Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

It is a very strange and disturbing time, isn’t it?

Here in Massachusetts we have a Republican running for governor who’s campaign is largely funded by her spouse. They live in this amazingly wealthy neighborhood in a house on the ocean north of Boston. His company is a few miles from the house, making for a pleasant commute. Which is all fine; but for the detail that the state’s economic development program helped pay for the villa his company’s in. Seems that the Republican administrators of the program decided that this delightful neighborhood, one of the richest in the state and possibly the country, was a economically depressed. Well I guess that’s what business friendly Republicans do.

And then we have this guy Allen in Virginia, running for Senate. He stuffed deer’s heads into the the mailboxes of black people, or niggers as he called them for years. After months of stories like that coming out about this guy he’s running neck and neck against his opponent. What’s up with people in Virginia?

I have often joked, but now I am afraid, that what globalization would bring to us was South American governance, i.e. where when countries go bad people of the opposition just disappear never to be seen again. The right to demand that a court review the why somebody has been tossed in prison, it’s what 400, 600 years old? Our elected officials, here in the US, recently set that aside. The president or his minions now have the power to disappear us.

Consider this story in the Times today. Guy happens on the vice president in the street. Tells him that he thinks the Iraq policy is reprehensible. Can you guess what happens next? Yup, the secret service tossed him in jail.

Why exactly do we fear terrorist more than this? Why do we fear terrorist more than people who would, apparently without shame, write laws that retroactively say that their torturing people is legal. Why do we fear terrorists more than people who would make torture legal?

And then you have the announcement that Rice, who’s now secretary of state, was fully briefed on the Al Queda threat in July 2001, months before 9/11. She was told on a scale of 1-10 this threat was a 10, that something had to be done. She did nothing. Which is news. It’s deeply troubling. But it’s part of a pattern that was already clear. The administration just didn’t care. Didn’t care to learn how care about this kind of issue.

So while that’s horrible I’m more bewildered that it appears the 9/11 commission knew about that briefing and left it out of their report. Huh? I know that the commissions report was horribly partisan, but really this is over the top. How exactly can we trust anything in the report at this point. What else got left on the cutting room floor?

Of course Rice handled the news like any bad PR problem. First pretended that meeting didn’t happen, then that she couldn’t remember it, and then finally her staff admitted it did happen. Hope thru out, I presume, that it might blow over.

II guess it did blow over.
Now we have a new circus. A congressman who’s been chasing underage boys around the capital building for years. The good news, for him, is that the Scientologists are old friends of his, so he’s hiding in one of their ‘rehab centers.’ He’s got some excuses. Blame those Catholic priests. Though people say he doesn’t drink he’s also blamed on the drink. You’d think given that he’s got millions of bucks he could get a better crisis manager to handle his PR.

Of course the real story there is that if you’re a viciously unethical political party boss, then a rich closet gay pedophile makes a great lieutenant. No risk he’s not going to follow orders! So now we have the small amusement of watching the party captains skitter like roaches under the fridge when the lights come on.

What’s wrong with this country? It still it isn’t clear that the Republicans will be shown the door in the upcoming election. How can any citizen vote for any of these people? This really bewilders me. More so, it terrifies me.

i’m enjoying reading “Breakdown of Will” by Ainslie. One name his work goes by is pico-economics. If that name is not intended to be sarcastic then it’s at least ironic given that Economics is currently king of the social sciences and Ainslie’s model underminds the king’s legitamacy. The market stalls of pico economics are set out inside your head. The market participants negotate for your attention, slices of your time. I recorded a bit of audio from the market floor in an old blog posting.

Re-negotiate your cable contract once a year. Oh, and your long distance service. Rebalance your investments annually. Keep an eye on your mortgage rate and refinance at appropriate times, but not too often. Consider having a health savings account. Clip coupons. Keep track of those rebates. Join frequent flyer programs as appropriate. Be sure you have a will. Check that your love ones know your end of life desires. Eat more vegetables. Take regular breaks to avoid typing injuries. Get plenty of sleep.

Here, let me quote a fragment from the book:

I have described a model of learned interests that compete freely on the basis of timeframes over which of their rewards will be prefered. … a person is a population of these roommates each clamoring for control of the room … to continue to exist each interest must be the highest bidder at some time or it will be extinquished …

But pico-economics is not like classical economics. Not at all! The math that governs in the attention marketplace of your head is taken straight out of bizzaro world. It might as well be non-linear. We don’t respect the future; even if you think you do. You don’t.

At the heart of this bizzaro math is deeply hardwired preference for immediate gratification over longer term goals. This evil math is time scale free so we will scratch an itch in preference to eating some ice cream, and eat ice cream that’s at hand in preference to a fine meal with friends in half hour, and that we will go off to long lunch rather than finish that deliverable the team needs to make progress next month, etc. etc.

The preference for short term ones v.s. long term is so pervasive that we tend to gloss over how odd it is. Would you like to stop what your doing and have some ice cream? How do you decide that turning your attention to the fun of a bowl of ice cream is worth it? The utilitarian answer is that you weigh the alternative and if it’s better than what your doing then you switch. What’s curious about living in the bizzaro world of pico-economics is that this calculation is radically different depending on how close at hand that ice cream is. Going out to get it? Going into the kitchen? Plucking it off the desert cart? Dipping your spoon the bowl? Each step closer and in the competition for your attention the ice cream becomes vastly more likely to seize control of your scarce attention. So much so that it makes no economic sense at all.

From animal experiments they know exactly how out of wack your internal calculator is. If the pleasure of ice cream is 2, 20, or 200 seconds away for the spoon, the desert cart, and the kitchen respectively then you will treat see the fun of ice cream as 66 units, 8, or 1 unit respectively. If we replaced ice cream with a financial reward this implies that people have to struggle to avoid accepting a dime in two seconds v.s. $6.60 in few minutes later. Rationally this makes no sense; since I could make a mint moving ice cream closer to my customers.

That our attention is so badly behaved creates a problem what we struggle with continually. For example we all know not to buy the ice cream and bring it home; i.e. to avoid the temptation. Ainslie reports a delightful experiment involving pigions. Pigeons have the same bizzaro internal marketplace. So if you put them in a cage and give them some buttons to peck you can show that they will peck a button that gives smaller rewards sooner over a button that delivers significantly larger rewards later. Amazingly this setup annoys the pigion. He knows that he is making bad choices. Apparently there is a rational market regulating pigion in there scolding the his irrational free market animal pigion. How do we know? Well they can augement the experiment to add a third button pecking that will disabled the short term reward button. The pigeon will use that third button to lock in his commitment to the longer term reward.

Avoiding temptation and using external devices to make binding commitments are both means to force your internal bizzaro attention economy to behave better. We don’t trust ourselves anymore than we trust other parties. We engage in lots of these strategic games in an attempt to keep the bizzaro internal economy from doing more harm. Most of these work by reducing our options. We lock in our savings in long term investments, we don’t buy the ice cream, and the pigeon pecks that third button.