2019 November Links

This is a post of links to research, blogs, articles, videos, etc. on topics I find interesting. I do this because I remember things better when I use them, and then I can better integrate them into my worldview. It also creates a stock of citations I can look back on, instead of struggling forever on google while I attempt to retrieve some study I read one time but can't remember where I found it.

Here we go...

Swearing Children

If my 5-year-old son told me, "it's a pretty damn beautiful day today" I wouldn't care. I would caution him against saying that word at school or around grandma, but if he wants to use the word damn in that way around daddy, then let the kid say damn.

If he told me the damn teacher wouldn't let him have candy, that would be a different situation.

Imagine the child who tugs at his mom's shirt and asks, "mommy? What does shit mean? The mother is aghast and tells her foul-mouthed spawn never to say that word. Or imagine the parent who shuts off the tv in the background because the children might hear a bad word. This kind of fretful inanity looks deeply superstitious to me. As if a mere utterance releases some literal toxin into the air. As if it casts a spell into the environment. These are situations where the parents appear just as juvenile as the children.

Incentives Matter (when I want them to)

When I listen to public discourse, I can't help but notice the tendency to argue incentives matter only when it's convenient for one's political positions.

Does taxing soda reduce sugar intake and obesity?

Will a carbon tax reduce driving?

Will a wealth tax reduce investment from the very rich?

Will longer sentencing reduce crime?

Will abortion restrictions increase at-home abortions?

Do seatbelt laws increase car accidents?

Do welfare programs increase unemployment?

Does minimum wage reduce hiring?

Does payment increase blood donation?

Do zoning regulations decrease the supply of housing?

Hijabs are just another socially enforced covering

If aliens came to earth, they'd probably be naked all the time. That's okay I don't mind. Alien culture is different from mine and when I visit the alien planet and see all the naked aliens I'll be accepting of their culture.

But I wonder if they'll be accepting of mine? In most human society acceptance, respect, dignity, employability, marriageability, physical safety, enfranchisement, social mobility, access to social institutions, freedom, and autonomy hinge upon our daily, unwavering, public adherence to clothing. We humans are told we absolutely must cover certain body parts. Rationalizations aside, this rule is actually quite arbitrary but the consequences of not complying so are severe.

An alien may object to such an oppressive norm. The aliens may form activist groups to free humans from the injustice of clothing. They may promote social media campaigns to liberate the humans from pants. They may share shameful pictures of parents dressing their babies in clothing and remark upon how these kids are being indoctrinated from their earliest ages. And honestly, they might be right, but so many cultures have so many rules like this. Just because as an outsider you can identify some of the arbitrary social rules of other cultures, that doesn't mean the ones you're absorbed in and unable to see aren't just as bad.

This is how I feel about Westerners criticizing Muslim cultures for enforcing Hijabs.

Your vote counts, it just doesn't matter

Elections are a winner-take-all system. If 55% of the country voted for candidate A and 45% of the country voted for candidate B, we get 100% candidate A. This is different from a market where if I spend $1 on ice cream, I get $1 of ice cream. Or a charity where if I give $1 to Malaria Consortium, they receive $1.

This isn't hard to figure out which is why I'm puzzled when people repeat the line, "every vote counts," as if that's an argument for voting. Sure they literally counted your vote, but that doesn't mean your vote mattered.

Pricing Life even when you don't want to

Last time on My Beautiful Bubble:

A robot tries to save Will Smith and a 12-year-old girl from a sinking vehicle. While the robot is smart enough to give an 11% survival chance for the girl, and 45% survival chance for Will Smith, for some reason it is not smart enough to weigh the child more heavily than the adult. But even if it was, Will Smith would probably still be the right decision.

I assume the problem here is with whoever invented the robots. He probably felt yucky attaching numbers to human lives so he made the robots evaluate every human being homogeneously. This mistake must have cost millions of life-years across the planet. But who cares? We wouldn't want Mr. Robot inventor guy to feel bad about pricing human lives.

All this talk about weighing the relative value of human beings is starting to make me feel like a bad person. Let's talk about that.

The Price of Life and that Scene from I, Robot

In the movie, I Robot, Will Smith tells a story about a robot who only has time to save Will Smith or a 12-year-old from drowning,

"I was the logical choice. It calculated that I had a 45% chance of survival. Sarah only had an 11% chance. That was somebody's baby. 11% is more than enough. A human being would've known that."

My GPS can be programmed to find me the closest restaurant, but not the closest restaurant that I like. Hypothetically, there's no reason why a GPS couldn't be able to do that. It just has to integrate preferences into its algorithm to trade off value and distance. So the GPS knows to direct me to FiveGuys instead of Arby's, but not if FiveGuys is more than 8.2 miles further away.

Google. Make this.

My GPS is stupid because it's 10 years old, it doesn't have access to my own personal indifference curves (or does it?), and what it would take to make it smarter in this way isn't worth the cost. The robots from the movie, however, are dealing with human lives, which is really important. It's also a more broadly recognized value to prioritize children over adults. This is an easy problem to solve.

The Dog Whistle Machine and Barack Obama: A Conversation

I already wrote about the Self-Reinforcing Dog Whistle Machine a few times. Most recently, I used the concept to describe the "Barack Obama as antisemitic" argument. If you package several ambiguous examples of antisemitism together it starts to look like overt antisemitism. That's because we naturally interpret each piece of evidence not in a vacuum, but in light of a reputation established by all the other pieces of information.

In case my point isn't coming across, in this post I want to oversimplify with a fake conversation,

The Dog Whistle Machine and Barack Obama

The Self-Reinforcing Dog Whistle machine describes a phenomenon where we smear someone's reputation with accusations of dog whistles, but only interpret the person as dog-whistling because their reputation is so smeared.

The classic fuel of the Self-Reinforcing Dog Whistle Machine is racism. Follow someone around for long enough documenting all the ambiguously racist stuff they do, and you can make it seem like a pattern of racism. But some groups load the Dog Whistle Machine with other fuels to destroy people they don't like.

This website loads the Dog Whistle Machine with anti-semitism and uses it on Barack Obama. Here are some quotes: