Not All That Glitters . . .

What does it take to be rich? 

Consider this thought experiment:

Imagine an island where the trade winds and the sea currents effectively prevent any ships from reaching it. On this island is a tiny mountain of gold about 10-feet high and 10-feet wide at its base. The value of this gold at today’s price of $1,500/troy ounce is about $6.89 billion.  But it is the 1800s, and this island is completely uninhabited and never discovered. Is this island rich?

Now suppose a big storm causes a ship to go off course and wreck into the island. There are 30 survivors of the shipwreck cast away on the island. The island has a minimal amount of resources to sustain these shipwrecked survivors. They live for a few years and then sadly perish having not been found. Before their deaths, are the shipwreck survivors rich?

Now suppose that modern air travel has revealed this island's existence. The shipwreck is discovered decades after its occurrence, and no one since the wreck has come upon the island. Although all of the survivors have a long died, the direct descendants of the survivors (some of them had children before having left on the final voyage) are tracked down and happen to be a limited number of people--about 1,000. It is determined that the shipwreck survivors were the first to stake claim on the island and are thus the rightful owners. By inheritance the 1,000 descendants are equal owners of the island and all its possessions. Are these descendants now rich?

We're Doomed, I say. DOOOOOMED!

Is humanity doomed? We certainly don’t lack apocalyptic scenarios: nuclear war, a robot uprising, out-of-control climate change. Unlikely, far-fetched? Not according to scientists and mathematicians who, in recent decades, have found a surprising new source for anxiety about the long-term survival of the human race: probability theory. The so-called “doomsday argument” holds that there is a 50% chance that the end of human life will come within 760 years.

That is the opening paragraph from an essay by William Poundstone in the Wall Street Journal. He also was a recent guest on Michael Shermer's Science Salon podcast discussing the wide implications for this elegant theory.

Also from the essay:

Since it is equally likely that those of us living today are in the first or second half of all past and future human births, let’s say that we are in the second half—which would mean that there are no more than 100 billion births yet to come. There is a 50% chance that is true, which at the current global birthrate (about 131 million a year) translates to a 50% chance that we have at most 760 more years of births. A changing birthrate would modify that estimate, but the calculation is that simple.

A friend forwarded the original link to me and we had a bit of discussion on it basically agreeing that the math and process is compelling, but that it seems to be missing something to make it as much as it seems to be. Specifically, I find it very interesting, but it seems to me like a confusion between or muddling of two different concepts.

One (German tanks) is like a kid turning to a football game on TV randomly and guessing about how much longer in real time (not game time) the game will last. The other (humanity) is like being a kid on vacation who wakes up in a car wanting to know "are we halfway there yet." The second case is much harder to answer if we include a key condition that the destination distance is not known by the kid. Even if he knows he is 100 miles from his house in OKC, he doesn’t know if the destination is Branson or New York City or elsewhere. It is much easier to ascertain where he might be in the football game as opposed to the vacation. A score of 14-7 and a flash of the scoreboard showing "3rd Quarter" is much more revealing than a road sign that has a highway number inside a Missouri silhouette. While he can apply the analysis in both cases, his prediction revisions will be orders of magnitude different as time passes for the vacation as compared to the football game.

Another problem I have is that the time frame is inversely proportionate to the future population growth rate. If we slow birthrates down to just above replenishment (about 2.1 births/woman), then we extend the time between now and the next 100 billion people. Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich might agree, but Jean-Baptiste Say and Julian Simon (and I myself) would not.  So my complaint boils down to: that when applied to something like humanity and it’s future, this doomsday calculation is not telling us as much as it is purporting to.

Top 100 Movies - Required Viewing

This is my partially complete list of "classic", right-of-passage movies everyone should see. I had my kids in mind when crafting this list. I drew from a much larger list of movies I want them to experience wanting to cull it down to an elite must-see list. 

It is partially complete because while it is a top 100, I am open to changing what makes the list. But I do feel that 100 is a sufficient number such that to be added to the list a new entrant would need to bump a movie from the list. 

Do not confuse this with a “greatest 100 movies” as this is not a measure of cinematic excellence or advancement of the medium. It is closer to a kind of most culturally important list, which overlaps largely but not entirely with a most popular list. Case in point: no one would list Caddyshack as a movie that set a bar artistically. However, it’s influence on and depiction of the subculture of golf has been phenomenal. I would bet that virtually everyone who has played a round since the movie came out roughly 40 years ago has during a golf outing made or heard a reference (if not many) to that movie. 

Additionally, there are other criteria or factors that to some degree contribute to a movie’s inclusion on the list including: I enjoy the movie/it has some nostalgia value for me, it is a movie that speaks to an important truth/it teaches something about the time it is set in or its genre or its underlying story, and it has cultural importance. Being culturally important and being on the list means that you can’t just read a synopsis of the movie to fully understand the cultural importance. You have to see it to get it.

The list in alphabetical order (sorry about "The" titles):

2001: A Space Odyssey

A Christmas Story

A Few Good Men

A League of Their Own

Airplane!

Alien

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

Apocalypse Now

Apollo 13

Back To The Future

Beetlejuice

Big

Braveheart

Caddyshack

Casablanca

Christmas Vacation

City Slickers

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Cool Hand Luke

Dead Poets Society

Die Hard

Dirty Dancing

Duck Soup

E.T.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Field of Dreams

Fight Club

Fletch

Footloose

Forrest Gump

Ghostbusters

Good Will Hunting

Grease

Gremlins

Groundhog Day

Happy Gilmore

Home Alone

Hoosiers

It's A Wonderful Life

Jaws

Jurassic Park

Karate Kid

Lethal Weapon

Life Is Beautiful

Match Point

Men in Black

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Mr. Mom

Mrs. Doubtfire

Napoleon Dynamite

North By Northwest

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Office Space

Old Yeller

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

Poltergeist

Psycho (1960)

Raiders of the Lost Ark

Rain Man

Raising Arizona

Remember the Titans

Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi

Rocky

Seven

Spaceballs

Spies Like Us

Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope

Swingers

The Bad News Bears

The Big Lebowski

The Blues Brothers

The Breakfast Club

The Dark Knight

Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back

The Godfather I

The Godfather II

The Goonies

The Jerk

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

The Matrix

The Princess Bride

The Royal Tenebaums

The Sandlot

The Shawshank Redemption

The Shining

The Silence of the Lambs

The Sixth Sense

The Terminator

This Is Spinal Tap

Three Amigos!

Titanic

Top Gun

Trading Places

Vacation

War Games

Weird Science

When Harry Met Sally

Young Frankenstein

You've Got Mail

On Stowaways and Hostages

Consider the following hypothetical situations and associated questions. Some time in the 1800s . . .

• A captain of a ship discovers a young boy (perhaps 9 years old) has stowed away on the ship once it is far out to sea. He will consume resources and be a distraction. Should dangerous events unfold such as bad weather, he will be an added liability. What duty of care does the captain have to the child? Can he force him to work on the ship—to what degree? Must he make him comfortable—to what degree? Can he put him in a lifeboat with small rations and send him adrift where he will likely suffer and quite possibly die before rescue? Can he ethically toss him overboard where he will certainly perish? What duty does the captain owe the boy?
• Same thought experiment but now assume the boy was accidentally trapped on the ship while in port through no fault of anyone in particular. It was simply and definitively an innocent mistake. Consider the same questions. 
• Same thought experiment but now assume the boy was accidentally trapped on the ship at port through the direct and certain fault of the captain. The captain was negligent by any reasonable measure. Consider the same questions. 
• Same thought experiment but now assume the boy was deliberately kidnapped by the captain and brought aboard for the purpose of working for the captain. Once the captain tires of the boy or has no further use of him, consider the same questions as before. 
• Same thought experiment but now assume the boy is the captain’s child, was deliberately and willingly brought aboard, and the child’s mother is deceased. Consider the same questions as before.

The Rational Fan: Managing Hopes and Constantly Adjusting Expectations

(I love the mirror image below the bars hinting at the symmetrical negative to any observable outcome.)

Consider the analogy of graphic equalizer meters on a old 70s-80s-era stereo--the ones that would show the recent high-point marks. I think this is a good symbol of the high-water-mark thinking that commonly clouds the judgment of sports fans. Specifically, an irrational (typical?) fan mistakes the best performance for the expected performance. The rational fan thinks in realistic terms where future expectations are influenced by past achievements but not set by them and mean reversion is always expected (eventually).

This would include updating for new information (e.g., a recent trend of wins or losses) when projecting the long-term expectation of winning. (i.e., Is recent performance simply an aberration and regression to the historic mean should be expected? Alternatively, has a new plateau been reached and future expectations must be appropriately adjusted?)

Consider also the emotional impact of a team's performance on a fan. The rational fan must contend with and accept the great irony that the more one's team wins, the more the wins tend to run together and the losses stand out, and vice versa. This is simply the law of diminishing marginal utility (not to be confused with the law of diminishing returns).

Irrational fan foresight is almost always myopic as they only see one side of what could be and probably do so in a vacuum. When an irrational fan imagines a play executed, he imagines an outcome determined by his conviction of the play’s potential success or failure. His judgment is probably additionally clouded by the play's potential excitement. If he would like to see a particular play call, he envisions a successful, if not the perfectly successful, outcome. If he disagrees with a play, he conceives of only its failure. A coach doesn’t get that luxury. Coaches should rationally weight the probability of success and the degree of success with the probability of failure and the degree of failure—what could be and how likely it is. Fans are allowed to dream, coaches are required to calculate. For coaches, magnitude matters.

So on any given play fans are liable to be deeply unsatisfied while coaches see the outcome as satisfactory toward a larger goal. But as should be expected, this is subject to error and unintended consequences. The error can be that coaches have bad incentives leading them to take less risk than they should (another example). The error can also be that fans expect too much. Back to the equalizer analogy, setting expectations on the abnormal high point causes fans to demand an unreasonable level of success. Fans can also be subject to what I would term conventional-wisdom bias--the primary source driving coaches to be overly conservative.

Also, when is a fan a true fan? Consider a convert. As opposed to religion, there is no long process filled with sacrifice and commitment culminating in a grand ceremony to becoming a team's fan. But perhaps there is such a process for becoming a "true" fan. Hence, the concept of bandwagon fans as illegitimate. It is only those who have been there through the tough times who can claim righteousness. For my teams I certainly feel this way.

Perhaps another way to look at it is that to be a true fan you have to feel physical pain when your team loses. Alternatively, you're not a team's true fan until the opponent's pain is your pleasure.

One more nostalgic image:

Ethical Free Riding

Partial list of ethical ways to free ride (enjoy positive externalities). Free riding is generally economically destructive and potentially unethical. For example, if paying for national defense is voluntary, the risk is that we get too little of it as many people attempt to free ride off of the benefit of everyone else paying for it. (Note: don't too easily accept this theoretical argument when applied to so many so called "public goods" such as roads and lighthouses.) While free riding off of others is unethical when you are taking resources from others, there are many examples of free riding that are ethically fine:

1. Mayberry - Because so many people (especially helpful if it is your neighbors) are so very active in their home security (setting burglar alarms, using Ring doorbells, etc.), you don’t have to be. You just need for your place to look like the kind of place that does.
2. Speed Racer - Because everyone wants to drive so fast, you can go above the speed limit safely and stay behind the fastest drivers who can run interference with Smokey. Defensively keeping pace with traffic is the safer way to drive. 
3. Quantum Leap - Be on time and keep your promises and you will exceed most people's general expectations. This is basically just capitalizing on other people’s inability to do the right thing. 
4. Gotham - The benefits of big-city life are great for both individuals as well as society at large. Not only are you doing good by the environment living in a big city, you are doing well for yourself in many ways. For you this means access to amenities that are less expensive and of greater scope in type and richness.
5. Quiz Show - When information is expensive, trust the wisdom of the crowd. Visiting a new town and looking for a good restaurant? Trust the one that is popular with locals--all the more so if it has other impediments to overcome like a poor location. 
6. The Matrix - There is basically no excuse for doing something new or difficult by winging it from scratch. Research and learn using Google searches, YouTube, blogs, et al. Somebody somewhere has been there, failed, corrected, and left it all waiting for you to discover. 

Don't Let the Ideal Be the Enemy of Improvement

This recent Scott Sumner post got me thinking about a truism I like to follow: 

Don't let the ideal be the enemy of improvement--my take on don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. 

Perfect is overrated. While I might be a libertarian idealist at heart, I have always striven to be a directionalist rather than a destinationist. And I certainly don't want to fall victim to the Unicorn Fallacy.

Consider The Big Five and reasonable milestones of progress to be aiming for.

• Drug prohibition - Marijuana tolerance is gaining. This is largely good (movement in the right direction). However, it probably will have unintended byproducts like legalization = authority endorsement leading to overuse as well as even stronger resistance to decriminalization, legalization, and tolerance for other illicit products (cocaine, heroin, LSD, etc.) and services (sex work, price "gouging", etc.). Reasonable near-term aspiration: Federal action decriminalizing if not descheduling marijuana despite the before-mentioned byproducts.
• Education - School choice is on a gradual but tepid rise. Reasonable near-term aspiration: A popular civil-rights figure strongly advocating for a voucher or charter school experiment in a major inner city. 
• Immigration - These seem to be dark times. Yet I see two aspects of optimism. First, Democrat rhetoric is improving as they attempt to draw a distinction from Trump--this isn't faith in Democrat dogma but rather faith they will paint themselves into a good corner. Second, Republicans will likely need to soften the stance Trump has defined lest they risk losing demographically--this isn't faith in Republican virtue but rather faith in their ability to see a self-serving means to an ends. Reasonable near-term aspiration: A compromise solution to allow much-greater levels of H1B visas and higher levels of "desirable" immigrants (where desirability comes from greater restrictions on immigrant access to benefits or sponsorship by entities such as employers or charities or sanctuary cities).
• Taxation - The biggest recent improvement has been in this category with the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017. By far the two benefits of this mixed bag of tax changes were the reduction in the corporate tax rate and the increase in the standard deduction. The latter should enable future tax simplifications such as removing deductions and allowances much easier to accomplish. Reasonable near-term aspiration: Increases in tax-deferred savings limits.
• War - This is the most stagnant category. Across the globe we are still explicitly overtly at war (Afghanistan, Iraq, et al.), implicitly covertly at war (Yemen, Syria, et al.), and potentially at war (Iran, North Korea, et al.). Reasonable near-term aspiration: A critical mass within the electorate of direct opposition to each of these three types of bellicosity. Even if it is a selfishly-derived opposition (stop wasting our resources on lost causes, don't fight other people's battles, regroup in case we need to fight a big enemy), it would be helpful.