I have a post up on CMC Forum about California's plan to impose new standards on manufacturers of large televisions. Read and debate.

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Every new car with a dashboard navigation screen has a feature that doesn't let you fiddle with the controls while the car is going over 10 miles per hour. This is annoying but maybe for the best, as if you are trying to punch in an address while driving on the freeway you're not going to be focused on the road. But the safety feature isn't complete, as you can still fiddle with the audio and temperature controls at any speed. My guess is that the car companies know that changing these controls isn't safe but if they banned the controls at high speed there would be a significant backlash from consumers. The most annoying thing is that if you have a passenger in the car, it's logical to assume that the driver can focus on driving while the passenger enters new directions into the nav screen. This division of labor is perfectly safe. And furthermore cars can tell if there's a passenger, because if there's a heavy weight in the front seat and the passenger doesn't have their seatbelt on a blinking light flashes on the dash. Why can't car companies combine those two features so if there's a passenger in the car you can control the nav screen while moving at high speed? That's a pretty simple innovation. Obviously you can hack around it by putting a few watermelons in the front seat or something but people hack around the driving system as it is, by idling along until they've entered in directions, or accelerating all the way to a red light and then braking suddenly, so that they maximize the amount of time they have to punch in directions. Perhaps there's a law against entering in directions while driving over 10 mph but I doubt it.

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Today's must-read article is this report by Democracy Corps summarizing the results of their focus group testing of conservative Republicans and independents. They sampled one group of Republican voters in Georgia and one group of white, non-college voters from Ohio (the independents). To summarize,

these voters identify themselves as part of a ‘mocked’ minority with a set of shared beliefs and knowledge, and commitment to oppose Obama that sets them apart from the majority in the country. They believe Obama is ruthlessly advancing a ‘secret agenda’ to bankrupt the United States and dramatically expand government control to an extent nothing short of socialism. While these voters are disdainful of a Republican Party they view to have failed in its mission, they overwhelmingly view a successful Obama presidency as the destruction of this country’s founding principles and are committed to seeing the president fail.

The quotes from the Republicans are harrowing; they back up the above conclusion 100%. Obviously the beliefs of any group of voters will sound a little wonky but these people are living in a parallel universe. The Republican politicians' problem is that to win the primary they need to win over these conservative (if conservative is really the right word) voters, but to win the general election they need to win over independents, who have worries about Obama but generally don't believe that he, as the arm of a secret cabal, is going to bring about the ruin of the United States. Furthermore the base believes that most Republican politicians have "sold out" - the only figure they support enthusiastically is Sarah Palin. How can I prove that Obama isn't trying to bring about the destruction of America, that Fox News isn't the only media channel telling "the truth," and that we are not going to become a socialist economy? I'm not sure that I can, with words; think about how hard of a job the evolutionists have, and the science is on their side all the way. But I could with bets; asking someone to put their money where their mouth is is the easiest way to get them to say what they really believe to be true. Perhaps we could ask them to, as Robin Hanson and Bryan Caplan suggest, put their money where their mouth is; force them to make specific bets on their political beliefs. If, as they suggest, the rest of America is wrong and uninterested in knowing the truth, there would be a lot of money to be made by betting on a government takeover of other sectors of the economy, or on the growth of GDP, etc. But for a large group of people to be this wrong about the state of things cannot be good for the country at large.

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Via Kottke here is a (two-week-old) Wall Street Journal article about how sports strategy improves relentlessly.

Considered more broadly, Constructal Law may be the closest thing to a grand unified theory for the evolution of sports. In a sports context, the river is the relentless search for the easiest way to score or win more often. In soccer, there is the indefensible through-ball, passed between two defenders to a striker sprinting into open space. In basketball, the two-handed set shot eventually gave way to finding the tallest, fastest players who could jump the highest and dunk.

I've had this thought before; I think that the worst teams that play today could beat the best teams from twenty years ago. Teams adjusting to a rule change resemble a new marketplace; some try out outlandish new things, evaluate their success and the best solution emerges quickly. This is why every team at the Olympics almost exclusively used the pick & roll; when you have shooters and good ballhandlers it's close to impossible to prevent a team from getting a good shot. Furthermore this is why the referee's decision to award penalty kicks has taken on an increased importance in soccer, and diving has become such a problem; free goals are few and far between, so it's worth taking a risk to earn one. Sometimes the efficient outcome in a sport makes the resulting game pretty ugly. That's when rulemakers have to step in and change things. Twenty years from now I hope people will be embarrassed at how many football coaches punted and kicked one-point PAT's, and how many baseball teams used sacrifice flies and sacrifice bunts.

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I've started reading books in the middle, rather than at the beginning. When you have a lot of books it's a quicker way to get to interesting material. Daniel Willingham, Why Don't Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom. If you enjoy learning, you're not a typical student. Willingham surveys child psychology and teaching literature to come up with seven arguments. Along the way he demolishes the visual-auditory-kinesthetic theory of learning. I never really understood how kinesthetic learners were supposed to grasp philosophy anyway. Tom Vanderbilt, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us). This has been covered by other people, but it's still good. Vanderbilt uses traffic as a launching point for a host of interesting discussions, like coordination problems caused by real-time traffic software and how to make people pay more attention to the road. Recommended reading for Southern California drivers. Tyler Cowen, Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World. Finally, the library delivered a copy. Cowen defends autism and explains that the autistic cognitive style is prized by our society; he points to nobelist Vernon Smith, for example, who has come forward as a self-diagnosed Asperger's child. Like David Gordon I wonder if Cowen is painting too wide of a brushstroke. Cowen also jumps from argument to argument, rarely spending too much time on any one topic, which may be a blogging tendency but which I don't like too much in a book. All in all I thought it was very good. Steven Skiena, Calculated Bets. Skiena is a computer science geek who has had a lifelong fascination with jai-alai; in this book he shares details of his quest to make money betting on jai-alai. In short, yes you can make money, but you can't make very much, as only about $15,000 gets wagered on any game and if you bet too much you start changing the odds. Unfortunately his strategy involved making bets on specific trifecta combinations, which means that although horse racing is also a pari-mutuel game, the techniques don't cross over. Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel. I was fairly disappointed by this book. Although I don't know what a travel book should say besides, "Start traveling." Benoit Mandelbrot, The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence. Mandelbrot is a Nobel prize winner who thinks that modern portfolio theory is not a good model to explain market movements. Check and check. The first half outlines the history of modern portfolio theory and the problems with the model, and the second half explores his neat work with fractals and market price movements.

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Often when someone delivers a devastating critique of an industry or particular policy issue, like healthcare, the immediate follow up question is, “Well, you seem smart, what should we do about it then?” From my experience most of the time this question is asked like a layperson would to a shaman, but the answers generally lack insight. And this strikes me as a very tribal, ask-the-wiseman approach to the issue. Now that the speaker’s presented the analysis, we should all be equally likely to implement the correct solution. Or should we?

If you think you have an excellent solution, how would you display your bona fides? One way would be to present a great diagnosis of the problem. But I think good solutions are few and far between.

From this post on government expansion by Robert Higgs.

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Last night Matt Steinglass tried to put the outrage over the execution of apparently innocent Texan Cameron Todd Willingham in perspective.

Well, okay — say the guy was innocent, and Texas put an innocent guy to death this one time. And let’s even grant that it’s not the only case. In fact, imagine for the sake of argument that 50 percent of the people Texas puts to death were innocent. Texas executed 423 people between 1982 and 2008, so let’s call it 212 innocent people killed by the state. Now, look at all the time, effort and money being spent on trying to get Texas to reform or eliminate its death penalty practices. It must be millions of dollars, not to mention all the media attention. If all that money were being devoted to ending malaria in Africa, isn’t it obvious that it would save thousands and thousands of innocent lives?

The difference, of course, is that we know for certain that the Texas state government ended Willingham's life, whereas lack of investment by Western governments is only one cause of malaria deaths in Africa. Furthermore, we as a society are terrible at putting a price on life. Imagine the following hypothetical situation. We launch a rocket to Mars, but the ship suffers damage on the way there and does not have enough juice to make it home. The two astronauts have a year to live before they run out of resources, and rescuing them will cost $400 million. Furthermore we know for certain that the rescue money will be taken from foreign aid which will go to various health and aid measures and is estimated will save 2000 lives, although we'll never know for certain whose lives we're saving. This is akin to the trolley problem. For another thought experiment, replace $400 million with X and try to figure out the value of X where the government agrees that rescuing the astronauts will not be a good idea. $1 billion? $1 trillion? If I'm a senator, I'm holding these poor astronauts lives in one hand but I am holding a sort of intangible, expected value of lives saved in the other. The choice is pretty easy; vote to effect the rescue. When we know for certain we are the cause of death we'll go to unbelievable lengths to save a person; when we have the power to prevent a lot of death, but we are not the main cause of death it's easy to dodge the moral bullet. I think the only way we decide that we can spend the money in a better way is if we create some automatic decision rule which says that if it'll cost less than $X million to save a life then we should do it but if not then we shouldn't. Or if we destroy all rocketship technology, so that it becomes impossible to save the astronauts. This of course is the root of the healthcare problem in the US. Advances in medical technology in recent decades have allowed for amazing new treatments in every field of medicine, that save countless lives. The problem is that these treatments are massively expensive, and may end up making the whole country bankrupt. If a dying loved one looks you in the eye and the doctor says they need the new treatment to live, and you're not even going to pay the cost for the procedure but your insurer is, then you say yes to pretty much any cost (use the same procedure as above - a new treatment costs M dollars - at what number M should we decide that the treatment is not cost effective? $20 million per life saved? The problem is that we have to come up with the money somehow, and we haven't found a way to stop Medicare from eating holes in the budget yet. If we don't find a solution the country will go bankrupt; already, most of the increase in wages from now until 2030 is expected to be eaten up by increased medical spending. Once the life is in your hands, it's too late; you're going to pay any price to save it, or get labeled a cruel automaton, someone who values money more than human life. The fact of the matter is that if we're willing to pay $1 billion to save every life, then we're going to run out of money very quickly. Maybe you disagree, but I think that if we only have two ways to spend $1 billion we should fight disease in Africa instead of rescuing the astronauts. But if I'm a senator can you imagine attaching your name to a "No" vote? The current approach of politicians is to dodge the issue at all costs, but we don't have much room for error anymore.

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I sat next to this guy on the train who was blasting heavy metal incredibly loud out of his headphones (and sleeping). Maybe he was having a bad day, but he was playing it so loud I feel like it had to be for everyone else's benefit. He wanted to share his music with the world but more tell the world that that music is part of his identity. I wonder if there would be a market for reverse headphones - headphones that only project music outward, for those people who want to project a certain self-image without listening to the music itself. One could listen to Coltrane or Vanessa Carlton's "Thousand Miles" while the world thinks they're listening to Black Eyed Peas or someone equally bad. You could also use reverse headphones as a way to ward people away from the seat next to you; Brotha Lynch and Andre Nickatina are perfect for that purpose. Would expand on this idea but I have three midterms tomorrow.

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