Parkour and Shakespeare

These two things have nothing in common except that they both occupied my afternoon. The head of our Dojo and I practiced parkour on campus, and then went to an outdoor showing of Romeo and Juliet.

Parkour is the art of moving swiftly and efficiently over obstacles. It involves a lot of jumping and climbing. We were both very careful not to try anything that would put us at risk. Anything involving movement and heights can be dangerous, but years of martial arts have given us a good awareness of the environment and what we are capable of. I am tired and sore, and have some scrapes on my hands, but we had fun and learned a lot. We still have a long way to go before we get really good, though.

The play was put on by a class that had some of his friends in it. It was different, but enjoyable. They were having fun with it. Both of Romeo's friends (Mercutio and Benvolio) were played by women, and they changed the lines so the characters were women. The actors were very physically expressive, so the production was lively and a little raunchy, just like it was intended.

Power

It makes no sense for people to make so much fuss about the nuclear power plants in Japan. The earthquake and tsunami killed over ten thousand people, and the nuclear plants have not killed a single person. This incident actually makes me feel better about nuclear power; those ancient plants survived a really nasty string of disasters that would not happen in the USA, and modern plants are far safer.

The numbers suggest that the Japanese spent too much money on nuclear safety. If they had spent that money on better tsunami protection, it could have saved hundreds or thousands of lives.

Coal mining kills hundreds of people each year, and the pollution from burning coal kills thousands more. The world would be a much better place if coal plants were replaced by nuclear power plants. Any yet the public paranoia about nuclear stuff makes it impossible to buy insurance for nuclear power plants, which kills investment in them.

Of course, if these numbers are right, building any large power plant now would be a mistake. In one or two decades, solar panels may be so cheap that it will never make any sense to run a power plant during sunny days.

I do not think that the future will have all households making their own power. It will certainly be much easier to live off the grid, with solar and biofuels, but it will still be more efficient to buy your power from a specialized provider. But specialized does not mean centralized. A lot of power is lost in transmission. Instead of big power plants, utilities will, if solar gets cheap enough, scatter solar cells all over the place, so the generation is close to the consumer and a single cloud will not reduce the power too much.

Traditional power plants will mainly provide supply at night and during cloudy days, and to meet demand spikes. For that you need a plant that can be turned on and off quickly, like natural gas. Nuclear power plants only make sense when they are run constantly, providing a steady supply of power.

Basically, In a world of cheap solar panels, nuclear power makes little sense. This is especially true if biofuel production technologies advance, as it seems they will. All issues surrounding nuclear power could become history in a generation.

Secret Fears of the Super-Rich

He found that the rich—especially the inheritors of vast fortunes—have unique sets of worries, and face the added difficulty of knowing that many despise or envy them. "Often the word rich becomes a pejorative," Kenny says. "It rhymes with bitch. I've been in rooms and seen people stand up and say, 'I'm Bob Kenny, and I'm rich.' And then they burst into tears."

The respondents turn out to be a generally dissatisfied lot, whose money has contributed to deep anxieties involving love, work, and family. Indeed, they are frequently dissatisfied even with their sizable fortunes. Most of them still do not consider themselves financially secure; for that, they say, they would require on average one-quarter more wealth than they currently possess.

Such complaints sound, on their face, preposterous. But just as the human body didn't evolve to deal well with today's easy access to abundant fat and sugars, and will crave an extra cheeseburger when it shouldn't, the human mind, apparently, didn't evolve to deal with excess money, and will desire more long after wealth has become a burden rather than a comfort. A vast body of psychological evidence shows that the pleasures of consumption wear off through time and depend heavily on one's frame of reference. 

 Read the whole thing

There seem to be two distinct sets of problems with being rich. One set comes from society. Other people treat you differently, and often worse, if you have lots of money. This is the kind of thing Ayn Rand complained about at length, along with the claim that such attitudes would result in the downfall of civilization. She takes things to an extreme, but it is true that if society does not respect wealth creation then we will get a lot less of it. People who earned a lot of money honestly* should never be ashamed of it, and if they are, that means something is wrong with our culture.

The second set of problems is psychological. Sometimes it can be hard to disentangle this from cultural conditioning, but it seems that money really does not make people happy. The most it can do is solve almost all of the problems that the outside world throws at you. That is not enough to satisfy most people, and it may even lead to dissatisfaction, to the extent that humans seem to have a natural impulse to be problem-solvers:

 Work is what fills most people's days, and it provides the context in which they interact with others. A life of worklessness, however financially comfortable, can easily become one of aimlessness, of estrangement from the world. The fact that most people imagine it would be paradise to never have to work does not make the experience any more pleasant in practice.

The problems of the super-rich are a small subset of a larger social problem. People in rich developed countries live in an environment that is utterly alien to the workings of the neurotypical human brain. The only people who will be truly comfortable with this environment are people whose minds are naturally abnormal, or those who have painstakingly reprogrammed themselves with the right kind of philosophy. Everyone else will be as nervous and confused and neurotic as a poodle in a mansion.

Compared to the miserable existence of most people throughout history, this is a good problem to have, but it is still a problem, and I have no clue how it might be solved on a societal level.

* 'Honestly' here means via any kind of voluntary exchange, anything does not involve politics, government contracts, fraud, or crime.

Chess and Computers

A big question about the future is what computers will do to human labor and economic activity. Here's a good article that looks at what computers have done to chess players. This is probably a good guide to what will happen with expert computers more generally.

Sample quotes:

Chess is an area where educational reform has been extremely rapid and extremely successful.  Chess education today revolves around learning how to learn from the computer, and this change has come within the last ten to fifteen years.  No intermediaries were able to prevent it or slow it down.  Humans now teach themselves how to team with computers, and the leading human players have to be very good at this.  The computers which most successfully team with humans are those which replicate most rapidly.

Chess-playing computers still are not meta-rational.  They do not understand what they do not understand very well, for instance blocked positions and long sequences of repetition.  That is one reason why human-computer teams are so important and so productive. 

Education Reform

My dad, a high school teacher, has been saying this kind of thing for years:

 advocates for better education have repeatedly latched on to a depressing litany of fads as the panacea for what ails American education. Believing that they have only a short window of opportunity for change, these reformers push for their ideas to be applied uniformly across the board. "New math," standardized testing, centralization, merit pay, small schools, community control, mayoral control, and dozens of other ideas have ripped through schools, often with disappointment and disillusion not far behind.
Many of these ideas actuallydid have some merit, says Hess, in the sense that they could help some specific students in some specific circumstances. For example, a rigorous focus on a narrow set of tested subjects may be reasonable for schools in chaotic, urban contexts where simply focusing on anything counts as success. But that treatment, like chemotherapy, has powerful side effects that should not be risked on the (relatively) healthy "patients" in more advantaged school districts.

Source 

There is no best way to run a school, just as there is no best way to run a restaurant. Different people need different kinds of services. Nobody can design a single plan that works for everyone. Instead of centralized rules, we need a system that gives people freedom to find better ways to teach.

Of course, pure freedom without any responsibility is a recipe for disaster. The output of schools has to be measured somehow. Standardized tests are one option, and are certainly better than nothing, but they still have problems. There is a debate over what exactly schools should do, and most people agree that they should do more than just boost test scores. I think most parents mainly want school to improve their child's future, both in terms of income and quality of life. There should not be too much disagreement on that. 

Therefore, the optimal, incentive-compatible solution would be one that gives money to schools based on the quality of the student's life after school.   If the child gets a good job and is happy and avoids crime and other social ills, the school should be rewarded. If not, the school should get nothing.

Of course, if done wrong, this scheme would result in schools just trying to enroll rich, well-adjusted kids. You have to correct for innate ability and home circumstances to find the improvement that is due to the school.  So at a young age, the government would collect data on children and their parents, measuring things that affect future life outcomes, like parents' income and household situation and the child's health status, IQ, and self-control. Then, these numbers are plugged into a computer model that predicts the child's future income and other measures of quality of life. 

After you get those numbers, you can measure what each school system actually does. If the child's life is better than what the model predicts, the school gets government money. If it is worse, they do not. Private schools and public schools should be treated the same, and parents allowed to choose the school they like the best. This kind of plan would probably create a lot of specialized schools, for example ones that are designed to work with low-IQ children and prepare them for decent jobs.

There are a lot of practical details to be worked out here, and I don't think my readers would be interested in the specifics. But they can be worked out. Whenever you have a problem, a good solution usually starts with thinking about exactly what you want, and then giving people a string incentive to produce those results.

Rural people and politics

An economist recently wrote a book talking about how big cities make people richer and more productive. The key idea is that ideas and efficiency and economic growth come from connecting people, and dense clusters of people make these connections much more likely to happen. Living in big cities also trends to be much more efficient: transportation and search costs are a lot lower, and city dwelling generates less pollution and much less habitat destruction than country dwelling.

The key policy implication is that we should support and encourage life and economic activity in cities in order to make our nation richer. If done right, you get things like the renaissance of New York City. At the very least, we should stop taxing city dwellers in order to subsidize rural areas and lifestyles that tend to trap people in poverty.

Here's a link to a blog post discussing the book.

Then this happened:

Yesterday afternoon, I got an e-mail from a "usda.gov" address. "Secretary Vilsack read your blog post 'Why we still need cities' over the weekend, and he has some thoughts and reflections, particularly about the importance of rural America," it said. A call was set for a little later in the day. I think it's safe to say Vilsack didn't like the post. A lightly edited transcript of our discussion about rural America, subsidies and values follows.

Read the whole thing. It is amusing and horrifying, like a train wreck. The secretary of agriculture tries to defend current policy, but just makes himself look like an idiot. The thing that amazed me was that, in his opening comments, he said:

And sometimes people don't realize that 90 percent of the persistent poverty counties are located in rural America. 

which is exactly the point that economists try to make: rural life often leads to poverty and we need to get people out of that situation. If you are trying to defend the merits or rural life, why would you go out of your way point out one of its biggest problems?

This blog post provides good commentary on this issue, I would have written something similar but linking to this is easier.

More on Placebos

I just came across this:

Kaptchuk tested the effect of placebo versus no treatment in 80 people with irritable bowel syndrome. Twice a day, 37 people swallowed an inert pill could not be absorbed by the body. The researchers told participants that it could improve symptoms through the placebo effect.
While 35 per cent of the patients who had not received any treatment reported an improvement, 59 per cent of the placebo group felt better. "The placebo was almost twice as effective as the control," says Kaptchuk. "That would be a great result if it was seen in a normal clinical trial of a drug."

I followed the link to the journal article and found exactly what they said to the patients:

Patients were randomized to either open-label placebo pills presented as "placebo pills made of an inert substance, like sugar pills, that have been shown in clinical studies to produce significant improvement in IBS symptoms through mind-body self-healing processes" or no-treatment controls with the same quality of interaction with providers.

The phrase 'mind-body self-healing processes' is suspiciously similar to what you hear thrown around in ads for quack cures. I wonder if this was intentional. Did they copy buzzwords from quack ads, the same way that Forer copied horoscopes for a psychology demonstration? 

This study helps explain why those quack cures are so popular: they actually do work for any condition marked by a subjective experience. With this study you could legally sell sugar pills for IBS relief, as long as the ad mimicked what these doctors told the patients.

Of course, the smart thing to do is skip the middleman and convince yourself that exercise or yoga or meditation or something similar will cause a dramatic boost in your health and make you feel better and more energetic. If you believe it, then it will be true.