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Comparing dictatorships

Why compare evil regimes? Sometimes a choice must be made which one to support. Inaction and refusal to choose is also a choice and may favour one or another. The help or harm to some regime may be indirect, e.g. through the enemy of an enemy.

How to compare evil regimes? I have encountered people who compare based on words, justifying crimes against humanity by some countries with the argument that their goals were good or the ideology was good, just wrongly implemented. (The subtext here is that if it was wrongly implemented in the past, perhaps it should be tried again in the hopes of implementing it rightly.) I disagree. Actions should be the basis of judgement, not narratives. A failure of a political system is a negative signal about it. Regardless of whether it signals a fundamental flaw or a low likelihood of right implementation, until all other systems have been tried and have accumulated a similar weight of negative signals, the failed system should not be tried again. This can be mathematically formalized as optimal sequential control under incomplete information.

I believe comparisons of countries should be based on objective criteria, preferably specified before the data is gathered (as in the scientific method). These objective criteria are for example the number of people killed, tortured, wrongly imprisoned, expropriated, the number and extent of wars started, the territory and population conquered and for how long, the economic and environmental damage caused. The number of ethnic or religious groups eliminated may also be counted, but this has the effect of weighting the deaths of people from smaller groups more.

The measures can be total or divided by time or by the number of supporters of the regime. The total of these criteria is generally larger for bigger countries. There is simply more opportunity to kill, torture, etc when there are more people available. The total measures are of interest because they show the whole negative impact on the world.

Division by time results in criteria that measure the flow of evil done. If the decision is which regime to eliminate first, it is optimal to focus on the one with the greatest predicted negative influence per unit of time. This strategy minimizes the total impact of evil regimes.

To find the expected number of crimes of a person from a dictatorship (or its leadership) without other data about them, the total crimes of the regime should be divided by its population (or number of leaders). Dividing by both people and time gives the expected flow of evil per person, suggesting an optimal strategy of removing leaders of criminal regimes.

The above focusses on past evil, but for predictive purposes the attractiveness or “selling power” of the regime also matters. How likely is the dictatorship to survive and expand? If more people favour and justify it, including outside its borders, it has a greater opportunity to do evil in the future. So the niceness of the narrative used to excuse its actions is actually a negative signal about an otherwise criminal regime. If the stories the dictatorship tells about itself make people consider its goals good or ideology good, then the dictatorship is more dangerous than another that cannot manipulate audiences into supporting it.

Principles help in resisting the siren call of “the end justifies the means.” For example the principle that nothing justifies crimes against humanity. No story about the greater good, no idealistic ideology. Another good principle is that actions speak louder than words. If a regime fails at good governance, excuses should be ignored.

On Trump and strategic voting

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Edit 9 Nov 2016: I was wrong. To avoid publication bias, I will leave this post up. It will teach people not to trust my political judgement.

Commenting on Trump is fashionable lately, so let me jump on the bandwagon. Probably these points have all been made before.
It seems the people most against Trump are the Democrat supporters, which suggests they are ignoring strategic voting. A famous voting example is that if A is preferred to B by the majority, B to C and C to A by different majorities (1/3 of people prefer A to B to C, 1/3 prefer B to C to A and 1/3 C to A to B), then with naive voters the order of votes matters. If first the A vs B vote is held and the winner goes against C, then A wins against B, after which C wins against A. But if B and C are voted first, then B wins, after which it loses to A.
One possibility is that Trump is preferred to other Republican candidates, who in turn are preferred to Democrats, who are preferred to Trump. In this case the Democrats should strategically support Trump against other Republicans and be happy that the primary vote between Republicans happens before the general election, not after. A conspiracy theorist might even suspect collusion between Trump and the Democrats or at least secret Democrat support for Trump to split the Republicans, like in the plot of All the King’s Men.
What if the polls show swing voters to favour Trump over the Democrats? Who people claim to support in elections is not necessarily who they actually support (the Bradley effect). Voters may claim to support Trump as a joke, or actually favour him now, but reconsider closer to elections. Putting Trump in power is like a dangerous adventure – there is a thrill at the possibility and many (claim to) want to do it when it is in the distant future. When the opportunity actually arrives, it may look too scary and people may get cold feet.
In the end, if Trump actually becomes President, he has antagonized many Republicans. There is a good chance of a bypartisan effort to block all his initiatives. The crazy and illegal things Trump has promised to do are just election promises – politicians break those all the time. Even reasonable promises are broken – radical ones are even more likely to be ignored. If Trump tries to do the unconstitutional lunacies, both parties have an incentive to impeach him. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, so taking down Trump may be just the thing to make Republicans and Democrats strange bedfellows and narrow the political polarization in the US.

Bayesian vs frequentist statistics – how to decide?

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Which predicts better, Bayesian or frequentist statistics? This is an empirical question. To find out, should we compare their predictions to the data using Bayesian or frequentist statistics? What if Bayesian statistics says frequentist is better and frequentist says Bayesian is better (Liar’s paradox)? To find the best method for measuring the quality of the predictions, should we use Bayesianism or frequentism? And to find the best method to find the best method for comparing predictions to data? How to decide how to decide how to decide, as in Lipman (1991)?

On grants, evaluation and efficiency

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Getting grants counts positively in an academic’s evaluation and results in promotions and raises. But grants are supposed to be inputs for research, not outputs. Other things equal, it should be preferable to get the same output with fewer inputs (more efficiently and cheaply). Given an academic’s publications and patents, the grants they received in order to create these outputs should count negatively in their evaluation. The university administration is interested in motivating grant-getting, because they tax the grants – take a fraction of each for themselves. The motivating is done by promotions and raises. Rewarding more use of inputs inflates the cost of research and diverts effort from scientific output to getting more inputs.

A justification for rewarding grant-getting is that having current grants makes it easier to do research, thus increasing the expected scientific output in the near future. This only applies to a person’s current grants, not those already spent. Perhaps the current grants may count positively in an evaluation, but the spent ones should still have negative weight.

Once the system is in place, there may be an additional incentive to follow it: signalling obedience to rules. If academics are expected to apply for grants, then the ones that publicly do not may be considered contrarian, which may have negative consequences.

A similar reasoning applies to researchers from rich and poor institutions. If university resources are used for the work, then the person from a rich institution had more inputs for their work. The same output from a scientist in a poor university should be a more favourable signal about them.

An analogous adjustment is done in US college applications when low socioeconomic status confers an advantage. The direction of the correction is right, but its appropriate size remains to be determined.

Yoga teachers are not using their comparative advantage

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A substitute good for yoga classes is yoga videos on the web. The advantages of following a video over going to class are that you can do it at home, at any time that suits you, can skip or repeat parts, it is free, clothes are optional and the selection of teachers and classes is much larger. If you prefer to do yoga in a group, you can get some friends together, but this reduces the time flexibility and a large group needs a large room. The advantage of a yoga teacher is that they can correct your posture mistakes, either by telling you (doable in a video call based yoga class) or by physically moving your limbs to a different posture. A teacher may also be a commitment device – if you have trouble motivating yourself to exercise, then someone’s oversight may substitute for willpower.

Most yoga teachers seem to not use their advantage, meaning they just instruct in front of the class and don’t correct people’s postures. I have seen this in online yoga videos taken in actual classes and experienced it in most classes I have attended. I have tried about 30 yoga teachers overall.

Maybe some students do not want to be touched for physical posture correction or the yoga teacher has a phobia of touching, or (especially in the US) there is a fear of litigation related to any physical contact. Even telling someone about their wrong posture may be psychologically difficult (people may be taught that “if you have nothing good to say, don’t say it”), or a student not used to criticism may react negatively to it, however gentle and well-intentioned it is. Maybe the philosophy is “whatever is, is right” and that yoga is so individual that there is no such thing as wrong posture. I disagree on this, having sometimes caused myself slight injury by overextending joints in wrong postures (that went uncorrected).

When to permit new construction

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In places with zoning laws (restrictions on what kind of buildings are allowed at a given address), there is often debate on whether to relax the restrictions. This would allow new construction or enlargement of existing buildings. The renters are generally in favour of more buildings, because the increased supply of housing lowers prices at a given demand. The landlords oppose construction, because it reduces the rents they can charge. These economic arguments are already part of the debate.

Much lobbying effort (that costs time and money and may create corruption) could be avoided if the market price of housing (rents or house transactions) was used directly in the regulations. New construction is allowed if the average rent is above a cutoff and denied below. Zoning laws may be a bad thing overall, but if they are to remain, they could be made more resistant to manipulation by basing restrictions on objective indicators, not lobbying.

The good incentives created by this require interest groups to put their money where their mouth is: if landlords want to prevent new construction, they should lower the rents they charge. Only with average rents low would building be blocked. Similarly, if tenants want more housing, they should pay the landlords more. They may of course decide to pool their money and found a property development firm instead.

Property developers want to get construction permits for themselves, but deny them to other property developers (their competition). The motivation to get a permit by fair means or foul is stronger when property prices are higher. In this case, the above reliance on the market price to regulate permits does not create good incentives. If new housing is allowed when prices are high, developers are motivated to form a cartel and raise the price. Permits reward high prices. A good price-based regulation of property development would require the opposite of the rental market mechanism – a low selling price of new housing should lead to more construction permits.

Raising the efficiency of the housing market

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Empty housing is wasteful from society’s point of view. Both landlords and renters would benefit from finding a suitable counterparty to contract with faster. There are already online systems for listing housing for rent and sale, and also notice boards for people seeking housing. This is a good start, but a predictive system would be better. Given enough data, computers could forecast who is a good tenant or landlord and which apartment or house suits a given person’s preferences. Less searching would be needed by all involved.

Rental agencies already have a tenant database where they exchange references for renters. A similar online system should be created for landlords and housing (distinguishing the two). Also, the rental agency or real estate bureau should be rated separately from the people working in it, otherwise bad agents may move from one employer to another and escape their reputation. A bad notoriety may even motivate a person to change their name. For good agents, the loss of a reputation not tied to their person may make it difficult to change jobs.

Instead of chancing on complaints or praise in forums, a renter could see a summary rating of many rental agencies, agents and buildings in one place. The building database should include objective measures like the distance of a building to the city centre and the nearest supermarket, the yearly electricity and heating bills, the outdoors noise level in decibels, some average air pollution measure, school catchment areas, floor plan and area, etc. This saves labour for prospective tenants, so each of them does not have to search for the same data from various sources. Information entered by past renters is hopefully objective and protects novice tenants like students from being misled by advertisements like “five minute drive to the city centre” (only at 3 am when the roads are empty, in a Formula 1 car), “short walk to the supermarket” (short compared to the Shackleton Solo expedition), “safe neighbourhood” (compared to a war zone), “quiet” (relative to a rock concert), “spacious” (roomier than a shoebox), “close to nature” (insects and rodents inside). Distances to various landmarks could be automatically downloaded from Google Maps when the building address is known. Crime, pollution and traffic density statistics could similarly be autocompleted.

Renters should be able to select the measures they consider important in the data and get a ranking of the housing on offer according to these. Once someone has rated several apartments, the system could potentially predict the housing that would please that person.

Religion is wrong with positive probability

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When a person says that some god wants X or rewards X and punishes Y, then how do they know? They, a limited human, claim knowledge of the mind of a god. When asked how they know, they say either that the god told them directly (using some revelation or sign perhaps) or that the god told some other person (a prophet) in the past, who passed on the message in the form of a book or an oral tradition. They certainly do not have replicable experimental evidence. If some other person was told, then recall the telephone game (children whispering in each other’s ear change the message radically) and people’s general lying, misunderstanding and misremembering. In any case, at some point a god must have told a person.
Let us look at this unavoidable transmission link between a purported god and a human. Could not an evil spirit have impersonated the god to the human (if evil spirits exist in their religion)? Or could it have been just a hallucination, dream, false memory? Psychology shows false memories are easy to induce (Brainerd and Reyna 2005 “The science of false memory”). How could a human tell the difference? Plenty of people in insane asylums claim not only to know a god’s will but also to be a god.
If there is a method for distinguishing real revelations from gods from false ones, how do you know it works? Either a god told you directly that it works or a person told you. In both cases we arrive at the previous question: how do you know it was a god and that you (or the other person) understood and remember the message correctly? If there is a method for finding and verifying good methods of distinguishing real from fake revelations, how do you know that works? And so on. Everything eventually relies on belief in the claim of a human. There is always a positive probability that the human imagined things that were not there or is deceiving self or others. Any religious claim is wrong with positive probability.
The next fallback position for advocates of religion is that even if it is wrong with positive probability, it does no harm to believe it. But how do they know? Back to the question about knowing the mind of a god. Why cannot a god reward nonbelievers and punish believers? And which religion out of the multitude in the world should one believe for maximal benefit? Some religions claim that a wrong religion is worse than none (heresy worse than paganism), some the opposite. To compare the expected benefit from believing different religions and from atheism, one needs to know the size of the rewards and punishments and also their probabilities. All this reduces to (conflicting) claims by humans about the will of a god. Which are wrong with positive probability.

Why intelligent people can be funny if they want to

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What does it take to be funny spontaneously? A good memory and quick thinking – the memory to remember jokes, the quickness to find a fitting joke for the situation before others.
Practiced funnyness also uses acting skills, which are acquired with time and effort. Intelligent people gain skills faster. Confidence always helps – a shy person dare not tell the joke or act in a funny way, because that draws attention. The caveat “if they want to” in the title is due to the possible confidence issue.

Theory and data both needed for prediction

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Clearly, data is required for prediction. Theory only says: “If this, then that.” It connects assumptions and conclusions. Data tells whether the assumptions are true. It allows the theory to be applied.
Theory is also required for prediction, although that is less obvious. For example, after observing a variable taking the value 1 a million times, what is the prediction for the next realization for the variable? Under the theory that the variable is constant, the next value is predicted to be 1. If the theory says there are a million 1-s followed by a million 0-s followed by a million 1-s etc, then the next value is 0. This theory may sound more complicated than the other, but prediction is concerned with correctness, not complexity. Also, the simplicity of a theory is a slippery concept – see the “grue-bleen example” in philosophy.
The constant sequence may sound like a more “natural” theory, but actually both the “natural” and the correct theory depend on where the data comes from. For example, the data may be generated by measuring whether it is day or night every millisecond. Day=1, night=0. Then a theory that a large number of 1-s are followed by a large number of 0-s, etc is more natural and correct than the theory that the sequence is constant.
Sometimes the theory is so simple that it is not noticed, like when forecasting a constant sequence. Which is more important for prediction, theory or data? Both equally, because the lack of either makes prediction impossible. If the situation is simple, then theorists may not be necessary, but theory still is.