Memes of Ben Ho

Michael Jackson: May he Rest in Peace

noreply@blogger.com (HoBs) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 21:27:00 +0000

I was surprisingly affected by the King of Pop's passing the other day (usually celebrities pass, like Farrah or Ed McMahon, and I barely bat an eye). Also, I was never a huge fan--I realized I didn't even have any of his MP3's (so like everyone, I went and bought his Essentials album off iTunes). It wasn't until he died that I realized how much I had been rooting for a come back, so that his legacy would not be the tawdry stuff that I was trying hard to not believe. It seems like after his death, that it is indeed his music that he is being remembered for. (a surprised sentiment shared by the chef of Danos, one of my favorite restaurants who carpooled with us randomly yesterday)

I suppose it is because Michael Jackson, more than anyone else, (though Madonna comes close), provided the soundtrack for my childhood, and for that reason alone, I was and and am wishing him well.

Far better joke than those Old MIT t-shirts

noreply@blogger.com (HoBs) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:13:00 +0000

I still have that shirt in my closet somewhere.

Chance Encounters

noreply@blogger.com (HoBs) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 15:38:00 +0000

(back from Asia, so will return to posting the backlog of posts I have)

A friend of mine related to me a few stories of random encounters with people he had not heard from in years. My response is that this happens so often, I am no longer surprised.

A girl I was in marching band with in high school in new jersey, who I never kept in touch with, I later bumped into on a random vacaction in banff canada, and then years later, she turns up as a student at the orientation picnic in the MBA program I teach in.

A key paper I cite in my dissertation, turns out to be written by one of R-'s classmate in med school, who wrote the paper with a darthmouth econ professor, and two weeks ago, the econ prof shows up to give a talk at Cornell. That econ prof's normal collaborator is the economist I worked with at the White House, who went to the same summer school I did in high school, which we found out since we were both being interviewed by the summer school director in the same week.

Sitting in a random starbucks in the upper west side in new york city, there were limited seats, so I shared a table with a guy who asked to borrow the book review from the sunday nytimes I was reading. He was looking for the review of a book he publishes. turns out he's a book agent for social science books. 3 days later, I am having dinner with a visiting harvard prof back in Ithaca, who is talking about his book agent, who sure enough is the guy I chatted with back at Starbucks.

A friend of mine from college, whom I hadn't seen or talked to since college turned out to live on my street in baltimore.

So what are the odds? I guess physicists call this a Fermi problem.

So let's say you have 4,000 acquaintances that you'd recognize and remember. (My high school had 300 people per class, I'd probably recognize all of them, plus a few hundred from adjacent classes. say 1000 total. then 1000 from college. 1000 from grad school. 1000 from work and otherwise).

Assuming most are yuppies, there are maybe 100,000 students who went to a top college per year. so 1,000,000 people within 5 years of you. so you probably know 0.4% of them. and if you include friends of friends, that's probably lots more. so given that you see say 50 yuppies in any given day, you have a 20% (50 * 0.4%) chance of bumping into a random person on any given day in a new place. Which doesn't sound too far off.

Healthy Eating on a Dollar a Day

noreply@blogger.com (HoBs) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 04:58:00 +0000

I have noted here in the past, that it is a fallacy that healthy food is more expensive than junk food (it seems that way because rich people like healthy foods and shop in expensive stores, while poor people like junk food and shop in cheap stores; but there is no particular reason why healthy food has to be expensive, see Chinatown for loads of cheap produce).

I have also noted that it is not that hard to feed yourself well on $3 a day. In response to all of these politicians looking like idiots by living for a week on the money people get for food stamps ($21 a week) and claiming it is impossible and that it leads to weakness and starvation, so in response I made up a shopping list of a variety of meals that aren't that far from what I normally eat for $21 a week.

So nice to know that I'm not alone. In fact this woman claims to be able to do it on $1 a day which impressed me.

But also just emphasized for me again that hunger in America is largely by choice (of course there are exceptions). This American Life story about a couple homeless guys emphatically makes that point that there is so much food available for the homeless that it is impossible to go hungry unless you choose to. As well as this photo I saw in the NY Times a while back, about people who have to skip meals to feed their children. The illustrating photo was a woman who claims she regularly skips dinner so her kids can eat. The thing was, that the woman in the photo was huge; she must have weighed at least 300 pounds.

Humans Can Multi-task!

noreply@blogger.com (HoBs) — Thu, 28 May 2009 22:13:00 +0000

Lifestyle gurus these days love talking about how multi-tasking is a myth, that people can't multi-task, but instead, just switch their attention rapidly between different tasks. And therefore we should do only one thing at a time.

Idiots.

That is multi-tasking. At least that's how computers do multi-tasking. (ok, there are exceptions, especially as computers take advantage of multiple processors) but that is by and large how all personal computers have handled multi-tasking. (that was one of the first lessons I learned about computers back when we were first upgrading from DOS to Windows 3.0... not even 3.1).

And if that kind of multi-tasking has worked for computers, I don't see why that's an argument that humans can't do the same.

A very dumb idea: make b-school like law/med school

noreply@blogger.com (HoBs) — Mon, 25 May 2009 04:10:00 +0000

The idea that we should "professionalize" business school so that it is more like med school or law school has been making the rounds recently (e.g. Time, NY Times, NPR, etc.). Whereas a true profession like law or medicine has a code of ethics designed to serve the greater good, business school is different because no such code exist.

Very large red alarms goes off for the economist in me at this idea. Because whereas others see professions as something noble, the economist sees a cartel. The standard view of professional societies (stemming from the medieval guilds) is that by regulating who can enter the market, they create a cartel that keep prices high by keeping people out. As Time noted, professionalization implies "a professional exam, a licensing board and exposure to malpractice," as institutions quickly become cooped by government. Economically, these institutions use government's coercive power to maintain their high prices. Some of the largest sources of dead weight loss and inefficiences in the economy are associated with the legal and medical industries.

That said, I am sympathetic to the benefits of monopolies. Like a benevolent dictator, a benevolent monopoly can often do the right thing, where a competitive market cannot (see Google for example). So maybe the lawyer and the medical cartel is justified, but the idea of professionalizing business so that you would need government approval to run any company is more than a little scary.

Star Trek Reviewlet

noreply@blogger.com (HoBs) — Fri, 22 May 2009 03:55:00 +0000

Saw it the other night. Sort of had to with a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes. I normally don't like movies with that time travel premise (perhaps the only exceptions are Harry Potter and 12 Monkeys) but aside from that I enjoyed it. It was a satisfying experience though the plot had much of the same campiness as the original show. The casting was pretty spot on. They are indeed trying to create a new franchise though it that might be weird having a series of movies where the actors are all doing impressions of the previous crew. This one was fine as an homage and I enjoyed the plentiful references, but not sure if they can do it again. Good special effects which is a first for star trek. Still lame a$$ fight choreography. Sulu's (played by Harold sans Kumar) allusion to fencing (see Naked Time from the original series) could have been awesome but was poorly executed.

An easily likable (hence the 98% rotten tomatoes score) but not a great movie.

Final Grade: B

When politicians argue, what they really believe rarely matters, all that matters is what they want.

noreply@blogger.com (HoBs) — Wed, 20 May 2009 02:11:00 +0000

Obama announced the intention to raise the requirements for average fuel economy standards.

Note this is much the same as the plan I helped develop for the Bush administration that got pooh poohed by the press. Obama wants 35mpg by 2016 and its get called historic, (we proposed a similar level by 2017, and the compromise with Congress came to 35 mpg by 2020).

The frustrating thing is that part of the defense for the increase that Obama and pundits have been using is that they are merely homogenizing standards since allowing different states to have different standards is highly inefficient.

Of course when Bush used that reasoning to block California from setting their own standards, this was roundly bashed by Obama and the media as impeding progress. The only reason different standards exist is because Obama overturned the Bush ruling.

How to fix the economy: On Transparency

noreply@blogger.com (HoBs) — Thu, 14 May 2009 16:38:00 +0000

When people ask my opinion as to what to do about the economy, I mostly punt the question. Arguing that is a macro question, and I gave up on studying it, because I think it is too hard a problem, not only for me to figure out, but even for the profession. I'm not sure anyone knows. But if pressed, one reform that does seem to be pretty easy to advocate is to increase transparency (this is a favorite prescription proposed by my students). Or perhaps not. As Truman famously lamented, there's no such thing as a one handed economist.

On the surface, transparency is good. It increases the free flow of information, and economic theory has told us that more information is almost always good, theory says that perfectly efficient markets depend on perfect information. And when information is hidden (i.e. when there is asymmetric information) you get market failures and inefficiencies. A practical implemenation of this idea in the financial sector that is often tossed around is to make more securities traded openly on exchanges rather than over the counter.

Of course thinking a little more deeply, there are problems with transparency. Partly, is the practical matter of standardizing incredibly complicated securities to put on an exchange. But more fundamentally there is the problem that transparency impedes the firms abilities to maintain trade secrets. Trade secrets, like patents, are another form of intellectual property protection (some argue they are the primary form of intellectual property protection given that the patent system is so broken), and though all intellectual property protection is bad for competition because it creates monopoly power and higher prices, it is good for innovation. So a byproduct of greater transparency could well be less innovation.

Two novel reasons for the industrial revolution: no sex and coffee

noreply@blogger.com (HoBs) — Thu, 07 May 2009 18:15:00 +0000

I listen to a lot of podcasts on my commutes. One that is not particularly good, but fills the time is a BBC podcast on recent pop-sociology called Thinking Allowed.

A couple recent episodes though postulated two novel reasons for the industrial revolution.

This is an oft studied question, since it seems to be a key piece of economic development. China led the world in economic development up until as late as 1800 when the industrial revolution allowed the UK and the Anglo- world to take a commanding lead, which it has yet to give up.

Donald (now Deirdre) McCloskey argues that it was the enclosure movement, the idea that whereas before fields were all public land, changes in law that made land private created the incentives for investment, and thus the revolution.

The two that were thrown out in recent episodes of Thinking Allowed:

1) No sex. The Victorian ethos that led to sexual repression created a torrent of creative energy that had no other outlet for release except in productivity. As Newton aprocryphally said on his deathbed that his greatest achievement was dying a virgin.

2) Coffee. The arrival of coffee from the New World and the spread of coffeehouses which replaced wine as the drink dujour was responsible for the great gains in productivity.

More reason to abolish the words billion and trillion from policy: Or why Gingrich and Waxman are morons.

noreply@blogger.com (HoBs) — Mon, 04 May 2009 00:44:00 +0000

I multi-task whenever I can, so at the gym, I normally do the elliptical with something to read, and then have tv on in the background, often c-span. So on a recent house hearing about climate change the following debate came up between Gingrich (uber-Republican) and Waxman (the Democratic sponsor of the climate change bill), I got more evidence why million, billion and trillion should be abolished from policy (see also here and here).

Paraphrased:

Gingrich: Your bill is going to cost Americans, half a trillion dollars over 10 years
Waxman: You are misinformed it is going to cost each person 40 cents per day
Gingrich: No, it's half a trillion!
Waxman: No it is 40 cents!
Gingrich: Poopy face
Waxman: Stupid Head

Ok, so they didn't use those words exactly, but that's what it sounded like. Of course 40 cents per American per day over 10 years is [drumroll please...] half a trillion dollars, but of course.

On Bull Shit: When Bull Shit has meaning.

noreply@blogger.com (HoBs) — Fri, 01 May 2009 03:36:00 +0000

While this article is a little harsh on the rarefied obtuse language favored by the literary theorists, it's still an interesting article.

While it is true that the language of literary theory is often obfuscating and it is often hard to tell good theory from bad theory so long as the same fancy words are used, as demonstrated by the column's writer, or by the physicist (Alan Sokol) that got what he called mumbo jumbo published in a literary theory journal, that doesn't mean it is all bad, it just means that it is an inexact art.

Reading what Sokol wrote which tried to combine ideas from quantum physics with words from literary theory, I actually think it contained useful ideas despite the author's protestations, and it doesn't demonstrate that literary theory is all bull shit.

What literary theory taught us is that the meaning of a work can be disconnected from the author's intentions. And many novels, works of music, paintings, have power and meaning far beyond what the original author foresaw. And there is nothing wrong in that. There is beauty in the stars without the need for intention (unless you want to claim that the beauty of the stars is evidence for God).

Also, I recently came across the Journal of Wine Economics (I was shocked that such a thing existed) and read an article on how in randomized controlled experiments, nearly all the judges at the most prestigious US wine competition gave identical wines significantly different scores, even when tasting then from the same flight. (This was a useful antidote from having to worry too much about taking wine too seriously).

However, while this study shows that taste is inexact, it doesn't show that there's no such thing as good wine and bad wine, just that there's a lot of noise.

And so just like it may be hard to judge good vs bad literary theory, it doesn't mean that all bull shit is without meaning.

(I've been meaning to read the book On Bullshit, been carrying it around, but haven't gotten around to it yet).

It isn't Easy being Green: and how feel-good environmentalism is usually dumb

noreply@blogger.com (HoBs) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:31:00 +0000

In class, I talk about how hard it is to figure out which activities are good for the environment, once the entire supply chain is factored in. And how common strategies to reduce your footprint are often dumb. In class, I talk about how ridiculous policies like banning bottled water (ala San Francisco) or banning air conditioning (Japanese government) are just incredibly dumb.

Part of the problem is that once you calculate the entire supply chain, it is unclear what practice is better for the environment. This recent nytimes article argues that steel water bottles are better than disposable plastic if you use it at least 50 times, though if you read the article carefully, if you wash your water bottle with hot water, then there is no benefit at all. The same is true for local food. Though you are not shipping your produce from Mexico, the fact that local food is often brought in smaller trucks and you drive more to buy it, means it is often worse for the environment.

The other part of the problem is that there are much cheaper and simpler ways to help the environment. For example, for about $20 you can take a ton of CO2 out of the atmosphere. Companies like Terra Pass will take your money and use it to plant trees or reduce landfill emissions or buy more fuel efficient stoves in poor countries.

So yes, you can reduce your carbon footprint by about a ton a year if you give up meat, or you can achieve the same effect for $20. If you value meat at less than $20 per year, than go ahead, but otherwise, that's not the best approach. There are of course other reasons to be vegetarian, just like I love local food.

Given the complexities, how do we make figure out what's right. Of course the easy economic approach is to make sure you pay for the carbon you are responsible for. This can be accomplished most simply with a carbon tax, or a little less simply with the cap and trade proposals currently on the table. That way all you have to worry about is the price, which encapsulates all the environmental costs within it.

Obama = Bush on trading liberty for safety

noreply@blogger.com (HoBs) — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 04:12:00 +0000

I have often used this forum to note that Bush = Gore and Bush = Kerry (note by transitivity, this implies that Obama=Bush=Gore=Kerry). Or in other words, people tend to commit the fundamental attribution error when evaluating presidents. They tend to attribute actions by presidents to the president's disposition, when in fact president's actions are often determined by circumstance, and thus different presidents often will make the same decision.

For example, while Bush was much lambasted by the media and by Obama for warrant-less wiretapping, presidential signing statements, extraordinary rendition, etc. Obama in his first few months have not only continued all of those practices by expanded their use.

Some are concerned, if not outraged and terrified. Though my interpretation is that if there is action (like warrant-less wiretapping) that two seemingly very different president's both agree on once in power, then maybe they have information on this we don't, and therefore maybe that means it is a very good idea.

For those concerned that we are trading "essential liberties" for "temporary safety" as Ben Franklin admonished, I just say the definition of essential is a mutable term, and is reevaluated with each generation. Just like our freedom of speech has been modified and adjusted over the years (you can't yell fire in a crowded theater, you can't threaten the life of a president, you can't spew racist speech, you can't libel, etc.) other rights are similarly re-evaluated with each generation. The constitution provides the president with the power to test these limits, though of course, it also provides for checks on this power.

new policy wonk blog KeithHennessey.com

noreply@blogger.com (HoBs) — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:17:00 +0000

Keith Hennessey, someone I used to work/with for at the White House (also a Stanford alumni) has been making the morning talking heads circuits recently. He was the National Economic Adviser, the position that Larry Summers now holds. To complement his punditry in today's new media age, he has a new blog.

This is his blog entry on gas prices based on a memo I wrote.

His latest entry on counting the under-insured is quite interesting, and contains lots of the other side of the story that we worked on producing under the W White House, but rarely gets play in the press. For example, he notes that of the 45 million without insurance, about a quarter are non-citizens, another quarter are automatically covered by government insurance even though they may not know it know it, but would if they walked into any hospital, and another quarter are young or with above average income.

Reminds me of another useful stat we found on minimum wage. Of those making minimum wage only 20% are in poverty, and only 20% of those in poverty make the minimum wage. Essentially most are well-off teenagers or people who may not really need the money.

An Economic Theory of Super Villains

noreply@blogger.com (HoBs) — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:16:00 +0000

Watching Watchmen (my Watchmen review here) recently reminded me of a theme of Batman (at least of the higher brow batman) found in Miller's Dark Knight Returns, and the more recent movie version, The Dark Knight, is that Batman "creates" his enemies. In Miller's Dark Knight Returns, it was a post-modern form of creation, a Hegelian thesis creating its antithesis (this was in the heyday of post-modernism, when people believed that the rules of literature could somehow be applied to reality). In Burton's film, it was a literal creation, Batman, dropped Jack Nicholson into a vat of chemicals, that turned him into the Joker. In the recent movie with Heath Ledger, it was somewhere in between, less literal, but also less literary, more sociological perhaps.

But I was wondering, could we have an economic theory of super villains. What would happen in our society if a super hero suddenly showed up. Can we think about this, Gary Becker Economics of Crimes and Punishments style. In some sense, a Batman, would effectively massively up the productivity of crime fighting technology, putting most crooks out of business. Essentially, by shifting up, the marginal cost of crime, Batman reduces the quantity of crime, but that also increases the marginal benefit of crime. Then, it becomes quite plausible that if the payoff to crime has gone up, the impact of Batman will cause talented people in other fields to shift professions, to take advantage of the high marginal benefits. Thus creating supervillains, villains who would have stayed out of crime before because the competition with the small time crooks kept profits in the crime industry too low.

This makes us wonder if it is possible then, that Batman actually makes crime worse. In a static world no. We are still at a low equilibrium for the quantity of crime. However, if talented people (who would otherwise have been at hedge funds or something) have now shifted to crime, and find that they are exceptionally good at it, thereby shifting the MB curve out, or the MC curve in, then maybe Batman can make things worse.

An Art Criticism Generator

noreply@blogger.com (HoBs) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:53:00 +0000

So a few friends of mine have started doing this annual creativity retreat, where they get a bunch of non-artists to just spend a weekend, doing art stuff. Here was my contribution: an art criticism generator, which also can be called ante-meta-art (or anti-meta-art), since meta art is about-art, ante-meta-art is about-art as art.

The words billion and million should be abolished from news coverage.

noreply@blogger.com (HoBs) — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 06:42:00 +0000

Ha. I've said before the words billion and million should be abolished from news coverage.

Movie Reviewlet: Watchmen

noreply@blogger.com (HoBs) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 04:00:00 +0000

I liked it, I didn't love it. It looked quite pretty, and had a good visual style. Not as good as 300 or Sin City, but a much harder subject matter, to translate the cheesy 4 colors of the original Alan Moore comic. It was a bit heavy-handed in its 80's references and its symbolism and its use of 80's music (which was a bit too obvious, a bit too loud; the nytimes was especially bemused by its use of 99 luft ballons. Even the normally background-y minimalist music it used called attention to itself given that it was a famous Philip Glass piece). I was especially amused by its blatant use putting the World Trade Center in the background of several scenes, with the express purpose of building the mood of unease that pervades the original book (albeit anachronistically, given the symbolism of the towers has changed much since 1985; also interesting contrast to spider man II which went out of its way to go back and digitally scrub all images of the World Trade Center from its movie).

As others all say, I agree, the opening montage was nice, and nice fake cameos of minor 80's celebs, like Annie Leibowitz, who serve as powerful signifiers. And as others have said, Rorsharch was especially well acted, he was the one part of the ending that moved me. And yes, the silk spectre-nite owl relationship was painful.

As for the new ending that was much talked about, it really maintained the same flavor as the original. Which is important because the ending is the heart of the movie. I also thought the ending was appropriate. a tidier way to do it, without introducing the deus ex machina of aliens. Though the ending fell flat for me. Perhaps because it is the kind of ending that once you know it, doesn't work for you anymore--you lose the oh shit-ness of it. Or perhaps because the movie dragged, or perhaps because it was the one part of the movie that didn't copy its dialogue from Alan Moore.

AO Scott called the ending juvenile, not just this movie, but the book as well. I remember being blown away by the concept when i was young. But maybe it is juvenile. I don't think so. But it forces me to reconsider. Because while it packs a helluva a bunch as narrative, it doesn't hold together upon further reflection. Human nature is not as simple or easily quelled as Moore implies.

This movie also made me appreciate the connection with Batman. Rorsharch and Nite Owl are two reflections of Batman, Nite Owl for his gadgets, Rorsharch for his Nietzchean upermensch sense of justice. This was highlighted by the use of the original 1980's burton batman theme song, and with the scene of Rorsharch enjoying the antagonism of his fellow inmates, echoing the scene in Batman Begins.

With time, my esteem of the movie has gone up. Reading the original again, I am amused at how close he stays to the original book. Probably the most faithful adaptation of any comic book. But it mostly works. Still, you walk away feeling you are missing impact, if that can be fixed, perhaps with more gore, perhaps with tighter writing, perhaps with tighter editing of the fatuous love scenes that slow the film down.

Final Grade: B+

My name on Amazon.com

noreply@blogger.com (HoBs) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:56:00 +0000

Actually, it is my friend Reza and his fiancee that has their book China in an Era of Transition: Understanding Contemporary State and Society Actors being published, but my quote is on the book jacket and thus on amazon.com, which is almost as cool:

“It is impossible to understand China's impact on global relations without understanding the interplay of the power structures that shape Chinese society. China in an Era of Transition provides important micro-analyses – on topics that range from intellectuals and ethnic minorities, to entrepreneurs and internet bloggers – illuminating the tensions that underlie the Chinese economic juggernaut; and in so doing, shatters the myth of the monolithic and unitary China.”

Quite bombastic, but figured that's appropriate for this sort of thing. Buy the book here, and I get a cut of the profits.

Two Visions of Healthcare reform: Bush v. Obama

noreply@blogger.com (HoBs) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 03:55:00 +0000

The NY Times recently laid out succinctly Obama's plan for healthcare. Something that sounds eminently reasonable, especially to an economist. Roll out a national system of electronic healthcare records, which will create a dataset that the government can spend $1 billion to analyze, so that they can design the proper incentives system to give doctors the right incentives to treat patients efficiently.

It all sounds very reasonable, especially to an economist. Because economists don't have tools to understand its central flaws: big government projects tend to screw up. A national electronic records system sounds eminently sensible, but the industry that creates such software systems (Enterprise Resource Planning ERP) is more known for its multi-billion dollar failures than its successes. The FAA has been trying to computerize for the past 40 years but so far is still using 40 year old technology. Plus, assuming that underpaid government bureaucrats can properly interpret the data and create the right incentives is a heroic assumption.

Seeing the Bush plan, first hand, you see a clear difference. It favored electronic records but it was hesitant to mandate a national system, preferring to make ways for private enterprise like google to solve the problem. It recognizes the failings of the free market (failings economists are quick to recognize) such as moral hazard, adverse selection, externalities, myopia, but also recognizes the main advantage, that competition leads to cost minimization, whereas lack of competition such as the case of government bureaucracy leads to potentially massive waste.

Play Magazine - RIP

noreply@blogger.com (HoBs) — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:21:00 +0000

Play magazine appears to be a casualty of the financial crisis which has hit the newspaper industry hard. And that is quite sad. Play is one of the magazines that the New York Times puts out 4 or so times each year, so that on any given Sunday, the New York Times comes both with its main magazine, and one of its targeted ones (e.g. Travel, Design, Style, etc.) and Play which covered Sports. The magazines are the main reason I subscribe to the Times.

I was recently reminded how way out of touch with sports I've become, while watching the superbowl. Back in college, still most of my friends followed sports, so I wound up watching as well, or at least keeping up so that I could talk about it. But for the past 8 years, I guess I've mostly been hanging out with academic types, who never talk about sports, which I'm cool with, but Play magazine was a nice way to stay somewhat in touch.

Play magazine was basically the sports magazine for over intelectualizing npr/nytimes readers. Its writers included people like David Foster Wallace and Steve Levitt who looked at how sports betting worked. Its articles dissected plays, analyzed the game theory of football play calling, and the physiology of sports.

You can see evidence of the cancellation by the articles appearing the regular magazine: the business of Roller Derby, or the use of serious statistics to analyze basketball; the article on NBA star Shane Battier by Michael Lewis was as much a lesson on conditional probability and marginal analysis as it was about basketball. So at least the articles are still being written hopefully.

Oh, and the magazine was pretty.

Great stuff. But I guess not much of a market. Ah well.

Diddit.com - The Ultimate for the Modern Obsession to Quantify all Experience

noreply@blogger.com (HoBs) — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:54:00 +0000

People have oft lamented the current generation's obsession to quantify all of its achievements. I remember when a friend of mine setup an online page to track how many UNESCO World Heritage sites his friends had been to, and how compelling it was to rack up a higher "score." Books for 1001 places to see/things to eat, etc before you die fill the bestseller list. Some may lament this obsession--I'm sure Sontag would, arguing we should live life in a state of Being as opposed to always counting--but I am happy that the new site diddit.com embraces it. It is a site of lists of life's experiences, designed to help you figure out new things to try, primarily by incentivizing you to fill up lists with your accomplishments. And of course, being a new web startup, in throws in a mix of social networking and Web 2.0.

I dunno, as an economist, I think quantification of stuff is great. It was nice going through a list of things to do before you die. I have always felt I've lived a pretty full life, but nice to see that out of the top 100 for example, I've done 80+, from try scuba, to dine at the White House, to be on tv, to see the redwoods of California, ride a horse, take a dance class, go hawaii, learn html, hit 21 playing blackjack, etc. Part of it is just quantification to make yourself feel good, but it does also introduce new things I want to do (run a marathon, visit the pyramids, visit every continent, go to the olympics, etc.) that I may not have thought of. Also a good chance to sit back and reflect on good memories, and good times.

The list of 100 things to eat is also fun, each bringing back a rush of memories (my first "real" tomato, fresh berries with R's aunt and uncle atop a mountain we spent 8 hours hiking, root beer floats with my grandmother in Taiwan at age 8, vodka shots at a party freshman year, grasshoppers at part of Jose Andres' contempo empire, shark's fin soup on my night in Beijing, single malt scotch at the scotch bar with R-'s friends in Baltimore, Abalone at our Hong Kong wedding banquet, the tasting menu at Jean Georges, Goulash in Hungary, rose water ice cream where I accidentally ate the cloth rose petal, Sacher Torte at the hotel Sacher in Vienna, deep frieds Snake from the art festival in Baltimore, GiFilte Fish with a couple jewish friends during passover, baked alaska on the cruise ship).

Kinda neat.

(And relevant to my research, there is a "showing" off angle to it. It is interesting to think about how conspicuous consumption works with experiential goods. Well you can still use experiential goods to signal, you just need the right opportunity to talk about it.)

Giving an A for effort

noreply@blogger.com (HoBs) — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 02:58:00 +0000

A recent NY Times article laments the fact that students these days have come to expect an A for effort.

Thinking about it, I'm actually ok with the idea of A for effort (there's the Marxist in me again), Assuming of course we could measure effort accurately, and they really put in sufficient effort. From a contract theory point of view, arguably grades are designed just to incentivize effort, and if they really put in maximum effort then an A makes sense.

Also, from a Rawlsian distributive justice point of view, it also makes sense. There's an interesting paper by John Roemer on how in a fair Rawlsian economy wages should be based only on effort. and things like innate ability and privleged background should all be subtracted out.

The only reason not to give the A for effort is if we believe our job is to provide accurate signals for employers or if it would be unfair to other students. Though perhaps the ability to put in effort is the only dimension that employers really care about. That is far more useful to them, than the ability to write essays about the fall of carthage or to derive Legrangians for maximization problems. There is evidence (that gladwell for example popularizes in his latest book) that innate ability doesn't matter too much, and that people we call geniuses like Mozart, are people who just had a low cost of effort. They only became geniuses after 10 years of hard effort and practice.

The virtues of Vista and the bounds of Smart Computing

noreply@blogger.com (HoBs) — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 21:51:00 +0000

I've been meaning to write an entry extolling the virtues of Windows Vista. On the whole, it is not especially whelming, though I do think that the degree of disdain it has received has been wholly unfair. I have two vista computers (clean installs) and neither has ever crashed. Whereas my iPhone crashes about once a week.

The main benefit is that it incorporates indexing into its directory system, so that searching files is fast. This has allowed me to adopt the google philosophy of "search, don't sort" which has saved me tons of time. Of course google desktop allowed you to do that in Windows XP, but this is just neater. After years of developing careful file saving habits (starting with our first DOS based x286 back when I was 10 or so), it is still nice to not have to worry so much any more. (I still am nostalgic sometimes for the abbreviations I developed back when file names were limited to 8 letters)

The other neat thing I discovered recently is that they now seem to incorporate some kind of "smart sorting" algorithm when you alphabetize a directory's contents. If you look at the picture, the files are sorted as:


lecture1.doc
lecture2.doc
lecture3.doc
lecture4.doc
lecture5.doc
lecture6.doc
lecture7.doc
lecture8.doc
lecture9.doc
lecture10.doc

While this is not strictly alphabetical (lecture10 should come after lecture1 and before lecture2) it is far more useful.

I used to be more diligent in naming things lecture01 and lecture02 to avoid this problem.

I used to worry when software tries to be "smart" and try to do things for me, because when software is smart, it makes it harder for me to be smart, and forces me to be lazy and stupid and just accept what it is doing for me. In this case, when I ask it to alphabetize, it doesn't really alphabetize, but instead tries to guess what I intend. But in this subtle way, I am quite pleased.

Google, too. I used to appreciate the elegance of google's original pagerank where sites were ranked based on how many other sites linked to it. It wasn't the perfect algorithm, but if you understood how it ranked pages, you could know its weaknesses, and could think for yourself how to be smart enough to circumvent them. Since it came out, google's search has adopted lots of proprietary algorithms that it hides from me, but on the whole, that's ok, because it works, so I don't mind being lazy.

Apple, though, goes too far in being "smart." It frustrates me that it thinks features like copy and paste and customization of just about anything on the iphone would be too confusing for me, and so it just decides what it think is best for me, instead of giving me a choice.

I guess it depends on personal preference. Hopefully there will always be room in the market for both.