Featured Articles

  • What is randomness?

    What is randomness?

    Erich Vieth | January 25, 2012 | 0 Comments

    Radiolab’s show on “Stochasticity” offers entertaining examples to explain the concept of randomness.   The story starts with the example of a 10 year old girl named “Laura Buxton” who released a balloon with a message: “Return this balloon to Laura Buxton.”    The girl who received the balloon when it came down many miles away was another 10 year old girl named “Laura Buxton.”  There were many other coincidences between the two Laura Buxtons.

    Contrary to the assumptions of most people, randomness involves results that look like patterns.  What about getting seven heads in a row? If you were only flipping the coin seven times, this can happen only one time out of 100, but if you get seven heads in a row somewhere in the process of flipping a coin 100 times, you can expect this to happen one time out of six, not improbable.

    Another example is the case of Evelyn Adams, who one the lottery twice in two consecutive years. If you look only at whether this will happen twice with the purchase of two tickets, it would only happen once in 17 trillion times. If you consider the entire universe of people who buy lottery tickets, the question becomes “what are the odds that somebody somewhere will win the lottery twice?” The answer to that question is that it would be surprising if that didn’t happen repeatedly, and it has happened repeatedly (listen to minute 17 of the show).

    The lesson? (at minute 19) “If you don’t see past yourself [to look at the big picture], you become prey to superstition.”

    In the case of the Laura Buxtons, the story becomes much more interesting when we focus only on the similarities of the two girls and downplay the many many things they don’t have in common.   But of course, listing their dissimilarities would not have been a good story, yet we prefer to believe in “magic”  (see min 20).

    See also, this post on patternicity.

    Continue Reading

  • Conservative Fantasy Role Playing

    Conservative Fantasy Role Playing

    Mark Tiedemann | January 16, 2012 | 5 Comments

    I wonder sometimes how a modern conservative maintains.

    Romney has won the New Hampshire primary.  All the buzz now is how he’s going to have a much tougher fight in South Carolina, primarily because of the religious and social conservatives who will see him as “not conservative enough.”  There is a consortium of social conservatives meeting this week in Texas to discuss ways to stop him, to elevate someone more to their liking to the nomination.  And right there I have to wonder at what it means anymore to be a conservative.

    I grew up, probably as many people my age did, thinking of conservatism as essentially penurious and a bit militaristic.  Stodgy, stuffy, proper.  But mainly pennypinching.  A tendency to not do something rather than go forward with something that might not be a sure thing.

    I suppose some of the social aspect was there, too, but in politics that didn’t seem important.  I came of age with an idea of fiscal conservatism as the primary trait.

    That doesn’t square with the recent past.  The current GOP—say since Ronny Reagan came to power—has been anything but fiscally conservative, although what they have spent money on has lent them an aura of responsible, hardnosed governance.   Mainly the military, but also subsidies for businesses.  But something has distorted them since 1981 and has turned them into bigger government spenders than the Democrats ever were.  (This is not open to dispute, at least not when broken down by administrations.  Republican presidents have overseen massive increases in the deficit as opposed to Democratic administrations that have as often overseen sizable decreases in the deficit, even to the point of balancing the federal budget.  You may interpret or spin this any way you like, but voting trends seem to support that the choices Republican presidents have made in this regard have been supported by Republican congressmen even after said presidents have left office.)

    [More . . . ]

    Continue Reading

  • Tebow, schadenfreude and blasphemy

    Tebow, schadenfreude and blasphemy

    Erich Vieth | January 16, 2012 | 1 Comment

    I barely follow professional football these days, but I’ve heard enough about Tim Tebow to be annoyed. I’m not annoyed that he has played well this season or that he appears to be a generous and kind-hearted fellow. I’m annoyed because he insists that the alleged Creator of the Universe cares about American football. If this were at all true, what does that say about this “God,” given that He has a lot of unfinished work to do healing the sick and helping to feed starving children? How would you characterize an allegedly omnipotent and omniscient God who would choose to watch professional football while even one or two children were dying from preventable causes such as the lack of food? The word “miscreant” comes to mind, because it’s not only one or two children: More than 16,000 children starve every day. And how difficult should it be for an adult quarterback to figure out that the Creator of the Universe wouldn’t actually hover around at American sports stadiums on the third planet from the Sun on Sundays?

    For the above reasons only, I was delighted to hear that Tebow and his team were thrashed by the New England Patriots yesterday. Maybe Tebow can figure out during this off-season that what he does for living is merely entertainment–it isn’t notable by any cosmic standard. Maybe he can figure out that if the Creator of the Universe has a to-do list, it doesn’t include caring about football games. Perhaps it’s not fair to pick on Tim Tebow, because he’s merely the most recent prominent athlete to assume that God cares about his performance on the field. But he has done an especially good job of bringing attention to himself based on his allegedly close relationship with “God,” so I’ll continue with this rant.

    [More . . . ]

    Continue Reading

  • Cascades of terror

    Cascades of terror

    Erich Vieth | January 1, 2012 | 2 Comments

    A few years ago, I wrote a post where I pointed out that early innocuous-seeming intellectual moves can result in huge consequences further down the road. I illustrated this point by mentioning that, for many people, the uncritical acceptance that cognition allegedly occurs in the absence of a neural network capable of able to support that cognition had led to the belief in souls (as well as ghosts and gods). We need to be careful about our early assumptions.

    I have recently finished reading Thinking, Fast and Slow, an excellent new book by Daniel Kahneman. In his new book, Kahneman writes that the availability heuristic “like other heuristics of judgment, substitutes one question for another: you wish to estimate the size of the category or the frequency of an event, but your report and impression of the ease with which instances come to mind. Substitution of questions inevitably produces systematic errors.”  [Page 130] I have often considered the great power of the availability heuristic. It is a phenomenon “in which people predict the frequency of an event, or a proportion within a population, based on how easily an example can be brought to mind.” We tend to recall information based upon whether the event is salient, dramatic or personal. It is difficult to set these aside when determining relevant evidence.

    In chapter 13, “Availability, a Motion, and Risk,” Kahneman reminds us that “availability” provides a heuristic for a wide variety of judgments, including judgments other than frequency. In particular, the importance of an idea is often judged by the fluency (an emotional charge) with which that idea comes to mind.” He describes the availability heuristic as perhaps the most dominant heuristic in social contexts, and describes how it can result in immense social damage when it is applied in cascaded fashion.

    The availability cascade is a self-sustaining chain of events, which may start from media reports of a relatively minor event and lead up to public panic and large-scale government action. On some occasions, a media story about a risk catches the attention of a segment of the public, which becomes aroused and worried. This emotional reaction becomes a story in itself, prompting additional coverage in the media, which in turn produces greater concern and involvement. The cycle is sometimes sped along deliberately by “availability enterprise orders,” individuals or organizations who work to ensure a continuous flow of worrying news. The danger is increasingly exaggerated as the media compete for attention grabbing headlines. Scientists and others who try to dampen the increasing fear and repulsion attract little attention, most of it hostile: anyone who claims that the danger is overstated is suspected of association with a “heinous cover-up.” The issue becomes politically important because it is on everyone’s mind, and the response of the political system is guided by the intensity of public sentiment. The availability cascade has now reset priorities. Other risks, and other ways that resources could be applied for the public good, all have faded into the background.

    .   .   .

    [W]e either ignore [small risks] altogether or give them far too much weight-nothing in between.… The amount of concern is not adequately sensitive to the probability of harm; you are imagining the numerator-the tragic story you saw on the news-and not thinking about the denominator. [Cass] Sunstein has coined the phrase “probability neglect” to describe the pattern. The combination of probability neglect with the social mechanisms of availability cascades inevitably leads to gross exaggeration of minor threats, sometimes with important consequences.

    In today’s world, terrorists are the most significant practitioners of the art of inducing availability cascades. With a few horrible exceptions such as 9/11, the number of casualties from terror attacks is very small relative to other causes of death. Even in countries that have been targets of intensive terror campaigns, such as Israel, the weekly number of casualties almost never came close to the number of traffic deaths. The differences in the availability of the two risks, the ease in the frequency with which they come to mind. Gruesome images, endlessly repeated in the media, cause everyone to be on edge. As I know from experience, it is difficult to reason oneself into a state of complete calm.

    [Page 142-144]

    Anyone who has bothered to watch what passes as “the news” understands the ways in which the “news media” works the availability cascade. I saw this firsthand after TWA Flight 800 exploded and crashed. I was approached by local TV news station in St. Louis while I was walking in downtown St. Louis. An extremely intense reporter wanted to get my opinion (this was within an hour after flight 800 had exploded and crashed into the ocean). She asked me something like this: “What is your reaction to the fact that it appears as though terrorists have shot down TWA flight 800, killing hundreds of people?” My response to her was, “Do we actually know that flight 800 was shot down by terrorists?” She was flabbergasted, and not interested in anything else I had to say. I watched the news that night to see what they did put on, and I saw several people reacting in horror that terrorists would dare shoot down an American commercial flight. The station was interested in stirring up anger and hysteria, not in asking or answering a simple question that I asked. It turned out, of course, that there is no evidence that terrorists had anything to do with the crash of TWA flight 800.

    Kahneman’s book talks indeed tale about the availability heuristic, as well as numerous other cognitive tricks and traps, with warnings that these mental shortcuts often have real-world significant (and even devastating) effects, and offering lots of good advice as to how to anticipate and avoid falling into these traps.

    I will be writing about this book for many months and years to come. It is a real gem.

    Continue Reading

  • A day at the zoo

    A day at the zoo

    Erich Vieth | December 28, 2011 | 0 Comments

    Yesterday, my daughter and I visited the Saint Louis Zoo. The idea was to have some fun shooting photos of the animals. The day was overcast and cool and many of the animals were active. I shot each of these photos using a Canon S95 pocket camera.

    Gallery of ten photos below (hit “full size image” for correct aspect ratio).

    [gallery]

    Continue Reading

  • The frustrating scientific method

    The frustrating scientific method

    Erich Vieth | December 27, 2011 | 1 Comment

    I just finished reading an excellent article by Jonah Lehrer of Wired: “Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up.” The article focuses on the scientific method. We all know that science makes steady progress as it spins its ideas and conducts experiments, right? Wrong.

    Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected. (In some labs, the figure exceeded 75 percent.) “The scientists had these elaborate theories about what was supposed to happen,” Dunbar says. “But the results kept contradicting their theories. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn’t make sense.” Perhaps they hoped to see a specific protein but it wasn’t there. Or maybe their DNA sample showed the presence of an aberrant gene. The details always changed, but the story remained the same: The scientists were looking for X, but they found Y.

    Sometimes, as Thomas Kuhn pointed out in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the entire theory needs to be revamped or discarded, breaking the conceptual continuity. Therefore, the practice of science is often not smooth sailing, contrary to popular conceptions. A good approach to dealing with the uncooperative data is for the scientist to make sure that he or she doesn’t work alone:

    While the scientific process is typically seen as a lonely pursuit — researchers solve problems by themselves — Dunbar found that most new scientific ideas emerged from lab meetings, those weekly sessions in which people publicly present their data. Interestingly, the most important element of the lab meeting wasn’t the presentation — it was the debate that followed. Dunbar observed that the skeptical (and sometimes heated) questions asked during a group session frequently triggered breakthroughs, as the scientists were forced to reconsider data they’d previously ignored. The new theory was a product of spontaneous conversation, not solitude; a single bracing query was enough to turn scientists into temporary outsiders, able to look anew at their own work.

    [caption id="attachment_21014" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image by Nicholas_ at istock (with permission)"][/caption]

    These comments ring true to me. Once again, skepticism to the rescue, and we need to turn to “outsiders” because we hesitate to murder our own children (this is a phrase I heard in a writing seminar–a reason for a separate editor). It’s important to remember, though, that bringing others into the conversation doesn’t always work. It has to be the right chemistry, where everyone is geared to the end result and where the criticism of the work needs to be savage though each of the participants nonetheless shows appreciation for each others’ hard work. We should strive for the benefits of group endeavors while avoiding groupthink:

    Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within groups of people. It is the mode of thinking that happens when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative ideas or viewpoints.

    Continue Reading

Recent Articles

Christianity and communism

Erich Vieth | January 26, 2012 | 0 Comments

What do Christian scripture and Communism have in common? At Daylight Atheism, Adam Lee explains:

The Bible goes so far as to say that the first community of Christians weren’t just socialists, but communists:

“And all that believed were together, and had all things common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.”

—Acts 2:44-45

By some accounts, this verse is what inspired Karl Marx’s dictum, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Irony of ironies: Communism began in the pages of the Bible!

The above is an excerpt from a post titled “Why We Should Tax the Churches,” and Lee develops this theme in detail, dovetailing with the modern-day struggle between the 1% and the 99%. He isn’t shy about bluntly stating why:

Even when it begins among the poor and disenfranchised, religion almost always ends up being co-opted by the wealthy and powerful and used as a convenient excuse to justify inequality.

Continue Reading

3 Idiots: “Aal Izz Well”

Dan Klarmann | January 26, 2012 | 0 Comments

This may not be the perfect forum for a review, but the film “3 Idiots” is about education versus training, science versus engineering, fear versus hubris (and the happy medium), life and death, love and despair, laughter and tears. And it has colorful Bollywood dance numbers, too!

I rented it on a whim, as it was billed as a movie about too-smart engineering students versus the educational system. I was puzzled when it began with English subtitles during the (Indian accented) English dialog. I remembered a 1990′s PBS/BBC series on the English language, when some of the impenetrable-to-me accents of the U.K. had no subtitles, but the perfectly intelligible-to-me Cajun and Ebonic dialects did. But as the blend of Hindi and English became apparent, I saw the need.

I loved this movie. Once one gets into the esthetic swing of Bollywood productions, it makes perfect sense when serious issues become silly dance numbers, and all characters are played as borderline caricatures. One can observe the essential cultural differences between our familiar American dilute-Christian one-life-to-live and anyone-can-become-president attitude and the Indian institutionalized attitude that reincarnation is the only way to improve your lot except through extraordinary means.

Why I think this is appropriate to this forum is the take on education. The protagonist has a scientific mindset that is often at odds with engineering philosophy and even more with institutionalized education. The system of teaching to the test is questioned, as is the principle of square pegs hammered into round holes. Vocation versus avocation is central to this, and expounded toward the end.

The 3 Idiots – Official Trailer has embedding disabled, but preview is fun even without subtitles. You get the idea of how English and Hindi have merged in their culture.

I defy you to watch it and not have the songs “All izz well” and/or “Zoobi Doobi” stuck in your heads.

Continue Reading

The breadth of the corporate state

Erich Vieth | January 25, 2012 | 0 Comments

Chris Hedges explains that the corporate state has not merely confiscated our political system. I stretches much further into our lives. See the following video starting at minute 5:30, where Hedges explains that affected systems include communication, education and culture. In fact, there is an assault upon liberal institutions that once made meaningful political reform possible, such as labor unions and our great universities, the latter of which are oftentimes run as corporate entities uninterested in teaching the humanities and extolling an artificially narrow analytic view of what it means to be “intelligent.” What modern education excels at is training up systems managers who strive to be hyper-deferential to authority. Modern education no longer strives to teach students how to think, but rather what to think. Hedges has a “dark” view of what’s going on, essentially that the corporate state is “harvesting” what is left to be had of America “on the way out the door.” (min. 28:00). At this critical time, there is no mechanism for changing the system by way of voting–Hedges argues that there is no way, in light of the corporate loyalties of Barack Obama, to vote against Goldman Sachs in the upcoming presidential election, which is using tax money to re-inflate the bubble before the next crash. Lawrence Lessig prefers to use all of our resources for reforming the system, “even if there is zero chance of success.” Both men are big supporters of the Occupy movement.

Continue Reading

Media Warning

Erich Vieth | January 25, 2012 | 4 Comments

Free Press handed out these decals about five years ago. The warning is as relevant as ever.

Continue Reading

How long would it take Mitt to earn YOUR salary?

Erich Vieth | January 25, 2012 | 1 Comment

How long would it take Mitt to earn your salary? Visit this article to Slate and find out.

President Obama earns $400,000 per year. It would take Mitt less than a week to earn that much money.

Continue Reading

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.

Tim Hogan | January 25, 2012 | 0 Comments

There is only one thing the President should talk about in his State of the Union and that is Jobs. If we look at what President Obama inherited, the GW Bush administration had eight years of private sector job losses and only had a net job increase due to government hiring

The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that private sector employment decreased by 673,000 over the eight years of GW Bush, while public sector employment increased. Total jobs created under the eight years of the GW Bush administration totaled 1.08 million. Ironically, increased public sector employment allowed for the Bush administration to not be the first to have net negative employment over its term since Herbert Hoover.
Total private sector jobs created since 2010 by the Obama administration number over 2 million (more than the total for the eight years of George W. Bush). President Obama has cut public sector employment by over 357,000 since taking office.

President Obama’s initial 2012 budget, despite yowling from the right that he never submitted any for a vote in 2011, was rejected in the US Senate at the same time as the Senate rejected the US House Budget plan drafted by Rep. Paul Ryan, (R-WI).

But, the US House Budget plan passed through the House on an almost party-line vote and supported by all the GOP Senators was projected to cost as many as 800,000 jobs and a 2% decrease in GDP in 2012.

The next jobs effort of the Republicans was to foment a false debt ceiling “crisis” which if the US had defaulted on its debt would have been catastrophic in causing a 5% GDP drop in 2012 and a loss of some one third of the value of US equities.

[More . . . ]

Continue Reading

More options = more difficult choosing

Erich Vieth | January 25, 2012 | 1 Comment

Psycho-economist Sheena Lyengar tells us that the average grocery store today offers 45,000 types of products. The average Walmart offers 100,000. The ninth biggest retailer in the world, however, is Aldi, which offers only 1,400 products. Aldi’s successful business model circumvents “choice overload.”

Less is more when it comes to choosing because more choices result in choice overload. In employee financial investment plans, more offerings means less participation.

She recommends that we take a bit of time to think about the consequences of our choices in a vivid way to stay on target. Another technique is to order the complexity of our choices so that we start with simpler easier choices to ease into complex projects.   These strategies are worth considering, since the average person makes 70 choices every day.  Most people could use help “managing their choices.”

There is quite a bit of overlap in this topic with the work of Barry Schwartz, who presented on the “paradox of choice.”

Continue Reading

Financial Advisors under the microscope

Erich Vieth | January 25, 2012 | 0 Comments

I recently finished reading Dan Solin’s The Smartest Portfolio You’ll Ever Own (2011), half of which is a damning indictment of most financial advisers. Solin makes a convincing case that those brokers who claim that they can pick stocks or time the market are selling unadulterated snake oil. In fact, avoid all of the following:

Buying individual stocks or bonds.
Actively managed mutual funds
Alternative investments
Variable annuities
Equity indexed annuities
Private equity deals
Principal-protected notes
Currency trading, and
Commodities trading.

Instead, Solin recommends the slow and steady historically documented growth associated with passively managed broad market index funds including many of the low-fee passively managed funds offered by Vanguard. Solin has ample shocking facts and figures to back up his claims and indictments, and he continues the attack on false claims and hidden fees here.

Continue Reading

The rules of the game in the age of the “war on terror”

Erich Vieth | January 24, 2012 | 0 Comments

Glenn Greenwald notes several recent legal decisions, all of which accord with the following rules for deciding cases in the age of the war against “terrorism.”

The Rules of American Justice are quite clear, and remain in full force and effect:

(1) If you are a high-ranking government official who commits war crimes, you will receive full-scale immunity, both civil and criminal, and will have the American President demand that all citizens Look Forward, Not Backward.

(2) If you are a low-ranking member of the military, you will receive relatively trivial punishments in order to protect higher-ranking officials and cast the appearance of accountability.

(3) If you are a victim of American war crimes, you are a non-person with no legal rights or even any entitlement to see the inside of a courtroom.

(4) If you talk publicly about any of these war crimes, you have committed the Gravest Crime — you are guilty of espionage – and will have the full weight of the American criminal justice system come crashing down upon you.

Continue Reading

Multiple wives for Newt

Erich Vieth | January 23, 2012 | 1 Comment

Funmentionables comes to the rescue of Newt, who reportedly wanted his second ex-wife to approve of an open marriage. Here is the Bible authority for the concept:

If he take himself another wife… —Exodus 21:10

If a man have two wives… —Deuteronomy 21:15

And here are the Bible characters who paved the way for Newt:

Abijah, Abraham, Ahab, Ahasuerus, Ashur, Belshazzar, Benhadad, Caleb, David, Eliphaz, Elkanah, Esau, Ezra, Gideon, Jacob, Jehoiachin, Jehoram, Jerahmeel, Joash, Lamech, Machir, Manasseh, Mered, Moses, Nahor, Rehoboam, Saul, Shaharaim, Simeon, Solomon, and Zedekiah.

Continue Reading

David Stockman comments on Mitt Romney’s version of capitalism

Erich Vieth | January 23, 2012 | 0 Comments

Appearing on Dylan Ratigan’s show today, David Stockman, an ardent traditional capitalist, criticized the leveraged buyouts engaged in by Mitt Romney at Bain, labeling this behavior speculation, crony capitalism and “an inside job.” Stockman served as Director of the OMB. during Ronald Reagan’s Administrations.

Stockman hammered Obama as well, based on Obama’s acquiescence toward out-of-control Wall Street banks. He points out that the elephant in the room is the Federal Reserve, which is churning out endless money, thus bloating the financial sector.  Stockman urges that we need to bring back Glass-Steagall as the starting point for a solution to this mess.   Stockman also sharply criticized Newt Gingrich’s claim that he served as an “historian” for Freddie Mac.

Continue Reading

Maher: There are different kinds of rich people

Erich Vieth | January 23, 2012 | 3 Comments

As Bill Maher points out at 2:25 at the following video, Mitt Romney got rich without offering a product.

Continue Reading

Prank worth noting

Erich Vieth | January 22, 2012 | 1 Comment

I’ve played pranks in my life, but none as good as this one:

Continue Reading