How to make Terrible Decisions in Response to Badness

How to make terrible decisions in response to badness:

Convince yourself that nothing is not an option. Assert confidently,
"I / we can't just sit around and do nothing!"
The caveman in the back of your mind will reassure you; something = strong = good and nothing = weak = bad.
We have now limited our possibilities to only somethings
Convince yourself that among the options of possible somethings, aggression is the least bad. Assert confidently,
"I / we hate aggression more than anyone..."
we have pretended we are realistic by calling terrible decisions terrible
"... but this is the least bad option"
Alternative somethings include mutually beneficial (I win you win), charity (I lose you win), and mutual destruction (I lose you lose) in contrast to aggression (I win you lose). Eliminate other possible options:
Mutual destruction is for sickos
Charity is for good people not bad people
Mutual benefit is achieved through dialogue, so convince yourself that dialogue is not possible. Point out unreasonable beliefs of the other, everybody has some, and use this as a proxy for everything else other believes
"They believe all these unreasonable things, so they must be unreasonable about this. Dialogue is not possible."

We have now successfully talked ourselves into a terrible decision.

I also suggest Bryan Caplan’s Misanthropy by Numbers

Technorati Tags: How to go to war unreasonably,how to lie to yourself about war,how not to respond to evil,self deception,terrible decision making,how to make terrible decisions in response to badness,how to make terrible decisions

How I Hurt my Knee (and how to grow up)

Several years ago, while playing a pickup game at a park in Phoenix, I hurt my knee pretty badly. Early in the game, the other team put a weak defender on me. I didn’t care for that, so the first time I touched the ball I took a quick first step past him and went to the hoop. Another guy came around on help defense and tried to block me. I ended up scooping the ball in. I’m not going to lie, it looked fabulous. I heard a guy say, “that guy is good” in response. But I got crashed into and ended up landing on my knee and having to quit the rest of the night.

I couldn’t walk at first, but after a few minutes I recovered and limped home.

The next morning I woke up to very severe pain.

I saw a doctor and he diagnosed it as a meniscus tear. He gave me a cast, a prescription for pain pills, and some crutches, and let me go. I was on crutches for a couple of weeks, and everything seemed fine.

When I felt ready I went back out to play basketball, and reinjured it rather easily. It just twisted it the wrong way. After a night it felt better and I could run again. Every time I went out to play, it felt fine, but it was fragile. It was very easy for me to hurt it. I kept telling myself that I really just need to take a few months off to let it heal completely.

It never did. It has been years without reinjuring it and it remains fragile. It gives out unexpectedly sometimes when I walk down stairs. I looked it up on the web and this is what I found.

“Meniscal cartilage does not heal very well once it is torn. This is mainly because it does not have a good blood supply. The outer edge of each meniscus has some blood vessels, but the area in the centre has no direct blood supply. This means that although some small outer tears may heal in time, larger tears, or a tear in the middle, tend not to heal.”

It looks like it would require surgery to fix it.

I can still play basketball, run, and jump. Quick turns and aggressive play style tends to reinjure it. I’m glad that I still have some ability but I realize that I have played the best basketball that I will ever play. And that’s kind of sad for me. Basketball had been a significant and great part of my life for a long time.

But you know, it sort of fits as a transition from one stage of my life to another. As we get older we ought to focus less on the body and more on the mind. Earlier in my life I had a lot more competitive fire than I have now. I wanted to challenge myself physically, and always push myself another step further. I don’t have those same goals anymore. Instead I’d rather build a better understanding of society and life. I would like to gain some wisdom before I die.

My injury is an even that accurately represents the change from one stage of my life to another. And I think that that change is a good one.

 

Technorati Tags: Meniscal cartilage tear,hurt leg basketball,becoming wiser,going from physical to mental,getting older,Basketball meniscus cartilage injury,going from strong to wise,Living a better life

Blog Links (Blinks if you will) August 29, 2013

• Quora Questions:
  Who is the best living economist? Kenneth Arrow
  Is the world becoming more evil? No we just get bad news faster
  
• Top 200 most influential economics blogs. Krugman is #1. Marginal Revolution is #5. Econlog is #12. Cognitive Strain hit 201st so didn’t appear on the list.
• Bryan Caplan disputes Noam Chomsky over whether corporations are totalitarian. In a nutshell, “Totalitarian governments try to control everything you do because they care about everything you do.  Partialtarian corporations leave you alone because they only care about your money.”
• Here is some more of Bryan Caplan on what a good student looks like. 1) Wants to learn 2) Resists forgetting after exam 3) Tries to apply what they learned in life 4) Puts truth first, particularly over taboos and cultural biases.
• A classic from Matthew Yglesias, The Kind of Liberal I’m Not
• Tyler Cowen’s Ted Talk on his mistrust of stories is one of my favorites.

 

Technorati Tags: Best Economist,Is the world becoming more evil,best economics blogs,Is capitalism totalitarian,Are coorporations tyrannical,What a good student looks like,Good students put truth first,the kind of liberal I'm not,Bias toward stories,Best of liberalism

How I went from an Active to Passive Libertarian

When I first began accepting libertarian ideas, I was very excited. It provided this competent framework for looking at the world. It was always one step ahead of the other political parties, which my entire life I considered completely unpersuasive and typically juvenile. It twisted conventional wisdom in knots by looking at the whole picture, the costs and the benefits, and the counterfactuals which other people treated as 0s. The rights based arguments were lacking; they started with counter-intuitive rules out of nowhere, called them rights, and then applied them to get libertarianism. That’s no way to do philosophy. But the utilitarian arguments made a lot of sense. Why is government getting in the way of people conducting mutually beneficial trade? Sure people make mistakes, but isn’t government made up of people?

Naturally, I wanted to tell everyone. Surely they must not have heard these ideas, or they would be the ones telling me! I wanted to make sure I was on solid ground, so I sounded arguments where libertarians and mainstream economics overlap; free trade, minimum wage causes unemployment, economic growth improves working standards (not so much unions or legislation), drug companies kill people by restricting drugs that save lives. I didn’t change any minds. And I didn’t understand why arguments that I found so persuasive they didn’t find persuasive at all.

In hindsight I realize that there are good economic reasons to reject that these beliefs lead to libertarian conclusions. But nobody I talked to was familiar enough with economics to make them. The counter-arguments consisted of drawing upon impressions we’ve all had since we were six years old and expressing them. China is destroying American workers with cheap goods. Big business would pay cents on the dollar without minimum wage. Drug companies would carelessly kill their consumers for profit if we let them. Workers would fall into meat grinders and managers would shrug and say, “get back to work boys!”

Every problem society ever has can be solved with new laws. And the fact that we have laws against problems that don’t exist proves the case. This is the logic that was applied to pretty much every single social issue.

I’ve become more familiar with economics and more familiar with libertarianism since then. The more I learn, the more I find a mishmash of parts I think are correct and incorrect. Over time I’ve realized that the problem is not education, its dogma. Most libertarians aren’t any different. I give a clear cut case for market failure and it never sinks in. There’s always another objection, no matter how inane. It’s no different from talking to conservatives about trade with poor Chinese workers, or liberals about trade with poor African workers. Economists have been past this cynicism toward international trade for 200 years. But these lessons never sink into social consciousness.

Part of my own experiences may have been my own fault. Maybe I didn’t do a good job giving the economic textbook case. Maybe I shouldn’t have joked around about my worshipping of Ron Paul. It was my light-hearted way of drawing attention to the libertarian candidate. But people took it as me drinking the cool-aid.

So my libertarian themed Facebook posts tapered away. I’m not in the business of changing minds. I allow others to vent their political grief toward me without challenging them. I divorced society. We’re just not meant for each other. I continue to satisfy my intellectual curiosity without feeling the need to share with others. It’s just a better way to live life. If I come by someone who is earnestly seeking, I’ll try to help out. If I come by someone who knows more than I do, I try to learn from them. I’ve found this whole process internally satisfying. But as soon as it becomes external, it is exasperating and I’m skeptical that it does any good.

I would encourage others to take the same approach whether they’re libertarian or not. These other people around you, they are not trying to know the truth. They’re going to believe what they like no matter what you say.

 

Technorati Tags: how to be a humble libertarian,libertarian rhetoric,how to convince people of libertarianism,how I became a libertarian,How to be a passive libertarian,How to be an active libertarian

Blog Links (Blinks if you will) August 23rd

• Six documentaries that were shockingly full of crap. I find #4 most interesting because I’ve encountered this argument that Jesus is just a retelling of ancient stories. After some research I found that the similarities between Jesus and others were either A) very broad (Performed Miracles), B) not actually similar except for absurdly broad interpretations (Mithras born from a rock is the same as born of a virgin) or C) revised by the Romans after Jesus (five loaves two fish). Just like Christians who claim that Darwin repented and renounced evolution on his deathbed, many atheists just believe what they like too.
• Can we double McDonalds worker wages by paying a 17% premium? If it sounds too good to be true it is. Consider; at twice the wage most McDonalds employees would be outcompeted by better workers. How would McDonalds workers fare competing against waiters and waitresses? Moreover, the 17% is a dubiously low number (we kept labor at something like 30% when I worked for Taco Bell). And consider how many poor people, the very demographic you are trying to help, are paying this premium when they eat at McDonalds.
• Owen Anderson asks, is self-deception healthy? Assume that true hope does not exist. Two opportunities emerge; false hope (e.g. fideism) and true hopelessness (e.g. skepticism). Since certainty of hopelessness is never the case because it could be that you just haven’t looked hard enough, the best response is to continue seeking true hope. Even until the day you die. Hope for hope. Seek and you shall find, but don’t self-deceive yourself into thinking you’re seeking when you aren’t.
• David Friedman and Michael Huemer participate in a Google Hangout discussion about Diamonds. They refer to a popular story that Diamonds became a popular engagement item because of a DeBeers advertisement. I’m initially very skeptical of stories which confirm popular biases against advertising. David Friedman points out a different paper which concludes that demand for diamonds started going up four years before the marketing campaign. Michael Huemer points out what should be obvious; you can’t just tell people to buy something and they buy it. Huemer is proceeded by some woman who represents popular biases by claiming that advertising are very powerful (and so it makes sense that DeBeers invented demand out of advertising) I guess somebody should have told all of the business failures that advertising is a magic wand that makes consumer buy useless products.
  David Friedman nailed it at the end when he says that Diamonds should be thought about kind of like language. There isn’t any particular reason why a word means what it means, just like there’s no particular reason why diamonds have come to signify what they signify, but there’s a need for something and that something tends to stick to social norms.
• This guy sings five octaves on the piano. It must be faked.
• Chuck McKnight is interviewed on Rethinking Hell about his conversion to the view that there is no inherent personal immortality (Conditionalism), and how he was fired from Answers in Genesis for this view and its implications on hell.

And a picture of a booshie

 

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How to Fix Canada’s 401 Traffic Problem

The 401 highway is a monster. A huge amount of Canada’s civilization is built around it. This makes the 401 the busiest highway in North America and one of the busiest in the world. As of 2008 the Toronto portion of the 401 gets most than 400,000 cars a day. The traffic on the 401 is horrendous at certain times of day, and the frequency of accidents on the 401 make it even worse. In fact, when someone dies in a traffic accident on the 401, its very possible that another lifetime is going to be lost in the traffic congestion that accident caused.

The first step to a solution is accurately identifying the problem. Why does traffic happen? Because people do not bare the costs of the congestion they cause others. Space on roads are in finite supply, and people will overuse it because they do not pay the costs of taking up space on a road. Every car takes up space on the road, and everyone else pays for that space through traffic. When everyone plays this game, the costs in traffic become very high for everyone. Roads get clogged up. This is a classic tragedy of the commons problem. Two obvious solutions: raise the price of driving in high traffic areas, or lower the price of alternatives.

The best way to tax traffic is whatever was is usually the most simple and has the least ripple effects. A tax on general driving, like a carbon tax, would help traffic. It is; however, very indirect and created distortions (ripples) in other areas. This might be an exception to the rule. These particular distortions are generally regarded by economists as efficient anyway. We want to tax driving anyway because it creates carbon emissions which create negative externalities. People aren’t paying the full price of carbon emissions or traffic congestion, so it makes sense to kill two birds with one stone through a carbon tax.

A more direct way is with a toll. If it isn’t discouraging traffic congestion then it is too low. If much of the roads become unused then the toll is too high. Again, we’re looking for the simplest way to charge drivers that has the least second-order costs. Stopping people at a toll booth before they get on to the 401 is obviously inefficient. The transaction costs would be too high. So charge them later by billing them through their license plate number. Even take it out of their tax return. Offer stickers that regular commuters can pay for ahead of time that gives them free access. I’m sure somewhere out there there’s an effective model of drivers being charged without being stopped.

Another way to fix this problem is to lower the price of alternatives. Me and my wife like to take the rail into Toronto. We usually sit in a near empty car full of seats. Why not charge less for a ticket and fill those seats up? There’s lots of room. Make it obvious that the rail is the way to go if you’re going to Toronto for a visit. The Via Rail is government owned, so its no wonder their pricing leaves cars filled with empty seats. This is extremely wasteful anyway. Relieve traffic on the 401 and reduce waste by by lowering the price of other modes of transportation.

There is another problem that creates traffic on the 401; accidents. Many of these accidents are caused by truck drivers. When they get in an accident, they create huge traffic jams. Make firms pay the full cost when one of their drivers get into the accident. Make them pay for all the time cost they put to everyone else when their accident held up traffic. Firms will have more incentive to train their drivers better, and make sure their sharp and aware when its time to drive. Of course they do this already, but not enough because they don’t bare the full costs that they’re imposing onto others.

Government “cracking down” on trucking standards is another way of doing this. Economists typically agree however that the better way to go is to adjust prices accordingly and let market mechanisms do the work. Government will not be able to do market jobs better than market participants trying to make money. The incentives and intimate knowledge of the industry aren’t there for governments.

Some applications might have problems or need to be adjusted, but there’s wide agreement from an economists viewpoint on what the basic problem is and what kinds of solutions to enact. The problem is negative externalities, and the solution is to raise the cost of driving in high traffic areas and lower the cost of close alternatives. I don’t expect us to ever get there. Why? Because voters want free solutions, or more accurately, solutions that look free. It’s not that the experts haven’t figured out and come to a consensus about the solution to the problem, it’s that there isn’t political incentive to do it.

 

A more technical explanation of the economics of traffic congestion

An economics tutoring session on traffic congestion

 

Technorati Tags: Economics of Traffic Congestion,Traffic Negative Externalities,Highway 401 traffic congestion solution,Solutions to traffic,Pricing traffic congestion,Pricing Roads

My Wait for Immigration

I’m an American who married a Canadian and moved to Canada. I applied for permanent residence through family sponsorship eight months ago. The end of the process has no end in sight. In fact, the Canadian immigration website recently posted a notice to applicants saying that they should expect delays because the people responsible for processing the application have gone on strike.

I cannot work. I can only wait. Even ignoring the delays caused by unions, the process has been long and arduous. It has a major negative effect on my life in terms of lost wages and well-being, not to mention costs to my wife. This is not how I wanted to spend the first year of my marriage, even if I would certainly do it all over again to be with my wife.

It would be easier to see a silver lining if I was convinced that immigration restrictions and unions were beneficial as public policy. I do not believe that for many reasons (For immigration try Open Borders Website, a debate with Benjamin Powell, or Bryan Caplan on Econtalk) (for unions try the Library of Economics, although I’m less convinced that labor unions don’t have a positive utilitarian impact on society). This makes this whole ordeal especially frustrating for me. Immigration restrictions aren’t good policy even when they’re enforced well, even when we ignore the costs to foreigners. Now I’m seeing first-hand how clunky the process is.

I find general sympathy for my situation among Canadians, yet somehow I can’t imagine they support looser immigration restrictions. Like Americans, Canadians seem to have a lot of strong beliefs about the terrible economic impacts of low-skilled immigrations on citizens. Also like Americans, they neglect to ask what the experts believe on the matter.

So I’m frustrated with the whole thing. I wish things could be cut and try for people like me who have no criminal record and is obviously not marrying someone just to move from one developed country to another. But its important for people like me to realize that my particular case, and whatever costs I bare, are a very small part of the total effects, costs and benefits, of immigration restrictions as a whole. So my story really shouldn’t convince anyone that immigration restrictions should be more relaxed. That’s not rational.

 

Technorati Tags: Personal Case of Immigration Restrictions,Waiting for Immigration,Delay of immigration unions,Effects of immigration restrictions,Low skilled immigrants,Marrying into Canada,Union strike

Blog Links (“Blinks” if you will) August 13/13

• I’m reading Owen Anderson’s book, The Natural Moral Law, The Good After Modernity, which recently came out in the much cheaper paperback form. So far it is excellent (I’m about half-way through). He’s careful and clear in his overview of how beliefs about the good have changed with epistemological and metaphysical beliefs over ancient, modern, and post-modern times. I’m looking forward to reading his own version of what the natural moral law is near the end of the book.
• I’m also reading Michael Huemer’s book, The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey. It is also excellent and one of the best books I’ve ever read. Huemer begins with common sense morality and ethical intuitionism and shows how political authority is inconsistent with them. Huemer has an earlier book defending ethical intuitionism. I haven’t read it and I’m not an ethical intuitionist. Which means that The Problem of Political Authority to me is a brilliant rhetorical device rather than a sound justification. People already believe that government is unjust based on the moral beliefs they already have. There also might be overlap between ethical intuitionism and the correct moral philosophy from which Huemer’s book can derive problems for political authority.
• Bryan Caplan reports a new financial service Upstart, which makes human capital contracts. Individuals raise money from investors in exchange for a fixed % return on future income. It was very well thought out.
• Robin Hanson connects inequality talk to evolution. I find his story kind of weak, but he asks an important question, why is so little concern expressed about all the other sorts of inequality?
• Someone I know on Facebook is worried about Colony Collapse Disorder a.k.a. the Beepocolypse; basically the bees are dying and the results are going to be catastrophic. My meta-analysis is that world-wide catastrophes are too rare to be predictable, but if we want to get substantive, here’s some economic counter-evidence.
• Bryan Caplan’s Ideological Touring Test is on Wikipedia. Here is Bryan’s description of it. The idea is brilliant; can ideologues on one side convincingly argue for the other side? I wish more writers would give it a shot. I might attempt to convincingly argue as an atheist or liberal / conservative some time.

 

Technorati Tags: Michael Huemer,Bryan Caplan,Robin Hanson,Colony Collapse Disorder,The Problem of Political Authority,Links,Good reading,Ideological Touring Test,What to read on the internet,Owen Anderson

The Examined Life Through Blogging

The patterns of life hypnotize us. The trance is not easily broken. Sometimes it takes pain and death to wake us up, even for a little while, before we lose ourselves in the trance again.

But we have to break the trance. I think Socrates was right when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living. To me living the examined life means bringing into awareness patterns of behavior that otherwise might have remained hidden. It means stopping to think about life, and one's role in it. It means asking questions like, are you doing what you're supposed to be doing? Living the way you ought? How ought man live? Living the examined life means not only seeking basic answers, but examining whether one is consistent according to that fundamental understanding. That consistency can also be called integrity. Do we have integrity? Or do we live inconsistently with our beliefs? We must examine life to find out.

The Apostle Paul advised the Corinthians, "Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith..." Isaiah criticized Israel, "The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib: but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider." If Israel didn’t know, how were they responsible? I see a lot of emphasis in popular moral philosophy on the failure of the will to do what is known as right, and very little recognition of the moral failure to take time to consider what is right in the first place. Israel wasn't responsible because they knew better, but because they didn't know better. Their ignorance was culpable because they didn’t live the examined life.

Fortunately, if we have integrity, we don't need to wait for the suffering from natural evil to break the trance. We can live the examined life now! But how do we overcome a world that is so able to hypnotize? When one person wakes up for a while, he will look at all the other people and give them a label like zombies or sheep. But that sense of awareness passes, and the "awake" person goes right back to the patterns of life with the sheep and zombies. These moments of awareness happen for everyone, but it never sticks. This is an apt example of how powerful these patterns are. The popular maxim, “Eat, Sleep, Play” (sometimes work) is indeed a frightening  exemplification of how lives are being lived. Where is the examined life in eat, sleep play?

So how do we break the trance? One way might be right in front of you. Journaling or blogging is a very effective way of taking stock of life. It induces regular and frequent “stop and think” moments. It forces the writer to make considerations and articulate them; look at them on the page and face them when the abstractions in the head are easier to ignore.

I would like to use Cognitive Strain as a forum for living the examined life. I also wish it to be an encouragement for others to live the examined life too. Because we examine life, we can be satisfied in not affirming contradictions in action or in thought. We are made whole by this concern for consistency that challenges the hypnotism of the patterns of life. Integrity unravels this impulsive neglect to live the examined life. The failure to seek and understand is a moral failure that the eat, sleep, play kind of life describes. You and I need to be more thoughtful than that. We need to live better.

 

 

Technorati Tags: How to live the Examined life,The Examined Life,Blogging,Analyzing life,More thoughtful life,Unthinking Life,Unexamined Life,Socrates