Hopefully Anonymous

Brain Droppings Monday December 29, 2008

1. For an organization to succeed it helps to have external people who are good bias manipulators of the external world, and good internal people who focus on reducing the inefficiency costs of internal politics.

2. There's a "valid" solipstic hypothesis I don't mention here but that I keep as a reserve when examining certain phenomena in apparent reality. For complete, otherwise irrational or arbitrary passive and/or coordination by everyone else in apparent reality, the solipstic hypothesis is that they're all intentionally trying to retard my power, status, and/or goal advancement. Examples of complete coordination that I think I've blogged about before include the near complete disinterest of comprehensively tackling the low hanging fruit regarding discussing "race" empirically. Similary with discussing persistence maximization/optimizing persistence odds. Those are two that leap to mind, but to those who think I'm race obsessed, I've gathered some informal empirical evidence that there are huge attention costs related to "race". When we look comprehensively at what distracts our attention from existential risk minimization, as we should, I think it'll be counterintuitive how high racial discussion, and its retardant effect on meritocracy/technocracy/competentocracy -and I don't just mean due to affirmative action- factors as a retardant against allocating attention and human and other resources in a more optimized manner.

3. Hanson has a smarter, more rigorous blog. It's his publications in peer reviewed journals and elsewhere. One could look at the writings of experts and research scientists that way generally. I recall when he mentioned combinatorial prediction markets in a blog post or comment, and about the only response was "what is that, robin?" Well, apparently he's written papers about it.

4. I'd like to see more discussions, of the blogging heads variety, between macroeconomists and international legal experts. Also, it would be interesting if Robin Hanson's joint blog was with mindhacks blogger rather than Eliezer. I think Robin would be pushed to more rigorous and higher quality posts by way of competition. And I think he would push the Mindhacks blogger to apply his excellent mind to the excellent topics and existential challenges that Robin comes up with.

5. I'd like to see exploration of evo psych reasons why the dramatic stories of stuff like international human rights crises capture our attention, but costs much more life to focus on it instead of more consequentially beneficial stuff. I put this in the category of stuff that is low hanging fruit in terms of solvability but on which there is near complete embargo on discussion.

6. Based on the most recent bloggingheads science saturday with Spelke, "core social knowledge" is an interesting evo psych idea, basically the social knowledge we're pretty much born with or only need generic social priming to obtain, as opposed to culturally innovated and transmitted social knowledge. Though their discussion of race got predictably sloppy with a quick retreat to majoritarian mythology. An example on how race is one of those myth on first principle topics. All sides "disagreeing" will still nontransparently be agreeing on shared touchstone first principle myths. Which makes it a conspiracy of attention (we're getting attention that would otherwise go to something like existential risk minimization), but what's interesting to me is that there's NO OTHER SIDE pointing out what I think is this fairly obvious observation. Hence the solipstic theory.

7. A tell (poker term) on a secret social war or skirmish: after Dershowitz defended Kudlow, saying he shouldn't be fired, Barnard invided Finkelstein to speak. I could see this as women/feminist (wasp? jewish?) elites firing a warning shot in Dershowitz's, and zionist males generally, direction. Kind of like, you try to promote stigma on us for Kudlow's firing, and we'll promote stigma on you for your defenses of Israel. I think this supports my theory that all other factors relatively equal, stigma may tend to devolve to the least intelligent populations. Two smart populations are playing nontransparent stigma games in this example. Although I acknowledge more diffuse and other populations may work against more of a gradient, and I acknowledge the fallacy of IQ or even cultural capital overreductionism.

8. I watched a speech Dershowitz gave to Houston's holocaust museum last year, and in an interesting aside he mentioned Israel's targetted killing committees incorporate bayesian mathemeticians who look at probability theory.

9. the speech also mentioned saudi donation to the carter center and elsewhere, and how it affected the way receipients spoke on issues. Is there a "secret" money war between Saudis and American zionists? Or are both sides being played by global WASP elites?

10. There are huge economic costs to preserving the status of older, less competent people. I wonder if the bailouts could also be seen in those terms.

11. Are God and the Devil battling each other, or are they battling everything else we could be paying attention theory? That's why I think analysis should often start with, why are we paying attention to this?  How much attentions should we be paying attention to this? Why are there only two sides or options being presented? Why did we shift terms from more descriptive, to more salient for evo pysch reasons (e.g. light vs. darkness)?

12. Fake racial heresy: The Watson flap/dustup.

Closer to a real racial heresy: (1) the idea that a substantial number of white americans have recent black ancestry. (2) The idea that black americans are a wealthy population in the world. (3) Holding both ideas simultaneously in the same narrative. Generally, I think we get closer to real racial heresy if we hold things that are heretical to multiple "sides" in the same coherent argument or narrative. Steve Sailor comes closer to doing this than most thinkers, which is why he often comes closer to real heresies and is awarded less representational privilege (which is different than controversy or stigma, a form of absolute representational privilege) by the mainstream media, it seem to me.

okay, that's it for now.

Reply to TGGP's Latest Comment December 26, 2008

TGGP posted a high quality, superrich in content comment, that I'll do my best to respond to with my limited time.

TGGP wrote:

"<i>The way to do this is to focus on where he's weak on meritocracy/technocracy.</i>
Do voters consider Obama insufficiently meritocratic/technocratic? The Republicans are trying to appeal to the median voter, not Hopefully Anonymous."

My Reply: My point is that it improves rather than impoverishes the commons, while not denying Republicans the opportunity to increase their share of power, if they challenge Obama where he's weak on competency, meritocracy, and technocracy. That's why those of us who care about that (or are insufficiently robust freeriders off the others who would advocate for it) should try to get technocracy types to compete and win in the republican primaries of the purple districts. No one claims Straussian tactics beats Rovian tactics in intrastate competitions (the argument would be for interstate competitions). Since Obama is moving in the direction of competing for political power without obliterating the commons (in contrast to Rove) I think Republicans should feel some slack to do the same. They'll likely gain with either strategy in 2010, so why not improve the commons?

TGGP wrote: <i>Also, empiricists seem not particularly motivated to puncture the myths both the protagonists and antogonists uphold In that way it reminds me of a differen magesteria.</i>
What empiricists are you thinking of here?

My Reply: Well Gelman is becoming sort of a symbol of the social science empiricist, with his latest book and whatnot, and I think he's laid down on some basic myths (most notably the first principles of the racial myths). But really, I mean just about all of them. Contrarian insights are rationed out sparingly, surrounded by huge heapings of myth conformities. I can think of no exceptions to that in any academic publications I've read. The closest exception is Hanson writing about health economics, I haven't seen anyone dismantle racial myths quite as comprehensively as he's come close to doing with myths surrounding the medical profession. Sure back in the day it was done with religion, and it's being done with free will now, but race seems to me to be low hanging fruit that nevertheless has empiricists in a death grip, preventing them from even seeming to desire to attempt a comprehensive dismantlement. It's more a fake dialectic, with "both sides" working in stylized ways together. Murray vs. Gould, etc. etc. etc.

TGGP wrote:
For readers unsure of what Hopefully Anonymous is responding to, I asked how long elite lawyers have been technocratic mythmakers here:
http://hopeanon.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/12/brain-droppings-december-16-2008.html#comment-142904164
I should add to that comment that I did come across a sociology paper that mentioned empirical criticism of Frankfurt school critical theory. Oddly enough, this paper was about the contrasting language used in the controversy over heavy metal and rap music in the late 80s.
http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~soci445/readings/BinderMetalRap.pdf
My reply: Don't have time to read it. I have no idea how you have the time to remain so literate and hold down a 9-5 job. You may be the Chris Hitchens (in terms of the ability to be widely literate) of your generation and you might as well make a profession of it.

TGGP wrote:
<i>I think the leading critical race theorists (Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, Lani Guineer, etc.) are rather clearly mythmakers, and so are critical legal theorists generally</i>
I remember coming across Glenn Reynolds and Ann Althouse (ugh) discussing a conflict between critical legal theory and multiculturalism at a law school:
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/190?&in=00:01:42&out=00:16:29
My reply: I like Ann. I don't run into that many women who in general are as myth-independent as her. She's a good candidate for being an ironic conservative (or whatever she is). Haven't seen that vlog. I'll try to look at it when I get the chance. ctc vs. multiculti sounds on its face like a classic fake controversy/fake conflict to me. Like they have a bunch of first principles in common and it would actually be more subservsive/enlightening to challenge the empirical basis of those principles.

TGGP wrote:
<i>so is Scalia and Alan Dershowitz</i>
I just came across a post at Philip Weiss' on Dershowitz you might find interesting:
http://www.philipweiss.org/mondoweiss/2008/12/i-suppose-graphomania-is-a-need-for-attention.html
My reply: Dershowitz had an interesting google author's chat on his latest book. What's interesting to me is he like a lot of these elite law profs have the talent to really dig deep in empirical analysis and experimentation regarding rule-making. But they settled for something a lot more junky, in my opinion. It would be interesting to excavate how and why the discipline has gone in that direction. I'm interested if the napoleonic system went in a different direction with their greater reliance on experts rather than juries. Also what the current Chinese situation is, with the praise they're getting in international media for competent governance (when they're not being criticized or noted for speech and association restrictions).

TGGP wrote:
Some off-topic stuff:

Bryan Caplan says "law is a shockingly phony discipline":
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/12/the_law_going_f.html

That reminds me of John Hasnas' "Myth of the Rule of Law":
http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm"

My reply: I hope I find the time to read that. The first title is a great one. I hope the content lives up to it. The second title isn't very innovative, particularly if it points out the commonly accepted reality that we live mostly by customary law and transient informal social contracts.

Brain Droppings December 24, 2008

There may be some repetitions in here. Just trying to get stuff from my notepad onto the web where it's searchable. The very last part is a response to TGGP's latest comment -I tried to post it to comments and it didn't go through, so I'm including it here.

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Glad to see more intelligence in the comments than in the original post (this seems to be a trend across blogs, including, probably, my own).

I really want conservatives and republicans to be effective challengers to Obama. The way to do this is to focus on where he's weak on meritocracy/technocracy.

Hint: go after the appointments to Secretary of State and Health and Human Services in particular. Also, I'm not sure about the qualifications for Homeland Security and and Commerce Department appointees for those specific posts. Obama chose governors rather than from the pool of true experts specifically at administrating commerce and homeland security policy, regulation, and granting bureacracies.

And in congress in particular, Republicans could be going after the antimeritocratic seniority system. At least this would be a challenge that would bring positive externalities to the American public.

Conservatives have trouble accepting it, but Obama did not run with a Jackson/Sharpton resume. He's a technocrat shamming as an identity politician (unlike Palin, who was the reverse, or Reagan who didn't feel the need to bother shamming).

For those who don't know you can access my blog by clicking on my name, it's:

http://www.hopeanon.typepad.com

statisticians, sociologists, and psychologists seem to have their own blindspot when it comes to discussing statistics and race/phenotype/ethnicity. Not that any other discipline sees more clearly, but I think it's perhaps a stronger mythology that succeeds in turning more of us into stakeholders. Thus obviously messy and incoherent realities about race, phenotype, and ethnicity are force fitted into narratives and the discussion tends to be focused on justifications of the force-fitting without any kind of dissent. I'm thinking about the lack of studies that look specifically at a spectrum of skin color and/or a spectrum of ethnicities without race as a reduced categories proxy.

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My neurosurgeon is a creationist?

Although probably not as worrisome as finding out that one's space mission director is an anti-copernican, I wonder how one should rationally react to finding out that a neurosurgeon is a creationist. I imagine the economist Becker would be more likely to get neurosurgery from them -particularly if they were a black lesbian.

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TGGP, I'm not enough of a legal historian to know, but I think much of our secular mythology comes out of the "civil rights movement" narrative, and later "reactionary" narratives, and I think what they all have in common is that they distract attention away from empiricism on first principles. Empiricism almost seems to me to be the nontransparent enemy, and maximizing the representational privilege of the protagonists and antagonists seems to be the goal. Also, empiricists seem not particularly motivated to puncture the myths both the protagonists and antogonists uphold In that way it reminds me of a differen magesteria.

How long have elite lawyers been "technocratic mythmakers"? I don't know if the myths of the American 18th century were created by "elite lawyers", I don't know of any celebrity lawyers of that time, but I think the leading critical race theorists (Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, Lani Guineer, etc.) are rather clearly mythmakers, and so are critical legal theorists generally, and so is Scalia and Alan Dershowitz, and I think they are colluding in a drama that seeks to maximize their representational privilege, and which isn't particularly focused on being empirical social scientists.

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Yeah, I think your explanation is too pat TGGP. Race is a huge part of secular mythology. I don't pretend to understand it -religious mythologies like Christianity are easier for me to understand. The power to get millions of people to behave in similarly stylized ways, mostly through the influence of a few hundred celebrity archetypes, and often against self-interest -- that's the power of racial narratives and dialectics in the American secular mythology. And supposed empiricists almost completely subordinate themselves to the first principles of the American racial mythology (I suppose the way scientists used to with regards to Christianity).

One gets a hint of the cracks and inconsistencies through Steve Sailor's blog, not because he tries to escape the mythologizing, but because his countermythologies are often so contrary to even basic principles of the mainstream (almost completely uncontested) discourse.

Brain Droppings December 21, 2008 Part 2

1. I highly recommend the latest blogging heads with Rehein Salaam (may be mispelled, the Atlantic editor) and Anne Marie Cox (also may be mispelled). What was especially valuable was their articulation of the ironic left and right, vs. the earnest left and right.

2. How corrupt is Richard Daley, the center of the Chicago/Illinois political machine?

3. Bloomberg willing to pay $80 million on the next mayoral election? A disgusting announcement to try to scare away equally competent competition. NYC should be an administrative training ground for young talent on their way to being NY governor and then vying for president. What a waste to have Bloomberg in there for a 3rd term. He should be moving up (running for Governor) or moving out.

4. I notice Kennedys never seem to give up their Senate seats, except if they're assasinated or they become President (this should NOT be construed as an unlawful incitement to any type of violence or lawbreaking).

5. I jotted down the question "Is telescopic philanthropy the most efficient way to solve irrational philanthropy?" but I'm not sure what I meant at the time. Now that I think about it, I think I meant that it may sate the emotion-based philanthropic desire most efficiently -kind of like the Atkins diet approach to food. If you're going to irrationally give based on whatever sways you to pity or a maudlin state, maybe its best to sate the urge with the most extreme triggers of that state. This isn't a strong thesis on my part, more of a question, which can probably be tested empirically.

6. The myth of the existing rational explanation. I think of that most prominently with a lot of Eliezer's writings. One notices that "the rational explanation" to an unexplained phenomenon often precedes even a somewhat correct rational explanation. I thought of this watching the classic movie "Dead of Night" -the character, clearly modeled on Freud and predicting Kissinger, posits a rational explanation as a matter of faith and narrative to all matter of things, even though he himself exists as a construct in the protagonists irrational dream. Although the movie was fiction, the phenomenon seems very real in my observation. I don't think this is a new insight on my part, but I think it's something not kept visible enough in popular and even intellectual discourse.

7. Anything to avoid a smotherocracy? I'd like to see an excavation of the males behind the construction of Obama as a challenger to Hillary Clinton. It seems in my observation that he was built up as a challenger to her when she was the democratic front-runner, and that the motivation was fear of a female head of state in the world's leading power. I think a lot of the classic feminist and post-feminist talk of men fearing smothering/mothering power of women has resonance here. It would be good to go back and track the news and origins of the Obama build up from book tour to "run while you're hot, you may not be hot in 4 years".

8. It's notable that the Chinese seem to be a bit more rational in some aspects of applying the death penalty than the Americans. It seems a lot more rational and respectful of human life to apply the death penalty for massive fraud, as the Chinese do, then to limit it to someone who kills a couple people, and then to try to extend it to child rapists, as Americans have been doing. However, to take it further, might it make sense to put social networks that cause massive fraud and waste to death? Although perhaps to kill a social network, one doesn't have to kill any of the members. One could do it with a series of restraining orders and injunctions against contact with the members, borrowing from existing contract and tort law.

9. A version of the theory from that guy that thinks nuclear proliferation spreads peace: a "nobody has the balls" theory of how one can use a limited number of nukes to ensure world peace. The theory is that any state or organized network logistically advanced enough to engage in terrorist attacks that cause fear to millions of people will be socially networked enough not to have the balls to kill 1 million people. So, 1 million people of the type that volunteered to be "human shields" during the Iraq war create a city state an live directly on a nuclear bomb. They then give the "button" to every rougue state and significant terrorist network. The idea is that none of them will have the balls to blow up these million people, which may change their perceptions and behavior. They may be disinclined to engage in terrorist to kill 100 innocents when they are made self-aware that they don't have the balls, despite the ability, to kill 1 million people. I don't know if this will work, but it might be simulatable. I'd like to see the theory explored further and more rigorously.

Brain Droppings December 21, 2008 Part 1

This will be a bit messy, a bunch of jottings in notepad that I just want to get onto the internet and make search available. Hopefully you can understand it. I don't have time or inclination to edit it to make it more readable (sorry). And some of it may have even been posted before (the earlier stuff, if any).

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TGGP, nothing startlingly insightful. Just when there is agreement about desired outcome, the legislation that has the greater probability of achieving that desired outcome among multiple options is the better legislation, by technocratic standards. The decision that it's better for one's healthy cellular systems to persist over a longer period of time than for one's cancerous brain cells to maximize growth over a shorter period of time is a normative decision. The best way to remove or thwart those cancerous brain cells is a technocratic decision.

(Once again, I understand there can always be niggling about this, but I think the broad concept is solid).

So, I think we want neurosurgeons that are technically competent, and I think we want legislators and administrators that are technically competent. Hence the law professor/public policy professor standard. Although I'm leaning towards experimental social scientist as the archetypal model for lawmakers, and I'll probably right about that in a post soon (as well as explaining why I think they should be at the top of the scientific hierarchy, above theoretical physicists, for example).

TGGP, I care about agreement because it allows for apples to apples comparison about technocratic achievement. Being a technocrat is about process. Being an ideologue is about fundamental goals (which could sometimes be about process, but don't have to be) it seems to me. So the agreement aspect is just to eliminate ideological noise in order to assess technocratic capability. For example, nazi germany and the USA share agreement that trains should run on time. Americans generally favorably assess nazi technocratic ability to manage railways. The soviets and the americans shared a goal for essential goods for common citizens to be easily accessible. When soviets saw that markets were a superior technocratic tool to achieve this than centrally planned approaches, they began to implement markets into their economic distribution mechanism.

http://www.policyintegrity.org
technocratic institute new to nyu law

atheists are lousy people because it's a self-selected group of people willing to publicly and nonanonymously refute popular myths.

Instead of separation of church and state we should have state experimentation with religion (different myths, or lack thereof, in different regions, to determine which results in the best consequences).

http://news.kontentkonsult.com/2008/12/manipulation-of-gold-prices.html
Fascinating analysis. I know too little about macroeconomics to know if it's insightful or crackpot.

Important update on Dr. Ishii

http://www.counterpunch.org/reed05272006.html

This breathless, manic post is both exciting and scary:

http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/people-blog/?p=2169

Martin Ginsberg, magna cum laude, harvard law:

http://www.atlantainjurylawblog.com/legal-profession-a-refreshingly-unstuffy-lawyer-bio.html

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JD, MPA, PhD profiles:

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/3/b37/868

Alex C. Sienkiewicz

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Stephen Foreman, PhD, JD, MPA, Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs, Robert Morris University

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Pauline Sieverding, PhD, JD, MPA

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http://experts.ttu.edu/browse/profile/400

http://www.law.ttu.edu/faculty/bios/sutton/

Victoria Sutton (Vickie Sutton), MPA, PHD, JD

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Kennard D. Brown

Ken Brown, JD, MPA, PhD

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Joshua M. Chanin, JD, MPA, PhD

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Charles H. Wilson III

http://radar.ngcsu.edu/~chwilson/

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Kevin Marshall JD, MPA, PhD

Kevin S. Marshall

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Brian Nickerson, PhD, JD, MPA.

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Deleon, Patrick H., PhD, MPA, JD. 2000

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JD, PHD (econ)

Josh Wright (J.D. PhD. Econ.)

Daniel Kessler (Stanford Business School Jd, Phd econ)

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JD, PHD (Math)

Thomas Brennan

http://www.law.northwestern.edu/faculty/profiles/ThomasBrennan/

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these mythmaking technocrats seem to exist in a different magesteria than the uberempiricists and hyperrationals. I'd like to best criticisms of their work by TGGP, Douglas Knight, Mitchell Peters, Caledonian, and others. BEST CRITICISMS, not easy countermythologies.

Mythmaking Technocrats:

Lani Guineer's latest:

http://www.harvardlawreview.org/issues/122/nov08/guinier.pdf

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Four people much better qualified to be appointed to the New York Senate Seat

http://www.albany.edu/rockefeller/pad/faculty_1/dawes.htm

Sharon Dawes

http://www.albany.edu/rockefeller/pad/faculty_1/faerman.htm

Sue Faerman

http://www.albany.edu/rockefeller/pad/faculty_1/pardo.htm

Theresa A. Pardo

http://www.albany.edu/rockefeller/pad/faculty_1/saidel.htm

Judith R. Saidel

Brain Droppings December 16, 2008

1. It seems like mythmakers and technocrats have been operating in "different majesteria" for a while, to borrow a phrase from religion vs. science. Quant types haven't been doing much to query the empirical foundations of critical theory, for example.

Brain Droppings December 14, 2008

1. The new Energy Secretary seems fantastic, from what I've heard. Tops the charts on domain competence, general competence. Clearly, the Obama transition team has been reading my blog (ha!).

2. That makes, in particular, the HHS pick, Daschle, all that more embarassing. Another thing I meant to say: I strongly suspect his "book" on national health care reform is ghostwritten, and I think I know by who -a former public health director for Maryland who went to Emory medical school. The tip off is describing the national health plan as "creating a federal reserve type system for health insurance". I heard that exact quote years ago from the guy I'm thinking of.

3. Mankiw's been on a tear of excellent posts and analysis. Clearly he wants to be working for the Obama administration as an economist. They'd be idiots not to offer him a prominent position. He seems to be working really hard to come up with technocratic solutions to the economic challenges we face. Obama claims to want to bring in republicans -could you do better than Mankiw? Mankiw first really came on my radar when I noticed he was one of the few bloggers Terry Tao links to, and the only economics professor in my recollection.

4. I recall watching Lani Guineer on youtube giving a lecture at some school and she cited a study that people often learn best by talking about a subject. She gave it in the context that people who speak more in class get better grades (these classes were blind graded by essays), and gave some evidence that it was causal not just correlated. I think about that watching blogging heads and seeing how bloggers interact through posts and comments. I think a lot of what's going on is people learning by reciting, explaining, and debating.

5. I'm still interested to know what the battleground congressional districts are of 2010. Us technocratophiles should be focused on getting highly qualified, competitive candidates running in the Republican primaries of those districts.

6. Who are the historians, if any, who are looking at history through the lense of decision theory?

7. Obama shouldn't fall into the hubris of "sharing some quality with me makes you qualified to administer something". For example, perhaps he thinks that because Daschle is a Senator like Obama he's qualified to run HHS.

8. I'd like to see theories of publication, status, and optimizing enlightenment. What are different mechanisms that work better or worse?

9. Check the counterpunch website circa 2006 if you're interested in reading more about Japan bioweapons research director Dr. Ishii. Funny, I couldn't find this story when I researched about him a few months ago. It's very detail rich (I can't vouch for the accuracy).

10. Good experimental econ/soc project: look for useful things (if any) where teams of christians outperform teams of atheists. Also see how mixed belief teams do.

11. I'd like to see tipping norms established for "free" media the way we do for the service industry. It's less efficient to "pay" today's blogging and youtubing entertainers by buying their books or patronizing their advertisers. What does one spend on entertainment in a year? What percentage of one's time does one spend on a particular blog (such as Steve Sailor's)? That's a good guide of how much you should tip that blogger, in my opinion. Given Freakonomics the book's reported study that most people do pay the suggested amount on a voluntary basis (I think it was on the order of 90% do, with regards to donuts and a suggested contribution jar) I think this could fund continued high quality media without the waste of coming up with DRM type stuff, or embargoeing media from convenient, distribution channels.

12. In the Leiter vs. Wilkinson dispute, overall I'm with Leiter. It's not that he's not an asshole when blogging, it's just that he's a much greater contributor to the enlightenment. And Leiter's legal philosophy vlog with Shapiro was a good demonstration about what's so good about blogging and the internet: we don't need dumber reporters as intermediaries between the public and experts any more. For years I dreamed of running a newspaper where every reporter had a ph.D. Functionally we have that today through the academic blogosphere. blogging heads should heavily concetrate on recruiting more ph.d., expert, professor vloggers.

13. I meant to blog that I find these candidate media realities (barack obama tv, for example) to feel a bit proto-fascistic once they've won executive office. Unfortunately, I feel like I'm chasing the news after the change.gov miniscandal about questions about the illinois gov.'s arrest being voted done. I agree that this is a kind of de facto censorship. The Obama transition team should make more effort for minority challenger voices to be heard, acknowledged, and addressed.

14. I'd like to see a law review article "Elite lawyers as nontransparent technocratic mythmakers".

Brain Droppings December 12, 2008

1. I think the recent daily show where Jon Stewart and Mike Huckabee discuss gay marraige is a great example of (coordinated) pageantry game to maximize representational privilege through archetype embodiment. Huckabee embodying the southern/heartland white conservative archetype, and Stewart embodying the coastal liberal archetype. Stewart and Huckabee could be seen as not competing against each other, but rather comprising a team competing against other liberal/conservative teams for our attention (a weak example that comes to mind is Hitchens debating various heartland conservatives about god during his recent book tour).

2. I'd like to a journal of anonymous social science research. But perhaps the internet obliterates the usefulness of that. Anyone can just publish any research they want onto the internet now, anonymous or not. The relevant people can find it with search and quickly determine if it's worth their time or not. It is still far understated how fucking revolutionary the internet is, particularly in lowering inefficencies in the intellectual enterprise. Libraries, universities, radio and television, non-package mail, they're all unecessary, and I suspect increasingly will only serve people who were already old when the internet hit its sweet spot (a few years back, probably around the time of the founding of overcomingbias and many of the academic blogs).

3. Stimulus idea: vouchers for buy useful things that can be made quickly (bikes, computers, efficient light bulbs, weatherproofing, winter clothes). The noneconomist Dick Morris claims giving stimulus moneys to the middle and lower classes will only result in them paying down their debt, not engaging in more beneficial economic activity to catalyze the economy. So how about giving them tailored vouchers or coupons? Then the businesses could redeem them for cash to the govt. I still support infrastructure spending, but I think most of us recognize "stimulus spending" is the trojan horse to get easier public acceptance for these long term investments towards economic efficiency and productivity in the USA.

4. The decision theorist is the king of experts, it seems to me. Because he gets to general competence. He's the interpreter of prediction markets, encyclopedia of the biases that inflict the boundedly rational, the master of the math behind game theory. General experts have their domain facts, the decision theorists corrects their intepretations of the facts. And if he's too hubristic? The person that can best discern that is an expert at decision making (at least of the subdomain of identifying flawed decision making due to hubris). I added this last part as a reaction to the recent trend of criticizing technocrats on the basis of "hubris", as if the person that correctly identifies how hubris flaws decision making isn't acting technocratically in that capacity.

5. The Kennedys embody gentrification of the moral high ground "We're too elite to be advocates for elites, and we're too beautiful to be spokespeople for the more repugnant subset of technocratic insights that could help nonelites or the population generally."

6. Two horribly misleading words: normative and positivism. They should be defined to be used this way instead. It's normative for a man to be about 5'10", and I really appreciated Ronald Reagan's positivism, a trait I think Barack Obama shares.

7. I see the Obama transition team slid out Daschle's name officially for HHS while the nation was distracted with the Illinois Governor's arrest. As I've blogged before, he doesn't have the resume to administer the largest bureacracy in the federal govt., the 700 billion dollar annual budget, Health and Human Services Administration.

No on Caroline Kennedy for New York Senate seat

It's one thing if she were to win it in an election. But to appoint a Kennedy who has never won an election?

Brain Droppings Monday 12/6/08

1. I've noticed a push to redefine technocrats as something other than top experts in the domain they work in plus general administrative competency. For example, claims that technocrats tend to have overconfidence that they can fix things through intervention compared to nonexperts. Here's why I think the "no true technocrat" rebuttal is different than the standard "no true scotsman" type response. Definitionally, it's more competent and expert judgment that allows one to notice when another is acting with overconfidence. So that comes down to a decision expert critiquing given subject matter expert about their decision making process. In other words, the true technocrat is the one that corrects the overconfidence, not the one with fancy degrees but less subject matter expertise or less general competence.

2. I'm interested in a geography of consequences to explain human behavior rather than "free will" to explain why punishment works even if we don't have free will. Just like a marble rolls through the curves of a landscape, up, down, and curving left and right, our behavior navigates the maze of alternatives guided in some part by anticipation of pleasure and in larger part avoidance of pain. Free will doesn't have to enter into the explanation, although I acknowledge that it's at least epiphenomenal (it is for me).

3. We've reached the point that Obama is accountable for everything that happens in the final Bush days. Obama should have at least one competent person on staff full-time tracking the bailout money, for example. I heard that the early Wall Street bailout funds were distributed so quickly that they weren't tracked. That's silly for billions of dollars and inexcusable -further, Obama deserves blame because he was here in real time with the rest of us, with a large bully pulpit not making a sound about it. The bailout money and the financial crisis are THE ball -the most important thing to get right. Speaking of which, the car companies bailout seems fishy, and it's weird and counterintuitive to me that liberal pundits seem to be supporting it in large numbers.

4. Repugnant market idea: credit cap and trading market for being able to create media with negative externalities (kind of like trading carbon caps). I think the latest research is strongly indicating that media can have measurable negative effects on populations. But rather than ban, trading caps might be the solution.

5. I'm thinking of a model of vote collection/politics as bias farming. Some politicians do seem to me to be farming bias in populations for power.

6. I notice there's a lot of ideology rather than technocracy (as contrast discussed in the Balkin/Posner blogging heads recently posted) throughout the common law. It would be interesting to see a systematic review.

7. It's surprising to me that few university presidents seem to be academic experts on university administration (for example Kudlow is very accomplished academically, but didn't specialize academically in that field).