Constructive Criticism

My boss just told me, "For a very intelligent person, you are really good at taking constructive criticism."

It seems obvious to me that I am very intelligent because I am good at learning from constructive criticism. Nobody is born knowing anything useful. Almost by definition, being an intelligent person means that, at some point in the past, you were good at taking constructive criticism from somebody. 'Learning from constructive criticism' is basically the definition of 'education'.

I walked into this job with the attitude that my bosses and the other experienced people were my teachers, and I was a student. I treat them like I treated my professors in grad school, respecting and deferring to their superior skills and experience while being unafraid to add my own knowledge, ask questions, and make suggestions.

I consider it right and proper that my draft documents will come back to me with dozens of comments and edits. I am the apprentice, and they are the masters. My work will inevitably have problems until I learn the approach, techniques, and presentation that the organization requires.

Even when the people editing and commenting on my documents are not the masters of my profession, they will always know something that I do not, or have a perspective that I need to consider. I can only learn from them, or learn how to communicate with them, if I respect and react well to their criticism.

But it is not just my intelligence that is boosted by my attitude to criticism. It actually helps my creativity as well. In the process of creation, I do not simply copy what has been done before. I do what I know is right, not what I think they want. I do not self-censor. This freedom and creativity comes because I know that my work will be criticized and edited as necessary, and I do not fear this. I am not afraid of being told to change. It is far better to see someone else squash my creativity into a box than to unconsciously internalize a stifling set of boundaries and limitations.

The key to this process is to sever any connection between my ego and the first draft of my work. Being told that I need to make big changes to my work is no threat to me, and I do not react with any defensiveness or hostility. I know that at the end of the process, my work will be very good. It will contain much of my originality and creativity and skill, while being molded in ways that make its readers better understand and accept it.

Mental Strangeness

Today I was confronted with something that made me realize how different I am from other people. It was a list of security questions for password resets. I assume that they were chosen because most people would easily be able to give a consistent answer to them. But most of the questions involved concepts, experiences, or mental processes that are alien or unimportant to me. I will run down the list:

"What is the first name of your best friend in high school?"

I do not have 'best friends'. This concept is alien to me. I have friends, and I do not rank them. There are three or four people with equal claim to 'best friend' in high school and my mind refuses to decide among them.

"Where would you most like to live?"

I have never thought about this and my answer to the question would likely change quite often. It seems a waste of time to dream and fantasize like this.

"What is the first name of your first boyfriend or girlfriend?"

The definition of the word 'girlfriend' is a very vague and fuzzy one, especially in the modern world. I am not sure if the first woman I kissed qualifies as a girlfriend or not.

"What city would you most like to visit?"

Again, I have never thought of this. There are lots of interesting places in the world that I might go to, but ranking them in terms of desire is never something I have done.

"What is the name of the street your childhood friend lived on?"

How am I supposed to decide which friend this refers to? I had lots of childhood friends. And I do not remember the street that any of them lived on, because my parents were driving.

"What is your favorite food?"

Again they ask me to rank things. I like lots of things, and my preferences change depending on factors like the season, what I have been eating recently, what I feel like, what the occasion is, and who I am with.

"What would you like your nickname to be?"

I hate nicknames. I want people to call me by my real name.

"Who is your favorite cartoon character?"

The media that I choose to consume at any time depends greatly on my mood and the situation. How can it make any sense to make arbitrary decisions like this? The word 'favorite' is inherently problematic for me. The very concept of picking a favorite seems both ill-defined and senseless in a wide variety of contexts. What is the point? Cartoons do not compete like sports teams. Am I declaring that I would always or usually choose to watch a cartoon with that character over any other? This is dumb. Am I declaring my affiliation to a certain social group of people that identify with the character? This also seems like a silly way of dividing and separating people.

"If you had the time and money to pursue any hobby, what would it be?"

Not only is this another ranking or favorite question, it presupposes that I desire to do something with my life that I am not currently doing. This seems like it would be an unpleasant state of existence.

"In what city did you meet your spouse/significant other?"

I do not currently have such a person.

"What was the model of the first car you drove?"

I have no idea which car my parents taught me to drive in. It was long ago and they no longer own it.

"What was the second state or country you lived in?"

Finally, a legitimate question about a well-defined fact of my life.

"What is the first name of the cousin who is closest to your age?"

I have lots of cousins close to my age, and I am not sure which one is the closest. I do not keep track of the ages of people with such precision.

"What was the first concert you attended?"

I have never been to a concert.

"What is your father's middle name?"

The second proper factual question.

"What is your maternal grandmother's first name?"

The third good question.

"What was/is your grandfather's occupation?"

I have two grandfathers, and each of them had several occupations.

Out of all these questions, I can only give a reliable and consistent answer to three of them. Most of the questions presupppose that I have generated arbitrary and irrelevant, but fixed and stable, ordered rankings about the things in my life. Many of the others assume that my life and that of my family followed some narrowly defined script.

One of the facts that people often do not understand about me is that I do not instinctively judge most of the things around me. Life happens. I experience things. I decide and act based on the situation and the constraints I face at the time. It seems a waste of mental energy to assign the things around me to arbitrary categories, or to compare and rank them. Judgments should be reserved for important things, and not the petty details of my personal existence.

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.