Message to Yourself

If you could call yourself five years ago and had 30 seconds, what would you say?

Think about it. Consider several options. Think about your priorities. When you have made a decision, read on.

Most people seem to answer this question with advice for their personal life. This was one of my first instincts as well. This says a lot about the way that human instincts work. Our minds seem programmed to focus on petty personal things.

A slightly higher order of thought is to give yourself advice on buying stocks. This is much more useful than personal advice if your goal is to maximize your personal quality of life, but it is still a rather petty and selfish thing to do.

After a bit of thought, I started to consider what kind of tragedies I could have prevented if I had accurate information from the future. A lot of bad things have happened in the last five years. Crafting the ideal message then becomes a problem of identifying bad things that I could prevent if I had foreknowledge of them, guessing the probabality of preventing them, and multiplying to find the highest expected benefit for the world.

Probably the worst disaster of the past five years is the Syrian civil war. But I cannot think of any way that I could have prevented that catastrophe. Even if I was the actual president of the US, it is not clear that I could have stopped it. It is a messy diplomatic and geopolitical situation, and an unverifiable 'message form the future' will add nothing to efforts to prevent the disaster, even if that information turns out to be accurate.

The same is true for any number of natural disasters, famines, and diseases. I do not think that a random Economics PhD student could have any real chance of preventing such things, even with 30 seconds of accurate information. Presumably I would trust the message, but attempting to tell anyone else about the source of my knowledge would mark me as a madman.

However, there are much smaller tragedies that I might have had a good chance of preventing with a phone call to the right people at the right time. Despite the fact that the FBI gets millions of signals a day, and has an incredibly difficult job of choosing which ones to act on, a very clear warning about a specific person on a specific date would probably get a serious response. If I called in about a week before the Boston marathon bombings and gave the name of the perpetrator and said I knew he was planning an attack, they would probably start investigating.

Outbreaks of foodborne illness kill far more Americans each year than criminals and terrorists. If I was in a position of authority, then knowledge of things like the 2011 listeriosis outbreak from contaminated cantaloupe, or the 2012 meningitis outbreak from compounding pharmacy drugs, would allow me to save far more lives than knowledge of criminal acts that kill a half or a third as many people. But I do not think that a message from a random civilian would be able to start an investigation that would prevent these things.

So, my message to myself would be a brief description of the worst domestic crimes and attacks in the past five years, with dates and perpetrators. I have not researched this very thoroughly, but my first guess would be the Fort Hood shootings, the Sandy Hook shootings, and the Boston marathon bombings. Those are bad events that I could have a high probability of stopping if I had accurate information in advance of the attacks, and that information is probably the limit of what I could fit into 30 seconds.

4 Player Chess

Last night I won a game of four player chess by accident. I know that any of the other players could have crushed me in a two-player chess game, but the four-player version is a different game in interesting ways. For example, it is rarely a good idea to trade pieces, even if you can take a more valuable piece, because that means that your two other opponents are both in a better position.

The game is fascinating. Although the pieces move the same way, the strategic dynamics are very different. It is not possible to play 4-player chess the same way you play 2-player chess. If you try to think through future moves, you will be exhausted from the mental effort and your work will be for naught, because the board can change dramatically based on the actions of your opponents moving against each other. One player was paralyzed with indecision, not wanting to move anything, before giving up and turning his side over to someone else.

You have to play 4-player chess like you play Go. Instead of trying to be a chess computer, go with intuitions of life, breathing, influence, and position. From the start I did not try to think through things; I made bold moves to shake up the game and cause interesting things to happen. Very early on in the game I 'opened Pandora's Box' by moving a piece where it could have been costlessly captured by another player, pointing out that he had no incentive to capture the piece because it was threatening his opponents more than him.

Later, there were many times in the game where I had no obvious move, so I just shifted my pieces so that they had more options, threatened more squares, or were defended by more pieces. Someone else was asking me a question about fitting Vibram Fivefingers, so I was not paying much attention, and for a couple turns I was randomly putting pressure on the leading player by putting him in check. Then he congratulated me for a checkmate and game win. When I asked how that happened, he told me that I could move my queen right next to his king, where it was covered by my knight, and I had a bishop blocking the escape routes.

When you take someone's king, you control all the pieces left on that side. The player I could checkmate had already done this to another player. It had been a very swift reversal; it had appeared that he was aiming for one player but then he saw an opportunity to checkmate another player instead.

I suspect that the game could degenerate very quickly if you played to win rather than have fun. The optimal strategy is probably to 'turtle up' and build a fortress. Once the game is shaken up and moving quickly, it is fun, but you need a kind of cooperative 'play for the lulz' attitude to make that happen. It may not be a coincidence that I had been playing to have fun and not win, and ended up both winning and making the game fun.

Packaged Food

Here is a good and important New York Times article on packaged foods. I will pull out highlights and add some commentary, which hopefully gets you interested in reading the whole thing.

On the evening of April 8, 1999, a long line of Town Cars and taxis pulled up to the Minneapolis headquarters of Pillsbury and discharged 11 men who controlled America's largest food companies. Nestlé was in attendance, as were Kraft and Nabisco, General Mills and Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Mars. Rivals any other day, the C.E.O.'s and company presidents had come together for a rare, private meeting. On the agenda was one item: the emerging obesity epidemic and how to deal with it.

The food industry is locked in a classic arms race. They are not monsters and they would love to give people healthy food if it meant the same profits. The problem is that if they fail to add sugar and salt to everything, they will lose market share to their competitors and eventually go out of business. So they spend vast amounts of money 'optimizing' foods for maximum taste in order to stay in business.

In most situations, we want to see companies working hard to deliver products that consumers want at a good price. That is what makes market economies so good. But the problem is that when it comes to food, the things that people want will end up killing them.

The way you end an arms race is with some kind of binding agreement. If everyone agrees to prevent the escalation of the arms race, then everyone is better off. Humans have a lot of instincts about fairness and society that help us maintain these kinds of agreements. This meeting was obviously an attempt to stop the arms race, allowing the companies to maintain their situation and keep food healthy.

It was a noble effort, but it failed, as the article describes. Outside of small groups that trust each other, these agreements are always hard to sustain, because the incentives to defect are so strong. If every other food company is making bland healthy food, you can make amazing amounts of money by adding salt and sugar to your stuff. This process is what makes non-competitive agreements hard to sustain, and generally protects consumers from cartels and incumbent firms getting lazy and trying to make profits without constant innovation. But again, with food the process works against consumers.

In the process of product optimization, food engineers alter a litany of variables with the sole intent of finding the most perfect version (or versions) of a product. Ordinary consumers are paid to spend hours sitting in rooms where they touch, feel, sip, smell, swirl and taste whatever product is in question. Their opinions are dumped into a computer, and the data are sifted and sorted through a statistical method called conjoint analysis, which determines what features will be most attractive to consumers.

If you are relying on your instincts and sensations to guide your diet, you have no chance of remaining healthy. The techniques described in the article will generate superstimuli, foods unlike anything found in nature, and your instincts will tell you that you should seek them out. When all of the tools of modern science are being deployed to create something that you will find attractive, then it requires a monastic level of asceticism to avoid that thing. When the attractive things are full of sugar and salt and have no vitamins, then people without such extreme self-control will suffer lots of nasty health problems.

The military has long been in a peculiar bind when it comes to food: how to get soldiers to eat more rations when they are in the field. They know that over time, soldiers would gradually find their meals-ready-to-eat so boring that they would toss them away, half-eaten, and not get all the calories they needed. But what was causing this M.R.E.-fatigue was a mystery.

A lot of people would like to have this problem, and there are several lessons here. The first is the value of exercise. Soldiers in the field are burning a lot of calories. Their instincts may not be telling them to replace all of these calories.

The second lesson is the power of novelty. Although there is a lot of individual variation, the reward system in our brains seems to have an instinct to reward us for new experiences. If you are in a good place with your diet, then trying something new might be hazardous to your waistline.

The final lesson is that a restricted diet may help you lose weight because your appetite will diminish. This might explain the constant popularity of fad diets, even though there is no medical reason for them to accomplish anything if calorie intake is held constant. Any arbitrary and strict limit on your diet will be easy to remember and may decrease your appetite, so they may produce good results as long as you are getting all the vitamins and important nutrients you need.

With production costs trimmed and profits coming in, the next question was how to expand the franchise, which they did by turning to one of the cardinal rules in processed food: When in doubt, add sugar.

We are now realizing that added sugar can be a bigger problem than natural fats. When I turn three plantains and an avocado into a feast of chips and guacamole and eat that for dinner, it is not the healthiest thing in the world but it probably does less damage to me than a dinner of spaghetti and premade sauce.

Kraft's early Lunchables campaign targeted mothers. They might be too distracted by work to make a lunch, but they loved their kids enough to offer them this prepackaged gift. But as the focus swung toward kids, Saturday-morning cartoons started carrying an ad that offered a different message: "All day, you gotta do what they say," the ads said. "But lunchtime is all yours."

I find this kind of thing abhorrent. Adults have the ability and understanding to deploy self-control against psychological pressure and optimized superstimuli, even though it is hard. But feeding on the insecurities of adolescents to sell them a horribly unhealthy packed food is inexcusable. This particular message is especially sinister because it implies that any parent that does the responsible thing and refuses to buy this junk is denying children the freedom they deserve.

We need to understand as a society that children are simply not qualified to make any choices about diet and nutrition. Most of them have no chance to resist the seduction of these carefully optimized superstimulus foods. Once they are exposed to such things, their desires and instincts will be warped and distorted and they will start to see healthier foods as inferior, and refuse to eat them.

North Korea

Maybe I am overreacting to recent news, and this is certainly not my area of expertise, but it seems that the situation in North Korea is going to change dramatically in the next few years or possibly even months.

For over a decade now, there has been a constant cycle of North Korean nuclear ambitions, plans, and tests, combined with bellicose rhetoric. It may not appear that this recent news is any different from all the rest, but there is a good chance that we are reaching a tipping point.

For decades, there has been an equilibrium where China protected North Korea and kept the situation stable. But now it appears that China is supporting strong sanctions against North Korea. Maybe this is not an actual change in policy, and maybe China is just sending a stronger signal to North Korea in an attempt to stabilize the situation, but there is a good chance that China is cutting North Korea loose. They may be calculating that ending the situation now is better than letting it linger. The fact that this new UN resolution comes just after a leadership change in China could be significant.

Even accounting for changes in the situation and internal Chinese politics, achieving this cooperation from China should be counted as a major accomplishment of the Obama administration. It is a major change from the past, and it could lead to a major improvement in the security and human rights situation in east Asia.

However, there is also a lot of danger. If China stops supporting North Korea, then the days of the regime will be numbered. It simply cannot sustain itself without constant support from the outside world, and it knows this fact. If China actually does cut them loose, that will start the countdown on a bomb. Hopefully the bomb can be defused before it goes off.

I suspect that history books will see the Arab Spring and possibly the upcoming events in North Korea as the defining aspects of the Obama administration, and that our current economic troubles and budget squabbles will seem utterly insignificant in comparison.

Sequester Correction

I was wrong about the USDA's actions in response to the sequester. The law says that all programs must be cut equally, which means that the food inspection service of the UDSA must be cut as much as everything else. It is not possible to transfer money from the rest of USDA to keep food inspection running. Since 87% the inspection budget is salaries of inspectors and the rest is support staff, there is no other place the money can come from.

So there will be problems, and there is nothing UDSA can do right now without a new law or some action by the White House to change the process to give agencies more flexibility.

Source, and I checked it for accuracy by reading the OMB report on sequestration.

I have little commentary to add, but see here for political analysis.

Anthropomorphizing Animals

The WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) mind also appears to be unique in terms of how it comes to understand and interact with the natural world. Studies show that Western urban children grow up so closed off in man-made environments that their brains never form a deep or complex connection to the natural world. While studying children from the U.S., researchers have suggested a developmental timeline for what is called "folkbiological reasoning." These studies posit that it is not until children are around 7 years old that they stop projecting human qualities onto animals and begin to understand that humans are one animal among many. Compared to Yucatec Maya communities in Mexico, however, Western urban children appear to be developmentally delayed in this regard. Children who grow up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood.

Source: We Aren't the World (I recommend reading the whole article, it is full if interesting and important facts.)

American children are constantly exposed to lies about animals. Much of the media they consume features animals that talk, think, and act like humans. They are exposed to this media far more than they are exposed to actual animals, and this fills their minds with mistakes.

For example, I was quite old before I realized that cats do not have the mental capacity to understand pointing at an object. Only dogs and humans, and some great apes, understand the concept of focusing attention on a thing that another creature is pointing at. I had assumed that cats can and should understand communication via pointing. My understanding of their actual behavior and capabilities was wrong, distorted by both my untutored instincts and by my unending exposure to media and a culture that treats their actions as human.

There are many, many people in our country who never stop projecting human qualities onto animals.  Most pet owners act as if their animals had human feelings, emotions, and desires. Pet behavior is interpreted as if it was human behavior. Cultures that have a better understanding of animals and the natural world do not make this mistake. They treat their animals as tools, fundamentally inhuman things that must be well-maintained but have no rights or purpose other than the jobs they perform. They view the WIERD relationship with animals as insanity.

If or when I have children, I will try to make sure that they have a lot of exposure to the natural world, and as little exposure as possible to media that features human-like animals. I want them to grow up with a realistic understanding of the world, and not a mind full of lies.

Tooth-to-tail ratio and sequestration

I have a fondness for military terminology. People in the US military often invents phrases that are memorable, accurate, and evocative. One of them is 'tooth-to-tail ratio'. It describes the proportion of combat troops (teeth) to support troops (tail).

The concept can be applied to many organizations. Very often, there is an identifiable group of people doing the 'front-line' work and a separate group supporting and directing them. For example, in education, the teachers are the teeth and the administrators are the tail. In health care, doctors and nurses are teeth and everyone else is the tail. In the USDA, the inspectors are the teeth and the people in Washington are the tail.

Teeth do need a tail to function. A pile of teeth without something holding them together is rarely effective at anything. But we often see a process of 'administrative bloat' where the tail keeps getting bigger and bigger without doing much to make the teeth more effective.

This is an inevitable outcome of human nature. People making decisions will instinctively try to help and protect themselves and the people they care about. Often, the people in the tail are combined in a single location and are socially connected, while the teeth are scattered about. This makes the process even harder to stop, because the prejudices of the people in the tail will reinforce each other and the knowledge of the teeth can get ignored. The administrators convince themselves that they are essential and all need more support staff, and the problems of the teeth start to seem as remote as the problems of poor children in Mali.

Competitive markets prevent tails from getting too fat. Any organization with a bloated tail will not last long, because someone else will steal away their customers by selling access to the teeth at a better rate. But if customers have no real choice, or the organization's budget is determined by a process that does not involve customers, there is little to stop the tail from fattening itself endlessly. This is most likely to happen in government agencies.

When budget cuts hit, the rational thing to do is almost always to cut the tail. It is very rate to see any kind of organization where there are too many teeth for the tail to support and cutting the teeth lets them bite more effectively. But the tail will always attempt to respond to budget cuts by cutting out teeth rather than let itself shrink. And because one of the functions of the tail is to manage the organization's money, it will get what it wants unless there is a lot of outside force to compel it to act otherwise.

With public agencies, there is an additional perverse incentive. Everyone in the organization, both teeth and tail, will want to increase the organization's budget. The way to do this is to convince everybody that cutting the budget would result in a disaster. Claiming that the teeth will fall out if the beast is starved will often result in the beast getting the food it wants. And for the reasons described above, this is a credible threat. The tail will actually prefer to cut out the teeth, and everyone knows it.

With that in mind, consider the recent news story that The USDA is claiming that sequestration will force it to furlough food safety inspectors.

Anyone with any knowledge of the USDA knows that this ridiculous. The Food Safety and Inspection Service is a tiny part of UDSA's budget. Most of their money goes to programs that promote US agriculture and farmers' interests rather than food safety. There are literally dozens of programs that could be cut that are less important than food inspection. Their tooth-to-tail ratio is already miniscule. Inspectors are mainly independent, working on their own in meat plants. They are probably capable of doing their jobs perfectly well for at least two weeks even if every other employee in the USDA was furloughed.

This announcement is a combination of political ploy and a self-serving tail. The potential budget cuts would not cause any decrease in food inspections if the organization was actually being run in the interests of the public. By comparison, the food side of FDA is not threatening to cut any food inspections or laboratory tests.

The National Cattlemen's Beef Association rarely says anything worth listening to, but their quote in the linked article is worth repeating: USDA is "using America's cattlemen and women as pawns in the agency's political wrangling with Congress".