off cooperating. Indeed, in a version of chicken where your behavior can affect the other player's decision (though this is not allowed in the strict game-theory version of the game, where both players must make their decision independently of the other), one rational course of action is to convince the other player of your own irrationality, thereby making the other player more fearful of the looming catastrophe of mutual defection and thus more likely to cooperate. But of course the other player can try the same trick on you! Just as with prisoner's dilemma, chicken is a dilemma with no clear, ideal solution.

Next post, I'll describe two more social dilemmas from the book.

Cottonwood – Prescott Valley – Cottonwood

The shortest path between Cottonwood to Prescott Valley is the zig-zaggy AZ 89A, which passes through the town of Jerome before going up and over Mingus Mountain. Thursday last week I drove Laura's car to Cottonwood and biked the route as an out-and-back.

Those of you who don't live in Arizona likely have never heard of Jerome (jah-ROAM). It was established in the late 1800's as a mining town, and like many mining towns of that era, Jerome went through a cycle of extreme boom and a bust. According to its Wikipedia article, the town's population peaked at over 15,000 people in 1929 and plummeted to about 50 by the late 50's. Since that low, Jerome, like most other of the fortunate former mining towns, has reestablished its economy by eking out an existence based on tourism.

What makes Jerome stand out is its topography: it's built on the side of a mountain. As you pass along the switchbacks of its main street, past the numerous restaurants and art galleries, nearly every view gives a panorama of the Verde Valley over 1000ft below. My point-and-shoot camera can't capture the beauty and gradients of the town, so I settled for this photo of the street overlooked by the J on the mountainside above.

But my trip wasn't a tourist trip. It was a bike ride with an aim to do some climbing. The pass over Mingus Mountain is about 7000ft above sea level, Cottonwood is about 3400ft, and Prescott Valley is about 5000ft. I opted to start in Cottonwood (as opposed to Prescott Valley) so that I would do the big climb first and the big descent last. This strategy worked out well because by the time I made my second pass up and over the mountain, it was during the heat of the day, and I was looking forward to a cool, breezy descent down the mountain.

A frequently asked question about a bike ride like this is: How fast did you go down the mountain? In truth I don't know because my nifty high-tech Garmin GPS had a dead battery before I left the parking lot to start my ride. But for a ride like this—which took five hours, including a stop at a Subway to eat an egg-and-cheese omelet sandwich—nearly all the time is spent slowly cranking up the mountain and I enjoyed only a few minutes that seemed faster than they were on the way down. It's like eating a full plate of Brussels sprouts and then having one small bite of a cookie. But oh is that cookie a lot of fun.

Capita

Pop quiz. Suppose you start with a human population of size two, and the population grows at an annual rate of 2%—that's the rate at which a population will double in 35 years. At that rate, it takes 1,128 years for the population to reach 10,000,000,000, which hypothetically we'll call the carrying capacity of Earth. Now suppose that after filling Earth, humans discover a nearby Earth-like planet that also supports 10,000,000,000 people, and further suppose humans innovate the means to transport themselves and their stuff to that planet cheaply, safely, and instantly. How long would it take to fill the new planet to its carrying capacity?

The answer is—duh!—35 years. Filling a second planet is merely another way to double the existing population, and 35 years is the doubling rate. And after filling that new planet, it would take 35 years to fill two more planets, then another 35 years to fill four more planets, another 35 years to fill eight more planets, and so on.

There's a physicist named Albert Bartlett who lectures on overpopulation, and he says inability to understand exponents is humankind's greatest shortcoming. Maybe he overstates his case, but there's a lot of failure going on in people's understanding of what per annum growth is all about, as evidenced by all the talk one hears these days of sustainable growth. There is not and can never be any such thing as sustainable growth, not for as long as the laws of physics resemble anything like what we understand them to be. As an upper-bound example, at our species' present size and with a 2% growth rate, it would take a mere 5,000 years for humans to convert all mass in the observable universe to human flesh. That's about as long as humans have been living in cities.

I pride myself on being able to understand a diversity of arguments, irrespective of whether I agree with their premises, but the argument that humanity has not, is not, and will not continue to be plagued by overpopulation problems is one I don't understand. It's not that I disagree with the premises. Instead, it's that any case that's to be made that overpopulation is not a continual threat for a successful species, including ours, has neither math nor biology on its side.

From the mathematical perspective, the problem is that exponential growth is fast—even if the annual rate is low, such as 2%. In our finite observable universe, all exponential growth must fail eventually.

But some people think this isn't a problem for us modern humans. Isn't our species' rate of growth slowing down? Aren't demographers predicting our species' population to stabilize sometime in the 21st century? Aren't the Malthusian doom-sayers going to be proved wrong?

This idea—that humankind will come to gracefully control its population—isn't the escape from overpopulation it may at first appear to be. And this has to do with biology.

The problem isn't merely that humans, on average, want to reproduce a lot. The scenario in which we're gracefully controlling our numbers hypothetically has that problem solved—presumably through the use of mild voluntary contraceptives, such as television. No, the problem begins specifically after we've stopped growing as a species: Natural selection requires a lot of graceless population control in order to work. Without some forceful culling from it, a gene pool isn't selected for anything, and given enough time without the negative feedbacks of selective pressures to keep it fit for its environment—whatever that may be—a genome will degrade. In short, without a drive to keep growing, a species will eventually find itself ousted by one or more other species. As living things, the point is not that we grow but that we try to grow.

I don't know what will happen in the 21st century or any other future century, but I do know that over the long term there'll be no such thing as graceful population control. Nor will there be sustainable growth. At best there'll be bursts of unsustainable growth followed by longer periods of graceless population control, and the latter will take the same regrettable forms as it has for past generations.

Why are we so afraid of this?

Underwhelmed by conscious choice

The genetic mutation that causes sickle-cell anemia also increases one's resistance to malaria. But whereas sickle-cell anemia is a recessive trait—meaning that to get the disease you must have two copies of the mutation—increased resistance to malaria is a dominant trait that comes from having only one copy of the mutation. Therefore, the optimal strategy for individuals living in an area with a high incidence of malaria is to have a single copy of the sickle-cell mutation, thus gaining resistance to malaria without the early death brought on by sickle-cell anemia.

The problem with this strategy is that if too many individuals pursue it then individuals suffer as a group. People who have a single copy of the sickle-cell mutation are carriers of the disease, and an offspring of two mated carriers has a one-in-four chance of having the disease and a one-in-two chance of being a carrier. An offspring of a carrier mated with a non-carrier has no chance of having the disease. So even though it's better for an individual to be a carrier and benefit from increased resistance to malaria, it's better for the group to have a mix of carriers and non-carriers, thus reducing the incidence of sickle-cell anemia. As with prisoner's dilemma, there's a best solution for the group that's in conflict with the best solution for the individual. How many other prisoner's dilemmas are lurking in our DNA?

For most of our species' history, we have benefited from mindless Nature solving our genetic prisoner's dilemmas for us. When the optimal solution is a mixed strategy, such as in tropical zones with regards to the sickle-cell mutation, Nature does an OK job of selecting for the mixed strategy. Without a mind to overthink the problem, or to pursue fashions or Faustian gains, Nature finds a balance between two diseases.

So when I hear that designer babies are on the way, Gattaca-style, and that some couples are already choosing the sex of their babies, I'm not struck with overwhelming confidence that this is a smart move over the long run—not until we're consciously able to deal with prisoner's dilemmas as well as mindless entities do.

I quit

As many of you know, I quit my job. I don't have another job lined up, so today is my first weekday of indefinite unemployment since November of last year.

The most common question I've heard this past week about my quitting is: Why did I do it? What I've done isn't common. While there are many reasons to leave a job—sometimes workers find another job, sometimes they're laid off or fired, sometimes they retire—quitting to go be by oneself and have no income is unusual. So it makes sense that people are curious about my motives.

Nevertheless, I like to flip the question: Why not quit? I believe unemployment is the ideal state for most people; we work nine-to-five jobs as a compromise with a world that, for most people, doesn't let you live well without the compensation a job provides. Foremost, people work for the money, though a surging second-place motive for full-time employment is insurance benefits. There are also some intangible benefits to working a job—or at least there should be—such as gaining a sense of accomplishment or spending the day socially, in the presence of other workers. Some people might assert that their job is important to society and few if anyone can replace them and do their job as well. I suppose.

But if unemployment is the ideal state—and let me clarify that I'm talking about unemployment as any alternative to working full-time to make profits for someone else, and yes I'm aware this is strange definition of the term—then presumably people who're employed are missing some critical ingredient for living life unemployed. As to what those ingredients usually are, we need only traverse the list of motives from the previous paragraph. For most people the primary missing ingredient is money. For many others it's stable health care coverage. And for some others it's a lack of a sense of accomplishment in their life away from the office, or a feeling of loneliness.

So why did I quit? Now the answer should be a little clearer: For the time being, my life is going well.

Therefore no wherefore

Today's post is a quick idea:

Whenever we're unsure about what will happen in the future, we don't really understand the past or present. Whatever information we lack that makes the future uncertain is the same kind of information we lack to make certain sense of the past or present. For example, if we don't know which way the stock market will move tomorrow because we lack some information about the market, then we also don't know why the stock market moved whichever way it did today because of that same lack of information.

Hindsight gives us the answer of what has happened, but it doesn't tell us why, no matter how compelling a concocted why may be. To understand why something has happened, you must've been able to predict it—else you're only guessing.

Auction sniping

Less than a minute left. It's up to $41. Laura sat at the table in our apartment, her eyes anxiously fixed on her laptop. $47. She crossed her fingers. A short gasp. Frantic typing. Bated breath. Then, with a smile and happy waving of hands: I won! It bumped to $50, but I won!

Great! That was your maximum bid.

No, I bumped my max to $53 a few minutes earlier—just in case.

Laura won the privilege of buying a pair of used running shoes.

Nearly everyone who has bought stuff off eBay knows the phenomena of last-minute bidding, a.k.a. auction sniping. An auction lasts for a week, and the first 6 days, 23 hours and 58 minutes bring about no activity beyond a few low-ball bids and maybe some questions for the seller. Then, in the two minutes before the auction closes, a swarm of would-be opportunists fish for a winning bid: The price spikes to somewhere around the market price for the item, and someone somewhere is rewarded for being irrational—though not so with my victorious Laura and her running shoes.

I'm not a fan of auction sniping—not on sites like eBay which include a proxy bidding service that automatically bids on your behalf up to a defined maximum amount. Proxy bidding is an efficient way to ensure you pay no more than what you value an item at. Either you're willing to pay up to X for something or you're not. Put in X as your maximum proxy-bid. Why bother with sniping?

But what if you really want to win?

You mean by changing your mind and paying more than X?

Well, yes.

Then change your mind now and proxy-bid more than X.

OK, I'm aware my argument leaks some air. The principal counterclaim of snipers is that their acts of sniping affect the auction by causing other bidders to bid, on average, less than they would otherwise. One idea here is that sniping reduces the chance of competitors falling into a sunk-loss fallacy whereby, upon seeing their maximum bid outbid, they increase their maximum bid to something more than they're otherwise willing to pay for. The dog fights hardest for the bone it has already tasted. I admit this is a concern. One way this problem could be solved is by changing the format to silent bidding: everyone makes a maximum bid and the winning price is the maximum bid. This system has the advantage of forcing people to think about value, not price. But it has the disadvantage of forcing people to think about value, not price.

Oh What a Weekend!

• You spent the whole weekend watching some of the food in your refrigerator grow mold and spores. It sure was fun.
• You spent the whole weekend watching the water in your refrigerator freeze.
• You spent the weekend baking oatmeal cookies.
• You spent the entire weekend watching Star Trek reruns.
• You rented some movies and ate artificially flavored buttered popcorn.
• You spent the weekend playing your stereo and patching the plaster your speakers cracked.
• You spent the weekend cleaning your microwave after you tried to dry your pet rat in it. You also need a new pet rat.
• You and some friends had a Hottub party this weekend.
• You played games on your computer all weekend.
• You watched CELEBRITY INCOME TAX EVASION on TV this weekend.
• You read all about the mating habits of the North American computer programmer in your encyclopedia.
• You read your dictionary all weekend. Boy, that was fun.
• You read your atlas and commited the population of 43 countries to memory. OH WOW!!!
• You went to the baseball game this weekend and ate hotdogs till you puked.
• You went to the theatre this weekend and saw the one MAN version of Cats.
• You had front row seats at a rock concert. The doctor said that the hearing loss shouldn't be permanent.
• You watched them change the mannequins at QT Clothing this weekend.
• You washed and waxed your marble this weekend right before it rained.
• You stayed home and did absolutely nothing this weekend.
• You spent the weekend hiking around Yosemite.
• You listened to the Talking Bear 256 times this weekend.
• You read the 'Wall Street Journal' this weekend.
• You thought about what you would do on your next turn.
• You spent the weekend in a hotel because they had to fumigate your apartment.
• You played in a ping pong tournament this weekend.
• You pitched horseshoes in your apartment all weekend. The people downstairs love you.
• You sat around and played solitaire all weekend.
• You went panning for gold this weekend, but all you got was wet.
• You spent the weekend in the laundromat washing your clothes. Now that was exciting.
• You took a friend out to a cheap restaurant this weekend.
• You went out and caught your own froglegs this weekend.
• You crawled around on your knees chasing snails this weekend.
• You spent your weekend thinking about work. Eccch.
• You spent your weekend trying to remove the mildew between the shower tiles.
• You spent the weekend listening to the newlyweds in the next apartment set up a new waterbed.
• This weekend, you won first prize in a beauty contest and collected $10. Whoops, wrong game.
• This weekend, you closed your curtains, locked your doors, turned off the lights, and ate presweetened morning breakfast cereal, with little marshmallows!
• You played stickball this weekend with the neighborhood kids and ended up wrenching your back and spraining your ankle.
• You read a romance novel, NURSE'S TURN TO CRY, in one sitting.
• You took a long hot bath this weekend and emerged looking like a California Raisin.
• You watched a torrid romance movie, LIBRARIAN'S DILEMMA, this weekend.
• One of your fillings came loose this weekend. It's a good thing you're handy with a soldering iron.
• You spent the weekend examining yourself under the fluorescent lights in the bathroom. Eccch!
• You spent the weekend wondering if black holes were lit with black lights.
• This weekend, you hung out at the mall, filled up on junk food, and made your mother ashamed of you.
• You went bowling with friends this weekend.
• You played two rounds of golf this weekend.
• This weekend, you had to bail your nephew out of jail.
• You had your marble repainted this weekend.
• You played in a volleyball tournament this weekend.
• You took a friend out to an expensive restaurant this weekend.
• You went to San Diego to play in the Over The Line Tournament.
• You went to Las Vegas in a $20,000 car and came back in a $200,000 Greyhound bus.
• You tried to drive to Hawaii to watch a surfing contest.
• You went scuba diving in La Jolla.
• You went deep sea fishing this weekend.
• You volunteered to take the local scouts to Disneyland.
• You drove the senior citizens' bus this weekend and they drove you - crazy.
• You helped several little old ladies cross the street to get to their aerobics class.
• You visited a sick friend in the hospital. REALLY!

You spent $15.

Note: Spelling and grammar mistakes in this post are attributed to an unknown North American computer programmer from 22 years ago.

Prove it

One phrase I'd like to see vanish from public and private discourses is proving a theory. Let's all agree there's no such thing as proving a theory. The phrase is as meaningless as erasing a pencil.

An example where proving a theory often comes up is in evolution vs creationism debates. One problem with evolution, we're sometimes told by creationists, is that it's only a theory or that it hasn't been proved. Of course it's only a theory, and of course it hasn't been proved. That's because there's no such thing as proving a theory.

Another, recent example where I've heard this phrase is that physicists proved the existence of the Higgs boson. First of all, the Higgs boson has only been possibly discovered; physicists remain busy analyzing the data collected last month at the Large Hadron Collider. But even if the data prove consistent with the theory of the Standard Model, the Standard Model won't have been proved, nor will the existence of the Higgs boson have been proved. That's because there's no such thing as proving a theory.

Theories can't be proved. At best they remain plausible and tentative explanations of what we observe in the universe around us. The most certain we ever get about a theory is when it ends up being wrong, such as with numerous obsolete or superseded theories, including theories such as spontaneous generation and Newtonian physics.

But if theories can't be proved, then what can be proved? The answer is: not much. The justice system may interest itself in proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but logic demands something far more stringent; logic requires proof beyond all doubt. So long as there's any possible way a statement mightn't be true, that statement hasn't been proved. And there are a lot of ways a statement mightn't be true. For everything having to do with the real world, there's the specter of Cartesian doubt, that nagging worry that everything we see and hear and otherwise sense is a hallucinatory deception. Unlikely, yes, but possible.

Someone with a better understanding of epistemology may correct me on this, but it seems to me the only statements that can be proved are abstract logical statements, such as math theorems. For example, we may prove the truth of the Pythagorean Theorem many different ways, including one way invented by a former President of the United States. That math can be proved and scientific theories cannot has to do with how math doesn't rely on sensory experience and is thus immune to Cartesian and other doubts.

Jobs, more jobs!

It's strange that it's during an economic downturn that people have a lot of free time and it's during the good times that people spend long hours doing what other people want them to do. Isn't this backwards?

Wanted: Profit-Minded Self-Starter

Scanning the job ads these days, I see that a lot of employers are looking for professionals who take initiative and who're profit-minded. I wonder what it would be like to work somewhere where I would be expected to take initiative about minding profits…

So here I am, at my new job. My initiative and profit-mindedness stir me to action. I search for the company's balance sheet to see what impact I can have on profits. But there I encounter a problem: I, a mere rank-and-file software developer, am not allowed access to the company's finances. I'm barred from seeing budgeting and other data needed for making profit-minded decisions. But because I'm resilient and capable of working around the rough edges of a problem—those were two other requirements for the job—I make do with what I can: I use my personal finances instead.

I study the transactions in my checking account, which is where my paychecks are direct deposited, and I gain my first profit-minded insight: I'm paid the same no matter what I accomplish at work. At first this seems like a setback because it means the only way I can raise my profits is by cutting expenses. And who wants to do that?

But I'm an outside the box thinker—another trait that landed me my current job—and I recognize that there's a smooth solution to this rough-edged problem. I can increase revenue, I say to myself, by getting a higher-paying job. So I set out, ever vigilant about minding profits, to find a higher-paying job.

Being as how I already looked for the highest-paying job I could get given the skills I currently possess—and the result was finding the job I currently have—it follows that I need to acquire more skills. I need to learn new languages, platforms, and tools. And it's well known that the best way to learn these things is by using them in a real project. But my current employer hired me to do a job I can do with the skills I already have. After all, they wouldn't have hired someone who needed time or training to learn on the job. Why waste resources on employees when they have no loyalty and will leave if they learn something more valuable? So that means I need to do my own work—stuff that's more likely to return a bigger profit. No problem.

So I begin padding my estimates for my assigned tasks and using the unused slack time to work on personal projects. I make websites, solve Project Euler problems, play with new operating systems, and pore over tech-news websites. Within a year I update my résumé with all the new things I know, and I go to job interviews ready to talk about everything I accomplished during the past year (at my current job). I'm also sure to point out my track record of taking initiative with profits and that I'm a proven fast learner who's capable of working without much supervision—and that I'll do as much for their company, too.

Tyranny of tyranny of the majority

Tyranny of the majority refers to any scenario in a democracy where a majority of citizens votes to oppress a minority. For example, if 80% of the people in a country vote to enslave the other 20%, that constitutes a tyranny of the majority. The outcome is a democracy with the brutality of an oppressive dictator.

Tyranny of the majority shows that it's insufficient to justify governance solely on the basis that what a majority wants it should get. Governance ought to require both a majority's will and moral justification for the act. But people will vote immorally on occasion. To protect against this, modern democracies have in place limits that minimize the possibility and impact of a tyranny of the majority. For example, the United States has a Bill of Rights as well as other constitutional amendments that guarantee personal liberties from the government. The Thirteenth Amendment prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude; along with our country's separation of powers, which (among other features) grants the courts the power to strike down unconstitutional legislation, it's unlikely for a majority of people to get away with enslaving the remaining minority.

Nevertheless, tyrannies of the majority happen every year. For example, many non-Arizonans decry tyranny of the majority against Arizona's constitutionally questionable enforcement against illegal immigration, just as non-Southerners decry tyranny of the majority when some Southern states force their public schools' science textbooks to give equal credit to evolution and creationism as scientific doctrine. Conservatives tyrannize reproductive rights, and liberals tyrannize fetuses. Democracy turns us into little tyrants who carry voter registration cards.

There are two ways to stop a tyranny of the majority. The first is for the majority to see the errors of its immoral ways and to stop oppressing the minority. This is great when it happens, but it's far from inevitable. Usually, tyrannical majorities keep on with their tyrannizing until they're forcibly stopped—often by a larger, encompassing majority. This is the second way to stop a tyranny of the majority, and it's called kicking the problem upstairs. It's what happens when, say, the federal government imposes uniform civil rights laws on all fifty states: smaller, individual majorities are swallowed into a larger, centralized majority—one that supports equal civil rights. The smaller, anti-civil rights majorities are diluted into powerlessness.

The United States has a long history of kicking problems upstairs to the federal level. It's a tactic underlying many progressive causes. Just as puritanism is the fear that someone, somewhere might be having a good time, progressives fear that someone, somewhere might be taken advantage of. The progressive fights for a good cause, and many of the benefits we enjoy today are due to progressives' victories, but as with most benefits there are costs. The act of forcibly ending a regional tyranny of the majority by kicking the problem upstairs brings about its own problems—often ones that don't manifest until later. Much later.

One problem is that tyrannies of the majority don't end merely because problems have been kicked all the way to the top. Tyrannies of the majority still happen at the federal level, owing to the same kinds of democratic pressures that cause them to form at regional and state levels. Only, once a problem has been kicked to the top, there's nowhere left to go—except possibly to war.

We ought to consider the act of kicking problems upstairs to be a nonrenewable resource. Like other nonrenewable resources, its use confers a benefit. But like other nonrenewable resources, its use is finite and produces waste. The benefit is that we resolve tyrannies of the majority affecting us now. The waste is that we're left with governance that's more centralized, and it's inevitable there'll be larger majorities tyrannizing larger minorities later. And because future people suffering those problems won't have an upstairs to kick their problems to, they'll have less means for resolution.

Because of this, we ought to be selective and prudent about what we kick upstairs. This means we ought to let people in other regions and states keep more autonomy for resolving their own conflicts.

Joke

Q: What do you call an economist with a prediction?

A: Wrong.

Space

The·Romans·conquered·their·world·with·only·the·interpunct
They·had·no·spaces
No·other·punctuation
Just·a·single·dot·to·separate·words

ThenaroundAD200theydroppedtheinterpunct
Allthewordsrantogether
Therewasnovisualindicationofwherewordsbeganorended

It wasn't until the dark ages that Western man invented the space

CI, PD, and the value of diversity

Today's post answers the question of how I came to be against the categorical imperative.

I never liked the categorical imperative—not since I first learned about it in an ethics class during my second year in college. But my current reason for rejecting the CI is new.

When I first learned about the CI, I thought it could be used to prove just about anything and was therefore a bad theory. For example, CI proponents often use the CI to claim that lying is universally bad based on some specific cases of lying being bad. But there are some specific cases where it's bad to tell the truth, so what's wrong with the claim that telling the truth is universally bad?

In hindsight I'm sure I missed something about the CI.

But nevertheless, a couple years ago I changed my mind in a way that made my previous doubts about the CI moot. What happened is I came to believe that humans are part of their ecosystem, not apart from it. This change-of-mind may not sound like much, but it has profound consequences.

One such consequence is the corollary that we live in a world full of trade-offs—that few ways of doing things are better in all regards. This is opposed to the world view of the rationalist, who believes that by thinking things through hard enough, one can eventually arrive at the best answer. The answer may be worldly, such as the secular ethicist who believes in the universality of the CI, or it may be otherworldly, such as the monotheist who believes in an unlimited god.

The former is Hofstadter's world of pure reason and superrationality, where prisoner's dilemma players have cause to believe their thought process ought to be shared by all other players and that therefore there is a correct answer to the game. But if humans are in an ecosystem then there's no basis for that belief. Behavior in an ecosystem satisfies niche, not law. And niches are finite, mutable, and diverse.

This is in direct contradiction to the CI, which is infinite, unchanging, and uniform. Thus, the CI has no place in an ecological world view—unless of course one niche is to accept the CI.

Now, many people would object to what I've written. They might say: Yes, human behavior is subject to niche, but humans will be judged according to law. Thus, the CI could be valid as a law. This would be the position of, say, a Christian who accepts ecological principles.

I have no counter to that objection. It seems to me that where a person stands on this issue is a matter of faith. And I welcome a diversity of opinions on the matter.

Bike maintenance update

Tonight I cleaned and re-lubed my bike chain. I got another 2000km on the previous lubing, thus bringing my total mileage for the chain to over 5000km with only two cleanings/lubings. (Is it OK to say mileage when using metric?) This is twice farther than I've gotten with any other chain, and my current chain shows little wear. So consider tonight's blog post another unpaid advertisement for Chain-L.

So now I'll claim to have conquered what were my two biggest peeves of bike maintenance:

1. Too many flats

2. Chains don't last long enough

The too-many-flats I fixed with Schwalbe Marathon Plus tires. I have yet to get a flat tire in 8000km or so on my current tires, which is quite a feat in goathead-infested Phoenix. As for broken glass, I now ride right through it.

So what are my new maintenance peeves? Here are some candidates:

• Bent rear derailleurs arms

• Handlebars needing new wraps

• Putting on and taking off fenders

• Truing wheels

Choose Craig's adventure

Craig still had a job. This was the problem on his mind as he sat down in his cubicle chair late in the afternoon. He had just returned from a team meeting that hadn't gone as he had hoped. The meeting was last-minute, having been announced with an email from the boss at 3:29 titled URGENT--meeting at 3:30. Upon reading the email Craig had hoped the meeting would somehow be about himself getting fired, but in fact it turned out to be near the opposite.

I just finished meeting with my bosses, Craig's boss said to start off the meeting. They told me we have to get the next generation of the product out the door by the end of the year. If we don't, then, well, we probably won't have jobs anymore. At that, Craig's spirits lifted, his mind calculating the likelihood of failure. In general it's a good bet any software project will be late. And it's well known the company Craig worked for was heading toward a financial cliff and getting desperate. Maybe this was it—Craig's big break.

But then the boss began laying out a plan and schedule. And as much as Craig didn't want to admit it, the goal to have everything finished by the end of the year was all too possible. There were risks, as all projects have, but not enough. Is our incompetent subcontractor involved? No. Are we doing both the residential and commercial software? No, just the residential. What about hardware problems? The hardware guys will fix the problems as we find them. But how long does it take to produce a new board? Two to three weeks. Isn't that too much time? No, we'll just solder quick fixes as needed. In all, too many answers and not enough questions.

Alas, the project wasn't doomed from the start as so many more worthwhile projects are. And the news got worse. The hardware guys, the boss said, have the hardest jobs. They have to get everything UL-verified in December. But you guys—you have to get your jobs done, too. If that means working 10 or 12 hours a day, then that's what you do.

Craig still had a job—maybe 25% or 50% more of a job than when he had started the day. And that's what was on his mind as he returned to his cubicle. He considered his options for a few minutes and then made a decision.

---

If you choose Craig to walk into his bosses office and give his two weeks notice, then turn to page 3, or, er, say so in a comment below and stay tuned.

If you choose Craig to stick with his job while maybe kinda looking for something better in the meantime, then say so in a comment below and stay tuned.

The fiction of fantasy

Reading a few books doesn't make anyone a master on any topic, let alone several topics at once. Imagine that for all your life you weren't allowed to read more than a few books, together covering everything you would ever know about history, language, literature, religion, mythology, economy, science, warfare, sociology, and so on. You would, frankly, know next to nothing.

Yet partaking in epic fantasy, such as reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy, fits this scenario: the reading of a few books describing another world, with those few books being everything we come to know about that world. But after reading those books, far from realizing our ignorance, we instead believe we got the real story. We believe we understand the different races of peoples, and the way magic works, and the only meaningful interpretation of that world's history. How incredulous we are!

If epic fantasy were anything like real life—and yes, I realize the irony of this sentence—the conclusion of every book and series would leave us more befuddled after than before. That Sauron fellow, we might say after finishing The Return of the King, he got a viciously lopsided treatment by the author. Even Hitler had some good points. I wonder what Sauron's real story is? Or: So all dwarves like to live in caves? Yeah, right. The author is too racist to bother fleshing out a people beyond a few stereotypes.

Yes, I know I'm taking seriously a genre of fiction—and one that's especially detached from reality. Relax, Craig, I hear you say. It's just a story. Maybe so. But I wonder if the biggest lure of epic fantasy is the comfort of believing in a world that makes sense, of believing in a world that our puny brains can get a handle on. If so then that's the fiction of fantasy. Reality can't be understood by one person, especially not by only reading a few books on it—never mind how numerous the appendices.