December 25, 2005
Monogamy as public good.
In Fooled By Randomness, Nassim Taleb differentiates between low-risk/high-quality strategies that result in surivival over the long term and high-risk/low quality strategies that look successful only because the losers are difficult to count. e.g. playing lotteries look like a good idea when you see how happy the winners are, but then you are not accounting for all the people who don't win. It may be obvious that lottery tickets are actually not good investments, but he shows that the same phenomena happens in all sorts of more professional investment contexts and even professionals don't notice.
He characterizes many trading strategies as equivalent to repeated plays of Russian Roulette with some payoff for survival. Over enough plays you will have a small number of rich survivors and a large number of ex-players who you will never meet. It will therefore appear like Russian Roulette is a good career as oppposed to, say, Dentistry.
A point to note here, is that the survivors of this game of Russian Roulette will be much more attractive than Dentists. They will have worked less hard, and earned more money. They will appear to have both good genes/memes to have succeeded in such a game (sic) and the wealth to give potential mates a high expectation of comfort for them and their kids.
In societies that allow polygamy (and perhaps adultry), these Russian Roullete players will crowd out Dentists for breeding opportunities. The result is that the next generation will be substantially LESS FIT than the prior one. One way out of this bind is for females to become highly efficient at differentiating between random success and expected success. One of the points of Fooled By Randomness is that such differentiation is exceptionally hard to do generally and particularly without specialized knowledge of the game.
An alternative strategy is for a society to adopt monogamy as a rule. Under monogamy, the Roullete survivor is more likely to get his pick of the female population, but less likely to crowd out the other lower risk strategies that acually have higher levels of expected success.
A third strategy is that women pursue all the highest expected value (or worst-case optimized) strategies and for men to specialize in risky behavior. In this model, large numbers of men are thrown into various forms of Russian Roulette games in order to procure random inordinate wealth to be distributed to the remaining population. This sucks for the random male but from a societal perspective is actually a good strategy. Male hunting and female gathering follow this model.
This third model requires polygamy in the case where gambling kills off the least successful mates (otherwise it is not breeding at capacity). However, absent war, success has become much more financial. In those realms some combination of monogamy and male-disposability makes the most sense.
The public goods problem is that individual women should prefer polygamy to monomany because if the inequalities between Roulette success and expected success are sufficiently large, a share of the Roulette's wealth may be subtantially larger than the expected marginal value of mating with the Dentist. So even as she would prefer to sleep with Roulette, the public-good is that she mate with the Dentist.
The male-disposability problem is further that men need some compensation to justify their engaging in more risky behavior.
The upshot is that the most successful people in a healthy society are highly likely to be male and further than these societies probably oppress women in various ways both to compensate for male risk and to breed fitter men.
Note: This post is just a thought. Not fully worked out. My gut is that this argument also plays into cultural hotpoint discussions of gay marriage and abortion, but I have not worked out the details.
Posted by Alex at 05:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Does cohabitation/monogamous-premarital-sex increase your likelihood of divorce?
David Friedman argues that you shouldn't be regularly sleeping with people you don't intend to marry. The instinct to pair-bond and the convenience of regular sex overwhelm the additional information gained.
Implicitly, if you are dating someone but NOT living with them, you are a better judge of their quality as a mate.
Note sure that he is right, but it is an interesting argument.
Posted by Alex at 05:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
December 21, 2005
Broken Windows: How the Japanese Ended the Great Depression
Talking with a friend yesterday about the two very different usages of the phrase "broken windows" in sociology and economics, I came up with this example.
Here is the cannonical Sociologists definifion of "broken windows":
A successful strategy for preventing vandalism [+], say the book's authors, is to fix the problems when they are small. Repair the broken windows within a short time, say, a day or a week, and the tendency is that vandals are much less likely to break more windows or do further damage. Clean up the sidewalk every day, and the tendency is for litter not to accumulate (or for the rate of littering to be much less). Problems do not escalate and thus respectable residents do not flee a neighborhood. The theory thus makes two major claims: 1) further petty crime and low-level anti-social behavior will be deterred, and thus 2) major crime will be prevented. Criticism of the theory has tended to focus only on the latter claim.
Economists refer to it as "The 'Broken Windows' Fallacy" and define it as follows:
The broken window fallacy consists of claiming that destructive acts (say storms, hurricanes, or terrorist attacks) will improve economic welfare by occasioning repair expenditures and putting people back to work.
One might say that the broken window fallacy sounds like a strawman when phrased this way, but it is frequently used to explain the end of the Great Depression by people who argue that it was the vast increase in government expenditures required to fight the war that finally got us out of it.
[Update: Ooghe in comments expresses a lack of clarity on why economists refer to broken windows as a fallacy. To be clear, the sociologist is arguing that if the window is broken, fixing it should be a higher priority than is necessarily apparent. The economist is arguing that you shouldn't break windows just to experience the benefits of fixing them. The two arguments don't logically conflict. But some versions of the WWII cured the Depression argument very much take the form of lets break windows so we can fix them.]
One way out of this tension is to observe that the world looked like a pretty bleak place in the 1930's as the Hitler, Musollini, Stalin, and Japan gained power at the expense of the West and more particularly as the expectations about their power increased. Given the risk that these powers might gain control of the planet and the desctruction of wealth that would ensue, it was probably very prudent not to make long term investments and to save as much as possible. One could think of German remilitarization as one sort of broken window and the Great Depression as the aggregate of reasonable responses.
The Great Depression more or less ended on December 7, 1941 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor it became clear that the US was going to clean up this mess. In effect this is a view that we should not treat WWII as an expense but as a capital investment that paid off in spades.
Posted by Alex at 06:33 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
December 20, 2005
Voice Chat
Cell phone manufacturers are considering a Voice Chat feature for cell phones.
Posted by Lonne at 01:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)
December 09, 2005
Outsourcing the Playing of Video Games
At one point when younger I was trying to level up on the "Adventure of Link" on the original Nintendo, and I found a place in the game where I could place a stapler on the controller and Link would continue to swing at a bird enemy that would perpetually regenerate, yielding experience points. I could go to dinner and come back later to find Link still swinging, but as a much more powerful character.
According to a recent article, some Americans are now outsourcing the playing of video games to China, where workers in sweatshops, being paid less than a quarter per hour, are playing games on their behalf to develop their characters to higher levels and to earn gold on multi-player on-line games. Some of these characters can then be sold for large sums of money on eBay and in classified ads.
Posted by Lonne at 06:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
December 08, 2005
New IM worm chats with intended victims
Link here.
I've always said there is little difference between viral marketing and computer viruses. Now we have agents traveling around smart enough to convince humans to install them.
SkyNet here we come.
Posted by Alex at 03:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Coffee intake also improves memory
See here.
And here is a chart of the caffeine content of various foods and beverages.
Posted by Alex at 03:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
December 07, 2005
Iran: False Negatives vs False Positives
Spurred by Muhammad El Baradei's recent confirmation that Iran is months away from an atomic bombJohn Noonan at Officer's Club discusses why war with Iran is likely imminent how it might play out. Scary stuff. I suspect that an attack will be simultaneously against both Iran and Syria because I think the US and Israel worry that Saddam had WMD and that they are now located in either Syria itself or the Bekka valley under Hezbollah (Iranian) control. The commenters discuss the question of whether or not an Iranian nuke is tolerable. The answer is that, even if you assume that they are rational, you still have the problem that once they have it, they are in a use-it-or-lose-it position with them. So they are likely to be used before it is rational per se.
Makes me think it is worth visiting Israel now, before the US/Israel attacks and Iran retaliates. Because, even if no WMD is used, Iran's conventional missiles can already hit Israel and do substantial damage.
Group trip to Israel?
Posted by Alex at 02:10 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
December 05, 2005
Coffee Intake Decreases Risk of Liver Damage
As reported yesterday, a study of 9,849 participants over about 19 years shows that "those who drank more than two cups of coffee or tea per day developed chronic liver disease at half the rate of those who drank less than one cup each day." It appears to have something to do with caffeine.
Posted by Lonne at 11:28 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (1)
December 04, 2005
Pole Thieves
There has been a recent crime spree in Baltimore in which thieves disguised as utility crews have been stealing 30-foot light poles and selling the scrap metal. The theft of the light poles is interesting enough that it has generated a significant amount of national press, most of which has focused on the situation as an example of the serious crime problem plaguing Baltimore as a city. While there is some inconsistency in the press with respect to exactly how much the theft of the poles is costing the city, it does seem clear that it is expensive.
There has not been a lot of attention paid to the constitutional issue raised -- will we have to revoke the Twenty-Fourth Amendment or at least reverse Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections to pay for them all?
Posted by Lonne at 08:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
