Monthly Archives: September 2007

Revolutionary

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I found myself sitting next to a copy of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” recently. I’d forgotten how much raw clarity and passion ran through the movements (anti-war, civil right, black power, feminism) of that era. Curious that having lived in that time one would forget.

There is a very sweet, though deeply sexist, section of the book about how he came to marry his wife. It includes this paragraph:

Mr. Elijah Muhammad taught us that a tall man married to a too-short woman, or vice-versa, they looked odd, not matched. And he taught that a wife’s ideal age was half the man’s age, plus seven. he taught that women are physiologically ahead of men. Mr. Muhammad taught that no marriage could succeed where the woman did not look up with respect to the man. And that the man had to have something above and beyond the wife in order for her to be able to look to him for psychological security.

Which I took note of because I’m currently excessively fascinated by the personal rule sets that people accumulate.

Imagine my amusement to see one of those rules appear in today’s comic!. Times change.

Preparation of Emotion

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I continue to be fascinated by Ainslie’s Breakdown of Will; which argues that the core challenge of our existence is a struggle between our various preferences over time. Our long-term and near-term preferences are continually churn to create inconsistencies of behavior that are totally irrational.  We tackle this frustrating inconsistency by attempting to strike bargains between our various preferences. He calls this intertemporal bargaining. I love this idea that the inside of our head is like disputatious committee meeting; i.e. it’s a governance problem.

Ainslie, et. al. have found only a very few tactics for the problem. Of which I find preparation of emotion fascinatingly perverse. It puts our nominally irrational self to work to achieve improved rationality. Since we know we can not trust ourselves to stick to our earlier agreements we roll up a bundle of emotion to deploy at the moment the temptation arises to break our earlier agreement.

A simple example of this might be the angry choice break off from a prior commitment, say a lover. Knowing we will be tempted to fall into the old pattern and it’s pleasures we prepare a knot of anger which can be deployed to counteract that temptation. Or we might learn to fear something we know will tempt us; and certainly we are all familiar with the seemingly irrational passion that others will bring to bear on avoiding something things – things which we do not find tempting or possibly enjoy. Or consider the situation were we are tempted by a near term lesser good (a lousy cookie for example) v.s. a distant but significantly better one (a fine dinner); in that situation winding up a emotional disgust to make it easier to shun the near term temptation.

I love that: it’s can be entirely rational to emote.

Professional Income Distribution

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This deserves highlighting.  According to this chart lawyers salaries split sharply after they leave school.  Some of them are paid a king’s ransom while other’s are paid quite pedestrian salaries.  I suspect this is true for most highly educated people.

Larry Katz was recently quoted as stating that “Over the past 20 years things have been very good for highest-end abstract skills”.  In so far as that is conventional wisdom it allows the inteligencia to distance them selves from the falling income of the majority of the population.  It creates the illusion that top few percent, who have captured all the income growth implicit in the rising GDP, are their class brothers.  For many well educated people, as that chart shows, that is delusional.

Changing the Rules

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I like this quote.

If a majority of the population is well accustomed to certain basic rules and if these rules work reasonably well common people even tend to stick more to these reliable rules than members of parliament and government would do – even if these rules are very unjust for some individuals or even major groups.

On the other hand, changing rules alone is only the one half of the process of change – the new rules must be known and accepted by a broad majority of the population to become effective. Direct Democracy does help to raise a discussion on rules in the families, at work and in other places ordinary people meet each other. Experts are forced to explain the necessity for change not only to a small number of people (members of government and parliament) but to everybody. This is very helpful to ensure that (almost) everybody will understand the need for change.

Reworking institutions to some end or another, e.g. the entrepreneurial act, is fundamentally about phase changes from one widely adopted rule set into something else.  What I like in this framing of the problem is how it highlights the switching cost.  The installed base is invested in the existing rule set.  While switching is risky, just as important is how they are used to paying to maintain the current system.  When the cost/benefits of the old/new regime are distant, impersonal, and fuzzy why should they change?  I’m amused by the presumption that it is experts who would face this problem – seems to me that it’s more often the affected minority who are interested.  Lastly I like how it faces up to the politicking/marketing necessary to drive such change.
I find the quote more interesting stripped of it’s context, but if you want you can look it up.

High praise

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“With many frameworks and languages, I get the feeling that I’m dealing with a metal cabinet covered by layers of marine paint; one where scratches tend to reveal sharp edges.  With Erlang, I get the feeling of a Victorian mahogany armoire; one where scratches in the wood simply reveal more rich wood.” — Sam

Nice blog you got there, would be sad if …

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Protection rackets seem easy to run on the internet.  While that example is pretty large scale; there are plenty of smaller opportunities for this kind of criminal activity.  Another long tail.  This morning this got caught in the blog’s spam filter:

hello , my name is Richard and I know  you get a lot of spammy comments ,  I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50%

He goes on to provide an IM contact and suggests the payment would be, only, some link juice.

Positive/Negative Emotions

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funny-kittenspreview.jpgI read Seligman’s Authentic Happiness some time ago.  He has an interesting hypothesis. The idea is that the negative emotions (fear, envy, greed, etc.) are about scarcity (win-lose) while the positive emotions are about more collective constructions (win-win). It is a bit difficult to discern which ideas in this book are well validated by good studies; it appears that this idea is closer to the insta-theory end of the spectrum than most. But I like it. Collective good, selfish bad.

Even if you can puzzle out exactly which ideas and techniques he suggests are well tested you still get difficult confusions between cause and effect. Happy people have larger social networks, but how can you tease out the causality?  In another example; it is will known that marginal increases in your wealth have a weak but positive correlation with happiness. That weak link suggests we ought to strive to earn more. Much less widely reported though is the trajectory of happy people tends toward higher wages and positions.  I think that a cheery affect tends to generate the wealth, not the other way around.

The studies did show some interesting effects. Your various traits (humor, punctuality, cleanliness, etc. etc.) do tend to be genetically inherited and they don’t tend to be strongly effected by circumstance. I particularly liked that they know that older siblings do often have higher IQs than younger ones. How much? One IQ point!

He has a few pages devoted to dismissing the Freudian idea that childhood trama creates an emotional blockage which latter blisters out in ugly behaviors. Those ideas have been extensively tested and they came up wanting.

The Freudian idea that emotions are like water, e.g. if you represses them up they will leak out elsewhere turns out to be extremely wrong. Repressing is fine, and effective. Bottling up doesn’t cause them to stew. No, stewing on them makes them fester. If you nurture a grudge you can turn it into a monster. Living with those is a bummer. If you nurture gratitude, satisfaction, forgiveness, confidence, optimism, etc. etc. you can fill your inner life with kittens.