Objectivity and transparency in media

The Economist argues that transparency is an adequate substitute for objectivity. The gist is that it's okay to be biased if you're upfront about your biases and provide supporting evidence.

That is idiotic. The fundamental problem is that the knowledge in your head does not have an audit trail. If you read something untrue or distorted, even if you know it when you read it, there's a good chance you're going to remember it as true.

The way they describe it sounds more acceptable, but they open the door for biased, distorted reporting. Human memory is flawed. It's unreasonable to expect perfect memory and discrimination from people in order to excuse away your own lack of objectivity.

They're people not resources damnit

Had a discussion at lunch with co-workers about the good and bad ways to use the word "resource" in business. The short of it is, resources are not people, and people are not resources. There's a special case: you can use it if you're talking about both people and not people.

Atlassian recently bought Bitbucket. From their FAQ:

"Bitbucket's performance has lagged due to poor infrastructure and lack of IT resources. Recently, Bitbucket customer repositories were migrated from an EC2 storage system to the Contegix data center, the same ISV that Atlassian uses for its hosted tools. Atlassian has hired a full-time IT resource to continue to improve the Bitbucket service..."

The first sentence is the good use, because they're using it to refer to people and objects (presumably computers, routers, etc.), as demonstrated by the succeeding sentences. The third sentence is obviously talking about a person, yet they act as though he is an object. That's the bad use. How could it possibly have diminished that sentence to use "employee" in the third sentence? I'll tell you what, they diminished the *person* when they called him a resource.

Buring the Koran

Okay, so take it as a given that the guy is a retard and burning the Koran like he wants to do is a retarded act. There's nothing interesting there.

My question: if exercising a freedom means that everyone from the local news to the President to General Petraeus is going to jump on you and say not to do it... is it really still a freedom? Prosecution isn't the only penalty that's out there. Social condemnation, media pressure, etc. all have a serious impact. That's a separate world from what's governed by the Constitution, but it's reflective of our society. Obama says it's "contrary to our values." That's not true; it's contrary to some of our values. It's hypocritical to assert that someone has a freedom, but they should not actually exercise it. The best way to put it is that it is congruent with the values implied by the Constitution, but it's contrary to some of the values held by many of the people. That's not exactly the moral high ground in a society that supposedly values freedom.

The Best Places to Live (and study)

You've seen the articles. They take a bunch of data and crunch it, and then proclaim Ames, Iowa; or Burlington, Vermont; or Eden Prairie, Minnesota as the best place to live in the whole country. Invariably, the places where people actually live end up far down the list: San Francisco, New York City, Dallas, and so forth.

That disconnect from reality convinced me long ago what the true value of these analyses are: they quantify precisely the flaws in their algorithms. I'll be the first to say that people are not rational, but people get mighty rational when tens of thousands of dollars are at stake. That's the difference each year between living in somewhere like Brooklyn vs. Overland Park, Kansas. Why would anyone choose to live in a closet that costs $2000/month when they could live in lovely Fort Collins, Colorado?

If all the data they have point to Nowheresville, the obvious conclusion is that their analysis is flawed. They're missing out on what matters to people. Yes, cost and schools and safety and big houses are important to people. However, if they are willing to pay thousands of dollars extra to live somewhere that has mediocre schools, relatively high crime rates, and small dwellings, that tells you there are factors that compensate.

And so I chuckle every time I see one of those articles. I'm sure that there are many undiscovered gems out there, but to rank so low places that compel so many people to deal with so many quantifiable disadvantages is ridiculous. The further down the list they put places like San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, and New York City, the more obvious it is to me that they are missing the point. They've got these models that reach such wildly different conclusions from reality that it simply emphasizes how bad their models are. They say those are awesome places to live, but nobody lives there. You do the math.

Anyway, so I've had that bouncing in my head for a while. Today I saw a thing that I realized was similar. The Parade insert in our newspaper had a run-down of colleges. "No disrespect to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, but you don't need to attend a fabled Ivy to get a big-league education." Just like the articles about cities, they take a bunch of numbers and some arbitrary formulae, and then spit out a list of names you've never heard of.

As much as higher education in this country is screwed up, I just don't see people getting things wrong so consistently for so long. I'm sure those schools they name are excellent schools. And I'm sure that the schools that everyone knows about are better. I'm sorry, but Rice University is not equal to Princeton. If my kids were admitted to both Princeton and Rice, I know which one I'd rather they attend.

Just like with "Best Places," they act like they've discovered some truth that all the rest of us have been missing this whole time. But their so-called truth is wildly different from the decisions that millions of Americans make each year. People will make all kinds of foolish and irrational decisions, but when so much money is at stake, they actually behave pretty sensibly. Really, it's kind of embarrassing that the Excel jockeys got it wrong. I feel sorry for them.

Overstating American Generosity

You keep reading how Americans are the most generous nation. "Superfreakonomics" states that Americans give 2% of GDP to charity. I'm suspicious that this is overstated. My guess is that most of that is giving to non-profit organizations that aren't strictly charities.

The key example of that is churches. Yes, many churches run soup kitchens, send tents to Haiti, and the like. But they also do a lot of non-need work targeted at their congregations. Is hiring a pastor an act of charity? Purchasing audiovisual equipment? Running a preschool? All of those serve to benefit their congregations, and you can't reasonably call them charitable work.

My suspicion is that the majority of church giving goes to activities like those, and not the soup kitchens, the tents for Haiti, and so forth. In other words, a lot of this charitable giving is really money spent by people to benefit themselves and their immediate community.

Maybe you don't like this example. What about public radio? I'll bet that donations to public radio are considered part of that 2% charitable giving (I assume the numbers come from the IRS). Does PBS feed the hungry or heal the sick? By and large, the benefits flow to the listeners of public radio. Their donations are not generosity so much as self interest.

Update: I read a little further in "Superfreakonomics" and found the authors obliquely hinting at the same point. I guess they wanted to avoid controversy, though, because they didn't go all the way with it.

Being pretty good can be a dangerous thing

You've looked at different ways of doing things and can confidently dismiss them. After all, you're pretty good at this. Maybe when you were new, these ways would have helped you get started. You don't need training wheels anymore. You've been doing this for a while. You've smoothed out some of your rough edges, gained some new skills, and become more seasoned. You've got a number of successes under your belt; this isn't just your ego talking. Clearly you must know what you're doing, right?

Sure, you make a few mistakes from time to time, and sometimes you bark up the wrong tree, but you're only human. These things happen. You've read about structured, formalized techniques for avoiding those errors, for making sure yours efforts aren't wasted. They seem all right on paper, but in the real world? In your world? There's just no way that would work for you. It's not like it would help that often, either; you're pretty good at this. And it would just slow you down. And besides, they sound so boring. They take all the craft and artistry out of it, and if you're not a craftsman and an artist, you're just a cog in a big machine. Those things are for people who aren't naturally pretty good. It's for little people, people without vision, who are fine with being cogs in big machines. You've got a knack for this, a real instinct.

You know what? You're right, people who aren't naturally as good as you probably need those things to be as good as you. That does not mean you should not also do them. You're pretty good without them, but you'll be even better with them. And who doesn't want to be better? Oh, right; the people who'd rather live comfortably in the delusion that they're already as good as it is possible to be.

I've seen this in many different places in many different ways for a long, long time. It makes perfect sense. It's not human nature to fix what isn't broken. Introspection is not in most people's natures, at least not in a moderate sense. They are plenty of people who introspect unproductively, of course, and get caught in the quicksand of depression or narcissism or any number of things. There's a small region of sanity between insufficient introspection and too much. That's where you need to stand.

Sure, you're pretty good. But are you perfect? Obviously not. So open your mind. You can be better. Once you get to be pretty good at something, you stop having such frequent conflicts with reality. You stop getting forced to change by external things. Most people find it hard to replace that with an internal drive. Once they're no longer forced to learn, they don't learn at all. Lots of people think of themselves as open-minded constant learners, but that's easy and not all that valuable. This isn't learning in the sense of acquiring additional information. This is about changing how you think and how you operate.

Try something different. Try it for real, without judgment. Fully immerse yourself in its modes and idioms, so you can see it from the inside. You can't speak German by translating an English sentence and translating it word by word. It'll get you there, but it'll be awful. It's not enough just to have surface knowledge of it. You can learn HTML in 21 days, but it's going to look like Geocities circa 1997.

Now, as we've discussed, you're pretty good. You're especially good with Thingamabangle. It's great at frobnication, but not so hot at dezmodessing. That's not a big deal because you don't do much dezmodessing. You can usually make do with frobnication, and maybe a little bit of chamazote. It's not like dezmodessing is all that useful anyway; you were forced to do it a couple of times, and it was so much harder than the frobnication and chamazote you would have used otherwise. So what if Thingamabangle is bad at something useless?

One day you're lunching with a friend, and he's raving about this Whizzaboo. He's just going on and on about it. So you give it a try. Wow, Whizzaboo sucks at frobnication. It's okay at chamazote. The big selling point is that it's great at dezmodessing. But you've seen dezmodessing; it's just not a useful technique. Whizzaboo is a waste of time; it's not nearly as good at Thingamabangle at the stuff that matters. Who cares how well the pointy-headed ivory towerians can make it dezmodess? You can't waste your time with this. So you stick to your Thingamabangle. You never even learn about Whizzaboo's benbillying. You never learn how dezmodessing with a little benbilly can do everything your frobnication and chamazote can do, but in half the time. You never learn that nobody who uses Whizzaboo cares about its poor frobnication, because they never ever half to deal with it. You just looked at the surface, which confirmed your prejudices.

You can't just dip your toe into learning something new. You have to embrace it fully, for weeks and even months. You have to be in there long enough that you think in the new way at every level instead of translating from the old way. Otherwise you're going to come to the wrong conclusion. It's quite possible that your snap judgment was right, and it's not the right thing for you. And even if you're wrong, nothing terrible will happen because of that. You won't get fired, you won't lose your house, you won't be embarrassed by your peers. You'll just go on the way you've always gone, until one day the way you've always done things just doesn't work anymore. Maybe that's okay with you. Maybe you're fine with being good enough. Maybe you're fine with putting off change until life slaps your face and kicks your ass. That's your choice. But you could be missing out on something great.

Aren't I speaking English?

No, you am not. "I" and "are" never go together. This has been a Public Service Announcement.

On heroism

The word hero is one that is overused and misused to the point of no longer having any meaning in popular parlance, like terrorist or producer. An act can be heroic if and only if:

1. It comes at some substantial personal cost. Whether it's the risk of physical injury in breaking up a fight, or the risk of losing your job by refusing to certify an unsafe product, it cannot be heroic if it comes too cheaply. An inflammatory blog post, for instance, costs nothing at all.


2. The benefits flow to others. If you gain from your act, it's not heroism.


3. Nobody would fault you for doing less or even nothing. I wouldn't think less of you if you didn't run into a burning building. This is in some ways the reverse of (1); you should not face substantial personal cost from failing to act, or choosing a less heroic alternative.

One thing you may note is that this definition basically invalidates every sports "hero" ever (especially due to (2)). That is no accident, because they're not really heroes.

An example that clearly fits the definition is the passengers aboard United 93 who stormed the cockpit on September 11. The personal cost? The highest price of all: death. The benefit to others? Everyone on the ground who would have been killed by the kamikaze run. And doing nothing was exactly what they were supposed to do in these situations.

A somewhat more uncomfortable one is that this definition disqualifies certain acts that are nonetheless highly admirable. Take for instance the pilot who managed to (relatively) safely land his crippled aircraft in the Hudson. There was no personal risk or cost to him, and he gained from his actions. If he hadn't done what he did, he would have been just as dead as everyone else. It was still an extraordinary accomplishment, but that landing wasn't heroic. However, that he stayed aboard to make sure everyone else got to safety first at least brushes the heroic. Maybe that is trying to have it both ways, but he could easily have rushed out in the general panic to save himself.

Worse than no apology

"I'm sorry you feel that way."

Not only is that not actually an apology, it pushes the blame onto you and expresses scorn for your feelings. Granted, sometimes you do deserve the blame and the scorn, but it's rather rude to point it out.

Unemployment: you're doing it wrong

Mr. Green said he had sent out 1,000 résumés and posted his credentials on more than 100 job boards since he was laid off from his management position at a data-analysis firm in January.

Source.

Carpet-bombing companies with your resume is not going to get you a job. Nor is putting your resume on job boards and waiting for a job to find you. It's not only this guy who has the wrong idea; his story is being used in the article to demonstrate how bad the market is. Even in a good economy that's a terrible strategy. It's a classic case of "work smarter, not harder."

Find the job that's a fit, where you can distinguish yourself from the other hundred resumes that have come in since Tuesday. You need to be proactive and selective, even in this economy. Ask The Headhunter has some good, sensible advice. It's not easy, and it's not magic, but it's the only thing that makes sense.

Skeptical of "light" foods

With no data whatsoever, I reject the assertion that low-fat or sugar-free versions of foods truly help people lose weight or to be healthier. What I expect is actually effective is one or all of:

1. Exercising more


2. Eating different types of foods (cutting out the ice cream instead of switching to low-fat)


3. Just plain eating less

I suspect that people who lose weight while eating light foods are also doing at least one of the above, and that people who only eat light foods without doing any of the above see little change.

The AMA on home births

The American Medical Association has issued a statement against home births (original Word doc converted to HTML by Google). To me this provides further evidence that, at the very least, the AMA does not have the best interests of the general public at heart.

One concern is their apparent disregard for quality of life issues. Their focus is narrow, defining success as survival of mother and child:

"An apparently uncomplicated pregnancy or delivery can quickly become very complicated in the setting of maternal hemorrhage, shoulder dystocia, eclampsia or other obstetric emergencies, necessitating the need for rigorous standards, appropriate oversight of obstetric providers, and the availability of emergency care, for the health of both the mother and the baby during a delivery..."

It is safer to never go on a boat. It is safer to avoid travel. It is safer to never drink more than a couple bottles of beer. Safety is not a goal to be achieved to the exclusion of all else. Of course we want the mother and child to survive, but in many cases medical interventions do nothing to improve survival rates.

Hospital births are unpleasant. The medical staff wants to get a live baby out. It matters little to them whether the mother has a 3 month recovery or a 4-week recovery. They don't care if you go home exhausted and stressed out. Many OBs seem to see their patients as unruly children who must be told what to do. They often seek control and predictability where a less predictable and more organic birth would be better for everyone involved.

Pitocin, epidurals, Caesarean sections, and other interventions all have legitimate and justified applications in some pregnancies. Like much of American health care, however, pregnancy and birth suffer from an excess of medical intervention. OBs certainly have their reasons. Our society is litigious. The financial incentives are perverse, rewarding the amount of work regardless of appropriateness. The staff doesn't have to suffer through a recovery made excessively difficult by unnecessary interventions. That their behavior is understandable doesn't mean it's in the best interests of all families.

Medicine is, ideally, an empirical discipline. However, the AMA cites no medical studies in support of their statement. That makes sense, because those research studies don't exist. There are studies suggesting that home births are not worse in terms of mortality, while being superior in reducing medical interventions. I am not the AMA, so I can't say what their motives are. However, the AMA is a powerful lobby with many characteristics of a guild. It seems reasonable that their motivation is to maintain control of a significant health area. That preserves their prestige as well as their livelihoods. Their efforts have the effect of reducing competition. That is so obvious a consequence that it cannot be accidental. Perhaps I am too cynical, and they make these efforts only with reluctance. Regardless, they consider the costs acceptable, which is suspect because they bear few costs and yield only benefits.

The final and most egregious part of this statement comes at the end:

RESOLVED, That our AMA develop model legislation in support of the concept that the safest setting for labor, delivery, and the immediate post-partum period is in the hospital, or a birthing center within a hospital complex...

They want to use the law to restrict individual freedom and force their methods on everyone. Their methods are often what's best. It's not often enough. The best data we have are clear, and the AMA offers little in rebuttal. Rather than prove the superiority of their care, and rely on individuals to make the right decision, they would rather use their prestige and political power to try to eliminate alternatives. That frees them of the burden of demonstrating their superiority, as well as eliminating much of the incentive to improve what is clearly not good enough.

This, among other issues, has led me to conclude that part of the dysfunction of the American medical system can be blamed on the AMA and similar organizations. They can be truly excellent in a number of areas, but they seem to believe that their expertise is broader than it is. Everyone make mistakes, even with the best of intentions. However, the AMA is a political entity as well, and those politics have tainted what they do. We have excessive respect for doctors in our society, and that reverence is hurting us all.

A classic example of my law of ranking

Remember my law of ranking? From a blog post about the relative value of professional sports franchies in the US:

The New York Yankees are the only non-NFL franchise in the top 27.

Emphasis mine.

Why 27? Simple: #28 is the New York Mets, another non-NFL franchise. What sounds more impressive, the above statement, "1 of the top 25," or "2 of the top 30?" 27 is slightly bigger than 25, so presumably has slightly more impact*, and 2 is much bigger than 1, so its impact is much less.

* Not worth it in my opinion, especially considering the Law of Ranking, but whatever.

Google stock is worthless

The current price is $588.14/share, but the rational, fair-market value is $0. There are two ways of realizing value from a stock. One is for the company to pay out dividends out of its cash flow. The founders have explicitly said they never will do that.

The other way to convert a stock into money is for someone to buy the whole company in order to capture their cash flow. That won't happen with Google. Their current stock price translates to a market capitalization of $184 B. That's what it would cost at current prices to acquire all of the outstanding shares in the company. Nobody can buy Google. Even if GOOG went down to its IPO price of $85, it would still be worth $26 B. There have only been a handful of acquisitions at that level. Would you buy a Google hoping for a buyout, knowing that your share would have to lose 85% of its value for that to happen?

Even if that unlikely occurrence were to happen, it still has to go up against the founders, who have said they have no interest in selling out. Of course, shareholders have rights. When your management acts against the interest of the shareholders, you can overrule them. At least, that's what you can do in normal companies. Not with Google. Larry and Sergey each own about 10% of the company. Eric Schmidt owns another 3% or so. They own Class B shares, which each have 10 votes. Everyone else gets Class A shares, with 1 vote apiece. If you do the math, it turns out that those three guys have about three times as many votes as all the other shareholders put together. You read that right. So you can't overrule them. And you can't buy Class B shares, either, because they turn into 1-vote Class A shares when they're sold.

It's possible for them to change their minds, of course. Why would they, though? Larry and Sergey are each worth something like $18 B each. Even if Google loses 99% of its stock market value, they'd still be fantastically wealthy. It's hard to imagine anyone being able to offer them anything they can't already get. It's only if they lose interest that they might sell, but that doesn't help anything because the remaining founder would hold a dominant number of Class B shares. You'd have to wait for both of them to get bored. When would Larry and Sergey both lose interest in Google? Going by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, it takes at least 30 years. That's a long time to wait for the possibility that Google will shift policy and pay a dividend or sell out.

To summarize, in other words: Larry, Sergey, and Eric won't give you anything, they won't let anyone else give you anything, and you can't make them, even if you buy up every single Class A share. It's like a piece of paper from a diploma mill.

So what are people paying for when they buy GOOG? As far as I can tell, they're all trading on the assumption that Google stock is worth something, but they haven't really thought about the implications of Google's ownership structure. It's a collective fiction. To be sure, so is the US dollar, but this is one of a whole different sort; people at least acknowledge that the dollar isn't real.

Above, I said there are two ways to realize value from a stock. I omitted one: someone else wants your share. That's the principle that there's always another sucker. It worked for a while in the late 1990s, but then the party ended. Do you want to be the one without a chair when the music stops?

Numbers supplied by Google Finance :-).

Note: this is a discussion just of the stock. The company is obviously very valuable.

Arlen Specter is a waste of space

A United State Senator getting involved in a scandal in football about some coach breaking a rule that shouldn't exist in the first place*? Yeah, because it's not like we have any real problems to solve that he might be pertinent to. Maybe it's for the best considering how utterly useless he was as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, where he blew a lot of hot air about illegal wiretapping. If he got involved in any real issues, what little progress we might expect the Senator to make would get reversed.

* You can use a video camera on the field, and you can look at signals, and you can write things down, but you can't record signals? The genius who thought of that is probably the same guy who thought up DRM.

Don't use words you don't understand

"If you go to Google Trends and track the number of times it is mentioned, the curve is almost algorithmic from a year and a half ago."

Emphasis mine. I guess his ignorance will keep him from being embarrassed by it. I'd be pretty embarrassed. But I'd like to think I wouldn't try so hard to sound smart, either. I'd probably just say "very steep."

Hey, there's another dumb thing in the article: "A steampunk fantasy game, Edge of Twilight, will be introduced by Xbox 360 and PlayStation next year."



Source.