Wanted: The Hedonist's Life Extension Diet

I've been reading through the archives of the FuturePundit blog, accumulating ideas and links for my Future Imperfect. One of things I notice is that, of the things there is some evidence are good for you, a considerable number are also good. That includes pistachios (mentioned in a previous post), chocolate, pomegranate juice, green tea, wine (for those that like wine), and probably lots of other things.

There is clearly an opportunity here for an ambitious author. Write a book on how to live longer and enjoy it more, putting together everything known about such foods. And if the book sells, there are further market opportunities. Chocolate covered pistachios, say, using whatever sort of chocolate is highest in the relevant chemicals. Green tea flavored with pomegranate juice.

In an old Playboy interview, H.L. Hunt responded to an interviewer who assumed that he subsidized his (right wing) radio stations by assuring him that they made money. "If this country is worth saving, it's worth saving at a profit."

"If your life is worth extending, it's worth taking pleasure in extending it" isn't quite as good a line; perhaps someone can come up with a better version.

Advice People Will Take

Future Pundit has a recent post about research suggesting that pistachios are good for your heart. The final sentence in the bit he quoted:

"What's more, we noted very good compliance and a positive response from participants during the four-week period."

I was struck long ago, reading the literature on whether large doses of vitamin E were or were not good for you, with the prejudice among some medical writers against anything that's easy to do--"popping pills" instead of regular exercise, for instance. As this example suggests, they have it backwards. If you find things good for people that they actually like doing, they are much more likely to do them. Even I could be persuaded to eat pistachios on a regular basis—for the good of my heart, of course.

Sex, Pleasure, Circumcision and Economics

Ronald Bailey has a post on Sexual Pleasure vs. Sexual Health: The Circumcision Trade-Off. The argument is that circumcision reduces the risk of getting AIDS but also reduces sensitivity and so pleasure.

I have no idea how good the evidence is, but it strikes me that there is a serious logical problem with one step in the argument—from less sensitivity to less pleasure. The limiting factor to duration of sexual intercourse, under most circumstances, is male endurance; one can plausibly model the process as a rising intensity of pleasure up to the point of orgasm, with total utility equal to the area under the curve. If so, greater sensitivity simply means that you reach the same maximum sooner, reducing the area under the pleasure curve.

And that's without even considering the utility of the other participant in the process.

The Diversity Scam

“Diversity,” in the academic context, is usually a euphemism for affirmative action, itself a euphemism for discrimination--variously racial, ethnic, gender or sexual preference based--in favor of groups viewed as disadvantaged. In the employment context, a diversity hire is someone hired in part because he is black, or she is female, or …. .

What I find particularly irritating about this usage is that those who adopt it are typically opponents of actual diversity. In the academic context, what matter are ideas. Two professors with different gender or skin color but the same views provide less relevant diversity than two professors of the same gender or skin color but sharply opposed views.

Supporters of “diversity” try to obscure this by arguing that a different racial or gender background leads to a different viewpoint. There may be cases where this is true, although it is hard to see its relevance to most academic fields. But in such cases, favoring prospective hires whose work shows a different and original viewpoint is surely more sensible than favoring members of minorities in the hope that they will turn out to provide a different viewpoint.

In fact, at least in my observation, the people and departments most inclined to favor “diversity” in the conventional sense are among those least likely to want to hire professors whose viewpoints differ from the consensus. What they want are people of the desired gender or skin color who agree with them. My standard thought experiment to demonstrate this is to imagine that, at some late stage in the search process, it is discovered that a prospective hire regarded as a strong candidate is a supporter, an intelligent supporter, of South African apartheid. Does the probability of hiring him go up or down as a result? I can predict, with little data but some decades of experience of the academy, that in any elite university and almost any department it goes sharply down. Yet that is a viewpoint to which almost no faculty member or student has been, or expects to be, exposed. Someone who actually believes in intellectual diversity should thus regard the additional fact as a plus, not a minus.

When I offer this thought experiment, a common response is that there are no intelligent supporters of apartheid, hence the additional information shows something wrong with the prospective hire. I take that response as evidence in favor of my thesis. Almost nobody who makes it has had the opportunity to argue apartheid with a serious, sophisticated supporter--indeed, I suspect many of them have never met anyone who would admit to supporting it at all. Yet we know that millions of white South Africans did support it for quite a long period; it is a considerable stretch to claim that none of them could have been intelligent and thoughtful. And, in my thought experiment, the supporter of apartheid has already demonstrated sufficient ability to make him a strong candidate before his unfortunate political beliefs are discovered. The confident belief that no reasonable person could support a position that many otherwise reasonable people did support is strong evidence of the failure to be exposed to a sufficiently diverse range of views.

Academic hiring is not the only example of hostility to diversity by people who claim to favor it. Consider the issues of home schooling and education vouchers. It’s pretty clear, I think, to anyone involved in the controversy, that one of the main objections to both is that they foster diversity.

The objection is not, of course, put in those terms. It is rather that both make it possible for parents with the wrong views--in particular fundamentalist Christians--to indoctrinate their children with those views. The clear implication is that it is desirable to make sure that all children get exposed to, perhaps even indoctrinated with, the current consensus views--the ones that they will be taught in the public schools.

If one believes that fundamentalists are wrong and the current consensus correct, it’s reasonable enough to want all children exposed to the latter. But even given that belief, it is a position directly opposed to diversity--a desire to lessen diversity by stamping out, so far as possible, those particular dissenting views. And in at least some discussions, the hostility to diversity is explicit; the argument is precisely that it is desirable to have a society whose members share a common set of beliefs. That is, I think, a defensible position, but it is bizarre to have it expressed by people who purport to consider intellectual diversity a desirable objective

Loaded Dice: How to bias research

In a recent Usenet thread, the question was raised of whether authoritarian personality types were more likely to be on the political right than on the political left. One contributor offered a link to a webbed book by Professor Robert Altmeyer which, the poster claimed, described scientific research that showed that the right was much more authoritarian than the left. I read the beginning of the book and concluded that it was indeed interesting--as an example of how to load the dice in order to get the results you want out of supposedly objective research.

The book starts off by defining "right wing authoritarian" (RWA) in a way which purports to be politically neutral; the author offers an implausible explanation of his entirely non-political reasons for labelling it "right wing." There follows the set of twenty questions (plus two that don't get scored) used to test subjects to see how RWA they are. On each question, the responder is supposed to express a view from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree." The grading is simple--on some questions you count as more authoritarian the more strongly you agree, on the rest you count as more authoritarian the more strongly you disagree.

What is almost immediately obvious if you read the questions is that they aren't testing for RWA as the author defines it but for a combination of that and right/left political views. When the question is of the form "people who campaigned for unpopular causes X, Y and Z were good," X, Y and Z just happen to be causes more popular on the left than on the right. When the question is of the form "We should follow authority X," X just happens to be a source of authority, such as the church, more popular on the right than on the left. No questions about people who campaigned for unpopular right wing causes or about deferring to sources of authority popular on the left.

Perhaps the worst question of all was:

6. Atheists and others who have rebelled against the established religions are no doubt every bit as good and virtuous as those who attend church regularly.

Almost nobody taking the test--my guess is literally nobody--has the data needed to know whether atheists are less virtuous, more virtuous, or just as virtuous as churchgoers. The only reason I can see why someone would respond with "strongly agree" is that he is an authoritarian accepting the authority of a particular subgroup within his society--one that is skeptical of religion. But that is supposed to be the extreme non-authoritarian answer to the question.

Interested readers can find a more detailed critique by me on usenet; the thread, including responses, is here.

Stocks vs Bonds: A Puzzle and Half a Solution

On average, buying stocks gives you a better return than buying bonds. That has been true for a long time. The return from stocks is less predictable than that from bonds, but the difference in return is large enough to make risk aversion an inadequate explanation. That, at least, is my understanding of the conclusion of those who have studied the question.

This presents an obvious puzzle to an economist. If stocks provide a better return than bonds, investors should shift to stocks. Once prices have adjusted to the shift, the future return on stocks should be lower than before, on bonds higher, and the process should continue until the returns are roughly equal, allowing for the different risks of the two kinds of investment. Yet that does not seem to have happened.

Some time ago I came up with a solution. Unfortunately, there is a serious problem with it. The purpose of this post is to explain the solution in the hope that someone else can see how to patch the hole.

I start with a simple assumption: All investors have inside information. Someone who works in a company knows a little more than outsiders about the prospects for that company. Someone who has made a career in an industry has a feel for what is happening in the industry. An enthusiastic customer in some niche market knows better than most which products are good and which firms are likely to prosper. One of the functions of the stock market is to put together all of this dispersed information and come up with stock prices.

Suppose I have expert knowledge of the industry I work in and money to invest. Investing all of it in that industry is risky, especially if I work in that industry, since I don't want the risk on my investments to correlate with risks to my income. So I invest some of it in the industry, taking advantage of my special information to do so, and the rest elsewhere. On the margin I am getting the return of an uninformed investor, on the average something between that and the return of an expert investor. Since everyone else is doing the same thing, everyone is getting that result.

What about investing in bonds? Since I have already invested as much as I want in the area of my expertise, investments in bonds substitute for the uninformed part of my investment. So, in equilibrium, the return on bonds will (ignoring any risk premiums) equal the return on my marginal investment in stock and be lower than my average return on stock--explaining why, on average, stock gives a better return than bonds.

The problem with this is that it depends on my uninformed investment giving a worse result than investing at random, since random investments ought to pay me the average return on stocks.

Anyone with a good solution? It's worth noting that the problem applies to other and more conventional views of the stock market. In order for clever investors to do better than average, someone has to do worse.

'I never did it, and anyway I've stopped"

In a recent CNN news story on a related issue, I came across the following statement from the Justice Department:

"As the Attorney General indicated earlier this year, any electronic surveillance that was being conducted pursuant to the [Terrorist Surveillance Program] is now being conducted subject to the approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court."

The clear implication is that the administration is no longer trying to argue--although it may still believe--that it was entitled to violate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by warantless interceptions of the sort of communications covered by the act. While this is, in my view, a step forward, it does have one uncomfortable implication which doesn't seem to have gotten much attention--that the administration is no longer prepared to deny that the President and a variety of people in the National Security Agency are guilty of repeated felonies, each punishable by up to five years in prison.

Thoughts on Intervening in Civil Wars

Listening to the radio while driving, I heard a clip of Newt Gingrich, who I find one of the more interesting modern politicians. He was responding to someone else's point that Iraq was a civil war and we should therefor get out. Gingrich stopped short of actually agreeing that it was a civil war, but he did accept the claim at least for the purposes of argument--and pointed out that civil wars do get won, as demonstrated by the U.S. Civil War.

It occurred to me that one might carry the argument a step further. If you are going to invade a country, the fact that it is engaged in a civil war seems like a point in your favor. The two sides are spending resources fighting each other that might otherwise be used to fight you; with luck, you might even succeed in allying with one side against the other. That, after all, is how the U.S. managed its quick and easy initial victory in Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance supplied the boots on the ground, the U.S. provided them with unlimited air power, and that was enough to reverse the outcome of the civil war and drive the Taliban from power.

What are the arguments on the other side? Why might the existence of a civil war make conquest harder rather than easier?

One possible answer is that it makes it harder if the invader is unwilling to pick a side. It is then in the difficult position of trying to keep members of each side from killing members of the other while getting along with both. Since the invader's troops probably don't speak the language or know much about the society they are largely dependent on local allies, none of whom can be trusted not to take the opportunity to use their position to support their side of the ongoing civil war.

In the case of Iraq, the U.S. allied with the Kurds--gave them enough of what they wanted so that they were willing, on the whole, to refrain from shooting at us and support us against other people who were doing so. But the U.S. was not willing to support either the Shia or the Sunni in their desire to rule the country to the exclusion of the other.

A second answer to the question of why a civil war might make conquest harder rather than easier is that it raises the stakes. No reasonable person thinks that the U.S. wants to drive the Iraqis out of the country and replace them with Americans. It's unlikely that the U.S. wants to rule Iraq for any extended period of time. But a reasonable Sunni might well worry about ethnic cleansing by Shia, or a Shia about ethnic cleansing by Sunni. And each group has good reason to worry that the other would like to establish itself permanently in power, reducing its rivals to at best second class citizens.

The higher the stakes, the more desperately people are willing to fight. One of the problems with an interventionist foreign policy that it gets the country following it into conflicts where the other parties have much more at stake, and so are willing to put up with much larger costs.

Consider the Vietnam War. People in the U.S. complained that the South Vietnamese were not sufficiently willing to fight. But in fact the Vietnamese, North, South, and Viet Cong, kept fighting after suffering casualty rates, relative to their population, enormously higher than the rates that drove the U.S. out of the war. The reason is obvious: What happened to Vietnam mattered a lot more to the Vietnamese than to us.

Justice vs Efficiency: An Example

One way in which a legal system discourages people from doing things that inflict costs on others is by fining them. Roughly speaking, there are two alternative approaches. Under criminal law, the fine goes to the state. Under civil law, it is called a damage payment and goes to the victim.

A variety of arguments can be made for one approach or another; interested readers may want to look at the chapter of my webbed Law's Order devoted to the general question. One interesting feature of the analysis is that the straightforward argument based on justice gives the opposite answer from the straightforward argument based on economic efficiency.

The justice argument is that the money should go to the victim, in order to compensate him for his loss. Indeed, the standard rule in tort law is that the damage owed are enough to "make whole" the victim.

For many, although not all, cases the argument from efficiency goes just the other way. The reason is that, even if the victim is not morally responsible for the loss, in most cases he makes decisions that affect how likely it is to occur and how large it is if it occurs. There is nothing inherently immoral about driving an expensive car, but the more expensive your car is, the larger the damages if my negligent driving results in my running into it. There is nothing inherently immoral about walking after dark in bad neighborhoods, but doing so can substantially increase the chance of being a crime victim.

From the standpoint of economic efficiency--loosely speaking, maximizing the size of the pie--we would like people to reduce the likelihood and cost of their being victims whenever the savings are larger than the cost of doing so. But if victims were fully compensated, as in theory under tort law they are, they would have no incentive at all to take precautions. Hence the efficient rule, for a wide range of cases, is that the money should go to anyone but the victim (or the perpetrator).

[I've linked to the HTML version of a late draft of my book. There is another version that consists of page images of the book as published with virtual footnotes--links to icons in the margin.]

Wanted: The Inn Between the Worlds

You are a player of World of Warcraft or some other massively multiplayer game. At some point, after you have been playing for a year or two and have established a network of friends and acquaintances, the server you play on gets too crowded; Blizzard announces that they are going to split it in two.

One result is to reduce lag due to overcrowding. Another is to split friendships. Some players go one direction, some the other, and never the twain shall meet.

I propose a simple way of ameliorating the problem: The Inn Between the Worlds, a server to which everyone, on every server, has access. Unlike ordinary servers, it does not represent a world with monsters, quests, and other processor intensive features. It is merely a (very large) inn. It exists to let old friends meet again, tell each other of their adventures, trade lies.

A similar but more difficult problem exists as new games come on the market. Some players leave the old game, some stay. Could a version of the same solution still work?

I think it could, although how well it works depends in part on the willingness of the companies that own the games to cooperate. I am imagining a game which is, again, merely an inn. It differs from all other games in that it allows players to bring into it their characters from other games. Since all they are doing is sitting, talking and perhaps showing off their possessions, the problems of interoperability should not be too serious. Legal problems could be more serious; it is unclear to what degree hosting my WoW character in someone else's game, complete with clothing, name, physical appearance and (inspectable but inoperable) gear, would violate Blizzard's legal rights. But that isn't a problem if Blizzard cooperates.

An encouraging sign is a recent story about plans by Second Life to open source its software, which should permit other people to build compatible worlds.

NSA, state secrets, and bonding: A suggestion

A government agency does something that is arguably illegal and ends up in court. Their attorney claims, perhaps truthfully, that in order to defend the case he would have to reveal facts about the agency's activities that must, in the interest of national security, remain secret. He accordingly asks the judge to dismiss the charges.

This situation--I'm thinking of litigation over the National Security Agency's wiretapping and related activities--raises a real problem. One can imagine a similar problem arising in a patent infringement suit when the defendant argues that, in order to show it is not infringing the patent, it would have to reveal a valuable trade secret. Our usual mechanism for settling legal disputes requires both sides to have free access to the relevant information; in some cases giving them such access could result in very large costs.

There is, I think, a fairly straightforward way in which we might deal with such situations. It depends on two assumptions. The first is that there is some responsible person--the President, the head of NSA, the research director of the corporation sued for patent infringement--who already knows the secret. The second is that the secret will expire within some predictable length of time. If the NSA is using top secret high tech to data mine phone records, it is unlikely to still be using the same method ten years from now.

Under my system, when the attorney asks for dismissal on grounds of state secrets or the equivalent, his request must include a time limit after which he agrees that the information will no longer be secret; the longer the time limit, the less plausible his claim and so the less likely the judge is to accept it. Prior to dismissing the claim, the judge asks the relevant responsible person, the one who already knows the secret, to testify under oath that the information does not confirm the other side's case, that revealing it would not result in a near certain verdict of guilty. When the time limit on the secret has expired the court takes up the case again, determines whether the testimony was true, and imposes penalties for perjury if appropriate.

Before taking the testimony the judge informs the witness that perjury in this particular situation is a capital offense. "Now, Mr. President, would you like to reconsider your position?"

That is, of course, an implausibly extreme version of the proposal. More generally, in order for the case to be dismissed, someone with the information must testify as to the implications of the information for the case, with penalties for false testimony severe enough to make it unlikely that he will be willing to perjure himself. In effect, he is bonding his testimony--in the limiting case with his head.

Obviously there are some practical problems, beginning with the fact that the person who knows the secret is probably not a lawyer. He should, however, have access to lawyers; it should not be that difficult for him to determine what sort of facts would or not result in his side losing.

How do we currently deal with such situations? One approach is to provide the secret information to the judge but not to the opposing side. But without the usual mechanisms of an adversarial trial, the judge may have a hard time telling how true or how complete the information he is given is. If he later discovers that what he was told was deliberately misleading, he has the option of imposing penalties for contempt of court, giving at least a weak version of my proposal.

Where do smart cheapskates go to college?

My daughter plans to apply to college next year and we've started our search with visits to Stanford, Scripps and Pomona and a good deal of research. One thing that struck me was how luxurious the elite colleges seem to be--a wide variety of good food, fancy architecture, security escorts home from the library at the touch of a button, very small classes, lots of hand holding, a general "cost is no object" style.

Part of the reason, presumably, is that students with very high SATs, grades, etc. disproportionately tend to be the children of well off parents. While college purports to be about education, a large part of its role in our society is as a place where people can spend four years enjoying themselves, searching for friends and mates, developing useful social contacts, and the like. If the children of well off parents are going to spend their time that way, they might as well do it in comfort. And for very smart applicants whose parents aren't well off, the schools have an extensive system of discriminatory pricing aka financial aid.

On the other hand, most of what these schools are spending money on seems to have a rather tenuous connection to the quality of education. That left me wondering whether there are any schools that specialize in smart cheapskates--provide a good education in the company of smart people at the lowest practical cost, which I would expect to be under half the cost of the elite schools we've been looking at.

Examples?

My case against TSA

Shortly after the system of luggage searches by TSA went into effect, some inexpensive jewelery in an outer pocket of a suitcase I checked disappeared. I suspected pilfering by whoever searched it, but since I had no way of either proving anything had been stolen or identifying the person responsible, I did nothing.

On my most recent trip by air, I had two suitcases--a big metal one and a smaller soft sided suitcase. The metal suitcase had a combination lock which I left unlocked, since otherwise TSA was likely to break it. Since without the lock I thought there was some risk of the suitcase opening, I put a luggage strap around it. The strap had no lock--you just pressed the sides of the catch to open it.

When I picked up the suitcases, the strap had been broken open. The other suitcase has two built-in straps to cinch it tight. Both were unfastened and hanging loose, at obvious risk of getting tangled in the luggage handling machinery. Nothing stolen, so far as I know, but the wanton destruction of about ten dollars worth of property and a risk of further damage.

Obviously, even if I knew for certain that TSA employees were responsible in both cases, that would not demonstrate that the organization itself was at fault--even a well run and well intentioned organization may sometimes hire a dishonest, irresponsible or careless employee.

My case against TSA starts by asking what they would do if they cared about such matters--if they were concerned to prevent vandalism or pilferage by their employees. The answer is pretty clear. When they search your luggage, they leave you a printed note telling you that they did so. All they would have to do in order to identify employees responsible for stealing or damaging property would be to have each note stamped with the name of the employee who did the search. If they got complaints from multiple passengers about the same employee they could then investigate further.

I take their falure to follow that policy or something similar as clear evidence of culpable negligence, reason to think that they don't actually care. Am I missing something?