Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy

Visited the Philly Art Museum yesterday. Besides their two Roberto Mattas, a couple pieces caught my eye; Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy were married, and produced cool stuff. A nice one from Sage:

Decoding Eco's Irony

The following from a Spiegel interview (hat tip to Marginal Revolution).

SPIEGEL: Why are these lists and accumulations so particularly important to you?

Eco: The people from the Louvre approached me and asked whether I'd like to curate an exhibition there, and they asked me to come up with a program of events. Just the idea of working in a museum was appealing to me. I was there alone recently, and I felt like a character in a Dan Brown novel [emphasis mine - MC]. It was both eerie and wonderful at the same time. I realized immediately that the exhibition would focus on lists. Why am I so interested in the subject? I can't really say. I like lists for the same reason other people like football or pedophilia. People have their preferences.

He's either being more humble than he should be, or profoundly ironic in a way I can't quite unpack.

Specialization and Gaming the System

All professions are conspiracies against the laity.
- George Bernard Shaw

One of the problems of specialization, and of living in a literate society of laws, is that specialists use their expertise to game the system at the expense of the majority. This is exacerbated because very important commercial and legal events are big and therefore, for most people, infrequent, and because specialists form effective guilds to exclude nonspecialists (for example, in academia). There are specialists involved in conducting these transactions and because of Pareto-principle-type effects, 20% of the causes (read "merchants") are responsible for 80% of the effects.

Consequently in these transactions, the most important that we conduct in our lives, there is usually a large asymmetry in experience, skill, and confidence. If you're buying a house or condo, you could quite literally be hundreds of times less experienced than the real estate agent (or infinitely, if it's your first time); if you're buying from a developer, the seller is also in a better position. Same going to the dentist; same testifying in court about something; same taking your car to a new shop for a big repair. I've never bought a transmission before, I don't know what I'm doing, and I just want to get out of there with as little damage to my bank account as possible. Because the transactions are infrequent, the chance that I will have repeated encounters with these merchants is low, so from a game theory standpoint they have no reason not to cheat me.

Perhaps the worst such example is legislation. Few citizens of democracy have the time, expertise, or inclination to read laws. Worse, today, no one even makes an effort. The model that modern democracy is based on is Athens, where you could show up to give your two cents, and law and knowledge weren't so specialized as to require two thousand page amendments to prior multi-thousand page laws. That is no longer the world we live in. An oral culture was good enough for the Iroquois constitution but not for more complex Athens. Have there been oral cultures in the past limited in specialization and growth because there's some fundamental upper limit to social complexity of oral cultures? In the same vein, is mere static writing no longer enough for twenty-first century democracies like the U.S?

There is also the problem of separation of gamers, and gamers' interests, from constituents. A large democracy invariably creates a class of legislators and lobbyists (the gamers) who write the laws. The larger the democracy, the smaller the body of decision-makers relative to the population, the greater that the Pareto principle will magnify inefficiencies and bad decisions and holes that in an Athens or Andorra-sized democracy could have been identified and rectified more quickly. The concern is that the legislative class's interests diverge so much from the people they are supposed to represent that the system is no longer representative. (Added later: one possible solution from Conor Friedersdorf here).

The term "broken" is thrown about in political discourse. If size (even if not complexity) differs between democracies, it may be interesting to compare the functioning of the legislature of a small democracy (Athens or Andorra) to that of a large one (the U.S. or Japan), though again what would be interesting would be to compare the functioning of legislatures, although one problem is I don't think we know how to devise a metric unit of measure for legislature function.

The accumulation of these impenetrable strata of the laws which are in theory binding us is a problem in that the current process produces a corpus that is necessarily rife with inconsistencies (especially regarding the use of precedents in the judicial branch); therefore, a worthy goal is a "legislative programming language" that would have to compile successfully on top of the current constitution and set of laws in order to be adopted. It's not compiling? Too bad - root through preceding laws and find the inconsistency; fix it, or fix your new law. We also would have to be less concerned that modern Supreme Court jurisprudence doesn't just amount to some kind of legal sophistry to go through contortions harmonizing what's written in the Constitution against what most of us agree is a reasonable decision, somehow even though we're centuries away from the ideals of the men that first put pen to paper.

But what we're concerned with is not so much having a neat constitution with its i's dotted and t's crossed, but rather one that works predictably. That is the real reason it's so unnerving that legislators do not and in reality cannot read the bills they pass. Robin Hanson has suggested that we hold policy-makers accountable for their policies - that is, have every new law or policy contain its own success criteria, and then follow it up (which he terms futarchy). The penalty for lawmakers - and ultimately, even voters - who are wide of the mark would be decreasing influence (i.e., at 18 we all start out getting 100 votes, but if you vote for a bunch of referenda that don't do what they said they would do, in the next election you only have 50). In essence, it's a prediction market, where the bet is made with future influence - and status, if you're a politician. Hanson describes futarchy as distinct from democracy (in my opinion to be provocative) but I think it's entirely compatible with democracy. Most modern democracies have adjusted the franchise repeatedly in the past to improve themselves. Is there a reason we should stop now?

World Values Survey Results

Have you seen the results of the World Values Survey?

The existence of this data makes it easier to determine the correlation of values, and the institutions dependent on them, with development and (most importantly) happiness. It's a bit of a coordination game, that is, a chicken-and-egg question: how exactly would a person in rural Zimbabwe go about obtaining self-expressive secular/rationalist values?

I do find it curious that in measures of quality of life, transparency, etc. the ranking organizations tend to be in Scandinavia, and the countries that typically do the best are in (drum roll) Scandinavia. Have you also noticed that in intra-US QOL measures, the Upper Midwest seems to do amazingly well? As I recall the survey organization is in Madison. This of course is possible, and you could say that the better-educated, more democratic, and more concerned with human welfare is a country, the more likely it is to have such organizations. Assuming that self-expression and rationalism are the good ends of the two dimensions on the values survey, Northwest Europe wins out again - although the executive board of the WVS has members from the US, Germany, Turkey, Spain, and elsewhere.

Added later: I was looking at this chart again and specifically looking at the ex-communist boundary. That's another way of asking how much of an impact a communist government might have on a culture. I'm typically a hard sell when it comes to arguments that a government can change the underlying culture (or even work well with it - witness democracy in Iraq). It's hard to tell, because the ex-communist countries are geographically adjacent, although the fancy footwork boundary around China, Korea and Taiwan is interesting.

Critical Thinking and Rejection of Received Wisdom in Greek Myth

Perseus knows from the conventional wisdom that fighting Medusa is a fool's errand, that to look in her eyes is death; yet he can't help himself, and in spite of common sense, he sets off to kill her. Too clever for his own good, he takes a polished shield that shows her reflection. Not only does he succeed in his mad quest as a result of this ingenuity, afterward he runs around using her head as an ugly-laser.

King Leonidas of Sparta goes to the Oracle to ask what he should do. The Oracle tells him either Sparta will fall, or you will die. Disgusted that a Greek oracle would suggest to a fellow Greek that they lay down in front of Xerxes, Leonidas leads the Spartans at Thermopylae. Whatever part of that story is real, we know that a) Leonidas really did lead the Spartans to fight and prevail against the Persians at Thermopylae, and b) the story as it's been handed down contains Leonidas's rejection of the Oracle. Because of this, Western civilization exists as we now now it.

Odysseus was told that no man could resist the call of the Sirens. Like a smartass he tells his men to cover their ears, and bind him firmly to the mast of the ship so he can hear them without jumping overboard. He hears the Sirens and once the ship has passed out of earshot he is no worse for the wear, though through his innovation he has experienced something supposedly fatal to mortals and defied the natural order.


Why Set Up Conventional Wisdom to Only to Reject It?

One of the functions mythology accomplishes, in its more coherent moments, is to transmit mores. Most of the time this is clear. Listen to Jehovah; if, despite direct commands from the Almighty, you give in to temptation like Lot's wife did, you will be smitten. Clear enough - which is why some of the Greek myths start to seem very strange indeed. Why would Greek myths so often set up a value or more, and then show how moral or cosmogonic authority can be dismissed with critical thought and persistence?

Imagine that, like Perseus, Lot were celebrated for overturning the established order, and doing an end-run around God by giving his wife a mirror with which to look back at burning Sodom. The Old Testament would have a different flavor.


Is This Aspect of Greek Myths Unique Among Ancient Cultures?

Is it possible that the Greeks were unique in incorporating directives to critical thought in their myths so early? To do this concretely, you would be forced to invoke some established wisdom, and then show how a hero could succeed by applying a new solution to an old problem. I have often wondered if the impact of Athens on the modern world was not a coincidence of history, that they were fetishized by the later Roman Empire who spread their work around Europe and the Middle East and it could have just as easily been the Lydians or the Cyreneans. (I've had the same questions about whether grapes are really any more characterful as the basis of a fermented beverage than say, apples.) If the Greeks were unique in so early celebrating as virtues critical thought and the rejection of static groupthink, this constitutes one argument for the uniqueness of the classical period and its contribution to world history.


Could Greek Myths Be a Palimpsest of Bronze Age and Classical Mores?

Another and not necessarily mutually exclusive explanation is that what we're seeing are bronze age myths with the standard structure of human fables, plus a layer added later, during the classical period.

In this view, maybe in the original "pre-rationalist" Mycenaean version, Perseus kills Medusa by luck or resists her power because he's Zeus's son, and the mirror trick was added later. Jason and the Argonauts encounter the Siren. As royalty (authority), Jason is able to outplay the Sirens, and the sailor who jumps off his ship is saved not by his own cleverness, but by a god. For this reason it's worth investigating whether the passage of Odysseus through the Sirens was a late addition to the Odyssey.

It should be stressed that this kind of shift-in-values-over-time is often investigated in epic works that seem to have accreted narrative from temporally-separated contributors, Beowulf being one example. Another is the Mayan Popol Vuh, which features Twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque defeating a whole pantheon of gods. Westerners don't typically draw a distinction between classical and post-classical Mayan periods, and the Popol Vuh is a K'iche' story from a post-classical culture in the Western highlands, separated by several centuries and more than a hundred miles from the much more famous earlier religious centers in the Peten lowlands. The interpretation is that the K'iche' were mocking the religion of their predecessors by incorporating its figures into their own myths and denigrating them.

It's worth noting that Beowulf and the Twins of the previous examples are "normal" exemplars of virtue who, like the heroes of the vast majority of human mythology, succeed by dint of their adherence to concrete ideals and their position within an authoritarian hierarchy (royal or divine heredity, or a mandate from a god or king). They aren't smartasses like Perseus and Odysseus.

Economic Rationality Index

It's been fashionable to point out that Homo economicus is not a fully rationally self-interested animal. Kahneman and Tversky were instrumental in waking us up to the reality that the human brain is not a universal well-rounded problem-solving machine - and of course, as a product of the accumulated exaptations and legacy systems and local optima and ad hoc functionalities of evolution, why would we expect it to be? Rather than serving as cause for hand-wringing, appreciating this fact lets us either do something to address and correct it, or at least to call it out and create hacks and workarounds. To me this is the promise of the Late Enlightenment.

I recently moved from the Bay Area to San Diego. Looking at gasbuddy.com, I noticed that the spread on gas prices in San Diego seemed greater. My experience of actually price-comparing gas stations has borne this out. There is greater variation over smaller areas in San Diego than there is in San Francisco. Sometimes there are ten cent differences at service stations across the street from each other. What's more amazing is that there are quite often cars filling up at the more expensive one. I've been tempted to walk up and ask people why. Clearly, this bothers me.

This suggests a way to compare the degree of rational self-interest between two geographic areas - take the price on 87 for all the gas stations within two predetermined square miles. Find the standard deviation for each square mile. Take repeated readings over some period of time and average, if you're worried about changes in supply cost rippling through the market and driving up the SD out of instability, rather than irrationality (non-100%-efficient markets is not that same as irrationality). Then look to see if the localities are consistently different. If there are consistent differences, next step: does it correlate with certain chains? Or with demographics of the area (education, income, income distribution)? Or some cultural intangible (i.e. San Diego is too relaxed for its own good)?

The square mile should be controlled so that there aren't geographic barriers (busy highways or streets, water, etc.) that would actually make consistent price differences more rational. The differences I've seen are ones between gas stations across the street or opposite ends of the block from each other. Since the index would consist purely of posted price as reported online, rather than sales, it's assuming that people are actually buying gas at the more expensive stations. But unless there's some bizarre detail at work here, this is a fair assumption - service stations aren't going to set a price at which nobody buys gas. (The bizarre detail could be something like - the local area is dominated by a single chain that profits from products other than gasoline, so its prices are less sensitive to actual consumer behavior; or, a frequent-flyer style gas club not available in both cities. This is why I should actually ask people what they're thinking filling up at the more expensive station, because maybe they are actually thinking something.)

In fairness, I'm very sad to have left San Francisco, and very eager to jump on anything that points the Bay Area or its residents as better than San Diego. But what I've observed anecdotally suggests strongly that San Diegans just can't be bothered to drive an extra 2 minutes to save three dollars. That is to say, it seems that San Diegans are truly less rationally self-interested than San Franciscans, and this provides a way for me to make sure it's not just my own confirmation bias operating against poor San Diego.

The next step is to actually do the calculation, which will take a while. If you run across this post and know of a similar index that's already established, please comment.

Sports, Conquistadors and Status

I'm posting a comment I left at Liberal Order. The blogger shows some amazing bankruptcy statistics for retired NFL players (78%!) and then does an estimate of the actual value of a career in baseball, from the perspective of a high school athlete - $86.

So why do people keep trying to get into sports? I think it's two things. First, it's partly the conquistador effect. An anomalous number of successful (read: more ruthless than average) conquistadors came from the Extremadura region of western Spain, Pizarro and Cortez among them. Extremadura is still poorer than the rest of the country, though beautiful in the spring. Going to the New World was a ticket out. Same for post-coal-and-steel Western Pennsylvania ("the cradle of quarterbacks") and the continuing disproportionate contribution of athletes to professional sports from inner cities and poor rural areas in general.

The second reason people want an $86 career is the Robert Franks reason, status. Adulation by people back home, by kids, and (most importantly) by the ladies has a concrete value to most people. Gentlemen: as a single man, would you consider switching to a job with a lower salary if it meant more access to females?