WWCF: First Contact

Which will come first?

Aliens Contact Us

or

We Contact Aliens

How quickly you dismiss this question on its very premises is interesting in itself. Let's start with the basic assumption that there have been, are, or will be aliens (intelligent life with origins beyond Earth). Now that we have that out of the way . . .

Where are you on the Fermi Paradox and The Great Filter? For this question to have meaning we have to additionally assume it is actionable because there will be a determination of contact made. So . . . 

Here are the terms:

Aliens contacting us would include the obvious spaceship lands on the White House lawn, but also signals deliberately sent that we detect/decipher even if they are not aimed directly for us. Add to this discoveries of artifacts here on Earth of past alien civilizations if those were exploratory or communicative in nature. So a deliberate message sent by aliens and received by us through passive discovery or active looking by us is the first condition met.

The second condition, that we make first contact, seemingly has a lot of hurdle to it. We have to discover aliens keeping to themselves to the extent they don't find us and make contact or we see one of their signals sent out prospectively, and then we make the first engaging move. Yet there is another way. If our signals we have been sending out unintentionally/sloppily since the time we have been aware that we've been transmitting to the cosmos or sending out deliberately to "is there anybody out there?" are received by aliens, then we have made first contact. Another feather in the cap of us first is what qualifies as "intelligent" life. While I am open to revision, right now I would allow anything at or above the minimum threshold of animal cognition. So Martian mice count, but Martian bacteria do not. As impressive as space monkeys would be, there is no chance they contact us first.

Robin Hanson has already been putting in the heavy lifting on this one. And don't tell me that it is already settled--dis ain't ova. 

My prediction: Perhaps I allow the Fermi Paradox to overly influence me or perhaps I'm too optimistic in regards to The Great Filter. Nevertheless, I come down on the side of the second case, we contact aliens first. To this I will assign a respectable but still negotiable 65% probability.

Trust Is a Fragile Fabric

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayeux_Tapestry

Of the many, many lessons to be learned from the COVID-19 Pandemic, one that stands out to me is how important honest communication is. Honesty is a bedrock of trust. Trust is an essential quality for a thriving society.

While fear can enable a society to survive, it takes trust to allow it to flourish. Largely we are only surviving the most recent pandemic. There are many reasons for this from poor understanding and application of science to isolationist responses regarding testing and vaccination driven by nationalist pride (distrust!) to blatant failure to test to failure to properly quarantine to failure to experiment and on and on. Granted that many of these failures came about because we were starting from a poor state of trust, we did not do much to improve the arrangement. In fact we set it back meaningfully along the way.

Suppose we get another pandemic (we will, just wait). Suppose further that it is similar to COVID in terms of virulence and contagion. Perhaps it is dissimilar enough that we have a caught-off-guard type of reaction thus making it even more similar to COVID. But we do remember COVID, so we actually do have some improvements in societal and government response. For example, some communities, large business firms, perhaps the federal government wants to conduct wipe-spread, rapid testing. What might stand in the way of that policy being well received and complied with?

The people that would need to be getting tested would need strong assurance that a positive test would be met with reasonable consequences. What about our response to COVID would give them that assurance? Although people would definitely want to know if they were infected all else equal, pushing back against this desire would be multiple, reasonable concerns. Namely, that they would be subject to harsh treatment if positive (social stigma, rough or indefinite or otherwise undesirable detention, etc.) and perhaps more reasonably that they would be subject to involuntary quarantine, lockdown, social stigma, etc. even if they tested negative. 

Compounding this would be a distrust that they were getting the full story. Vaccination acceptance still suffers from the horrible Tuskegee Study crime. To a lesser degree dismissive elite responses to those with concerns about vaccination, as unfounded as those may be, also deters people from trusting authorities on vaccines. Being told masks are worthless and then that masks were essential sent a clear message--don't trust the authorities. This was one of many noble lies, a short-sighted concept that completely fails to ask the essential question: And then what?

The Chinese government lied to the world at the early stages of the pandemic. They have characteristically been very deceptive as the pandemic has unfolded including apparently not cooperating with the investigation of a lab leak cause. We should expect and demand better from our authorities. In the long run people respect the concept of 'we don't know' especially when coupled with transparent, honest, and updating 'here is what we are thinking'. The 'And then what?' from this approach is productive responsibility and fruitful experimentation. 

Two Methods of Improvement

Let's compare two general methods of improvement: 

1. Truncating the left tail so as to eliminate the undesired portion of the distribution
2. Increasing the distribution so as to grow (fatten) the right tail and therefore increase the desired portion of the distribution. 

Both methods have the effect of shifting the mean rightward. But the first is artificial.

Let's explore the first method. People paid primarily for their looks are an example of truncating the left tail. (One might be tempted to say “supermodels”, but that is a particular, specialized subclass of this universe. It is like saying basketball players when we are actually talking about athletes.) They exist within a distribution of attractiveness (subjectively considered as that is the only way) that simply has lopped off most or all of the left side. Some are gorgeous to you; others are gorgeous to me. Some are not so attractive to you while others, perhaps ones you really like, are not so attractive to me. Anyone in particular within this group might be just okay to any random observer. Taking everyone's opinions together as a whole, though, on average gives us an ordered distribution [similar to the theoretical and problematic Keynesian Beauty Contest]. 

When considered from the average observer’s viewpoint, the only thing missing in the distribution are all those who would be below some threshold. In other words the “lowest” (most left) person paid for looks is just an average looking person compared to all of humanity. Because we can’t manufacture attractive people yet, we are forced to use the truncate strategy. 

So the only way to bring about beauty improvement is by leaving out those who are less than some level of beauty (I used eliminated everyone below the average beauty score in the example). So we can get there, but it is artificial--we just left out the less than "beautiful", whatever that actually means in this hypothetical.

Now think about wealth. How do you increase average societal wealth? This is problem from a different realm because unlike beauty where we are currently limited to some degree of diet control, physical fitness training, and plastic surgery we can move wealth around. 

In the case of wealth what is the better path: Minimizing the impact of bad ideas (truncating the left tail via redistribution) or increasing the rewards for good ideas (fattening the right tail)? 

Bailing out bad ideas has moral hazard risks--we are subsidizing bad ideas. When you subsidize something, you get more of it. Taken to the extreme income redistribution is not sustainable. The system collapses in on itself through actual complete resignation (a dead-end Nash equilibrium) or deliberate exit (John Galt). Because of this, we are forced to use the grow the distribution strategy. 

Notice how this distribution is truncated and non normal (there is a minimum at 70 and the distribution has a right skew). No one is below some level of actual wealth (even debtors and prisoners get a meal and a place to sleep). So in some sense I am assuming some of the first strategy--a social safety net of some kind. I wanted to make it more realistically skewed, but time didn't permit. However, we should be careful how easily we succumb to the notion that there are people with true wealth at the far, far reaches of the distribution. Just how rich is Jeff Bezos compared to you or me really, seriously? 

Growing the distribution has a side benefit of minimizing the impact of bad ideas--a kind of resistance to bad ideas having meaningful, lasting impact. Subsequently the opportunities for good ideas are increased since this method is positive sum (it grows the pie) while the former strategy is zero sum and eventually negative sum if taken too far.

Am I assuming too much? I really don't think so. 

Unfortunately, advocacy for method two is unpopular because of social desirability bias. People don't want to admit that they want the rich to get richer. Or worse yet, they think letting the rich get richer somehow makes us all worse off. 

WWCF: Sensors in Football or AI Calling Balls/Strikes in Baseball?

Which will come first?

Sensors in the NFL (determining touchdowns, etc.)

or

Artificial Intelligence Calling Balls & Strikes in the MLB

Basically, which of these two professional leagues will first adopt a replacement for human officiating judgement? The Hawk-Eye system has been finding wide adoption in many sports with tennis being the most substantial example to date.

For decades now we have had greater and greater use of replay review. NBA basketball is perhaps the most developed version of this even if it is imperfect. And despite the old-fashioned nostalgia and general complaints ("they still don't get it right!" . . . "it takes too long to be worth it" . . . et al. ad nauseam), I don't think the trend of trying to get it right with the help of technology is reversing.

You don't have to look far for examples of meaningful mistakes in both sports all of which are painful for fans and damaging to the brand. But vested interests (unions and fans who fear change, to name just two) hold back improvement*--slowing us down from where we are otherwise going. 

Here are the terms: 

• Football - in the least having sensors used to determine touchdowns when the officials on the field are in doubt. It would qualified if these are used to overrule upon challenge or if the officials can use them similar to how every score is reviewed by rule.
• Baseball - in the least the calling of balls and strikes by an autonomous system. To be clear this is not overruling the umpire but autonomously determining in the first place. 

Baseball would seem to have the clear lead in this evolution. However, football would be less disruptive since this would only be employed at critical plays like scoring (the criterion for this WWCF) as well as potentially first downs and out of bounds. 

My prediction: The MLB has more to gain as that sport is much more at risk of losing fan share. It also has obviously been making more moves in this direction. Therefore, they will opt to make a leap out of a greater sense of urgency thus being the first mover.

*One could argue that there is some art involved in catchers framing pitches as well as potentially some game improvement by umps having degrees of freedom in the strike zone. However, the spirit of the game is probably not in how sly a player can deceive, and it takes ~25 umpire "improvements" to negate one obviously blown at bat. Likewise in football I fail to see anything desirable about referee mistake.

Does Ranked-Choice Voting Really Work?

All else equal, it would be good to reduce divisive partisanship in politics and to get elected officials who are more generally representative of their constituents' views. At least it seems like that would be good. Upon typing it I immediately have my doubts that I can both defend those goals as meaningful and desirable. And even if I can, it might be ridiculous on its face with the "all else equal" qualifier being impossible.

After all, all else equal, I would love to be worth $100 billion.

Regardless, let's briefly explore one possible method of improving elections, ranked-choice voting (RCV); aka, instant-runoff voting. From Ballotpedia ranked-choice voting is

an electoral system in which voters rank candidates by preference on their ballots. If a candidate wins a majority of first-preference votes, he or she is declared the winner. If no candidate wins a majority of first-preference votes, the candidate with the fewest first-preference votes is eliminated. First-preference votes cast for the failed candidate are eliminated, lifting the second-preference choices indicated on those ballots. A new tally is conducted to determine whether any candidate has won a majority of the adjusted votes. The process is repeated until a candidate wins an outright majority.

Let me state up front that I very much like this as something that might help break the two-party duopoly that corruptly prevails in America today. This is a goal that isn't necessarily in line with the reasoning that RCV could reduce divisiveness, etc., but I think it is consistent with those goals. 

Yet a simple but extreme thought experiment gives me some doubts about RCV as a cure for the supposed ails. 

Consider this election ballot: 

• Jesus
• Almost The Devil
• A Goofball
• The Devil

Now suppose that we hold the election and the first-place results are:

• Jesus - 38%
• Almost The Devil - 30%
• A Goofball - 20%
• The Devil - 12%

Under RCV we don't yet have a winner because no candidate has a majority. So, we eliminate the lowest first-place vote getter and give his second-place votes to the remaining candidates. Presumably in this hypothetical everyone who voted for The Devil, who has now been eliminated, put Almost The Devil as second place. Therefore, the new results are:

• Almost The Devil - 42%
• Jesus - 38%
• A Goofball - 20%

We still don't have a majority vote getter; so we now eliminate A Goofball whose voters equally split their votes for Jesus and Almost the Devil as second place. Therefore, the new results are:

• Almost The Devil - 52%
• Jesus - 48%

My hypothetical has resulted in Almost The Devil defeating Jesus. That seems bad on its face. Additionally it probably does not satisfy the Condorcet criterion (a known short coming of RCV among other systems). This is just one way RCV might not live up to our dreams. The Volokh Conspiracy at Reason explores another, similar dampening of expectations for what RCV can achieve in heavily contested elections. 

My hypothetical concern here might be rejected for at least one of two reasons (or both): 

1. In repeated experience voters should get better and better at using the new system. This is similar to rejecting the argument that a simple one-time experiment in a classroom "proving" prisoner dilemma problems mean people will fail at coordination ... therefore, government force is required to make them make the right choices. 
2. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If this is a 90% solution to known problems with elections and democracy, it might be worth this hypothetical, unlikely risk.

Perhaps mine is an uncharitable view on the electorate in general. The thing is when I apply the labels (Jesus, The Devil, etc.) so as to be self evident about the hypothetical candidates you get an unfair look into the future that is not visible to the voters ex ante. Reasonable minds will be rationally ignorant about specific candidates, and no amount of homework done ahead of time will tell us the future with certainty. 

Perhaps it is an argument against democracy--one could charitably say it is simply an argument in favor of less democracy. I think it is certainly an argument for less government power. Electing Almost The Devil as Advisement-Only Czar to the Local Private Firm Dog Catchers minimizes his tyrannical reach. 

I still think RCV is a big step in the direction of improvement. But this thought experiment has given me some moderation in my expectations of what it can achieve. 

P.S. See also this podcast from Building Tomorrow for an overview on RCV and its potential implications. 

Winkler's Wager

Let me state upfront I know that for the most part (if at all) I am not breaking new ground here. 

Are we all basically agnostic? Or all basically believers? How much of the rejection of belief (disbelief) is just a rejection of the behavior and style and beliefs of individuals or institutions the nonbeliever (believer) finds amiss or reprehensible or simply unconvincing? 

Years ago in thinking about this topic and in preparation for this blog post specifically I polled two friends. These are each very thoughtful, highly intelligent people. One is correctly described as a strong believer in God. One is correctly described as a strong disbeliever. Separately I asked them simply "What is the probability God exists?" leaving it fairly open ended for their own interpretation. Both of these people know how probability works and why 100% and 0% are bad answers. 

The believer stated that he wanted to say 100%, knew that was technically impossible, knew that faith might be a reason to actually make it legitimate, but settled on 90% (all of this recollection conditional on if memory serves; it was 5 years ago). He gave a good explanation for his thinking to support the answer.

The disbeliever answered via email, so I have his response. After sleeping on it, he answered 20% with a thorough account of his reasoning. 

I don't want to make this about their specific answers. This was just an experiment regarding my prediction about what they would say and why they would say it. Why I completely understood what they said and why they said it (it basically matched my prediction as well), I do not feel fully compelled by either. 

Similarly, I ran this twitter poll recently:

Probability a supernatural being(s) (aka, God) exists?

— Steve Winkler (@swinkler78) March 6, 2021

Obviously, this was not a meaningful sample size. But that isn't the point as much as the split among the choices I presented gives some indication that I think resembles how people tend to think about this.

Faith = ???... belief in the face of doubt? That definition would imply that 100% and 0% are not legitimate answers. Doubt seems essential for faith to have meaning. And the existence of doubt pushes one toward the unsatisfactory middle point of 50/50.

I think this is more easily seen in the case of a believer. But it is true at the antithesis as well. Atheism (certainty there is no God) is a faith by the atheists' own definition--one cannot prove a negative (e.g., there is no God); therefore, atheism cannot be scientifically proven. 

Ask a believer and a disbeliever this question: What it would take for them to reverse their view? This leads me to believe all in this debate are "believers" ultimately. And yes I know the problems with this over simplicity.

To the point of many in the atheist community, a point Penn Jillette makes in this piece, no one is really agnostic. A person always will find a way to dismiss evidence or argument offered against the view they hold in their heart of hearts. 

I think this gets to the crux of the question. The right answer is perhaps +/-50% with faith in God or faith in not God (something beyond the material realm) pushing one off of this center point of pure agnosticism toward one of the two faiths. The existence of God is a non-falsifiable conjecture; therefore, using science or reasoning to "prove" either the existence or the nonexistence of God is futile and fallacious thinking. 

Can we at least point to arguments to guide our judgments on God's existence? It would seem this is quite hard beyond simply an exercise in persuasion for those already tempted to be on the same side of the argument--we can never change the minds of those on the other side. Yet, minds do change and in both directions. The links in the P.S. sections allude to this.

So much of this ageless debate is people talking past one another. Adjacent to this is the determinism versus free will debate. Usually there is confusion on the part of those arguing for free will between determinism and fatalism, and usually there is confusion on the part of those arguing for determinism between free will and randomness. 

Sam Harris makes a strong case for determinism but only on the back of a reductivism I don't think can be denied--yes, there are always causes . . . it is cause and effect all the way down. Yet this basically amounts to a tautology that avoids the important parts of the question. Can we hold ourselves and others responsible for actions taken? What does it mean to choose? To act? To fail to act? 

I am a dualist on the issue. When I play pool, my choice of where to aim the cue ball and how to hit it are my free will, the resulting actions of the balls on the table are pure determinism. The determinist would entreat, "Is it not just a higher order of underlying causes that lead you to 'chose freely' how to strike the cue'?" My answer is "Yes, of course, and that isn't interesting for the matter at hand." Daniel Dennett says it better. 

Similarly, believers in God and disbelievers in God tend to talk past one another. They mischaracterize the other side's position and misunderstand what the other side means. This is not helped by how poorly the believers tend to understand their own position or how dismissively the disbelievers tend to assume past the implications of their own position. Believers wish to put God in a box and disbelievers live out the story of the Apostle Thomas. Taken to logical ends most believers' understanding of God can be disproven and most disbelievers' reasoning forces them to reject all knowledge and facts about the world. Experiments to this end: 

1. Ask a believer to convince you that their belief is genuine as opposed to something that makes them feel good.
2. Ask a disbeliever to explain why their expectation that their car will get them to work tomorrow morning is not predicated on faith or many small faiths they themselves cannot prove. 

Each will often struggle: In the first case because it is hard for a believer to identify a reason for faith beyond a desire for faith; In the second case because most people do not know how an automobile works and the existence of the future is continually theoretical--I'll prove tomorrow exists . . . tomorrow.

We should not depend on the ill-equipped be the strawmen foils for our favored positions. 

Consider my work as a practitioner within the investment management profession. My most sophisticated client would find the way I explain my job to my young children and the way my young children understand what I do to be quite unimpressive and perhaps even unattractive. That doesn't invalidate the philosophies I hold or the method I employ or the track record I've achieved professionally. Likewise part of what I do and any successes or failures associated with it might be simply due to luck. My efforts and explanations are at least to some degree counterproductive, irrelevant, and orthogonal to their associated outcomes. My shortcomings, imperfections, and activities themselves within financial money management neither prove nor deny the existence of financial money management.

Perhaps the most challenging part for believers is to separate God from being simply a personification of truth, love, and perfection. 

Perhaps the most challenging part for disbelievers is to build a foundation of truth (moral, mathematical, and physical) without the identification of God as this foundation. 

Both sides accuse the other of shortcuts for the sake of certitude. Both sides make the mistake of looking to religious texts as scientific works. If you do this, you are gravely missing the point. Newtonian/Einsteinian physics can't speak to ethics or morality. Likewise, the Bible, et al. are not going to serve your quest for scientific truth. 

Along the journey of building this post over the past few years these fellow travelers were helpful: 

Tyler Cowen considered similar questions, Ross Douthat weighed in quite awesomely, and Think Again – a Big Think Podcast (125. Reza Aslan (author) – Deus Ex Hominem. 

Related: A little footnote on the population of "atheists", What is Robin Hanson's kind of atheist?, and Philosopher John Gray discussed the Seven Types of Atheism with Russ Roberts on EconTalk. 

Here is another very good, related conversation.

From this comes this insightful item: “Religion has nothing to fear from science, and science need not be afraid of religion. Religion claims to interpret the word of God, and science to reveal the laws of God. The interpreters may blunder, but truths are immutable, eternal and never in conflict.” If I could be so bold, I would like to add a corollary. Faith and religion are very poor at discovering and developing legislation to govern society and scientific facts to explain the universe and world around us. Faith and religion are very well-suited for the discovery of righteous first principles and guideposts for how to love and live among one another. Likewise science cannot teach us right from wrong but can teach us true from false.

P.S. Is God math?

And

https://fakenous.net/?p=1863

https://fakenous.net/?p=1649

https://fakenous.net/?p=1909

https://fakenous.net/?p=1929

https://fakenous.net/?p=1937

P.P.S. How should a Christian Bayesian react to the Mayans, et al? Should they heavily discount the evidence and slightly shift their prior or slightly discount the evidence and heavily shift their prior? Is this question a risk of confirmation bias?

P.P.P.S. I avoided the heresy of an adjacent issue: that perhaps believers of all types (Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, ... Mathematicians?, Universists? ("let the Universe decide..."), et al.) are all yearning and seeking to follow the same ultimate God. 

A Greater Sage Theory

Just a few wondering thoughts on the latest techno-investing development--non-fungible tokens or NFTs.

What gives a collectible object value? Are NFTs like Beanie Babies or Picasso paintings? 

Think of this as a spectrum between pure speculation and pure intrinsic value. An object never lies entirely on one end or the other of this dimension. Where it resides is also not necessarily stable.

Fine art is "fine" in that it has a low degree of speculation relative to perceived intrinsic value. 

Gold is the ultimate financial consensual hallucination – – we can easily, reliably believe that it will have value across societies and well into the future. It is much more difficult to believe that Beanie Babies will have that quality. Picasso paintings are somewhere in between.

Scarcity is an important quality for determining marginal value, but it doesn't say much of anything about intrinsic value. This is the crux of the diamond-water paradox. I think there are two important subtypes of scarcity as it relates to collectibles: organic and manufactured.

Organic scarcity is producing 10,000 Babe Ruth cards and only 1,000 survive decades into the future. Manufactured scarcity is knowing that 10,000 Derek Jeter cards are desired but only producing 1,000 of them. 

Organic scarcity might be thought of as "authentic", but that too is in the eye of the beholder. The 1,000 Babe Ruth cards aren't any rarer in the example above given those parameters.

NFTs are a manufactured scarcity. However that is not very important except to the extent that someone values genuine authentic scarcity--the organic kind--as opposed to fabricated scarcity. Yet I can easily see an appreciation for the manufactured scarcity nature of NFTs. So don't be too quick to dismiss the limited denominator as a factor for these collectibles.

To the extent you can believe that people will continue to value the interestingness of NFTs along with the thing (art work, sports moment, etc.) that a particular NFT is associated with, you can credibly and reliably believe that that specific NFT will have value. 

At this point they are obviously deep on the speculation side of the speculation vs intrinsic value spectrum. Time will tell.

A Hypothetical SARS-CoV-2 Study

Perhaps this already exists, but I doubt it. At least I do not expect this ambitious of a study has been attempted at the rigor I desire. And I know it is a lot to ask. 

Nevertheless, here is the rough outline of what I'd love to see done well.

Independent variables examined using county-level data for the U.S.:

• 20-day trailing average humidity
• 20-day trailing average temperature
• Latitude 
• Population density
• Stringency measure (government-mandated restrictions)
• Mobility measure during COVID relative to the same mobility measure average value for 2019
• Median income
• Proportion of population 65+
• Percentage of elderly in LTC facilities
• Population proportion by ethnic/race ancestry (hypothesizing that prior immunities are associated different geographies)
• Date of first case within y-hundred miles (adjusting for treatments, interventions, etc. changing over the timeline)

Results:

• I would like to see the cross sectional results of confirmed COVID deaths by standardized timeline (from date of first case; from date of first death; from x days past first case within y-hundred miles).
• I would also like to see the time series analysis in total and by various cohorts for confirmed COVID deaths. 

My general hypothesis is that every thoughtful observer will find the results somewhat surprising. These same, thoughtful observers come at the problem with their own biases and priors as well as some unintentional agendas (the intentional agendas are for the unthoughtful observers). I think they tend to emphasize the areas they find compelling while somewhat negligently remaining silent or quiet on the areas they actually don't disagree about but feel are overemphasized by others. To that extent there is a lot of talking past one another. I am very specifically thinking about the realms of both the libertarian/classical liberal/neoliberal/generally freedom-championing thinkers and the economists/social and public policy thinkers. 

The problem is the audience has very much grown and diversified for these thinkers. It is very hard for the casual observer to understand the nuance and the starting positions of general agreement. For example, the public has always been completely oblivious about the fact that economists agree fundamentally to the vast extent that they do.

In the case of COVID this problem has been greatly magnified. And at the same time the slippage into hyperbole has been greatly amplified too. The result is painting ourselves into corner solutions. When the narrative has been taken to the extent that many so often and so easily have taken it (myself included of course), our narratives tend to fall apart. Again, this is for the thoughtful observers. 

P.S. Yes, at first glance I can see potential problems with the independent variables, and I assume there are many more I can't yet imagine. The covariance between stringency and mobility might force one of them out of the analysis. In that case I would like to see a rigorous comparison between just these two--Phil Magness points to some of what I would expect in that voluntary mobility changes dominate policy. After all, politicians follow rather than lead.

It Depends . . .

One-dimensional thinking vs deeper-level thinking (AKA, solve for the equilibrium).

Considering this:	One-dimensional thinking concludes:	Deeper-level thinking concludes:
To arrive at a destinations sooner one should drive…	Faster	Slower
A risk-averse investor should consider taking on…	Less market risk	More market risk
A successful salesperson…	Knows how to get what she wants	Knows how to satisfy peoples’ needs
To increase revenues...	Increase prices	Lower prices or offer coupons
To reduce the damages of a dangerous vice...	Prohibit it	Normalize it
To better preserve competitive balance in sports leagues...	Restrict player compensation	Liberalize player compensation
To reduce the risk of gun violence there should be...	More gun restriction	Less gun restriction
To change minds...	Speak more	Listen more
To increase the income of low-skilled workers...	Enforce high minimum wages laws	Lower or eliminate minimum wage laws
A satisfied restaurant customer...	Cleans his plate	Leaves some food uneaten
Basketball teams who shoot poorly (have a low percentage of shots that go in) should...	Be highly selective with their shots	Shoot the ball a lot more
To help the children who toil in child-labor manufacturing we should...	Ban and boycott their products	Buy and enjoy their products

Sometimes the obvious is right, and fast thinking serves us well; sometimes the less obvious is right, and slow thinking serves us better.

I Was Desperate. Honestly Afraid. And Completely Helpless.

At first it was gradual, and then all of a sudden it was acute. I could be blamed for putting myself in such a position--at least it was somewhat my fault. But live long enough and you'll inevitably find yourself at the mercy of those around you, willing and desperate to take their help, and completely without options. 

It was late. Very late. And I was on a rain-drenched highway. Tired. Unable to go farther. And very hungry. 

I hadn't called ahead because I hadn't planned to be there. But there I was on a highway in the middle of nowhere Texas. To say I was between large cities was both true and meaningless. The middle of the Pacific Ocean is between large civilizations. 

I am a strong believer in the power of the consumer--that if you shop around and negotiate, you can drive a great bargain. But I was at the mercy of the supplier--a mere price taker that night. 

A warm meal, a dry bed, a safe place. My needs were a short list. Yet not fulfilling each would be critically bad. Drive on and the risks grew exponentially. Try to negotiate a better deal, and my only options might evaporate before my desperate eyes. 

Any slightly observant person could see my position of weakness. Any slightly opportunistic person could sense my vulnerability. So how bad did it get?

Not too bad at all under the circumstances. The motel owner had stayed up late, as it turns out, just for me on the off chance I would be there in need of his accommodations. His accent made clear he and I were not born and raised in the same place. I was a stranger on his doorstep, but he welcomed me as one would a good, long-time acquaintance. I paid him $159 for a room with a hot shower and comfortable bed I would use for the next 8 hours. After, he (or his staff) would have to clean it up restocking and doing laundry. I would leave without saying goodbye. 

Before that shower, I needed food. Two in the morning is not when many meals are served as evidenced by the many closed restaurants. No one ever starves missing one meal, but it can be quite unpleasant to do so. And good decisions are not made on an empty stomach and a poor night's sleep from the same. The 24-hour restaurant made sure that wasn't my fate. I was their only customer in the 45 minutes I spent. At least three people (couldn't tell if there were more in the back) gave me nourishment and quiet companionship all for the price of $23.

The morning sun brought a new day and a fresh outlook. My car was safely waiting untouched for my departure. I grabbed coffee and a Danish set out for me at the motel before dashing out the door. A quick fill up at a gas station meant I could be on my way not needing to stop for hours. 

I felt slightly uneasy leaving so abruptly that morning. Guilty would be too strong a word, but I was dashing off having taken so much from so many who were so generous to have provided it for so little in return. I can't imagine I'll ever be back on that same highway, and even if I am, it is unlikely I'll ever stop in that little spot again. I hope someone else can do a little more someday to take care of the people who took such good care of me.

P.S. This post's story is truish. It is a amalgamation of true prior experiences in my travels for the purposes of making a point. Life is tough--use markets.

Breaking Professions Down Into Three Essential Roles

I think one can categorize most professions into a small number of distinct roles--let's explore this idea and arbitrarily limit the number of roles to three in each case. It is my contention that few of the people practicing these professions are good at more than one role, and many are not very good at any of the roles. Consider:

• Lawyers: navigator, firefighter, bodyguard
• Financial advisors: tour guide, travel agent, psychologist
• Medical doctors: band-aids, antibiotics, placebo
• College professors: inspirational speaker, revealer of truth (model explainer), advancer of truth (researcher)
• Elementary school teachers: babysitter, basic skills tutor, etiquette shaper
• Catholic priests: moral consigliere, charity executive director, art museum curator

No One I Know Committed Voter Fraud

This is not a post about recounts and pursuit of truth. It is not a post about probability. It is a post about imagination.

I don't know 1 million people, much less 70+ million. I cannot even imagine what 1m people looks like. I've been to football games with 100,000 people. One million is like (checks notes) ten times that. 

I can imagine 1 million pieces of paper--dollar bills, pages in books, ballots, etc. 

I know some people who voted for Biden, some for Trump, and some of us (bless our hearts) who still believe in freedom who voted for Jorgensen. But remember, I don't know and cannot even imagine 1m people in any form much less 1m people who all wanted to vote for Biden (or Trump, but that isn't important right now). 

Okay, so I actually can imagine it, but it is a bit hard if I want to concretely think about 1m people showing up and filling out a ballot for Biden. It is much harder still to imagine them all showing up together at one time and doing so. 

But that is what the ballot counting looks like especially after the fact. Boom, X-thousand for Biden, Y-thousand for Trump, etc. 

I've seen enough TV to be able to imagine what a fraud looks like. I can imagine easily a vague picture of what a million or so ballot fraud looks like. Truck pulls up to the back of the warehouse, doors open and a sinister fella peeks out, coast is clear, truck gate is lifted revealing fat stacks of freshly-minted fraudulent ballots, dollies unload the loot...

Add to this that perhaps I have motivated reasoning--I would love (hypothetically) to discover that Biden "won" because of fraud. Combine that with my natural and defensible lack of imagination that millions of people see the world differently than I do and in a way that I think is very significant (it was, after all, the most important election of our lifetime). 

Do you see how it seems more likely, perhaps much more likely, that fraud is at play in the 2020 election? What is more likely, that something I can barely imagine happened or something that I can easily conceive of happened? I'm just asking questions here.

Unfortunately, "seems more likely" is equivalent to "is more likely" for many, many people. The Monte Hall problem contains an amazing paradox. The probability is dependent on the perspective of the chooser; however, the perspective that matters is not the chooser's imagined framing of the problem. It is the fact that from the perspective of the chooser and the new information he now has, the probability assignment has changed in a way for him that it has not changed for an uninformed observer--for the chooser it is 2/3 vs 1/3 (i.e., 67%/33%); for the uninformed observer it is still 50%/50%. 

Probability is in the eye of the beholder. But the beholder doesn't get to invent out of whole cloth the critical elements governing the probability (subjective though they may be).

I lied, this is a post about probability.

The Electoral College by Private Land Mass

One of the ways voting used to be limited was property ownership. Specifically, there were property qualifications where only property owners with sufficient holdings (along with other qualifiers like race and sex--i.e., white males) could vote. 

This got me thinking: what if the U.S. Constitution's provisions for the composition of the House of Representatives and thus that portion of the Electoral College had been designed around private land ownership rather than population?

Sooo.... I created a model for how that might look today given the amount of private land ownership by state. Now, this would have created the strong incentive to maximize private land ownership resulting in a much different picture than that below. But working with the lay of the land today, the crazy result would obviously be a huge boon to large western states and residents in them. Notice how Alaska doesn’t get a big lift and Nevada actually shrinks as a result of how much of each state is owned by the government. 

To further the thought experiment, I applied Eli Dourado's election model to see how the current Presidential election might be affected. Spoiler alert: This looks very good for Republicans.

This is a rough model—so I very well may have made mistakes. (Sources are in the linked spreadsheet.)

What Explains Country Variation in COVID Deaths?

I see a lot of vague or implied speculation on why there are such large differences in COVID-19 death rates (et al.) among various countries and regions. But many of these have internal tensions once we think a little deeply about the arguments being hinted at. Biases are leading to a lot of lies of omission if not just outright bad reasoning.

Why is Sweden different than Finland? What explains Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea versus France, Italy, and Spain? Germany versus Belgium? USA NE versus Texas versus Florida versus USA Midwest?

Here is a partial list of the usual and some unusual suspects:

• General health in the population
• Partial immunity including from prior coronavirus exposures
• Climate including ability to comfortably be outdoors and in open-air environments (definitely relative to when the virus struck)
• Prior and continued use of various drugs and treatments
• Proportion of at-risk people especially elderly
• Quality of procedures for protecting the vulnerable
• Quality of testing
• Quality of tracing
• Population density (within cities and otherwise relative to where people actually live; e.g., excluding most of Canada when measuring for Canada)
• Government NPIs including lockdowns and other policies but not test and/or trace
• Degree of movement within and among various communities (city to city, within a city, cross sociodemographic, in and out of country, et al.)
• Strain(s) of C-19 virus affecting country and timing of the infection

I suspect that the error term in any formal analysis might prove to contain all the variation. Remember, "the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist."

If You Are Up To Your Neck in Piss, and ...

... I'm about to throw a bucket of snot in your face, would you duck? In other words, who are you going to vote for/against for president?

The title and lead in for this post is from something my grandpa used to ask me often when I was young. He was full of pithy little sayings, questions, and aphorisms that were his way of teaching a lesson or making a point. He was a down-to-earth person with a keen ability to see through bullshit. Perhaps years on the road in his profession as a long-haul truck driver gave him this perspective. Incidentally, my one-time non de plume for this blog, Fonzy Shazam, is based partially on his CB handle, "Shazam". 

Answering the question of this post has a bit of question begging to it as it is not at all clear that you should vote. Your vote has no chance of affecting the outcome of the election. NONE. So I am approaching this from two directions:

1. Your vote will signal ever so slightly support for a candidate. As we'll see, this will have a lot more value for some than others.
2. We could consider this from the standpoint of voting as if your vote would determine the outcome.

As a libertarian I approach this from a decidedly different view than many, but I believe the trend toward independent thinking is undeniably growing. Team R and Team D are less and less appealing for a growing number of Americans. 

Libertarians are not uniformly behind their own candidate, which should be expected from open-minded thinkers. To this end the Soho Forum recently held a three-way debate considering who libertarians should vote for. It is well worth a listen. 

In fact there are two different elections going on for the presidency this year. This has been the trend, but I think (hope) it is at a critical inflection point. Trump and Biden are trying to see who gets naming rights to the bulldozer that will continue to run you over. Jorgensen is unfortunately not in contention to win that "prize". Instead she is proclaiming a message that there is another way--trying to earn enough support that libertarians can no longer be ignored (e.g., getting onto the debate stage despite the rigged system) and letting the uniformed know there has been a group here for a long, long time steadfastly supporting the principles the duopoly works against until they reluctantly must support. 

Now, on to the show . . . Rating the Three 2020 U.S. Presidential Contenders

I will try to be as concrete as I can on this evaluating the candidates along several critical dimensions. 

1) COVID pandemic: I think we have to start with the issue of the year since it is such an important issue relating directly to what we expect a state and its leaders to "solve". It is a 9/11-type moment in magnitude and reshaping of priorities. That does not imply there is very much the president can actually do about it, but there was a good deal in the actual case of 9/11 and the current case of the pandemic. I am working on another post with my advice for humans and their leaders in the upcoming next pandemic--yeah, I know; audacious post. It should be no surprise that my advice is largely for government to get out of the way. Therefore, I think the libertarian philosophy would best set an environment conducive for least harm in the event of a pandemic. Trump obviously can be evaluated directly since he was president during the pandemic. He failed this test doubling down rather than changing strategies. He did not stand up to (drain) the swamp as the FDA, CDC, et al. thwarted progress and solutions. He was on the wrong side of testing showing no understanding of how critical it is. He shifted in the wind reacting to democrats rather than charting a course of sensible policy and leadership. Whether you support these policies or not, he reflexively closed borders in a clumsy, late, and haphazard method, and he waffled on lockdowns sending very mixed messages. He politicized it and provoked divisiveness. In other words he Trumped it up. Biden on the other hand was . . . silent. He didn't have a definitive, detailed plan until well after most of the worst had passed, and what we do hear from him now is not good--a simple rehashing of failed generalities and banalities. 

Verdict: Jorgensen wins by default as her natural position on decentralization and free markets best positions the country in the event of pandemics. Trump edges Biden on policy as his base's position of opening up is better suited for where we are now in this pandemic. However, Biden is the better pick once we consider the standpoint of general public opinion on opening up and moving forward from here. Trump supporters already think the pandemic worry is overblown, and a Biden victory allows Biden supporters to agree.

Jorgensen>Biden>Trump

2) The Big Five: [spoiler alert: Jorgensen is much^10 better on all five issues than either Trump or Biden. She opposes and will fight to end the drug war, she will work for free markets in education, she will strongly support immigration expansion, she will be vastly better on taxation and war. So let me just evaluate the two others.]

Drug Prohibition - Most of all these dimensions are a competition for last place between Trump and Biden. This is no exception. Trump's behavior and policies and appointments have been a combination of don't care about it and please the base. This is not progress or hope for the future. Biden and Harris' histories on the drug war are atrocious. But just as Obama entered office opposed to gay marriage and then "evolved" on the issue, Harris has changed on marijuana. For what its worth the democrats' rhetoric is better than republicans. I want good, just policies, and beggars can't be choosers. Biden>Trump

Education - This one isn't close. Trump is much better than Biden. The better chance of meaningful education reform and support for local reform is under a Trump administration rather than a government school union/bureaucracy Biden administration. Trump>Biden

Immigration - This one is close, to many people's probably surprise, in a race to the bottom sense. Biden is not a strong immigration supporter. Trump is awful on immigration, but the equation is Trump hates immigration therefore Biden opposes hating immigration. Categorize this as trade below being issues that are no longer Biden priorities once Trump is out of office. Still, Biden gives us a chance to stop the bleeding. Biden>Trump

Taxes - Trump's base wants lower taxes which is totally unrealistic and inconsistent with the spending levels of the Trump presidency--presumably supported by the base. However, the sentiment of low taxes lends support for small government, which is good. Much better are the tax reforms that Trump signed into law such as a higher standard deduction and lower corporate rates (an issue Obama supported and couldn't get accomplished). Biden's tax instincts are not good--he wants to use taxes as a political tool--and his base's sentiment is downright scary. His actual plan is not progress as it has objectively bad public policy. Trump>Biden

War - I truly think Trump accidentally could be the meaningfully better candidate on this issue. His base holds him back. It is an accident because it is only his selfish version of America First that causes him to dislike American engagement abroad. However, he would still like to have every possible dollar spent growing the military and by extension the military-war-making-industrial complex. Biden believes with wide application America can and should guide the policies and actions of foreign nations and peoples, and he is willing to use force if necessary--with a low threshold for necessary. There are two facets at play here: who would reduce the risk of war more and who would reduce the incidence of war more. On the first point I believe it is a tie in general with Biden improving the tail risk (very low chance of a highly disastrous war). Similarly a dangerous new Cold War with China is less likely under Biden. On the second point I believe Trump gives us a chance to bring troops home and reduce engagements by virtue of his desires and the antiwar movement on the left that always goes into hibernation when a democrat is in office. This is a close one. When in doubt, reduce existential risk. Biden>Trump

Verdict: Jorgensen is the clear winner here as I stated before. Trump edges Biden since his wins were meaningfully different and magnitude matters.

Jorgensen>>>>Trump>Biden 

3) Court Appointments: Jorgensen would appoint judges who understand the Constitution and respect the limits of government power. Trump would seem to be much better than Biden, but we shouldn't seek liberal judges or conservative judges. We should seek judges who have consistent and good reasoning. Such judge candidates can be found with support on the left and the right. I do believe that Trump's nominated judges will come from a pool that is more aligned with those of Jorgensen. 

Verdict: This issue is overrated in importance. I myself have been guilt of this quite often. The judiciary largely goes where the zeitgeist leads. 

Jorgensen>Trump>Biden

4) Trade: As mentioned above, don't be too quick to assume an optimistic future for trade under a Biden presidency. He has generally not been good on this issue and the democrats/progressives have always been worse than republicans/conservatives--current clown show not withstanding. Biden's core base is allergic to trade. He and democrats currently are supporters of it only because Trump is against it and only to the extent they can score anti-Trump points. Ironically, Jorgensen would be the pro-manufacturing job candidate as her policies would grow our economy much more than either of the other two.

Verdict: The long sweep of history is in favor of free trade--popularly by poll and, more importantly, actually by behavior. Only one candidate in this race understands that and works to strengthen it.

Jorgensen>Biden>Trump

5) Regulation: I have no doubt that Jorgensen is the best on this issue. Her surrounding advisors and appointments would greatly advance the cause of shrinking government. I keep hearing that Trump is clearly better than is Biden. I do believe that, but . . . just how good is he really? Not so great it turns out. I continue to make downward adjustments to my priors on this one. And you don't have to look far to see problems.

Verdict: A Jorgensen administration would have a chance to significantly curtail the regulatory burden. Trump is beholden to interests that push against regulation more so than is Biden.

Jorgensen>Trump>Biden

6) Executive Orders: This is a mixed bag as I would expect a Jorgensen presidency would accomplish a lot by executive order, a practice I otherwise greatly oppose. However, I expect she would tend to respect the power and its actual constitutional limits. For the other two I err on the side of assuming more malpractice from Biden than Trump with Obama and the first four years of Trump as limited evidence. 

Verdict: The use and abuse of executive orders is a barometer on how much inappropriate power the administration is engaging in overall.

Jorgensen>Trump>Biden

7) Sanctity of Personal Choice: There may be no other issue for which Jorgensen distinguishes herself from the other two than this one. It is her core. To believe Trump champions this is to fall for the sham rather than looking more deeply into the actual behavior and action. But sadly Biden is even worse. His position is that government knows best. Technocrats can and should guide the economy and other public policy. Trump's penchant for industrial policy narrows the gap in this race to the bottom, but as low as he goes, he simply will find Biden there waiting for him.

Verdict: Libertarians don't make good, that is to say electable, candidates largely because they are such deep believers in the idea that government is not the solution. But I am grading on how well each candidate scores on the issue not on how their position affects their electability.

Jorgensen>Trump>Biden

8) The American Image (home and abroad): This is a very important issue, but it is widely misunderstood. When I see the protesters in Hong Kong waving American flags and signing the U.S. national anthem, I see the image of America as a shining city on a hill. People often confuse the concept of the American image abroad as meaning we must submit to the will of other nations' governments or we must forcefully exert our will on others. Likewise, people often confuse the image at home as meaning we must surrender our personal, moral autonomy or all be nationalistic xenophobes. In truth the idea is that we should have pride and hopefulness for our nation as a defender of virtuous principles, and we should project to the world the best possible example of what free markets and free minds can accomplish. We should champion the rights of minorities and the opportunity for all to be the best they can be with those limits being constantly elevated to higher potentials. Trump has tarnished the image abroad by not being a constructive or trustworthy partner with other nations' leaders. He has tarnished the image at home by not leading us toward peaceful resolutions of the conflict between the police state and those who have been its victims. I don't believe Biden is much better, but it wouldn't take a lot to improve our situation in both cases. And I do believe Biden would give the peaceful protesters epistemic cover to distance themselves from the violent protesters and other criminals. This includes many state and local politicians who have been to cowardly or incapable to lead.

Verdict: The image needs improvement, and it will not be made better through divisiveness and control. See the next item for more.

Jorgensen>Biden>Trump

9) Persuasion versus Demonization: Don't fall victim to the low-level thinking that is easily swayed by pleasantry (or normalcy) over content. Just because Trump is gruff, rude, and unbecoming doesn't make him wrong (or right). Both major party candidates are looking to have their way with you. It probably shouldn't factor in that one will buy you dinner first while the other says, "Just get in the van." Note how Trump in a lame duck term and possibly facing more impeachment threat has pluses and minuses relative to Biden who will have a “mandate from the American people” and a desire to make his mark, God help us. As for Jorgensen, she is of an ideological core that holds persuasion in high exultation. The nonaggression principle doesn't just mean you don't hit people to get your way. It also means you need to win hearts and minds to advance the truth.

Verdict: Biden calls people names, but Trump is good at it. Both encourage hostility. 

Jorgensen>Biden>Trump

10) Federal Reserve Appointments: This is the issue the Libertarian Party is weakest on--perhaps the only significant weakness. My hope is it is more rhetoric than ideology. End The Fed is a power banner message but an empty policy. I agree that in a much-closer-to-perfect world we would have free markets in money. But we cannot get there with simplistic destruction like I think we actually could when it comes to say the Department of Agriculture among so many examples. I don't think she would in fact end the Fed. I think she might bring meaningful reform and openness if not some deregulation to move duties out of its domain. Trump and Biden are nearly the same in this regard as most appointments here are out of the macroeconomic professional class (as good or bad as that group is on average).

Verdict: I fear a radical appointment from Jorgensen. 

Biden=Trump>Jorgensen

Weighing all of the above and anything left out, consider the difficulty each candidate would face in getting their agenda executed. If they require legislative action, then it is less likely the bad things they would do actually get accomplished. As always their rhetoric is much, much greater than their capabilities or true desires. For example, if Trump had his way he would spend all of his time and effort playing golf and giving speeches (and tweeting). He doesn't care about you. And neither does Biden. 

Overall Verdict: Don't waste your vote. Voting for one of the current failures is a waste of your time and a waste of an opportunity to affect change. 

Jorgensen is the clear winner. A vote for her will not elect her. But neither will a vote for Trump or Biden. However, a vote for her strikes another blow against the two parties, and on the margin that matters a lot. One more drop of water in the ocean for Trump or Biden changes nothing. If I vote as if the vote will determine the outcome, my answer is the same. If you make me vote for Trump or Biden in the real world election where I cannot affect the outcome, I would vote for Biden as I prefer the signal of change. If you make me vote for Trump or Biden in a hypothetical where my vote does determine the outcome, I would vote for . . . if it is gun to my head, I might just say "open fire", but otherwise I reluctantly vote for Trump with the hope that the choice causes significant improving change within the Democratic Party or a chance for libertarians to gain a large new group of supporters (left and right).

P.S. This analysis is independent of ways in which the candidates might benefit me personally (as any meaningful analysis like this should be). For example, Biden would likely be good for my personal tax situation by removing the SALT cap, good for my home value and quality of life by subsidizing higher education including the university I live right next to, and good for my job by making taxes more complex which as an investment professional provides me job security. 

P.P.S. If Biden turns out to be mentally unfit for office, much of this become moot. 

P.P.P.S. Sumner has his own list.

P.P.P.P.S. Some asides: 

Thankfully, it isn’t Sanders. 

Seriously, he is the embodiment of playing with quality-of-life fire. 

Michael Huemer offers a critique of Trump from the conservative point of view. 

I recently summarized the thing I most like and the thing I most dislike about the Trump presidency as such: I most like that it has greatly accelerated the demise of the two-party system in America. I most dislike that it fosters and strengthens the fear and loathing of "the other" in all its many, hideous connotations. Notice that I am referring to the Trump presidency rather than Trump himself. To arrive at these I am using a comparative lens. While I like the tax policy and judicial appointments, these would have largely been very similar if not better sold in a different Republican administration. I detest the separation of families, deportations, and killing of many, many foreigners, but these were the case in the Obama administration as well. One must always ask as compared to what. Is the two-party prison in which we dwell really just giving us a “decision” between the bully you know and the bully you’ve forgotten?

Alternative post title: One of these things is not like the other thing, one of these things just doesn’t belong…