Casey Zak’s Mighty Blog

Got something stupid to say, and nowhere to say it?  Now is the time and here is the place.

Warning: The following is entirely and completely distasteful.

Recently released interviews reveal that Fox News viewers saw a different Senator Obama than they expected in the first debate.

“I always thought you pronounced his name ‘Osama’!” exclaimed Peggy Fincherton, 42, a housewife from Twashookie, AR. “And really, he looks so much better without that turban on. He’s not even that black!”

“You know, he never once threatened to destroy civilization,” noted Randy Spears, 38, a truck driver from Pisscrapalot, LA. “I mean, Rush always says about how the liberals want to destroy civilization, and Obama’s so liberal, you know? But I guess as long as he’s not marrying dudes, I’m okay with him. I mean, he can grow out of the whole black thing.”

Cody Schittbranes, a marmot-scraper from Balls, TX, found that Obama passed his scientific litmus test. “He didn’t try to sound all smart, didn’t talk none that bullshit about the world bein millions years old, or how we come from apes, or what revolves around what. He ain’t all uppity like they said.”

In contrast, viewers seemed positively excited by Sarah Palin’s debate performance.

“I got to admit, I likes lookin at her,” said Chuck Chuck, 42, of Likimudbut, FL. “I do wish she would shut that god damn mouth, though.”

Patricia Gentlewort was defensive and effusive at the same time. “It was, like, totally unfair, you know, with that woman, and the questions. This time, it was like, it’s me, you know? And I’m talking to you, you know? I mean, you can’t fake that kind of real.”

But the last word of the day went to Bubba Clinton, 59, reportedly from Big Rocks, AK. “Yes, she was rambling and incoherent. But it takes a remarkable woman to head this country. And I can tell you from experience that this woman can give head like no other. She could take the chrome off a truck hitch.”

As I’ve thought about it over time, I’ve come to believe that the evolutionary view of the natural world implies a ”hierarchy of being” in which sentience is a matter of degree, not a yes or no sort of thing.

As with most sort of primitive insights that I have, this one has been taken and developed by a smarter person.  Robert Freitas Jr. developed something called the Sentience Quotient, which he defines as the logarithm of information processing rate to brain size.  Humans have an SQ of around +13, with most animal life clustered within a few points of us.  Plants range from -2 to +1 (carnivorous plants at the +1), and computers range from +6 to +9.  In our universe, the physial limits for SQ are from about -70 to +50.

Freitas’ SQ is not a perfect measure, and not even likely a good one.  But it offers a useful starting point to begin contemplating the implications of a hierarchy of being.

Freitas has naturally done this as well.  Remarking on the possibilities of interspecies communication, he says:

At present, human scientists are attempting to communicate outside our species to primates and cetaceans, and in a limited way to a few other vertebrates. This is inordinately difficult, and yet it represents a gap of at most a few SQ points. The farthest we can reach our “communication” with vegetation is when we plant, water, or fertilize it, but it is evident that messages transmitted across an SQ gap of 10 points or more cannot be very meaningful. What, then, could an SQ +50 Superbeing possibly have to say to us?

That last question suggests many compelling possibilities.  For starters, consider the numerous religious accounts of interactions with deities, which are often described as being overwhelming, ecstatic, and awesome.  What if some of these experiences were interactions with superintelligent beings?  Wouldn’t it be possible that the ecstatic love and sometimes inspired wisdom of saints reflects a futile effort to express what has been communicated?  A sort of “fallible revelation”?

Fallible revelation would be expected to create the typical religious disenchantment of critical thinkers, as religious texts accumulated flawed communication and fradulent misrepresentations over time.  In my experience, even if they believe in the existence of God, most critically minded people do not entirely accept the notions of God advanced by major religions.  The major world religions all have a bit of institutionalized illogic and immorality to them, which inevitably grates on the critical mind.  Nevertheless, even the most critical people also typically find certain elements of religious expression that possess special depth.

To take this a step further, let’s combine the notion of SQ with a touch of theoretical physics.  In brane cosmology, the universe exists as a restricted mathematical form (a brane) inside a higher dimensional space (the bulk).  Our physical reality of matter and force can be affected by interactions with the bulk and other branes.

In this context, consider the possibility that there are other branes with much higher dimension and more permissive physics than our own.  These could allow the evolution of life with an SQ greatly beyond that which is possible in our own universe, and that could interact with us in ways we might not readily comprehend.  Though it’s beyond our answering, we can at least ask the question: what would be the thoughts and perogatives of such a being?

To me, it is entirely plausible that such a being might create something like our universe as a form of artistic expression, a speculative exploration of creative possibility.  The intention behind such art would naturally be beyond our understanding.  Nevertheless, like fish coming to the surface to solicit food from humans, we might be struck with an incommunicable intuition that some form of intention drives the phenomena our existence.

The direction of this speculation is obvious: it is scientifically possible, and may even be quite probable, that our own existence takes place in the shadow of much higher beings that can only be described by the ineffable term “gods”.  That is not a statement of faith.  It is just a statement of possibility that I find somewhat compelling.

I secretly love late-night commercials and infomercials.

You know how people sometimes make very simple errors in reasoning, like screwing up 2+2 or something, after which they smile and laugh and say, “Gee, that was dumb!”  Infomercials take that same amusement and stretch it out for half an hour.  Infomercials also have a weird sort of honesty in that their deceit is so straightforward.  They present the familiar consumerist myth in a refreshingly naked form, offering total happiness from a useless product.  Finally, the hypothetical person being targeted by infomercials is a totally hilarious creature, a person of pure id, full of animal fascination and desire, but totally unthinking.  In other words, the white trash ubermensch.

For illustration, here’s a quick rehash of some of my favorite infomercials, with some analysis here and there: 

1.  Push Up Handles (handles that go on the floor)

Tom:  “Do you find it difficult to do push ups?  Have you always assumed that this is because you are lazy and weak?  Well, let me ask you this: Where do you grip the floor?”

Katie:  “Grip the floor?  Why, I can’t!  There’s nothing to grab on to!” (Woman’s hands slip frantically on floor; she falls on her face, winces, rubs hurt spots.)

Tom:  “Exactly.  But that’s not the case anymore.  We had a team of top engineers and Navy Seals work together to design these — (holds up little handles) — space aged exercise facilitators that make push ups as easy as 1-2-3!”

Average Sounding Guy:  “I used to be fat, stupid, and unemployed. (Picture of fat guy in dirty wifebeater).  Then, I got this amazing system.  (Picture of super-athelete doing smooth pushups on handles).  Now look at me!  (Picture of guy in Ferrari with top down, large-breasted blonde in bikini in passenger seat).

2.  Thermo-Kleen (plain detergent that guy is really, really excited about)

“I’m sure you’ve seen detergent before.  And you probably know that they all have the same basic ingredients. 

But you’ve never seen anything like Thermo-Kleen!  Just look at this shirt (show wrinkled dirty shirt).  All you have to do is put it in your washing machine, add Thermo-Kleen, and presto!  Now it’s clean! (show clean shirt)

I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking, ‘But all detergents do that.’  But have you ever thought about how exciting that is?  I mean, just look at this (show picture of dirty shirt)!  Now look again!  (picture of clean shirt)  Isn’t that just the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen!  I’ve got to tell you, I’ve seen some pretty amazing things in my life.  But I’ve never seen anything that could compare to the staggeringly awesome cleaning power of Thermo-Kleen!  It has the heaven-sent miraculous power of clean!”

3.  Money Making System (Guy who wants to give away a priceless secret for $99.95)

Man:  “Do you not like being poor?  You know, I used to be poor and miserable, just like you.  Then I found the secret to unlimited wealth!  It’s all right here in this book.  Would you like unlimited wealth?  Why, then just buy my book and learn my secret!”

Woman:  “I was poor as poor can be.  But then I got this book, and then I was like, ‘Wow, now I’m totally rich!’”

4.  Caulk Scraper (A simple plastic square for like $40, designed to solve the existential problem of messy caulk)

“Tired of messy caulk-covered hands?”  (Show picture of hands covered in viscous white goop, shaking slowly with intense disgust, goop slowly dripping off)

“Well, never again with the amazing Caulk Scraper 2000!”  (Show picture of simple plastic square scraping off excess caulk from tile, and then happy clean hands up in front of camera)

5.  Hot Girls Line

Several bikini-clad women lean around suggestively on a leather couch.

“Hey there, big boy.  You know, we’re all waiting here to talk to you.” (Is it really so hard for clans of half-naked beautiful women to find late night companions that they take out commercials on late-night cable TV?)

“Call now.  Don’t make us wait any longer.”  (Wait — you girls made this commercial and knew it would take days to get to me.  Obviously, you’ve got some patience.  What’s a few more seconds?  For that matter, why the commercial?  Why don’t you just come and get me when I’m out at bars looking for you?)

Much like everything in American life over the past decade or so, there are two competing narratives to explain our current crisis — the “incompetent” and “malicious self-interest” narratives. 

Under the “incompetent” narrative, financial executives simply did not understand the new risks posed by their evolving business models, and their fallible judgment led to our present difficulty.  The incompetent narrative suggests that we need more regulation, as executives of major financial institutions should not be permitted to take risks which they do not understand and which are deeply injurious to public welfare.

The ”malicious self-interest” narrative holds that financial executives did understand the risks of their operations.  However, the bonus-heavy structure of their compensation incentivized them to pursue high short-term profits at the expense of long-term viability.  In this narrative, the deaths of Lehman, Fannie, and Freddie were not accidents; they were murdered for profit.

I think the accumulated evidence of the past decade suggests that the second narrative is at work.  This type of event — the socially harmful destruction of a major company by self-interested executives — has been repeated over and over in recent years in many different industries, and its effects keep growing in toxicity. 

The “malicious self-interest” narrative is not just a regulatory problem.  It is a cultural problem.  We live in a culture whose organizing principle is “greed is good”; that an individual’s pursuit of wealth at all costs is not only permissible, but laudable and virtuous.  You can see this principle every day on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, and in the speeches of politicians on both sides of the aisle.  This notion is childish and destructive.  No serious economic thinker has ever embraced it, and no civilization has ever been built on it.

The rise of America was driven by a spirit of federation and unity, a willingness to throw all our chips in the same pot and to share both success and struggle with each other.  We are tottering today because we have turned antisocial self-interest into a public virtue.  We rose by binding ourselves together with one another.  If we fall, it will be as individuals.

Bill Kristol has an op-ed in today’s NYT where he parses a Barack Obama commencement address and finds several glaring ommissions.  Among other things, Obama forgot to mention that his $14,000 salary as a grass-roots activist was a competitive inflation-adjusted entry level wage in today’s economy.  He forgot to mention that he spent two years doing other things after college besides activism.  But the greatest sin of all is that Obama forgot — gasp! — to list military service when ticking off a list of public service options.

Let’s think about those criticisms.  Obama’s $14,000 salary wasn’t nothing, but I’m sure it was a fraction of what he was making at one of his post-college jobs, a research associate at Business International Corporation.  Does he need to be starving and naked in the streets in order to have made an economic sacrifice?  Oh, and the other post-college job that Obama held during the two-year gap between college and activism in Chicago?  Obama worked for NYPIRG.

Finally, let’s think about military service.  Is parsing a commencement address for any and all errors and omissions the way to infer Obama’s opinions on military service?  I mean, look hard enough and you’ll find something missing from any speech by any candidate to support whatever view you like.  Reading into such ommissions is like a interpreting a Rorschach, and says more about the analyst than the candidate.  If you want to know whether he supports our troops, look at his direct statements and actions.  Like his support for the GI bill vs. McCain’s opposition to it.

This sort of politics — the deliberate cultivation of misperceptions — is certainly not without precedent, and it will always be present in a democracy.  The problem is that thanks to guys like Kristol, it has become the discursive style of the entire Republican establishment.  Republicans now think more about how to spin public opinion than what they’re doing.  Over time, this inversion of priorities leads to a departure from principles.  You wind up with a “conservative” party that supports huge government, crippling deficits, the elimination of civil liberties, torture, foreign policy adventurism, et cetera.

This was not always the way of things.  There has long been a sort of Goebellian subculture within the Republican party (in counterpoint to the liberal PC thought police), but it traditionally served to advance core conservative principles.  Recall, for example, its use in advancing the “Contract with America” and the Republican Revolution of 1994.  The problem has been that with the Bush administration, Republicans became tied to a whole series of crappy policies that violate classic conservative principles.  The propaganda arm fell in line and committed itself to defending these policies (recall Rush Limbaugh’s infamous complaint about having to “carry the water”).  As a result, the entire party is now lost in a political fog of war, often using its considerable polemical weaponry to attack positions that are essentially conservative.

A movement can only lose its soul in this way when those at the forefront have no regard for its principles.  To wit, witness Bill Kristol, conservative intellectual Godfather, attacking a man who certainly outranks most of us in terms of patriotism and sacrifice for the common good not by questioning his policies, but by questioning his patriotism and the nature of his sacrifices.  Now, Obama is far from being a conservative.  But to my mind, a man who attacks the patriotism of a citizen on the basis of his considerable public service is farther still.

In response to faculty criticism during my qualifying presentation, I’m presently developing a model which formalizes my thoughts on how consumption, investment, financing, and risk should move together.

I’m about the billionth guy in economics to do this.  Everyone’s take is of course slightly different from the others.  But mine is really quite different from all of them.

I don’t like deferring to convention.  I don’t like modeling something in a certain way simply because the field does it and considers it acceptable.  You can get a job by doing this.  But your research will be total crap, much like about 90% of what gets published these days, because it is based on total crap.

At the same time, convention exists for a reason.  Researchers assume that everyone can be collectively treated as a single representative person who values things according to a certain mathematical function, or that all uncertainty reduces to a coin flip, because the math is much easier under these assumptions.  Forfeit the first assumption, and you wind up with chaotic equations to describe even the simplest economic behavior.  Forfeit the second, and statistical tests become much more difficult and much less certain.  Yet if we make either assumption, we are beginning an inquiry into reality by assuming it away.

I haven’t been blogging much lately, or doing much of any normal activities, because I’ve been totally consumed with working this stuff out.  I don’t think I’ll come back to reality until I’m finished with the model.  For now, I sort of identify with my work.  When I figure something out, life is imbued with a sense of harmony.  When I’m struggling, everything feels haphazard and discordant.  Until I have a final result, the whole enterprise seems an uncertain mix of worthy struggle and vain intellectual masturbation.

In the mean time, I’m thankful to all those close to me for putting up with my remoteness.  It seems to me that a better person could be both a devoted researcher and a proper human being.  Ultimately I care more about the latter, but my cares are compromised by necessity.  Being a good person is easier when one has a job

Ah, how wonderful to have a blog to ramble on. 

I recently had a discussion with someone over when it is appropriate to assume that you are at fault.  For example, let’s say that you bump into someone walking through an airline terminal.  In the case of a mutual mistake, such as two people colliding while looking askance at a departure display, the polite thing is for both parties to apologize.  But what if you have a sense that someone pulled a jerk move?  For example, suppose you were being inattentive, but you’re pretty sure that you did see the other person out of the corner of your eye being attentive and walking straight into you anyways, as though they were entitled to a particular path through the airport.  Do you apologize, apologize with sarcasm, say nothing at all, or take some other option?

I think the answer given to this question reveals a good deal about a person’s character.  The key aspect in framing was that you were “pretty sure” of what the person did, but not entirely certain.  In the presence of uncertainty, where do you tend to assign blame?  With yourself, or with the other person?

I think many people have such a strong distaste for wrongfully blaming others that in the presence of uncertainty, they would much rather blame themselves.  In the above situation, say you figure there’s a 90% chance that the other person deliberately bumped you.  So there’s a 90% chance that you’re not responsible for the bump.  On the other hand, there’s a 10% chance that you are at least partially at fault.  So if your response blames the other person in some way, there’s a 1 in 10 chance that you’re assigning the entire blame for an accident to someone who at worst bears only part of it.  I think that most people are so bothered by the notion of incorrectly blaming another innocent as opposed to incorrectly blaming themselves that they tend to absorb blame in the presence of uncertainty.  Hence the highly common event of a mutual bump, after which both parties say “Excuse me.”

An important and deliberate aspect of how I framed that example is that you have two models of the other person’s behavior, and you are uncertain which is correct.  I think that some people have a cognitive bias where they settle on one model and then act as though they are certain of the model behind the other person’s behavior when they are not.  This “decisive” bias produces different behavior from the same set of values.  However the choice of model is made, so long as a person sometimes sees the counterparty at fault, then they will sometimes be “certain” of their misconduct and blame them accordingly.  They still perceive themselves as acting properly, but if the person still has a distaste for blaming others, then settling on a single model has produced behavior that the individual might well define as unethical if the situation were perceived in its entirety.

This may seem trivial, but consider what happens if we extend this line of thought beyond bumping in airports to making lawsuits over wrongdoing, or doing violence to others upon provocation.  Individuals who are “decisive” in my description, who settle on one model and then reject others, will tend to do much more unjust harm to others.  This problem is actually worst when a decisive person chooses models rationally — when uncertainty over blame comes entirely from model ambiguity, settling on the most likely model is the same as placing equal value on wrongly blaming others or ourselves.

However, decisiveness also has some positive effects in business or leadership situations.  The practice of settling on the most likely model and acting as though it were certainly the case may create uniformity in planning and efficiencies in action that would elude a more deliberate person.  But considered in a moral context, decisiveness as I’ve described it here is a willingness to consider the world amorally, but act morally once a view is determined.  If we assume that most people have a distaste for blaming other innocents as opposed to themselves, then the desirability of decisiveness really depends on two things — how much efficiency is gained in settling on a single view of things, and how much uncertainty over who is at fault in a situation varies across different realistic views of the world.

As for myself, I think human judgment (or at least mine) is in most cases too frail to properly determine what a “realistic” view of the world is, and that competing views find fault with different parties.  I consider decisiveness desirable in managers who make decisions with minimal moral content.  However, when a leader has to navigate the moral complexity of the world we live in, and has violence or resource redistribution among his remedies, I prefer a less efficient but more considerate leader to a decisive and resolute one.  I’ll tolerate waffling and contemplation if it reduces action that is harmful to others who are innocent of wrongdoing.  That’s just my personal preference, though.

From yesterday:

“I attempted to replace my light fixture.  Or, alternatively worded, I have destroyed my light fixture.”

One of the fun little doodads of knowledge that I’ve maintained from my undergraduate days is an understanding of language as a set of agreed symbols.  As symbols, words have varying degrees of accuracy.  For example, if I say “chair”, it’s straightforward to get some notion of a chair in mind.  But because the concept is pretty general, your precise chair probably differs from mine.  And even if we specify things as much as possible, our notions will probably still diverge here and there.

But the fact that language is approximate does not render it degenerate.  If the two of us were to encounter a master chairmaker, he could probably listen to our descriptions of our respective chairs and distinguish which one of us had a better understanding of what a chair really is.

Which brings me to my point.  I’ve noticed that the ability to deploy language often outstrips a person’s understanding of the concepts underlying language.  This lack of understanding only becomes apparent over time, however, as it can hide for a while behind the generality of language.  But poor word choice and inapposite argumentation show themselves clearly as discussion evolves.  You can pick up from context that a person doesn’t really know the proper usage of a word.  You can follow patterns of conversation to distinguish whether a person has a properly developed thought or is just repeating logical structure that they heard elsewhere and are redeploying without understanding.  This characteristic of having more words than understanding allows a person to portray a greater intelligence than they possess, thus enjoying a surplus of attractiveness for the amount of time it takes the other conversant to sound their hollow depths.  Specific errors can hide for a time behind the general imprecision of words, long enough to develop a social connection with someone who might otherwise not have been interested.

I myself would admit to veering towards the needlessly verbose, but there are others far worse than I am.  When I encounter such folk, the conversation is all dissonance.  Words and concepts are tossed around in imprecise ways which contort or violate their meaning, and the conversation evolves in a haphazard and illogical way, meandering through meaninglessness rather than converging towards substantial points of communication.  I come away irritated, wanting to spend some time in monologue simply to have access to clean and properly structured thought.  While I can’t really judge others who share in my faults, there are some people who I really do prefer to avoid for this reason.  Listening to them think is like hearing nails on a chalkboard to me.

Of course, the fact that I just took 4 paragraphs to say “I don’t like bullshitters” likely means my blog is capable of similar screeching.  Oh well.  At least I can hope for a robust readership of S&M types