Hopefully Anonymous

$700 billion bailout plan: Fake crisis like Iraq War, or most expert approach to thwarting a 2nd Great Depression?

I think that's the key question. One of the best clues for us non-experts is, how similar is the selling of the $700 billion dollar plan to the selling of the Iraq War? In some ways it seems very similar, which increases my skepticism of it.

Also, in some ways this feels like a plan to tax silicon valley to preserve the power institutions of Wall Street. It's notable that the reverse didn't happen when the dot com bubble burst.

However, in the end I think the best guide is the consensus of experts (including expert set-up and interpretation of prediction markets. So what is it? What can almost every relevant expert agree on regarding the bailout? It seems to me all of them are against salary caps for CEOs. That seems to me to be a transparent populist sop. Anything else?

Zogby hints and McCain landslide ... why?

Zogby hints that he thinks the election will end in a landslide for McCain despite the absence of current clear evidence suggesting this is likely

http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20080925/NEWS01/80925009/1002/NEWS

Two thoughts:

1. If he's right, is that a classic example of expert intuition (seeing a patter pointing in a clear direction, even though a surface look at the data doesn't confirm one's intuitive certainty, due to long experience in analyzing this type of data)

2. Does he think what's going on is something like a Bradley Effect on steroids? Why does he think this didn't hold true in Democratic primaries?

Daily Brain Dump

1. A classic "both wrong" dialectic: http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/09/measure_of_the_head.html

All our brain functions don't apparently map reliably to bumps on our head. Are brain functions apparently aren't distributed homegenously across the brain, either. So if mindhacks is reporting this dispute from the past accurately, they were both wrong. What 2 party disputes about models of reality could be wrong today? Incidentally, the go-to dialectical synthesis, "some functions are distributed homeogenously across the brain, and others map reliably to bumps on our head" also seems to be wrong. The aesthetic of preferring a debate between two opposing ideas, and even to resolving the otherwise unresolvable debate by proposing a synthesis idea may have more to do with our ape aesthetics than with accurately modeling and discerning reality.

2. So what's really the best thing to do about the financial system meltdown. Who are the experts on this sort of thing? The NYU Stern economist (he has a name like Rubini or Rubeiri) who presumably is an expert and who is most notable for predicting what would happen seems like a natural expert to consult on what happened and what to do about it. I'm concerned that the SEC chair and many others don't seem to be making a show about consulting experts. But perhaps it starts by identifying WHO are the top experts on these sort of financial crises and their solutions. Also, didn't something similar happen in Japan and East Asia? What can we learn from them.

Daily Brain Dump

1. I'd like to try to tie together several points I've been blogging about in a rough form here.

1a. that people often vote for who they thinks represents their bundle of traits better for president, which include physical traits (hard to fake), life narrative traits (not easy to fake), and worldview traits (easiest to fake).

1b. That which minority population physical traits are most stigmatized may in large part have to do with which subpopulation carrying those traits are least intelligent.

1c. that people care about macrosociological representations of the status of people with their bundles of traits (mass media, celebrities) in large part because it has effects on their microsociological lives and interactions.

1d. that this stuff matters in terms of maximizing my persistence odds.

2. To expand on 1b.

2a. The median population height in the united states is usually thought of in gendered terms, 5'10" for men and 5'4" for women. both men that are 6'2" and 5'6" are numerical minorities. However, the evidence seems to be that there's greater stigma and discrimination against 5'6" men. One possible explanation might be that 6'2" men are smarter, and so are to better manipulate 5'10" men to be inclusive, or even privilege them as a phenotypical minority.

2b. same concept for blue eyed blondes vs. dark skinned blacks in the USA or some other countries like Italy or Spain.

2c. same concept for jews vs. muslims in the USA.

Well, I'd like to write more but I've run out of time.

Some recommended links

Unusually informative old post from Mindhacks, on how proto-faces can be used to determine which personality traits might be discrete:

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2005/01/morph_your_personali.html

Also check out the stanford online encyclopedia of philosophy (called PLATO) entry on game theory for a good, minimally mathematical introduction to the field.

Today's Brain Dump

1. I'm interested some changes to American governmental structure to improve management and to make a more natural training/experience ladder to the presidency. Here's the proposal, which hinges on diversified experimentation (as opposed to "libertarianism" or "socialism", or "market-oriented liberal democracy") as a governmental model. I think that we should think of orders of magnitude for management. The top order of magnitude is the USA, with a President at the top serving as chief executive for 300 million people. The bottom order of magnitude is the equivalent of a neighborhood association president, serving as chief executive for 300 people. The people at each stage elect the people at the next stage higher (representing an order of magnitude higher of people). The number of states would be reduced from 50 to 10, each with a 30 million population. It would probably be something like California, New York, Florida, Texas, Northwest, Midwest, Southwest, South, New England, MidAtlantic, with some smaller states merged into the 4 big states rather than into the new regional block states. At every level of executive governent experimentation would be strongly encouraged. Some experimentation (of limited effect) would be directed at the national level. Some nonexperimental policy would be directed at the national level. However, no policy would be imposed on 100% of states or lower levels of government. Nor would it be allowed for 100% of states to engage in the same policy, where there might be benefits to force states or lower levels to try new things. This probably comes close to paternal libertarianism in some ways, except that I don't care for the libertarian part beyond its utility (I don't care for it as a "natural right" or that sort of thing). Enough of this messy shit. Let's get scientific and experimental and diversified in our governance and figure out as best we can what works.

2. I think the OJ model helps us understand why big events that cause people to pick sides helps actively construct popular culture norms of concepts like race, gender, religion and status hierarchies and alliances. For example, Howard Stern would often ask people "do you think OJ killed Ron Goldman and Nicole Simpson?" and show even most liberal whites saying yes while liberal blacks say no. It was a stigma production moment for black americans while helping reify whiteness for jews (and for women perhaps). I see similar dynamics at play in this and past elections, except that Sharpton is a stigma producer that many blacks saw as a rejection opportunity in 2004 and Obama resists easy stigmitization with game so good that he's separated from most of what other blacks are doing, like an outlier point way positively deviant to the rest of a bell curve. I also see some parallels with arabs/middle easterners. Many in the US perform excellent positive integration game, much better than many black americans, but ran into a shitstorm when Bin Laden's celebrity rose post-9/11. here's where I think game theoretic approaches to understanding race (and the many other identifiers) construction, negotiation, and stigma can be helpful -Bin Laden chose an option that may have harmed people that looked like him and had his ancestral narrative as a whole, but helped him as an individual in terms of maximizing his celebrity. okay, I'm out of time. I'll try to flesh these out further and comments as always are welcome.

David Einhorn, hero, Christopher Cox, villian?

David Einhorn, hero, Christopher Cox, villian?

Robin Hanson types point out regularly that short-sellers can be unappreciated heroes for providing information to the market, and hence, the rest of us. We may have a great recent example.

http://www.thebigmoney.com/articles/judgments/2008/09/17/let-heads-roll

Intrade Presidential Market Seems To Be Smarter than me

The intrade presidential market seems to me to have proved itself to be smarter than me. Also perhaps Mankiw (although I intuit he got lucky while performing one of his standard McCain alignments -still can't argue with the outcomes).

About 1 week before Obama's electoral college advantage vanished intrade shifted from 60/40 Obama to about 50/50. McCain recently has a slight EC edge, and Intrade's been reflecting that too -it did IN ADVANCE.

This may be a powerful personal demonstration of the superior intelligence of markets that meet a certain threshhold standard of traits.

The performance is a marked contrast to the republican Veep market.

The 1 week in advance accuracy reminds me of weather prediction. I wonder if this will hold a while as a level of prescience for the intrade presidential market and similar predictive markets.

another brain dump

I've started using Mnenosyne, it's a fantastic supplement to my learning tools.

Here's an andrewsullivanism: why don't doubters of Michelle Obama's intellect compare her college senior thesis with Sarah Palin's best college work. (Although I should add I don't claim Michelle is in Obama's league, nor do I claim she was above average for a harvard law student. If she was the standard black admit to harvard law she probably would've been a median student at a lower ranked ivy law school like cornell law if she were white, in my understanding of the admit differentials. But she may have been an exceptional black admit and been someone who would've gotten into harvard law if white, but as  a median admit, not an extraordinary admit like Obama.)

Eliezer Yudkowsky seems to be falling into his old overreductionist, overconfident expression of certainty, preference for dialectics, with his recent post favorably contrasting mathematical development of artificial intelligence as opposed to cog sci/evo psych informed approaches. Cowen's recommendation of assigning percentages to belief would be helpful. I think in particular these overconfident expressions of certainty are more about status reward seeking than attempts to best model reality. So, I'm going to punish his behavior by lowering my opinion of him as a thinker, and I encourage other readers to do likewise.

Some thoughts (a brain dump)

As I write this I don't know in advance exactly what I'm going to write or write about. I just feel the need to dump out some thoughts and put them out there.

I listened recently to the Simpsons season 3 dvd commentary track on an episode that conan o'brien commented on -i forget which one it was. He mentioned that he was creating content all the time off camera, and it occured to me that there was a lot of product in that for him. he would do well to be wired 24/7 like that engineering professor with the wearable computer. Like those wearable cameras I think microsoft markets that have been shown to help old people with their memories better than journaling.

I'd like to be wired like that myself -so much content that would be good for this blog gets lost as thoughts pop in and out of my head throughout the day, but I'm engaged in other projects.

Even more, of course, I'd like many idea originators to be wired like that. Something like that could happen in a Vernor Vinge Rainbow's End future, an idea he didn't really explore in his universe (the capture and rendered searchability of any idea anyone has at any time).

mindhacks blog is better than ever. His (Vaughan's) only real weaknesses I've uncovered are (1) a naivete about race -he seems to be comfortable with a sort of dumbed down progressive approach to progressive race mythology, blacks=victims, whites=oppressors, progressive whites=saviors. and (2) he violates my bugaboo that blogs should be easy to comment to, because his requires some type of registration first. But the posts are fantastic. Also, I'm not that interested in the fucking opera he's been hyping lately. I don't really give a fuck that the actors all dance, sing, and play instruments too.

I'd like to do a run down of the common games from game theory and look at how they could be at play  in standard micro and macrosociological interactions.

Also, I'm interested in looking at identity, alliance, and myth comprehensively, and well infused with game theory insights. For example, there was the longstanding liberal/radical academia concern with "gender, race, and class". Why were those more salient than "height, health, and attained education"?  Or "facial symmetry, mental health, and who-your-parents-were"?

okay that's it for now.