Today's failure of the mainstream media is inserting "balance" into a story where there is none. The media often gives groups the appearance of legitimacy by acting as if some issue is open for debate, when in fact the issue clearly favors one side or the other. As George Orwell often wrote, language is extremely important in framing issues, and a falsely balanced story can give readers a skewed perception of reality. Example #1 is this NYT story on the continued unrest in Iran. The "balance" in the story is that the Mousavi camp disputes the election results, and the Ahmadinejad camp, which won the election, calls it legitimate. All of the evidence the NYT presents about the disputed election is from the Mousavi camp, which may lead the reader to conclude that their protesting is all sour grapes. But we know the election was thrown. Ahmadinejad won, in every province and region of Iran, between 66 and 69 percent of the vote, with over 85% of those eligible to vote casting a vote. Not only is that impossible (the more people who tend to vote in an election, the closer it gets), but Iran's own elections commission called the results illegitimate. Furthermore, the early returns suggested a win for Mousavi, and the Interior Ministry even called to congratulate him on his victory, and then abruptly changed course and announced wildly different results. The Mousavi camp is not rioting in the streets because they're mad their candidate lost; they're mad because some conspirators have fixed the election and their candidate, in all likelihood, won over 50% of the vote. But the impression you get from the article is that one side is simply whining while the other side rejoices. In the interest of "balance," the NYT has given the Ahmadinejad position the appearance of legitimacy, when it's clearly the case that he did not actually win the election. Readers would come away from the article with a skewed perception of the rioters' reasons for rioting. Example #2 is the continued cowardice of the media on the issue of torture in US prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. Waterboarding is torture under the Geneva Convention, which we have signed. The United States has prosecuted several other governments and individuals for waterboarding, in statements which clearly label it "torture." A waterboard is now prominently displayed in a museum in Cambodia on the Khmer Rouge's use of torture to elicit false confessions during the Vietnam War. Christopher Hitchens and Mancow Muller, who agreed to be waterboarded and each lasted less than ten seconds, agree that it is torture, as does Jesse Ventura (and do take time to watch those videos, as they are gut wrenching and prove the point more effectively than words). We have tortured detainees in other ways, including depriving them of sleep (by chaining their ankles to the wall) for days at a time, forcing them into cramped boxes, forcing them into public nudity, beating them, and so on. Nearly 100 inmates have died in US custody, some as a result of torture. But the media continues to act as if the issue is in doubt, only because Republicans believe the issue to be in doubt, labeling all torture as "enhanced interrogation techniques," which suggests something a tough guy might do to you if you get in trouble with the casinos or the Mafia. This is despite the fact that when other people do the things the USA has done in its prisons, the media calls it torture. This is done in the interest of "balance," because Democrats call it torture but Republicans don't. Imagine that some senator woke up tomorrow and declared that they believed that the circumference of a circle was three times the diameter, not 3.14159 etc, because the Bible says so. If this is news, "balance" requires the reporter to say that "The senator presented evidence that the circumference is three, while Harry Reid declared this preposterous and that the true value is 3.14" or some such thing. Nowhere in the article does the statement's actual truth get evaluated. Meanwhile you have a whole group of readers who leave the article believing that there is real doubt surrounding the ratio of a circumference to the diameter, and that we just don't know what the value is. The MSM can't just call the Senator's position bullshit, because of "balance." Hopefully that will change soon.

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Tommy Craggs of Deadspin has an excellent new post up on why Scott Boras, the most hated agent in sports, is not actually that evil. Currently, teams take turns selecting players they like, which means that the player can only sign with that team, has to live where the team tells him, can get traded to another team at any time and have to move, etc. This limits players' ability to earn wages fitting their ability, because if they don't like the offer given to them, they can't start talking to another team. Boras has been more effective than any other agent at finding ways to make his players' salaries more closely track their actual earning potential, either through making them eligible for free agency earlier, or by squeezing teams for more money than they usually give. This has made Boras the enemy of every GM, and disliked among the public. Given that Boras has made many teams shell out significantly larger amounts of money for their draftees than they would normally have to, it makes sense that he is disliked by most fans, but it is a shame, from a libertarian perspective. The draft system is another example of a place where America has less economic and political freedom than Europe; in Europe every player is a free agent, and can sign with any team at any time. Consider a talented 18-year-old player. He's probably spent every day for the past eight or nine years working hard on his baseball skills, in the batting cages, taking grounders and fly balls. His parents have put in a ton of money so he can play on traveling teams all summer and have good coaching. The result is that this kid is five-tool fierce, dominating the local high school league, hitting towering home runs, etc. Everyone thinks he's on pace for the major leagues. All of the effort and time he's put in are worth something. But because of the draft, he must negotiate a take-it-or-leave-it contract with exactly one MLB team, and put in time in the minors before breaking the majors, becoming a free agent and being eligible to get paid his share. The problem with the current system is he can get hurt at any time and not be able to play, and get dumped out of the baseball system with no money - there's no insurance against this, but there would be if young players got paid more. If we allowed players full freedom to sign contracts with teams  our sports leagues would closely resemble Europe's. Players' earnings would increase, at every level, but especially among talented youth. The teams with the highest revenues (the Yankees, Red Sox, Braves) or teams with deep-pocketed owners would gain a huge competitive advantage, as they can afford better players at every level of development. In the English Premier League, the top four teams, Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal, and Liverpool, dominate the standings every season; we should expect a similar result in the MLB. Teams in small markets and teams with stingy owners would suffer, especially because we have such a good statistical understanding of baseball now that there are hardly any more inefficiencies to exploit. For fans 20 of 30 teams in the MLB, a World Series title would be something that occurs once a century, if that. Teams would also construct baseball academies in the United States as alternatives to high school and college, and sign young players to stay there, to take classes but mostly to play baseball. Most MLB teams already have academies in the Dominican Republic, which is one of the few areas where all players are immediately eligible for free agency (Boras considered moving one of his clients to the Dominican to make him eligible). All good Premier League teams fund youth academies to develop young talent; every good player in England goes through the academy system, not the regular high school system. Furthermore, we should expect some teams and owners to go bankrupt. Spending enough on players to win the World Series would surely require owners to make a loss on their investment. While some owners go bankrupt now, their ability to do this is limited by the salary cap, revenue sharing and other factors. The net result is that players would have more freedom to pursue wages that pay them what they are worth, which they deserve, like anyone who puts in years worth of time and energy to become good at something. But the competitiveness of the MLB would probably decrease, and because the league has only a few rewards in place (making the playoffs, the pennant, the World Series) this would spell mediocrity and more frustration for smaller teams' fans. But the MLB should make this tradeoff, because it's not fair to the players to have their wages held down. So we should praise Boras.

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Indeed, one could define science as reason’s attempt to compensate for our inability to perceive big numbers. If we could run at 280,000,000 meters per second, there’d be no need for a special theory of relativity: it’d be obvious to everyone that the faster we go, the heavier and squatter we get, and the faster time elapses in the rest of the world. If we could live for 70,000,000 years, there’d be no theory of evolution, and certainly no creationism: we could watch speciation and adaptation with our eyes, instead of painstakingly reconstructing events from fossils and DNA.

From an essay by Scott Aaronson, "Who Can Name the Bigger Number?" The essay traces the history of really big non-infinite numbers, and explains why it's important that we try to conceive these numbers.

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People who say they care about the environment believe that we could end global warming if only every person, corporation, and government, cared about the environment as much as they do. Certainly they believe that by purchasing carbon offsets, voting for high speed rail and expensive public transit, shopping at Whole Foods/purchasing locally, buying Priuses/Vespas/used cars, investing in solar panels or ethanol, and/or recycling (which does provide benefits), that they are 1) making a difference in the fight against global warming, and 2) that if everyone were to make the same sacrifices, the world would be safe from rising sea levels. (By the way, the sea levels are rising; no serious academic denies this). I call bullshit, for the following reasons. 1) For most people, it's much more important to signal care for the environment than actual care for the environment. Currently, good will toward the environment tends to have very visible signs. The government wants to construct new high speed rail lines, wind farms, and have cars running on ethanol. Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s plan to paint all of our roofs and roads a lighter shade, which would have roughly the same effect as removing every car in the world from the road for 11 years, was pretty much met with crickets. As one of six billion polluters on Earth, I am not going to observe any difference in the Earth's temperature whether I drive a Hummer or ride a used bike. The social benefit from signaling care for the environment outweighs the observed environmental benefit. 2) It is nearly impossible to put a price on "benefit to the environment." Many people act as though helping the environment is worth any price, like the tagline in the Visa commercial. As Arnold Kling writes,

Once you stray from using market prices, you can have all sorts of unintended consequences. How many gallons of fresh water should you be willing to use up to save a pound of carbon emissions? Do you know how much more water is used in the manufacturing of biofuels compared with the refining of gasoline? The whole point of market prices is to do these calculations for us.

The usual result is overpayment for little actual benefit. 3) When the laws are set up so that the cost of pollution is low, it makes economic sense for people and firms to pollute. The environmental problem is known in economic terms as a free rider problem. If paying taxes was voluntary, it wouldn’t make sense for anyone to pay, because everyone enjoys the benefits, like an army and paved roads, whether or not they personally paid taxes. Similarly, it doesn’t make sense for people to reduce their polluting activity, because the Earth is going to warm up whether or not they eat less meat this year.We pollute because it is cheapest for us to do so, even though in the long run society is worse off. Companies have only one goal: to maximize profits for their shareholders, by providing services or goods that people want at the lowest possible cost. Environmentalists tend to view this as evidence of the evilness of firms, but companies are not purposefully evil; they are indifferent. Extra costs for helping the environment, in the form of “social obligations,” will raise a firm’s costs, reduce its profits, and make it less competitive relative to firms that are not worried about the environment. I believe most current environmental efforts by firms are merely for good public relations, as in #1. 4) If people think their voluntary efforts are actually making a difference, they may be less likely to support the massively expensive, painful regulations that we will need to actually solve the problem. As Richard Posner writes,

If people believe that voluntary efforts will suffice, there will be no political pressure to incur the heavy costs that will be necessary to avert the risk of catastrophic climate change.

The people who are most likely to buy carbon offsets, go local, support the environment, are the people who we need most to support useful legislation on the environment. If they are content to "avoid cognitive dissonance by exaggerating the practical efficacy of largely symbolic gestures, such as purchasing carbon offsets," as Posner says, they will be less likely to push for the deeper sacrifices that we need to make to save the planet. The simplest economic solution, but the toughest politically, is to place a higher price on pollution, so that people and firms make environmentally beneficial decisions as a normal result of cost-benefit analysis. Prices are an unbelievable tool for aggregating costs. The price of milk tells you exactly how much it costs to raise a cow, milk it, bottle the milk, drive it to the store, and pay someone to stock it, without having to worry about how much the individual components cost. That way, people who pollute would pay higher prices, to offset the damage they cause to the environment, and everyone would have an incentive to make smart environmental decisions.

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Michael Lewis stated recently in an interview with MSNBC:

The [Oakland] A’s have no intellectual advantage, as evidenced by their performance.

Oakland is certainly not helping their cause with incompetent managing. After Oakland's Orlando Cabrera hit a leadoff double in the first inning of tonight's game against the White Sox, the team was in an excellent position to score runs - teams can expect to score 1.19 runs when they have a runner on second and no outs. But then the A's made a stupid, conservative error; the manager ordered Adam Kennedy to sacrifice bunt, moving Cabrera over to third. This move increased the chance that the A's would score at least one run (from 62% to 70%), but decreased their expected runs to 0.98, a loss of 0.2 runs. If the A's make one dumb decision like this every game (a low estimate), they cost themselves about 32 runs during the season. If the game is tied in the eighth or ninth inning, it makes sense for the A's to try to get a single run to take the lead. But at the beginning of the game it makes no sense to be reducing EV by pursuing low-risk strategies - the A's need to pursue the highest expected value course, even if, sometimes, they end up stranding the runner at 2nd. Unfortunately the manager is much more likely to listen to criticism for not moving the runner over than he is for not being risky enough. I'm somewhat ashamed to see the A's, whose front office puts such a high emphasis on statistical analysis, completely abandoning the math in their on-field decisions; it's as if there's a complete disconnect between the front office and the manager. Perhaps the A's have given up on the season already, and Beane and co don't care about what the manager does.

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It’s a period piece from six months ago.

I found it in Will Leitch's review of The Girlfriend Experience.

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Andy McKenzie writes about the various people that enjoy destroying arguments by Malcolm Gladwell and David Brooks. I read Gladwell for the stories and skip his conclusions. More on Gladwell's article: I played Little League baseball, and one of the coaches in the league told all but two of his players to keep the bat on their shoulder for every single pitch, essentially hoping the pitcher threw four balls before he threw three strikes. Yes, this team won many games by walking players around the bases. But God killed a million kittens in the process. Even if your team had the worst players in the league, would you want to employ this strategy? Pressure defense works at younger ages (at all ages, on some players) but shouldn't be used extensively for the same reason we don't let kids run to first base on a dropped third strike until they're older, and encourage kids to swing the bat, even if the pitcher stinks. There are bigger goals; preparing players to play in high school and/or college, letting them practice driving to the basket, practice one-on-one defense, help defense, setting screens, etc. This is why the summer camp I coach at enforces a halfcourt man-to-man rule; they want the kids to improve. The acceptability of a strategy that will make you look like a douchebag is inversely proportional to the league's competitiveness. I make an exception for intramural sports and adult leagues, where douchebaggery is a valued part of the game. The truth is that smart coaches adapt to any dumb strategy, whether it's taking every pitch, holding the ball, pressure defense, telling your kids to take a dive in the penalty box, the A-11 offense, double teaming Stephen Curry or any other strategy where you try to hide your weaknesses. Given that the girls here were trying to go to the national tournament, you would expect that another coach would figure out how to beat them, or maybe the national tournament wasn't that hard to qualify for, or maybe their team was actually better than the article gives them credit for. That said, I love pressure defense for high school and college teams. I watched a Rick Pitino Louisville team absolutely destroy Stanford in the NCAA Tournament with a press, going up 41-13 in fifteen minutes. I don't think anyone's really tried it at the NBA level, both because any point guard can dribble circles around defenders, and because keeping players at a high level of fitness for 82 games, plus playoffs, would be extraordinarily difficult.

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Take a look at this article from the NYT. There are hyperlinks all over it, and not just the usual ones linking to related stories at the NYT - they're links to stories and background from all over the Internet, including Bloomberg.com, the CDC, and others. I must admit I'm surprised, but this is a good thing for readers; it enhances a reader's knowledge of the full story, and allows the author to stuff digressions and sources in the links. One advantage of Web/Kindle reading over print is that the Internet allows for placement of footnotes in the actual text, as hyperlinks (you can also do this in a Microsoft Word document, but I haven't seen many people take advantage of this). David Foster Wallace would have loved it.

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I went and saw Karl Rove speak at CMC last semester; one of the things that struck me about his speech was when he described the President's daily routine. The President's time is divided into fifteen or thirty minute blocks, each allotted to a specific group, with little time in between for preparation or formality, and the President is expected to be prepared for each group, each question, and debate that might follow. He gave examples - one minute the President might be in a discussion of whether states or the federal government get the rights to sell permission to drill offshore in certain areas, and he'll need to know the background and make a decision, and the next the President could be consoling the parents of a soldier killed in Iraq, and he'll have to know their names and details. Every night, Rove said, the President gets a 200-page "briefing book," full of twenty different things that the President needs to know about, and he gets about 2 hours to read it before bed, so he'll be ready for the next day. Now my schedule isn't as full as the President's but I loved the idea and I've started to implement my own version. I mix together any and all of the following: - Reading assignments for class (or SparkNotes summaries) - Lecture notes from last class - Lecture notes from classes I took today - Magazine articles (New Yorker, Atlantic, Economist etc) - John Mauldin (a well-regarded financial writer) - Long blog posts (Becker-Posner in particular, Scott Sumner, others on occasion) - Reading from my shelf And I try to split it into chunks of less than ten minutes (any more and I start getting restless). I read this in the time after dinner and before bed. Thinking of it as a "briefing book," that will prepare me for the next day, helps me get through it, and it gives me an idea of how prepared I'm going to be for the next day. Furthermore, the mix of for-pleasure and for-class material is another way to help get through it.

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So, the San Jose Sharks just got bounced out of the playoffs in the first round, to the #8 seed Ducks, after compiling the best regular season record of any team in the NHL. I think that this poor performance was specifically a matchup issue; during six or seven games in the regular season, the Sharks and Ducks scored an equal number of goals, suggesting that while the Sharks were good against most teams, they did not enjoy that much of an advantage against this specific team. I've never really liked playoffs. I understand that they keep things interesting at the end of the season for most fans, and thus they're a necessity for ticket and TV revenue (and as Bill Simmons points out at the end of this article, the NHL needs money badly). But they diminish the importance of the regular season and undercut the accomplishments of the team that played the best over the course of the season. Furthermore, most sports don't take efforts to favor the top teams - the bracket is set at the beginning of the playoffs and never re-set. Hockey deserves plaudits; the top seeded team remaining in every round faces off against the lowest seeded team remaining in the tournament. Again, sports leagues in the US could do well to emulate their European counterparts. European leagues strike an excellent balance between rewarding the top teams and keeping things interesting for fans. The top 20 teams in England play a round robin series of 38 games, and at the end of the league season the first placed team is the champion. The league championship is the most coveted prize for every fan and every team, and comes with prize money and automatic entrance into the European Championship in the following year. There are multiple "prizes" available for teams out of the running for first place - the next three teams also make the European Championship, the next two teams after them qualify for a lesser continental tournament, and the worst three teams in the league are sent down to the lower divisions. Really, how exciting is that! If the Lions, the Knicks and the Pirates faced demotion every season, how much faster do you think the dysfunctional parts of the organization would be tossed out? Everyone has an incentive to play hard through the end, and owners have to spend money on their teams or risk relegation. Still, if you're between 14th and 8th, there's not much excitement. That's where the second great part of English soccer kicks in. The playoff atmosphere in England is created by the FA Cup, which is the second-best trophy to win. Everyone, from college teams to semi-pro to the Premiership teams, faces off in one giant bracket, sort of like the Indiana high school basketball championship. Furthermore, after every round the matchups are drawn out of a giant pot just like the lottery, so such oddities occur as the two best teams facing off in the first round, or non-league (roughly, the 100th best team and below) teams hosting teams in the Premier League. There are vagaries and more vagaries and matches are rarely uncompetitive. In sum, the European league system is vastly superior because they set up parallel trophies: one to reward the best overall team, and one to reward the winner-take-all, luck-driven playoff system. In the US, not every team makes it to the playoffs, and the best team doesn't win a trophy every time. Winning the league doesn't matter so much as getting hot at the end of the season, as the Ducks were in six games this past week.

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