I was recently surprised to discover that California has price controls which are designed to encourage hoarding in emergencies and to discourage stockpiling in preparation for emergencies. The law in question is called an anti-gouging law, and temporarily limits price increases to 10 percent in some emergencies. I’ve seen conflicting reports about whether Bush’s declaration of emergency triggers the price controls, or whether it requires a state declaration of emergency. The governator has indicated that he has no plans to join the Bush/Lockyer exploitation of Katrina, but my limited observations suggest that gas stations in the bay area have limited their gas prices increases to 10 percent, and a few of them ran out of gas over the weekend.
It looks like the gas supply problems will ease soon enough that the price controls won’t have done much harm this time (diversions of gas shipments that were intended for other parts of the world will any week now spread the supply reduction over large enough regions that a fairly small price premium over what would have prevailed without Katrina should keep supply and demand in balance).
On a related note, Alex Tabarrok made a claim that suspending gas taxes won’t help consumers. I’m suspicious of his belief that a temporary suspension will have little effect on supply. I expect that oil companies will have an important incentive to draw down their inventory more than they otherwise would, especially just before the taxes are reinstated (since their profit margins will decline when taxes resume). I expect this effect to reduce prices to consumers by a modest fraction of the amount of tax relief. This will come at the cost of increased vulnerability to new supply disruptions. I doubt that the voters who have caused politicians to suspend gas taxes have given much thought to the wisdom of this tradeoff.
Randal O’Toole has a provocative claim that New Orleans residents had trouble evacuating because fewer of them own cars than in typical cities (urban planners accomplished their goals).
This is clearly not the main reason for the unusual death toll from Katrina (the death toll in Mississippi seems to be an order of magnitude higher than I would have expected based on results of recent storms with similar winds and the long-term trend of declining storm deaths), but it deserves more discussion.
After wading through many online dating web sites, and being depressed at having to choose between searches on superficial features which return thousands of uninteresting results, or keyword searches which rarely return any results, I found OkCupid! (thanks to Wayne Radinsky). I have some hope that it will do for online dating what Google did for searches.
It encourages people to provide it with lots of information that can be used to compare people, mainly by asking lots of yes/no or multiple choice questions (many submitted by users). A few examples (selected more for their amusement value than importance):
Eventually, a computer will write the best novel ever written.
I should be able to sell my vote for cash if I feel like it.
Would you rather get caught masturbating by your mother or father?
Could you date a giant carnivorous reptile?
Would you ever date or mess around with a good friend’s ex?
Ethnicity restrictions? You racist. Please note that unless you leave these blank (which we recommend), you’ll only match with people who’ve submitted their ethnicities.
They have some way of deducing from user responses how valuable each question is.
They’ve written and open sourced their own web server.
It’s free and plans to stay that way, and is supported by ads.
I’m a bit disappointed that they claim the site shows “a disregard for profit”. I doubt they’re any less interested in profit than Google is, although they’ve clearly avoided the cover-your-ass culture of large bureaucracies. The site doesn’t yet have enough people to be terribly valuable, but it appears to be growing quickly enough that it will succeed.
So for I’ve got one message from a person who is a good deal more interesting than anyone I’ve met on the usual dating sites in quite a while, except that he’s in Pennsylvania (OkCupid doesn’t seem very good at handling geographic preferences).
I’m annoyed that their menu for languages in which I’m fluent offers Khmer, C++, LISP, and some languages I don’t recognize, but not Python.
It has a Friendster-like provision for lists of friends. If I know you and you become an OkCupid member, please let me know.
Robin Hanson writes in a post on Intuition Error and Heritage:
Unless you can see a reason to have expected to be born into a culture or species with more accurate than average intuitions, you must expect your cultural or species specific intuitions to be random, and so not worth endorsing.
Deciding whether an intuition is species specific and no more likely than random to be right seems a bit hard, due to the current shortage of species whose cultures address many of the disputes humans have.
The ideas in this quote follow logically from other essays of Robin’s that I’ve read, but phrasing them this way makes them seem superficially hard to reconcile with arguments by Hayek that we should respect the knowledge contained in culture.
Part of this apparent conflict seems to be due to the Hayek’s emphasis on intuitions for which there is some unobvious and inconclusive evidence that supports the cultural intuitions. Hayek wasn’t directing his argument to a random culture, but rather to a culture for which there was some evidence of better than random results, and it would make less sense to apply his arguments to, say, North Korean society. For many other intuitions that Hayek cared about, the number of cultures which agree with the intuition may be large enough to constitute evidence in support of the intuition.
Some intuitions may be appropriate for a culture even though they were no better than random when first adopted. Driving on the right side of the road is a simple example. The arguments given in favor of a judicial bias toward stare decisis suggest this is just the tip of an iceberg.
Some of this apparent conflict may be due the importance of treating interrelated practices together. For instance, laws against extramarital sex might be valuable in societies where people depend heavily on marital fidelity but not in societies where a divorced person can support herself comfortably. A naive application of Robin’s rule might lead the former society to decide such a law is arbitrary, when a Hayekian might wonder if it is better to first analyze whether to treat the two practices as a unit which should only be altered together.
I’m uncertain whether these considerations fully reconcile the two views, or whether Hayek’s arguments need more caveats.
Book Review: Nanofuture: What’s Next For Nanotechnology by J. Storrs Hall
This book provides some rather well informed insights into what molecular engineering will be able to do in a few decades. It isn’t as thoughtful as Drexler’s Engines of Creation, but it has many ideas that seem new to this reader who has been reading similar essays for many years, such as a solar energy collector that looks and feels like grass.
The book is somewhat eccentric in it’s choice of what to emphasize, devoting three pages to the history of the steam engine, but describing the efficiency of nanotech batteries in a footnote that is a bit too cryptic to be convincing.
The chapter on economics is better than I expected, but I’m still not satisfied. The prediction that interest rates will be much higher sounds correct for the period in which we transition to widespread use of general purpose assemblers, since investing capital in producing more machines will be very productive. But once the technology is widespread and mature, the value of additional manufacturing will decline rapidly to the point where it ceases to put upward pressure on interest rates.
The chapter on AI is disappointing, implying that the main risks of AI are to the human ego. For some better clues about the risks of AI, see Yudkowsky’s essay on Creating Friendly AI.
Book Review: Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt
This book does a pretty good job of tackling subjects that are worth thinking about but which few would think to tackle. Their answers are interesting but not always as rigorous as I hoped.
The implication that this is an economics book is a bit misleading. While it is occasionally guided by the principle that incentives matter, it is at least as much about Kelvinism (the belief that we ought to quantify knowledge whenever possible), but then some of the book consists of stories which have little to do with either.
My favorite parts of the book explore the extent to which experts’ incentives cause them to pursue goals that don’t coincide with their clients’ interests. But his arguments about realtors exaggerate the extent of their conflict of interest – it is likely that part of the reason they are quick to sell a client’s house more cheaply than they would sell their own is that the realtor is less likely to need to sell by a deadline.
I am left puzzled by the claim that crack gang leaders want to avoid gang wars, but gang members are rewarded for starting violence with promotions. Who’s controlling the rewards if it isn’t the leader? Why can’t he ensure that members who engage in nondefensive violence aren’t promoted?
Two years ago a DARPA project was canceled after some demagogues attacked a straw man which bore a superficial resemblance to the actual project. Now Robin Hanson (who had some involvement with the project) has written a defense of the straw man, i.e. an argument that futures markets might be of some value a predicting specific features of terrorist attacks (although not nearly as valuable as more natural uses of futures markets such as predicting the effects of changes in Homeland Security budgets on the harm done by terrorism).
He has a somewhat plausible argument that there is useful information out there that might be elicited by markets, particularly concerning the terrorist choice of method and targets. An important part of his argument is that in order to be useful, the markets might only need to distinguish one-in-a-thousand risks from one-in-a-million risks. One weakness in this argument is that it makes mildly optimistic assumptions about how reasonably people will respond to the information. There is clear evidence much spending that is advertised as defense against terrorism is spent on pork instead. Markets that provide a few bits of information about which targets need defending will raise the cost of that pork-barrel spending, but I can’t tell whether the effect will be enough to meet whatever threshold is needed to have some effect.
The section on moral hazard seems to contain a rather strange assumption about the default level of trader anonymity. The “reduced” level he talks about seems to be about as much as the U.S. government would allow. It isn’t clear to me whether any anonymity helps make the prices more informative (does anyone know of empirical tests of this?). The optimal level of anonymity might vary from issue to issue according to what kind of trader has the best information.
The proposal to hide some prices is more difficult than it sounds (not to mention that it’s far from clear that the problems it would solve are real). Not only would the exchange need to delay notifying traders of the relevant trades, but it would need to delay notifying them of how the trades affected the traders’ cash/credit available for trading other futures. Which would often deter traders from trying to trade when prices are hidden (it’s also unclear whether the trades that would be deterred would add useful information). In addition, I expect many of the futures that would be traded would be about targets and/or methods covering some broad range of time; it’s unclear how to apply a condition about “attacks to occur within the next week” to those.
The proposals to deal with decision selection bias sound politically difficult to implement (unless maybe Futarchy has been substantially implemented). But there isn’t much risk to experimenting with them, and elected officials probably don’t have the attention span to understand the problem, so there probably isn’t much reason to worry about this.
Liberty Magazine has an interesting article on Dubai called Freedom Blossoms in the Arabian Desert about the remarkable prosperity and freedom in that city.
A quick internet search shows reports such as this Report on International Religious Freedom and this report on Sunshine and censorship: Press freedom in UAE suggest the Liberty article exaggerates how free it is, suggesting it’s more like another Singapore than a Hong Kong. But even with that caveat, there’s still plenty of room to hope that it’s providing an opportunity for the Muslim world to escape the political systems that have kept it primitive.
Book Review: The Blank Slate : The Denial of Human Nature and Modern Intellectual Life by Steven Pinker
Pinker makes a good case that there’s a widespread bias toward a blank-slate world-view. But when dealing with serious scientific literature, his attempts to find clearcut enemies seem mistaken.
Pinker’s claim that “The second scientific defense of the Blank Slate comes from connectionism” is pretty puzzling. This “defense” consists of modeling the mind as “a general-purpose learning device”. But the books that Pinker references (Rethinking Innateness, and Parallel Distributed Processing), are both careful to point out why their models are completely consistent with the kind of genetic influences on behavior that evolutionary psychologists are talking about. Their disagreements with Pinker seem to be at most about how those influences are implemented, and even there I can’t find anything in Pinker’s arguments that clearly rejects what the connectionists believe.
Pinker’s attacks on Gould’s quasi-defense of the blank slate mainly convinced me that Gould didn’t want to think clearly about the subject, probably because he considered that any mechanistic explanation of the mind (genetic or environmental) was demeaning.
Pinker’s arguments that it’s silly to believe in the tabula rasa and noble savage world-views are eloquent and compelling, but his response to the “it’s demeaning” attitudes will convince fewer people, because he ignores the very real benefits of holding an unrealistically high opinion of one’s self (overestimating one’s abilities seems to be an effective means of advertising one’s strengths). To those who want to portray themselves as angelic or as wiser than software of the future, an accurate model of the mind is genuinely demeaning.
Pinker seems somewhat inconsistent about how important it is to know whether the mind is a blank slate.
On pages x – xi he says “the conviction that humanity could be reshaped by massive social engineering projects led to some of the greatest atrocities in history.” But in the chapter on fear of inequality, he claims (more convincingly), while defending his views from the charge they will encourage Nazism, that the differences between Nazi beliefs in genetic superiority and the blank slate viewpoints of Stalin and the Khmer Rouge didn’t have much effect on whether those tyrannies engaged in genocide – it was the greater tendency to divide people into in-groups and out-groups that best distinguishes the worst of the genocidal tyrants.
Pinker exaggerates the importance of finding the correct answer to the nature-nurture debate in other ways as well (I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that an author overestimates the importance of what he’s selling).
He gives examples such as forcing people to live in drab cement boxes (as if their taste for a more natural surrounding could be reversed by social engineers), or releasing psychopaths (because societal problems caused their insanity).
But a genetic component to these behaviors doesn’t prove that they can’t be altered (I have genes for brown hair – does that mean I can’t dye my hair blue?). It only gives hints as to why they might be difficult to alter.
It sure looks like careful scientific studies of whether we knew how to alter these behaviors would be a more reliable way of debunking the faulty conclusions.
There’s a report that the Flynn effect has stopped fairly abruptly in the industrialized countries. The new data suggest a more sudden halt than nutritional theories would predict. I’m uncertain what to make of this.