Assorted Links

1. Reasons for optimism.

2. On effective teaching. HT: Marginal Revolution
If that’s not enough for you, here’s an hour and a half video on classroom flipping from KPC.

3. Why is Communist iconography cool? As someone who thinks genocide is the ultimate evil, it’s a critical question to find why mass murderer worship is so appealing to some.

4. McArdle on the Oregon Health Study. Chait being Straussian?
Update: From another discussion, “If, on the other hand, we wish to consider non-statistically-significant effects, then we ought to conclude that the net effects were unattractive, mostly because coverage induced smoking, which more than offset the risk-adjusted physical health benefits provided by the incremental utilization of health services.” So basically, given coverage, a few people decided to smoke more, which negated the effects of health coverage. Offsetting behavior.

5. Tiger moming doesn’t work. Nature: 1, nurture: -1.

A Proposal for Science Journals

Scientific journals have a bias toward positive results and are hesitant to publish replications. To anyone familiar with the scientific method, that is a major problem, as science requires unbiased and repeated tests to verify results. Therefore, I propose the following reform for evidence based scientific papers:

1.) Papers are accepted or rejected before the data are collected. The scientists submit their abstract, data collection methods and the tests they will run. Ideally, the paper will be accepted before the data itself is even collected so that the researchers themselves are unbiased. Failing that, at the minimum, journal editors will not be able to select for studies which agree with their ideological biases, because they won’t know the results until it is too late to reject.

2.) Immediately upon accepting a paper, the journal releases the paper for other scientists to verify. Anyone who wanted to could begin running the paper with their own data and try to pre-replicate the study. At this point, they would know the methods, but not the “original result”. Thus, replicators would not be biased in either direction. The more common bias would be to confirm the original study, because the researchers typically do not want to rock the scientific boat and offend the original researchers. Conversely, ideologically opposed groups might want to counter the conclusions of the original researchers for the notoriety of contradicting their opponents.

3.) Both papers would be published simultaneously regardless of their outcomes. The original paper’s authors would get access to both datasets and research notes so they could reconcile any differences. Perhaps the discrepancy would be a difference in testing or in data sampling and seemingly contradictory results could be reconciled.

4.) All data and methods would be published for independent re-replication. Scientists who did not publish their data and methods would be treated as frauds and shunned (as they should be!).

The way journals are run today is shocking. That so called scientists could refuse to publish their data and not face widespread condemnation/dismissal is mind boggling to me. That’s pretty much explicitly saying you falsified it, or you have something to hide. That journals can reject a paper just because it disagrees with their biases is likewise troublesome. To quote one of my favorite philosophers, “You don’t use science to show that you’re right, you use science to become right.”

Straussian Skyrim

Skyrim, the latest installment of the Elder Scrolls series is one of the greatest games ever made. It’s world is open, beautiful, incredibly detailed, and engaging. The game opens with the player’s character lined up before an Imperial execution squad along with members of the rebel group, the Stormcloaks. After the introduction, the player’s character escapes the chopping block and is free either to ignore the civil war for the rest of the game or get intimately involved in it and join either side. The sub-plot of the war between the Stormcloaks and the Empire is a metaphor for the Middle East, and in particular, America’s relationship with fundamental Islam.

There are three major factions in Skyrim’s civil war: Stormcloaks, the Empire, and the Thalmor.

The Stormcloaks represent the Muslim Brotherhood, and fundamentalist Islam in general. They are fighting for the right to worship Talos. The Empire surprisingly does not represent America, but rather native dictators who ally themselves with America in exchange for peace and money. The Imperial leaders mostly agree with the Stormcloaks in their desire to worship Talos. They have signed a peace treaty with outsiders to suppress Talos worship in exchange for trade and peace, much like, for example, the Saudis. America is represented by the Thalmor. The Thalmor have military superiority over the Empire, which they use to extract religious compliance. You could perhaps view the Thalmor as taking a “we know what’s best” approach and imposing their way of life through force.

Maybe Americans are correct to try to impose Western values, and maybe the Thalmor are correct to try to wipe out Talos worship. In my opinion, it looks like the writers of Skyrim definately don’t think so. The Thalmor are portrayed as arrogant, demanding, and insensitive to native culture. While I believe America has put a lot of effort into becoming more responsive to local culture, the critique certainly held at the beginning of the Iraq war.

The Imperials come off looking pretty bad, but also stuck between a rock and a hard place. The character definitely gets a taste of the brutality of their rule. But once you meet the High Queen, you realize she is in a very difficult position. She herself is sympathetic to the desire to worship Talos, just as many middle eastern tyrants are sympathetic to fundamentalist Islam, but she cannot openly support it without going to war with the Talmor. Similarly, Middle Eastern dictators must constantly pay lip service to western values, lest they be deposed by America, or at the very least, have their foreign aid cut off.

The Stormcloaks don’t come off as looking particularly good either by the end of the game. Their rhetoric is powerful and they talk a good fight, but as they conquer city after city, the locals start complaining about their crassness and how they can’t go on with their lives as they are used to. The Stormcloaks are often accused of racism and xenophobia. For example, the Dunmer and Argonians represent the Jews and the Coptic Christians. Despite living in Skyrim for as long as the Nords, they are treated as second class citizens. Life under Stormcloak rule is portrayed as harsh, but the Stormcloaks take pride in their strength and virtue.

Shouting is rhetorical power made manifest. Words themselves have magical power in Skyrim and those who can control their words are the most powerful. Dragonspeak is the language of ideas, and in Skyrim, ideas are literally mightier than the sword. The game’s developers let the player decide who to side with, and like reality, each path has its advantages and disadvantages.

Further Reading:
Leo Strauss

Assorted Links

1. Analysis of Syria and problems of intervention.

2.Stumbling and Mumbling grumbling about non-utilitarian news articles.

3. A year without the internet.

4. It would be nice if the government’s mistakes were typically a product of stupidity, venality or bureaucracy. Then we would need only to remove the idiots, fire the villains and cut the red tape. More often, the outrageous stories we hear are cases of decent people trying to solve tough problems under difficult constraints that we simply haven’t taken the time to understand.

5. There is no great stagnation – 90′s edition

Centralization of Power and Communism

TL:DR: You can’t have centralized power without hierarchy, and forced equality requires centralized power.

Communism, in the ideal, is the reallocation by force of economic resources to the workers. Such a massive undertaking requires massive amounts of centralized power. Decentralization is anathema to communism, because any decentralization implies inequality. “From each according to their ability…” implies the ability to take anything from anyone. Islands of isolated political power would thus result in islands of uncontrolled wealth, and more importantly, islands of political opposition to the central state. Thus, pluralism is anathema to communism. Any independence implies inequality as people use their freedom to become better off than others.

Communism succeeded in the first half of its unofficial motto. Communist regimes were incredibly efficient at extracting wealth from their populace, driving them beyond the brink of starvation to squeeze every last drop of surplus value from them. Where Communism seems to have fallen by the wayside is in the second half of the motto: “…to each according to their need.” The concentrated economic surplus from an entire economy is an incredibly valuable prize to control. Such a prize would attract all sorts of people interested in capturing it. Who is likely to win such a contest? The type of person to meekly hand out an equal share to everyone else in the country? The suggestion that anyone who controlled it would simply hand out equal shares to everyone defies belief. Has anyone in the history of humanity ever distributed their wealth equally to all other humans? Would such a person be willing to lie, cheat, and murder their way to the top of a political party? Would they stay altruistic?

Marx himself recognized that it would not be easy to “sweep away by force, the old conditions of production”. It takes a certain kind of person to be willing to kill a million people to achieve an ideological goal. You can’t be the kind of sloppy, disorganized sociopath who goes on a mere shooting spree. As the great political philosopher Eddie Izzard said “You must get up very early in the morning.”. Perhaps there would be enough true believers to fill the ranks of the proletarian army, but what if there were not? You would need to convince the non-believers though other means, most likely through rewards. The more heinous the deed, the higher the reward needed to induce compliance, and the more sociopathic the people you would attract.

So now we’ve got a massive prize up for grabs and a combination of sociopathic individualists and idealistic altruists competing for it. Who wins? The top seat could go to anyone, if they are clever enough, but after that things get interesting. Suppose you have two types of people competing for memberships in the Politburo, idealists and pragmatists. Idealists want what is best for the country and think long and hard about what that is. The pragmatists will do anything for power and wealth. Idealists will inevitably have disagreements with the leader and will be willing to fight over those disagreements. Pragmatists will not. Regardless of who is the top dog, they will want people who are loyal and willing to implement their polices. Dissension and lack of cooperation hurts the leader regardless of whether the leader is an idealist or a pragmatist. Thus over time, idealists will be replaced by pragmatists, often in quite spectacular ways. A big group to suffer under Stalin were other communists with different ideas of how the state should be run. One interesting side effect of this phenomenon is that once the charismatic leader dies, the government is almost completely filled with pragmatists who are chiefly concerned with political survival, such as the current Chinese leadership. Often that produces surprisingly good governance (relative to what came before) so that the risk of rebellion is minimized.

Each position in the “pyramid of capitalism” was simply replaced by a communist equivalent. Kings were replaced by secretaries and chairmen, clergy replaced by propaganda ministers and bourgeois replaced by members of the party. Maintaining control over a government requires a flow of rewards to one’s followers. Those who support the regime get more than those who do not and then you are back to inequality. Creating equality through violence is self-defeating. The capacity for violence is not a disembodied force, it requires groups of people willing to wield it. They need to be motivated and controlled and that requires hierarchy.

Happy May Day!

Further Reading:
The slope of the pyramid can be quite steep.
The Iron Law of Oligarchy
The Museum of Communism
Econtalk with Caplan on Socialism
Art Cardin on capitalism vs socialism

Assorted Links

1. Daniel Day Lewis to play Obama in upcoming Spielberg movie. Funniest video I have seen in a long time.

2. Daron Acemoglu, the Chuck Norris of economics.

3. Health care reform is difficult

4. The Atlantic on Open Borders. HT Bryan Caplan

5. Quora: What mind blowing facts seem like hoaxes but are not?

Assorted Links

1. Is there a shortage of STEM graduates? Companies are so whiny these days about workers. “There’re no PhD’s with 10 years of experience willing to work for $10 an hour, waaaahhhh!” Shut up and pay the market price. Lebron von Strauss comments.

2. Dove Real Beauty Sketches – For men (humorous)

3. Jon Stewart on Miranda and the Constitution. He makes America a better place to live in by being a voice of reason without being boring.

4. Game theorists make the weirdest exams.