In a twin conspiracy, a pair of identical twins would pretend to be only one person. For example, in college each twin could specialize in, and then ace, half of the classes; their GPA would soar.  They might together make partner in a law firm by handling a lot more work than other lawyers.  They could cheat on their spouse and while offering that spouse a near-constant video of “their” activities.  In fact, they could always have an alibi for anything they did.

This strategy seems tempting in “winner take all” areas of life where small productive gains are given huge rewards, or where secretly having more time can make you seem a lot more productive.  For example, high level managers attend a great many meetings to connect different parts of their organization.  A secretly-twin-CEO could attend twice as many meetings, and make twice the connections.

Of course if this actually happened often our institutions could easily adapt to check for secret twin conspiracies.  They don’t now look because they don’t expect them.  It would be interesting to search for such secret twins.  For example, one might take a list of top CEOs and compare the ratio of non-identical to identical twins in this group. If that ratio was substantially larger than in the larger population, that might suggests many secret twins hiding among CEOs.

One twin told me the loss of autonomy in this secret twin scenario would make it unacceptable to her, no matter what worldly success it produced.   Do people really care that much more about autonomy than success?

Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not. Shaw

The average woman is born with around 300,000 eggs … 12 percent of those eggs remaining at the age of 30, and only 3 percent left by 40. … From the mid-30s on, the decline in fertility is much steeper with each passing year. … Female undergraduates significantly overestimated their fertility prospects at all ages. … The biological reality that female fertility peaks in the teens and early 20s can be difficult for many American women to swallow, as they delay childbirth further every year. … The older you get, the more difficult it is to get pregnant and the higher the chance of miscarriage, pregnancy problems such as gestational diabetes and hypertension, and chromosomal abnormalities such as Down syndrome. … The risk of autism increases with a mother’s age.

More here.  Also, Andrew Leigh:

We estimate the relationship between maternal age and child … learning outcomes and social outcomes. … Children of older mothers have better outcomes. … When we control for other socioeconomic characteristics, such as family income, parental education and single parenthood, the coefficients on maternal age become small and statistically insignificant.

Today high status women stay long in school, start careers, and take long to match up with a man before having kids.  They are often too late, their kids have more defects, and the interruption hurts their career.  Low status women more often have an accidental early kid out of wedlock.

Imagine a different equilibrium, where females pick a male at 15, then school more slowly to have kids till some standard age (20? 25? 30?), when females return to full-time school and uninterrupted careers.

While it is not entirely clear if this new equilibrium would be better or worse, it certainly has some positive features.  Kids and moms would be healthier, kids more numerous and less accidental, moms more energetic, older folk would enjoy more grand kids etc., and career interruptions wouldn’t make female employees suspect.

Early parenting would have to be paid for by grandparents or via loans (or perhaps income shares), presumably in trade for some loss of autonomy.  While childhood does seem to be lengthening, it is not clear if this autonomy loss could be accepted.

For the male pattern, there are two obvious variations: males switch life-plans along with females, or males stay on the current plan.  Having males also switch would keep mates at similar ages, promote healthier kids and more energetic dads, and reduce opportunities for gender discrimination.

Randomness in kid timing and number would make it a bit harder to estimate student quality based on student performance – could we find ways to correct for this?  And the fact that low status moms now have kids early makes it harder to coordinate a switch to this new equilibrium.  But still, it seems an interesting thing that never was, about which to ask: why not?

From a conversation with Rob Wiblin, Katja Grace.

Though I generally avoid disclaimers, since Bryan Caplan calls my latest claim that econ efficiency is a good tool for finding win-win deals “compete nonsense,” let me try to clarify:

• We have many purposes when we talk about “what to do”, and making deals is only one of our purposes.
• Getting what we want is only one of many reasons we try to achieve deals; we also want to signal our features, for example.
• Analysis aids are only one of many sorts of aids that can help us to make deals; aids can also to organize negotiations, enforce deals, etc.
• Most useful deal aids are relatively specific to a particular context, such as real estate sales, or marriages; when available, more specific tools tend to be more useful.
• Deal aids can specialize in what groups that they best assist.  A particular aid might be best suited for couples, club, firms, or nations.  Wider aids specialize in assisting larger groups.

Economic efficiency is our best wide general analysis tool for finding win-win deals that get people what they want.  That isn’t everything, but it is a lot.  I’m glad I mastered this tool and am eager to apply it.  Efficiency can:

• Suggest Deals – Efficiency analysis suggests policies to make “the biggest pie.” A deal also needs folks to agree on a way to divide the pie, such as via cash transfers between the parties.  Even so, knowing better ways to make bigger pies should make parties more eager to agree to deals to lock in such gains.
• Be Part Of A Deal -  Groups can make explicit deals to adopt the results of efficiency analysis.  For example, legal systems can adopt a general accident rule that puts responsibility on the least cost accident avoider, and government agencies can be instructed to make policy decisions on a cost-benefit basis.  Most can reasonably expect to gain from such policies, even if they do not expect to gain from each particular application.

Admittedly:

• Efficiency analysis is a rough guide, and does not determine exact implications with certainty for each possible situation.
• The policies efficiency recommends depend on particular modeling assumptions and parameter estimates, for example, and those depend on particular analysts and sources used.
• Even when negotiators have access to solid analyses, deals can fail for many other reasons; good analysis doesn’t ensure good deals.
• Most deals are not between all possible parties, and each deal may well disadvantage those not included in the deal.
• People may expect to gain from a deal, but end up not actually benefiting.
• As a wide general tool, efficiency is less useful for small deals or for contexts where specialized tools are available.
• Efficient deals may well be immoral, or unattractive for other purposes of deal-making, or of “what to do” talking.

Few deals can guarantee to get everyone more of what they want, but by encouraging and enabling more better wider deals, the use of efficiency analysis sure seems to me to tend to get most everyone more of what they want.  Isn’t that good enough?

OK, now that I’ve tried this exercise of explicitly listing many possible disclaimers, when is this sort of exercise actually worth the effort?

Robert Samuelson:

The uninsured, it’s said, use emergency rooms for primary care. That’s expensive and ineffective. Once they’re insured, they’ll have regular doctors. Care will improve; costs will decline. Everyone wins. Great argument. Unfortunately, it’s untrue.  A study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that the insured accounted for 83 percent of emergency-room visits, reflecting their share of the population. After Massachusetts adopted universal insurance, emergency-room use remained higher than the national average, an Urban Institute study found. More than two-fifths of visits represented non-emergencies. Of those, a majority of adult respondents to a survey said it was “more convenient” to go to the emergency room or they couldn’t “get [a doctor's] appointment as soon as needed.” … Medicare’s introduction in 1966 produced no reduction in mortality; some studies of extensions of Medicaid for children didn’t find gains.

HT Tim Starr.

Efficiency isn’t morality, and it is a serious confusion to think it should be. Let me try again to explain.  I said:

Economic welfare cares not about giving people experiences but about satisfying their preferences. … If we do something a dead person would have wanted, that counts as a benefit.

Adam Ozimek responded:

But we care about satisfying people’s preferences because, unlike the dead, they can know that those preferences being satisfied. … If were going to count the preferences of the non-existent, then it would seem that the number one priority of all society would be to bring as many of them as possible from non-existence into existence. The easiest way to do this is to mandate pregnancy. … If we care about satisfying the preferences of the dead even though they won’t know their preferences are satisfied, does that mean we should not be concerned with whether or not living people know when their preferences are satisfied?

Adam reminds us of Tyler’s position:

Dead people don’t count in the social welfare function. (If they did, how many of them would prefer non-democratic or racist outcomes?  And would we count that?  We shouldn’t and we don’t.)

When our distant ancestors sat around debating if to change locations, expel a troublemaker, or attack neighbors, they were often ambiguous about whether they were choosing what they wanted or what was moral; they preferred to pretend these were the same.  We similarly prefer ambiguity when we argue policy today.

So it is important to clarify: As an analysis tool, economic efficiency is designed and well-suited to finding win-win deals that [added: tend to] get us all more of what we want. It is not well-suited to achieving moral outcomes, except when morality happens to coincide with getting people what they want.  Otherwise, win-win deals will predictably not achieve morality when many involved do not want to be moral.

Many of us want things we will never experience directly; we want our children to prosper after we are gone, for example. This is especially true of our moral wants; we want our donations to Africa to actually help real Africans. So we are understandably wary of deal-making frameworks which explicitly suggest that they seek only to achieve the appearance, not the substance, of our wants.  So yes, a deal-finding analysis tool should definitely count unseen wants!  Furthermore, observers concerned that deals might neglect morals should be especially eager for our deals to achieve unseen wants.

Frameworks for finding win-win deals should also try to include as many things as possible that can have wants and participate in deals.  This includes racists, pedophiles, slaves-owners, robots, animals, distant past and future folk, and future folk who may or may not end up existing.  Yes many may be morally offended if racists get what they want, but that offense counts in what other folks want, and therefore enough offense will ensure that win-win deals will not give racists much of what they want.

Limits on contract may distort prices and interfere with the ability of efficiency analysis to help us find useful win-win deals.  But that is a good reason to enforce more kinds of deals, not to try to distort efficiency for a task to which it is poorly suited: choosing moral acts.

Added: Bryan Caplan responds.

Maybe not “worship” exactly, but at least great respect and deference.  By “efficient” I mean that it increases economists’ standard “cost-benefit” concept of welfare.  That is: as usually estimated, the benefits of deferring greatly to distant ancestors far outweigh its costs.  And while this does suggest that we should defer more to ancestors, it also shows just how much distorted prices can break economists’ favorite tools.

The economic welfare of a proposed change is the benefits minus the costs of that change, translated into cash terms, though of course changes don’t have to actually be cash transactions.  When available, market prices are commonly accepted as estimates of the benefits and costs of things gained and lost.  Economic welfare is a powerful heuristic for finding win-win deals: in many kinds of situations, the strategy of consistently making the changes that increase economic welfare tends to be usefully close to an actual win-win deal that gives most everyone more of what they want.

The efficient ancestor worship problem arises from two key facts:

1. Economic welfare cares not about giving people experiences but about satisfying their preferences, i.e., giving them what they want.  And even long dead people still have (or “had” if you prefer) preferences that we could now better satisfy.  If we do something a dead person would have wanted, that counts as a benefit.
2. At standard market interest rates, the magic of compound interest quickly gives astronomical priority to the preferences of folks who lived long ago.  For example, in historical records near risk-free interest rates (e.g., land rents over prices) consistently exceeded 9%/yr from 3000BC to 1350AD, for a total factor of over 10162.

Together, these facts suggest we would increase economic welfare if we spent less than 10162 dollars today to do anything for which a 3000BC ancestor would have been willing to pay a dollar (equivalent in their currency).

Clearly we would quickly bankrupt ourselves if we tried to implement such “efficient” changes, and doing so would not be remotely close to a win-win deal with our ancestors.  What goes wrong here?

Our contract law system refuses to enforce many win-win deals between distant generations.  Many folks would be willing to create trusts that accumulated funds long after their death and then paid distant descendants (perhaps indirectly) to do things like remember their ancestor’s name, pray to his gods, etc.  Unless stolen, such funds would eventually come to dominate the world economy and dramatically lower interest rates.  With lower interest rates, economic efficiency would count the preferences of distant ancestors as far less valuable, and as a bonus businesses and governments would have far stronger incentives to attend to the interests of distant future folks, such as via global warming policies.

But we in fact refused to enforce a great many such long term deals.  For example:

The rule against perpetuities at common law … prevents a person from putting qualifications and criteria in his will that will continue to control or affect the distribution of assets long after he has died, a concept often referred to as control by the “dead hand.”

Our unthinkingly repugnance at being controlled by the dead, and our eagerness to grab their resources, prevents us from enforcing long-term win-win deals.  This refusal to enforce deals increases interest rates, which distorts all our trade-offs across time, bringing economic welfare estimates into stark conflict with intuitive moral judgments about time trades (as in global warming), which then encourages people to turn to non-economic frameworks for policy analysis.

When policy distorts prices, it distorts calculation of economic welfare, which encourages people to ignore economic welfare when choosing policy, which reduces their reluctance to intervene to further distort prices, which leads to a sad spiral of increasing confusion.  Please, let’s enforce long-term win-win deals!

Added: A fascinating alternate history might start from a year 1300 English legal precedent enabling flexible growing long term trusts.  By 1800 early trusts grew a billion-fold, and trusts dominate the economy.  What else changed?!

Imagine that we discovered a “hole in space”, through which we could see an alternate Earth, filled with people recognizably like us, though different in many ways.  Those people could also see us.

While no objects could move from their side of the hole to ours, small items (but not humans) could move from our side to theirs.  Furthermore, the hole had the amazing property of multiplying everything we sent through by a factor F of a million!  That is, if you tossed a gold coin through the hole, a million identical coins would come out the hole on the other side.

How tempted would you be to toss useful items, like food, through the hole?   Remember, the cost to you, relative to the benefit to them, is 1/F, only one part in a million.  When considering the following variations, and their various combinations, consider not only F = a million, but also ponder what fraction F would make you indifferent to tossing or not:

1. Your gift goes to a random person on the other side.
2. Your gift goes to a government on the other side, which controls the hole.
3. You can specify to whom your gift will go, using some simple descriptors like “poor”, “smart” etc.
4. We could also do other things to help them, such as by studying a problem of theirs and sending them a report with suggested solutions.  But these other actions don’t get multiplied by F; a million copies of the report doesn’t help more than one copy.
5. The hole isn’t very reliable, and only one time in a thousand does what you toss through the hole actually get to the people on the other side.  But when the hole does work 1000*F items come out the other side.
6. You have very good theoretical reasons to think that most likely there are people much like us on the other side of the hole, but you can’t actually see through the hole (though they can see us).

The point of this parable is that interest rates would also greatly leverage any gift you gave the distant future folks.  For example, in 1785 a French author wrote a satire about Ben Franlkin, the most famous American to Europeans.  While Franlkin was famous for his Poor Richard’s Almanac, the satire mocked American optimism by having “Fortunate Richard” leave money in his will to be invested for 500 years before being given to charity.

Franklin responded by leaving £1000 each to Philadelphia and Boston in his will to be invested for 200 years.   He died in 1790,  and by 1990 the funds had grown to 2.3, 5M$, giving factors of  35, 76 inflation-adjusted gains, for annual returns of 1.8, 2.2%.  Why has Franklin’s example inspired no copy-cats?  Does no one care to help distant future folks through the multiplier hole of compound interest?

More wisdom from Hard Facts:

We … [did] research to discover if courteous clerks fueled sales.  … We ultimately found little if any evidence that courtesy increased store sales. …The main finding … was that clerks in stores with more sales were actually less courteous.  Apparently, the crowding and long lines in busy stores make clerks and customers grouchy. (p.39)

A survey of more than 200 human resource professionals from companies employing more than 2500 people … found that even though more than half of the companies used forced rankings, the respondents reported that forced ranking resulted in lower productivity, inequity and skepticism, negative effects on employee engagement, reduced collaboration, and damage to morale and mistrust in leadership. (p.107)

Individuals believe that others are motivated by money, even as they know that they are much less so. … A survey … of almost 500 prospective lawyers … revealed that 64 percent … said they were pursuing a legal career because it was intellectually appealing or because they were interested in the law, but only 12 percent thought their peers were similarly motivated.  Instead 62 percent thought that others were pursuing a legal career for the financial rewards. (p.115)

A survey of 205 executives from diverse industries found that 68 percent reported their companies had executive bonus plans because senior management believed tthat such plans would motivate executives.  These same executives reported, however, that they did not make daily business decisions based on how such decisions would affect either their bonus or those of other people. (p.116)

Students who are in school or who have chosen a major for instrumental reasons – in order to get a better job or to make more money – are much more likely to cheat than students who have chosen a course of study because of their interest in in the subject matter.  (p.124)

In 2005, Boston-based doctors published the very first clinical trial of alcohol-based hand sanitizers in homes and enrolled about 300 families with young children in day care. For five months, half the families got free hand sanitizer and a “vigorous hand-hygiene” curriculum. But the spread of respiratory infections in homes didn’t budge, a result that “somewhat surprised” the researchers. A Columbia University study also found no reduction in common infections among inner-city families given free antibacterial hand soap, detergent, and cleaning supplies. The same year, University of Michigan epidemiologist Allison Aiello summarized data on hand hygiene for the FDA and pointed out that three out of four studies showed that alcohol-based hand sanitizers didn’t prevent respiratory infections. Then, in 2008, the Boston group repeated the study—this time in elementary schools—and threw in free Clorox disinfecting wipes for classrooms. Again, the rate of respiratory infections remained unchanged, though the rate of gastrointestinal infections, which are less common than respiratory infections, did fall slightly. Finally, last October, a report ordered by the Public Health Agency of Canada concluded that there is no good evidence that vigorous hand hygiene practices prevent flu transmission. …

In hospitals, outside of these clinical trials, just half of doctors and nurses regularly clean their hands before patient care, despite widespread publicity. More worrisome: In hospitals where massive educational efforts have increased hand-washing rates from 40 percent up to 70 percent, there has been no overall reduction in infection rates. Even in highly regulated places like hospitals, the promising benefits of hand-washing remain largely unrealized.

More here; HT Tyler.

Added 12Mar: Yvian lists may pro-washing studies here.

Conventional wisdom tends to treat President Hoover as a clueless advocate of laissez faire who refused to stimulate the economy in the dramatic downturn. Franklin Roosevelt, on the other hand, was the heroic leader who both saved the day and transformed the American economy through his promotion of the New Deal. …

There is little corroboration in the historical record for this simplistic storyline. … Most of what both Presidents did in fiscal policy had little impact on the Depression one way or another. … The consensus view is that FDR’s [main] policy success was the abandonment of the gold standard in 1933.

Though there is still a lively popular debate about the “true” cause of the Great Depression, there is nonetheless a strong expert consensus … The Fed’s focus on curbing speculation in the stock market by restricting lending—as well as its unwillingness to extend liquidity and expand the money supply in the face of a collapsing economy and a wave of bank panics in the early 1930s—deeply aggravated the severity and extent of the downturn.

That is John Nye.  Read and learn.

More wisdom from Hard Facts:

Harvard Business Review has published at least three articles on incentive pay and organizational performance in the past decade.  … Each makes a similar point: compensating people for only individual performance creates more problems than it solves, so rewards should emphasize organizational, not just individual, performance. … Not one of these articles refers to the prior article, because HBR precludes footnotes and … discourages references to prior work. (pp.43,44)

James March … put it “Most claims of originality are testimony to ignorance, and most claims of magic are testimony to hubris.” … Knowledge isn’t generated by lone geniuses who magically produce brilliant new ideas in their gigantic brains.  This is a dangerous fiction. … Hackman was troubled because he could only find published success stories about companies that had redesigned work to be more motivating and meaningful.  Yet in his experience most redesign efforts were failing. … a study found no significant performance differences between Peters and Waterman’s “excellent” companies and a representative sample of Fortune 1000 companies.  (pp.46-48)

Yet more wisdom from Hard Facts:

Bloodletting was used routinely until 1836 when French physician Pierre Louis conducted one of the first clinical trials in medicine.  Louis compared pneumonia patients whom he treated with aggressive bloodletting and those he treated without it.  Louis found that bloodletting was linked to far more deaths. … George Washington, the first president of the United States, … died two days after a doctor treated his sore throat by draining almost five pints of blood.  … A remarkably high percentage of medical decisions still reflect the often-obsolete practices that a doctor learned in medical school, the ingrained traditions of a hospital or region. (p.13) …

What she thought was a straightforward study of how leader and coworker relationships influence errors in eight nursing units. … [She was] flabbergasted when nurse questionnaires showed that the units with the best leadership and best coworker relationships reported making 10 times more errors than the worst. … Better units reported more errors because people felt psychologically safe to do so. …

Nurses whom doctors and administrators saw as most talented unwittingly caused the same mistakes to happen over and over.  These “ideal” nurses quietly adjust to inadequate materials without complaint, silently correct others’ mistakes without confronting error-makers, create the impression that they never fail, and find waits to quietly do the job without questioning flawed practices.  These nurses get sterling evaluations, but their silence and ability disguise and work around problems undermine orgainzational learning.  (pp105,106)

Clearly most med errors are not reported, and docs reward nurses more for covering doc asses than for improving patient outcomes.

More wisdom from Hard Facts:

Merit pay for teachers is an idea that is almost 100 years old ahd has been subject to much research.  In one study conducted in 1918, “48 percent of U.S. school districts sampled used compensation systerms that they called merit pay.” … The evidence shows that merit-pay plans seldom last longer than five years and that merit pay consistently failes to improve student performance.  … [Researchers] also showed that cheating [by teachers] was quite sensitive to the size of the incentives provided for enhancing student scores.  … The same problems emerged when merit-pay systems were implemented in the 1980s. … “It is like policy makers suffer from amnesia.” (pp.22-24) …

The evidence strongly suggests that students learn better when they are not graded and certainly not when they are graded on a curve.  … When drill instructors were tricked into believing that certain randomly selected soldiers would achieve superior performance, those soldiers subsequently performacned far better on tasks like firing weapons and reading maps.  (p.38)

Ending social promotion harms students and schools, and the strongest negative effects are found in the best, most rigorous studies.  At least 55 studies show that when flunked students are compared to socially promoted students, flunked students perform worse and drop out of school at higher rates.  One of the most careful studies found that, after controlling for numberous alternative explanations indlucing race, gender, family income, and school characteristics, students held back one grade were 70 percent more likely to drop out of high school.  (p.51)

Back in December Nancy Lebovitz commented here that the book Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management “may be may be of interest to any contrarian”  She is quite right.  So much so that I will do a series of posts quoting from it. Here is Hard Facts on mergers:

Study after study shows that most mergers – some estimates are 70 percent or more – fail to deliver their intended benefits and destroy economic value in the process.  A recent analysis of 93 studies covering more than 200,000 mergers published in peer-reviewed journals showed that, on average, the negative effects of a merger on shareholder value become evident less than a month after a merger is announced and persist thereafter. …

More thoughtful leaders might do what Cisco Systems has done – figure out the factors associated with successful and unsuccessful mergers and then actually use those insights to guide behavior.  … A Fortune article on bad mergers noted that “infrastructure giant Cisco has digested 57 companies without heartburn.” … Cisco figured out that mergers between similar sized companies rarely work, as there are frequently struggles about which team will control the combined entity.  … Cisco’s leaders also determined that mergers work best when companies are geographically proximate, making integration and collaboration much easier. … and they also uncovered the importance of organizational cultural compatibility for merger success.  …

You might think that companies would learn from all this experience … you would be wrong.  Business decisions … are frequently based on hope or fear, what others seem to be doing, what senior leaders have done and believe has worked in the past, and their dearly held ideologies – in short on lots of things other than the facts. (pp. 4,5)

The probability of being sentenced to death is much greater if a defendant kills a white or Hispanic victim who is married with a clean criminal record and a college degree, as opposed to a black or Asian victim who is single with a prior criminal record and no college degree. …

“Irrelevant social facts also shape the ultimate state sanction” Phillips says. “In the capital of capital punishment, death is more apt to be sought and imposed on behalf of high status victims. Some victims matter more than others.”

Phillips research is based on 504 death penalty cases that occurred in Harris County, Texas between 1992 and 1999.  Drawing on the same data, Phillips’s previous research demonstrated that black defendants were more likely to be sentenced to death than white defendants in Houston. The racial disparities revealed in the prior paper become even more acute after accounting for victim social status – black defendants were more apt to be sentenced to death despite being less apt to kill high status victims.

More here (HT naz). I expect such patterns to be found in most legal jurisdictions, not just Harris County Texas.  You will find it hard to find any lawyer, judge, or law professor who will go on the record saying these are officially accepted as legitimate considerations in legal sentencing.  Most will say the law “tries” to ignore such considerations.  And yet such patterns have long existed, have long been widely known to exist.

These are motivated biases, not just random accidents of a system trying to be fair but failing to because of limited human mental capacity.  These errors are far more likely to persist than the opposite error.  If the opposite errors were suddenly to become common, enormous concern would be expressed, great resources would be spent, and we’d be willing to consider large institutional changes to eliminate them.

The place such errors enter is of course via “judgment.”  We recoil in horror at the thought of a simple legal system where judges or juries could make any decision they wanted in each case they considered.  But we also recoil at the thought of a legal system with explicit rules which had to be followed exactly in each case.  We instead prefer a legal system with lots of specific rules, where in the end “reasonable” people are allowed to exercise “judgment” about how to “interpret” the rules.   It sure looks like what we want is the appearance of constraining ourselves to follow rules, combined with the practice of arbitrary choice.

Our income tax system gives each of us a stake in the work of others – the more money others make, the more we each get via taxes.  In principle we could use this fact to justify a great deal of intervention in everyone’s work lives.  For example, one might argue: why should we let folks choose fulfilling but poorly paid jobs like social worker, veterinarian, or forestry agent, if they are capable of becoming an lawyer, doctor, or engineer?  Or why should we let folks work part time to focus on a music or acting hobby, or choose to live anywhere but the city where their skills are worth the most?

To most folks such regulations seem intolerably intrusive.  But when people are asked to justify our common and extensive regulations and subsidies of medicine and education, they often mention exactly this issue – that such interventions make sense because we all have a stake in the work of others via the income taxes those folks pay.  Why the asymmetry?  Why do folks think these arguments make sense regarding medicine and education, but not regarding choice of career or location?

My guess: humans inherited intuitions that the community should have more say in and contribute more to medicine and education.  This is the way our distant ancestors did things in their small nomadic forager bands, and we intuit we should act similarly today.  The stuff about managing our cut of others’ income is just a rationalization.

A few months ago I had a nice long talk with a smart high-ranking, well-published (ex-) military officer who focuses on soldier psychological issues.  He said most war movies aren’t at all realistic.  When I pressed him for a realistic film, he offered Catch-22, at least for emotional realism.  This doesn’t appear on any of the four lists of most realistic war films I found in a quick search (here, here, here, here), which agree only modestly with each other.

The supposedly realistic Hurt Locker is favored to win Best Picture tomorrow, but some complain about its realism:

Many in the military say “Hurt Locker” is plagued by unforgivable inaccuracies that make the most critically acclaimed Iraq war film to date more a Hollywood fantasy than the searingly realistic rendition that civilians take it for. … To those who were there, Iraq is real life. And they’re very sensitive — some would say overly so — when their war is portrayed via a central character who is a reckless rogue. … “When he puts a hood on like Eminem and starts roving outside the wire, it’s ridiculous.”

Is it even possible to make and sell a realistic war movie?  The experience of war varies enormously across wars, battles, roles, moments, etc., and most of that is insufferably slow and boring.  Since war is so powerfully symbolic, and so many care about those symbols, it seems many would complain about most any emotionally compelling war film, even if exactly accurate on a particular event.

What exactly could it mean for a film to be “realistic”?  Since few are entertained by watching random samples of real life, entertaining films must select strongly from the space of actual and possible events.  One might allow a movie any initial setting, no matter how strange, and call it realistic if events depicted that were typical conditional on that setting.  But then how long does the movie get to “set the scene,” after which we start to evaluate its realism?  And for how many settings could realistic behavior given that setting be entertaining?

Tell pretty women they are smart, and smart women they are pretty. saying

We prefer to be liked, vs. disliked, but we also care about which features others most like about us.  For example, we might prefer to be liked for our sense of humor, rather than our looks.  But it seems to me that we most prefer that people who like us not know why exactly they like us.

It is of course a bad sign about someone’s opinion of you if they can’t think of any positive features of you.  It is also a good sign about their devotion if they sometimes try to make sure you know that you have good features.  But we would be disappointed and even disturbed to learn that someone knew that how much they liked us was captured by a particular known formula referring to objectively measurable features, no matter what those features were.

Someone who knew exactly where you and other folks ranked on their quality scale, and who could easily track how those rankings changed with time will know how much they like you more or less as your features changed.  Even if you are their favorite person at this moment, the odds are that someone else will soon outrank you.

In contrast, consider someone who has had a lot of contact with you, and who knows mainly that they like you, but not why exactly they like you.  This person will have more trouble finding someone else that they like more than you.  In this case you are more of an experience good, that has to be experienced to be evaluated.  If it is expensive to experience other folks enough to know their attractiveness, you have more confidence that you will continue to be one of their favorite people.

(From a conversation with Amanda Budny.)

My January talk at Foresight 2010, Economics of Nanotech and AI, is now available: video, slides.  Seems I had a habit of messing my hair while talking.  Silly me.

If the ship is sinking, do you save yourself or risk your life to save others? The answer, it seems, depends on how long the sinking takes. If there’s enough time, you can switch from adrenalin-driven self-preservation to conscience-driven self-sacrifice.

The insights come from a new comparison of survival data from the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 with the loss of 1517 lives out of 2207, and the fateful torpedoing of the Lusitania three years later, which killed 1198 passengers out of 1949.

The main difference between the two sinkings was time: it took 2 hours and 40 minutes for the Titanic to go down, while the Lusitania sank in just 18 minutes. The result: a huge difference in survivor profiles.

On the Lusitania, survival favoured able-bodied men aged between 16 and 35, … On the Titanic, in contrast, the same group of men were … more likely to die. … Children were 30.9 per cent more likely to survive on the Titanic, compared with passengers over 35, while on the Lusitania children had no better survival chance. …

Strikingly, women of all ages on the Titanic had a probability of survival 53 per cent higher than for men, compared with an 11 per cent higher chance of dying on the Lusitania. … First-class passengers on the Titanic had huge survival advantages non-existent on the Lusitania.

More here.   Yet more support for the thesis that far mode is more for social image, near mode more for personal gain.