You are currently browsing jeff’s articles.
You often hear that an incomplete course of antibiotics can promote the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria. Patients are told not to stop taking antibiotics just because you feel better but instead to always complete the full dosage. This is obviously partly for the health of the patient. But it is also said to guard against drug-resistance.
I have never been able to understand the logic. So I sat down to try to figure it out. I came up with one possible answer but it seems second-order to me so I am not sure if its the primary reason.
One thing that seems obvious is that every time you ingest antibiotics you create natural selection pressure within your body that favors any drug-resistant mutants that are there. This is why the headline cause of super-bugs is overuse of antibiotics. For example antibiotics are often prescribed and taken for non-bacterial illnesses like the common cold. Also, antibiotics are given to livestock that people eventually eat.
But this doesn’t get us to the recommendation to complete your course of antibiotics. Since the problem is the antibiotics, it tells us to use them as little as possible. How could it be that the first dose helps the super-bugs, but the last dose hurts them? They are drug-resistant after all, right?
I used to think that it must be that the selection pressure increases the rate of mutation. This may be true but I don’t think it’s enough to support the complete-course policy. Suppose I am halfway done with the recommended dosage and I stop. My usage so far has encouraged mutations and I may be infected now with a drug-resistant strain. Now the mutation-inducing effect is irrelevant because the superbugs are already there. Their natural growth rate is going to dwarf any additional growth due to mutations.
More generally, since every prescription of antibiotics is a public health cost, then every time I continue to take my doses I am creating the same externality.
I finally hit on one idea which has to do with competition within the body among bugs of differing levels of resistance. Start with this observation. If I have a super-bug in me and I continue to take anti-biotics, I kill off all the wimpy-bugs leaving the super-bugs to have free reign over my body. Presumably they grow faster without the competition. OK. But that seems again to suggest that, at least from a public health perspective, I should stop taking the drug so that the wimpy-bugs can outcompete the super-bugs.
So we add one twist to the model. Suppose that my body has a baseline system of defenses that can fight off any bad guy, super- or otherwise, as long as there are sufficiently few of them. Then, if I stop taking the drug too early, my defenses may still overwhelmed by the sheer numbers. All the bugs start growing again and if I started with just a few super-bugs in me, then when I start to show symptoms again I now have lots of them. However, had I continued to completion, all of the wimpy-bugs would be gone and my body’s natural defenses could have mopped up the few super-bugs that were left hanging around.
It’s a coherent theory. But I am not sure I believe that it is quantitatively important. So I still find the advice a little mysterious. Any of you know better?
Honestly I have no good theory. Here are some rejected ones:
- They are the only ones sufficiently lacking in self-respect.
- Since ads drive everything what matters is the audience still watching at halftime. By that time the geezers have already drunk enough to be glued to their sofas, but not enough yet to be asleep.
- Only Pete Townsend’s generation knows how to count to XLIV.
- It’s a kind of best-of the has-beens competition. A shadow rock-and-roll hall of fame.
- You can hide their spectacles and tell them its Carnegie Hall.
- Minimizes the, ehem, fallout from wardrobe malfunctions.
Eddie Dekel points out the following puzzling fact. At the gym most people wipe down the exercise machines and benches after they use them and not before. There are a few obvious social benefits of this policy. For one, you know better than your successor where the towel is most advantageously deployed. Also, the sooner that stuff is removed, the better.
But still it’s a puzzle from the point of view of dynamic efficiency. With this system everyone mops once. But there exists a welfare improving re-allocation where one guy doesn’t mop and after him everyone mops before using the machine. Nobody’s worse off and that one guy is better off. A Pareto improvement.
In fact the ex-post-mop regime is especially unstable because that one guy has a private incentive to trigger the re-allocation. He’s the one who saves effort. So from an abstract point of view this is indeed a puzzle. Moreover, there is this Seinfeldian insight that complicates things even further.
ELAINE: Never mind that, look at the signal I just got.
GEORGE: Signal? What signal?
ELAINE: Lookit. He knew I was gonna use the machine next, he didn’t wipe his sweat off. That’s a gesture of intimacy.
GEORGE: I’ll tell you what that is – that’s a violation of club rules. Now I got him! And you’re my witness!
ELAINE: Listen, George! Listen! He knew what he was doing, this was a signal.
GEORGE: A guy leaves a puddle of sweat, that’s a signal?
ELAINE: Yeah! It’s a social thing.
GEORGE: What if he left you a used Kleenex, what’s that, a valentine?
(conversations with Asher, Ron, Juuso and Eddie. I take all the blame.)
One case in which dropping copy protection improved sales.
It’s been 18 months since O’Reilly, the world’s largest publisher of tech books, stopped using DRM on its ebooks. In the intervening time, O’Reilly’s ebook sales have increased by 104 percent. Now, when you talk about ebooks and DRM, there’s always someone who’ll say, “But what about [textbooks|technical books|RPG manuals]? Their target audience is so wired and online, why wouldn’t they just copy the books without paying? They’ve all got the technical know-how.”So much for that theory.
More here.
Addendum: see the comments below for good reason to dismiss this particular datum.
Here are some tips.
Computer Scoring – … Tax returns are “scored” using two systems – Discriminant Function System (DIF) and Unreported Income DIF (UIDIF). The Discriminant Information Function System (DIF) score gives the IRS an indication of the potential for change in tax due, based on past IRS experience. The Unreported Income DIF (UIDIF), as you can imagine, scores the return on the potential for unreported income. The higher the score, for either, the more likely the return will be reviewed.
Apparently these tips come from the IRS itself! When would it make sense for the IRS to teach us how to avoid an audit? It would make sense if the ways of cheating on your taxes were known and easy to describe. Then the IRS just announces it will audit anyone who does something that looks like that. But if there are always innovative ways to cheat on your taxes then an announcement like this, if truthful, probably only helps cheaters avoid audits.
On the other hand the IRS’s objective might be to maximize prosecutions. Then they want to lie about their audit policy and hope you believe them.
Its obvious right? Ok but before you read on, say the answer to yourself.
Is it because he is the most able to make up any lost time by the earlier teammates? Because in the anchor leg you know exactly what needs to be done? Now what about this argument: The total time is just the sum of the individual times. So it doesn’t matter what order they swim in.
That would be true if everyone was swimming (running, potato-sacking, etc.) as fast as they could. But it is universally accepted strategy to put the fastest last. If you advocate this strategy you are assuming that not everyone is swimming as fast as they can.
For example, take the argument that in the anchor leg you know exactly what needs to be done. Inherent in this argument is the view that swimmers swim just fast enough to get the job done.
(That tends to sound wrong because we don’t think of competitive athletes as shirkers. But don’t get drawn in by the framing. If you like, say it this way: when the competition demands it, they “rise to the occasion.” Whichever way you say it, they put in more or less effort depending on the competition. And one does not have to interpret this as a cold calculation trading off performance versus effort. Call it race psychology, competitive spirit, whatever. It amounts to the same thing: you swim faster when you need to and therefore slower when you don’t.)
But even so its not obvious why this by itself is an argument for putting the fastest last. So let’s think it through. Suppose the relay has two legs. The guy who goes first knows how much of an advantage the opposing team has in the anchor leg and therefore doesn’t he know the amount by which he has to beat the opponent in the opening leg?
No, for two reasons. First, at best he can know the average gap he needs to finish with. But the anchor leg opponent might have an unusually good swim (or the anchor teammate might have a bad one.) Without knowing how that will turn out, the opening leg swimmer trades off additional effort in return for winning against better and better (correspondingly less and less likely) possible performance by the anchor opponent. He correctly discounts the unlikely event that the anchor opponent has a very good race, but if he knew that was going to happen he would swim faster.
The anchor swimmer gets to see when that happens. So the anchor swimmer knows when to swim faster. (Again this would be irrelevant if they were always swimming at top speed.)
The other reason is similar. You can’t see behind you (or at least your rear-ward view is severely limited.) The opening leg swimmer can only know that he is ahead of his opponent, but not by how much. If his goal is to beat the opening leg opponent by a certain distance, he can only hope to do this on average. He would like to swim faster when the opening leg opponent is behind but doing better than average. The anchor swimmer sees the gap when he takes over. Again he has more information.
There is still one step missing in the argument. Why is it the fastest swimmer who makes best use of the information? Because he can swim faster right? It’s not that simple and indeed we need an assumption about what is implied by being “the fastest.” Consider a couple more examples.
Suppose the team consists of one swimmer who has only one speed and it is very fast and another swimmer who has two speeds, both slower than his teammate. In this case you want the slower swimmer to swim with more information. Because in this case the faster swimmer can make no use of it.
For another example, suppose that the two teammates have the same two speeds but the first teammate finds it takes less effort to jump into the higher gear. Then here again you want the second swimmer to anchor. But this time it is because he gets the greater incentive boost. You just tell the first swimmer to swim at top speed and you rely on the “spirit of competition” to kick the second swimmer into high gear when he’s behind.
More generally, in order for it to be optimal to put the fastest swimmer in the anchor leg it must be that faster also means a greater range of speeds and correspondingly more effort to reach the upper end of that range. The anchor swimmer should be the team’s top under-achiever.
Exercises:
- What happens in a running-backwards relay race? Or a backstroke relay (which I don’t think exists.)
- In a swimming relay with 4 teammates why is it conventional strategy to put the slowest swimmer third?
Since I was never really sure myself, whenever I thought of a good reason to keep blogging I wrote it down. I have a pretty large collection now. Here’s a few.
- writing is exercise just like jogging is and yoga is
- i have a hard time coming up with topics of conversation. i am a total loser at parties. now i can slip away, break out my iPhone, go to the blog and remember what i blogged about last week. instant conversation topic. now i am even more of a loser at parties.
- people live at different tempos. mine is slow.
- its good practice at being imperfect.
- it sharpens my thinking all day long because i am always on the alert for interesting things to blog about
- procrastinating writing my novel (so far I have a title: Banana Seeds)
- To get gigs
There are lots more. I will post more later.
Happy Birthday to us! Here’s how it got started. About a year and a half ago I wrote an email to Sandeep saying we should start a blog. He ignored me and I forgot about it. Then a few months later he wrote back something like
Hey: I’m into the idea of starting a blog as long as I can blog about topics other than economics (and occasionally mention economics!). Interested? They’re hard to sustain on your own unless you have verbal diahorrea and are vain enough to think every stupid thought is worth writing down.
which to me read like a reply to an email I never sent (I forgot I ever sent the first one) so I thought he must have meant to send it to someone else and had sent it to me by mistake. But in fact I had already started “blogging” to myself as a sort of trial run for starting a real blog. I would write a few sentences in an email to myself every day to see if I had enough ideas and the stamina to keep it going. So I thought I would take advantage of Sandeep’s mistake and I wrote back
totally, i was going to ask you. in fact i ahve been planning for a while. i have been writing mini blog posts and saving them so as to have a stockpile before actually starting. i have a few thoughts about format too.
definitely not an economics blog (except when we feel like it.)
most of my stupid thoughts i think are worth writing down.i have even decided on a name for my blog but if you dont like it we could come up with one together.
And so we started thinking of a name. Sandeep had a lot of bad ideas for names
- hodgepodge hedgehog
- platypus
- bacon is a vegetable
- release the gecko
- coordination failure
- reaction function
and he is too much of a philistine to appreciate my ideas for names:
- banana seeds
- vapor mill
- el emenopi’
so we were at an impasse. Somehow we hit upon the name Cheap Talk. Sandeep ran it by some folks at a party and it seemed like a hit. (That name was taken by a then-defunct blog and wordpress does not recycle url’s so we had to morph it into cheeptalk.wordpress.com.)
The first post was February 2, 2009. We didnt publicize the blog widely at first because we wanted to make sure we could keep it up before making a big commitment. It seemed to have some momentum so we went public about a month later. It has been a ton of fun and I am really glad we took the plunge.
- 736 posts
- 2,090 comments
- Most popular post: The Economics of Pinball (47,000+ views)
- Least popular post: 1 view.
- We have 1,382 RSS subscribers via google reader.
You are late with a report and its not ready. Do you wrap it up and submit it or keep working until its ready? The longer it takes you the higher standard it will be judged by. Because if you needed the extra time it must be because its going to be extra good.
For some people the speed at which they come up with good ideas outpaces these rising expectations. Others are too slow. But its the fast ones who tend to be late. Because although expectations will be raised they will exceed those. The slow ones have to be early otherwise the wedge between expectations and their performance will explode and they will never find a good time to stop.
Compare Apple and Sony. Sony comes out with a new product every day. And they are never expected to be a big deal. Every single Apple release is a big deal. And highly anticipated. We knew Apple was working on a phone more than a year before the iPhone. It was known that tablet designs had been considered for years before the iPad. With every leak and every rumor that Steve Jobs was not yet happy, expectations were raised for whatever would eventually make it through that filter.
Dear TE referees. Nobody is paying attention to how late you are.
Responding to the message “Salinger is dead. Happy now?” His debut novel, King Dork is about a kid who, in an unavoidably Holden kinda way, hates everything about the cult of The Catcher in the Rye.
That said, unlike Tom, I didn’t hate “The Catcher in the Rye” when it was first thrust upon me by numerous parents, teachers, priests, counselors, and other authority figures. I knew I was supposed to revere it, to identify with Holden, and to keep it close to my bosom and all that. “Finally,” I would say, obediently following the script provided by helpful, smiling, over-eager adult facilitators, “someone who understands…” Maybe I even kind of meant it. And they would pat me on the head, or on the back, depending on how tall they were in relation to me. Eventually, though, I began to wonder. What does it mean when you’re in a room full of people who all have the same, exact opinion on something with little or no divergence? It’s kind of creepy, whatever it means.
The Econometric Society which publishes Econometrica, one of the top 4 academic journals in Economics has taken under its wing the fledgling journal Theoretical Economics and the first issue under the ES umbrella has just been published. TE has rapidly become among the top specialized journals for economic theory and it stands out in one very important respect. All of its content is and always will be freely available and publicly licensed.
Bootstrapping a reputation for a new journal in a crowded field is by itself almost impossible. TE has managed to do this without charging for access, on a minimal budget supported essentially by donations plus modest submission fees, and with the help of a top-notch board of editors who embraced our mission. There is no doubt that the community rallied around our goal of changing the world of academic publishing and it worked.
This is just a start. Already the ES is launching a new open-access field journal with an empirical orientation, Quantitative Economics. Open Access is here to stay.
From Robin Goldstein:
I’ve previously discussed the thorny issue of the overzealous advocacy of a traditional recipe to the exclusion of all others. In response to Florence Fabricant’s claim, for instance, that “for any pasta all’amatriciana to be authentic, it must be made with guanciale (pork jowl),” not bacon or pancetta, I responded that “too many food writers construct a counterfactual Italy of culinary dogmatism, a population of finger-wagging guanciale zealots, a nation…harrumphing around about how the world is going to shit now that people are making amatriciana with pancetta…People and recipes aren’t anthropological tokens. They’re living things, the products of neural assemblies and proteins and chemicals bouncing across the ages. Narrow your gaze and squint your eyes too tightly in the search for authenticity, and you might miss that whole, beautiful landscape.”
Perhaps I should revise this statement: clearly, there are some finger-wagging guanciale zealots in Italy. They tend to gravitate, it seems, toward the Ministry of Agriculture. The question of whether “zero tolerance,” when it comes to food, is fascist, patronizing, noble—or all three—is certainly one for further contemplation.
Wine produced around Montalcino can be called Brunello di Montalcino only if it is 100% Sangiovese. If imposters put Cabernet into their Brunello, and people like it, should the rules of the appelation be vigorously enforced? You are inclined to say no because people should have what they like. But if it were that simple there would be no reason for the appelation at all.
It could be that people want to know for sure which wine is 100% Sangiovese (and meets other benchmarks) and which is/does not. The appelation system allows them to know that without preventing them from having their SuperTuscan Cab/Sanjo blends if they prefer that.
The hypothetical “ticking time-bomb” scenario represents a unique argument in favor of torture. There will be a terrorist attack on Christmas day and a captive may know where and by whom. Torture seems more reasonable in this scenario for a few reasons.
- It’s a clearly defined one-off thing. We can use torture to defuse the ticking time-bomb and still claim to have a general policy against torture except in these special cases.
- The information especially valuable and verifiably so.
- There is limited time.
If we look at torture simply as a mechanism for extracting information, in fact reasons #1 and #2 by themselves deliver at best ambiguous implications for the effectiveness of torture. A one-off case means there is no reputation at stake and this weakens the resolve of the torturer. The fact that the information is valuable means that the victim also has a stronger incentive to resist. The net effect can go either way.
(Keep in mind these are comparative statements. You may think that torture is a good idea or a bad idea in general, that is a separate question. The question here is whether aspects #1 and #2 of the ticking time-bomb scenario make it better.)
We would argue that a version of #3 is the strongest case for torture, and it only applies to the ticking time-bomb. Indeed the ticking time-bomb is unique because it alters the strategic considerations. A big problem with torture in general is that its effectiveness is inherently limited by commitment problems. If torture leads to quick concessions then it will cease quickly in the absence of a concession (but of course continue once a concession has revealed that the victim is informed ). But then there would be no concession. And as we wrote last week, raising the intensity of the torture only worsens this problem.
But the ticking time-bomb changes that. If the bomb is set to detonate at midnight then torture is going end whether he confesses or not. Now the victim faces a simple decision: resist torture until midnight or give up some information. The amount of information you can get from him is limited only by how much pain you are threatening. More pain, more gain.
The Sports Economist picks up on the economic impact of Tiger’s expected absence from professional golf tournaments this year.
But it may be a boon to academia. I previously blogged about Jen Brown’s research on “the Tiger Woods effect” as evidence of strategic effort in contests. In tournaments with Tiger Woods present, the rest of the field performs noticably worse than in tournaments in which he was absent. While that study was careful to note and account for the possibility that Tiger’s absence (by choice) from a tournament might be correlated with some unobservable factor that could bias the conclusion, these concerns are always present.
Fortunately, over the next year we will have a nice natural experiment due to the fact that Tiger’s absence will represent truly independent variation. Looking forward to seeing an update on the Tiger Woods effect. (Trilby toss: Matt Notowidigdo.)
I once tried setting my watch ahead a few minutes to help me make it to appointments on time. At first it worked, but not because I was fooled. I would glance at the watch, get worried that I was late, then remember that the watch is fast. But that brief flash acted as a sort of preview of how it feels to be late. And the feeling is a better motivator than the thought in the abstract.
But that didn’t last very long. The surprise wore off. I wonder if there are ways to maintain the surprise. For example, instead of setting the watch a fixed time ahead, I could set it to run too fast so that it gained an extra minute every week or month. Then if I have adaptive expectations I could consistently fool myself.
I think I might adjust to that eventually though. How about a randomizing watch? I don’t think you want a watch that just shows you a completely random time, but maybe one that randomly perturbs the time a little bit. Would a mean-preserving spread make sense? That way you have the right time on average but if you are risk-averse you will move a little faster.
You could try to exploit “rational inattention.” You could set the watch to show the true time 95% of the time and the remaining 5% of the time add 5 minutes. Your mind thinks that it’s so likely that the watch is correct that it doesn’t waste resources on trying to research the small probability event that it’s not. Then you get the full effect 5% of the time.
Maybe its simpler to just set all of your friends’ watches to run too slow.
T-Cow disagrees that Paul Krugman should be Fed Chairman:
Elsewhere I have to strongly differ with the Johnson-Kwak proposal that Paul Krugman be selected. I don’t intend this as a negative comment on Krugman, if anything I am suggesting he is too dedicated to reading and writing and speaking his mind. The Fed Chair has to be an expert on building consensus and at maintaining more credibility than Congress; even when the Fed screws up you can’t just dump this equilibrium in favor of Fed-bashing. What lies on the other side of that curtain isn’t pretty. Would Krugman gladly suffer the fools in Congress? Johnson and Kwak are overrating the technocratic aspects of the job (which largely fall upon the Fed staff anyway) and underrating the public relations and balance of power aspects. It’s unusual that an academic will be the best person for the job.
Even if you think that Krugman would be the best person for the job that doesn’t imply that we should give him the job. The decision is between Krugman doing what he is doing now and Bernanke as Fed chairman versus Krugman being Fed chairman, nobody doing what Krugman is doing now and Bernanke going back to teaching Princeton undergrads. To prefer the latter it is not enough that Krugman is a better Fed chair than Bernanke. His advantage there must compensate for the other changes in the bundle.
In the top tennis tournaments there is a limited instant-replay system. When a player disagrees with a call (or non-call) made by a linesman, he can request an instant-replay review. The system is limited because the players begin with a fixed number of challenges and every incorrect challenge deducts one from that number. As a result there is a lot of strategy involved in deciding when to make a challenge.
Alongside the challenge system is a vestige of the old review system where the chair umpire can unilaterally over-rule a call made by the linesman. These over-rules must come immediately and so they always precede the players’ decision whether to challenge, and this adds to the strategic element.
Suppose that A’s shot lands close to B’s baseline, the ball is called in by the linesman but this call is over-ruled by the chair umpire. In these scenarios, in practice, it is almost automatic that A will challenge the over-ruled call. That is, A asks for an instant-replay hoping it will show that the ball was indeed in.
This seems logical. It looked in to the linesman and that is good information that it was actually in. For example, compare this scenario to the one in which the ball was called out by the linesman and that call was not over-ruled. In that alternative scenario, one party sees the the ball out and no party is claiming to see the ball in. In the scenario with the over-rule, there are two opposing views. This would seem to make it more likely that the ball was indeed in.
But this is a mistake. The chair umpire knows when he makes the over-rule that the linesman saw it in. He factors that information in when deciding whether to over-rule. His willingness to over-rule shows that his information is especially strong: strong enough to over-ride an opposing view. And this is further reinforced by the challenge system because the umpire looks very bad if he over-rules and a challenge shows he is wrong.
I am willing to bet that the data would show challenges of over-ruled calls are far less likely to be successful than the average challenge.
A separate observation. The challenge system is only in place on the show courts. Most matches are played on courts that are not equipped for it. I would bet that we could see statistically how the challenge system distorts calls by the linesmen and over-rules by the chair umpire by comparing calls on and off the show courts.
Here’s a case where English has it relatively easy. There’s been plenty of fuss over whether to retain actress or to use actor for females as well as males, whether to adopt new gender-neutral terms like chair and craft in place of chairman and craftsman, and so on. But most English words for social roles and titles are already linguistically gender-neutral: president, senator, minister, dean, secretary, teacher, boss, judge, lawyer, …
In languages like Italian and Spanish, in contrast, nearly all such words are specified for grammatical gender, and their grammatical gender is usually interpreted sexually.
From an interesting post at the great blog Language Log. Lots of great comments too.
Yahoo! has been building a social science group in their research division. In addition to some well-known economists, they have also been attracting ethnographers and cognitive psychologists away from posts at research universities.
The recruitment effort reflects a growing realization at Yahoo, the second most popular U.S. online site and search engine, that computer science alone can’t answer all the questions of the modern Web business. As the novelty of the Internet gives way, Yahoo and other 21st century media businesses are discovering they must understand what motivates humans to click and stick on certain features, ads and applications – and dismiss others out of hand.
The article is an interesting peek into the boundaries of business and basic research. They are not always smooth.
However, there are risks when a for-profit company adopts an academic approach, which calls for publishing research regardless of the outcome. Notably, one set of figures from a study conducted by Reiley, the economist from the University of Arizona, raised eyebrows at Yahoo.…it could underscore a growing immunity to display advertising among the Web-savvy younger generation.The latter possibility would do little to bolster Yahoo’s sales pitch to advertisers hoping to influence this coveted age group. But raising such questions may be the cost of recruiting researchers committed to pure science.
In principle a prediction market should generate more accurate predictions than a simple poll. For example, in an election, the outcome of a poll should be known to the traders and incorporated into their trades. But in practice, the advantage of prediction markets is small, or so suggests a new study.
In a new study, Daniel Reeves, Duncan Watts, Dave Pennock and I compare the performance of prediction markets to conventional means of forecasting, namely polls and statistical models. Examining thousands of sporting and movie events, we find that the relative advantage of prediction markets is remarkably small. For example, the Las Vegas market for professional football is only 3% more accurate in predicting final game scores than a simple, three parameter statistical model, and the market is only 1% better than a poll of football enthusiasts.
More here. My view is that there is no theoretical reason for interpreting a market price in a prediction market as a probability. That is, if Coakley is trading at 75 cents there is no reason to interpret that as a 75 percent probability that Coakley will win. At best there is an ordinal relationship: a higher price means a higher probability. Likewise with a poll.
Studies like these should instead be measuring the conditional probability of an event given the price observed in the market. Because, even an “innacurate” prediction can be a very good one. To take an extreme case the market might always underprice the probability of a Coakley win by 25%. But then by dividing the market price by .75 we can infer the right probability with perfect accuracy.
Sandeep and I are writing a paper on torture. We are trying to understand the mechanics and effectiveness of torture viewed purely as a mechanism for extracting information from the unwilling. A major theme we are finding is that torture is complicated by numerous commitment problems. We have blogged about these before. Here is Sandeep’s first post on torture which got this whole project started.
A big problem is that torture takes time and when the victim has resisted repeated torture it becomes more and more likely that he actually has no information to give. At this point the torturer has a hard time credibly commiting to continue the torture because in all likelihood he is torturing an innocent victim. This feeds back into the early stages of the torture because it increases the temptation for the truly informed victim to resist torture and pretend to be uninformed.
In light of this it is possible to say something about the benefits of adopting more and more severe forms of torture, waterboarding say. A naive presumption is that a technology which delivers suffering at a faster pace would circumvent the problem because it makes it harder to resist temptation for long enough.
But this logic is backwards. Indeed, if it were true that more severe torture induced the informed to reveal their information early, then this would only hasten the time at which the torture ceases because the torturer becomes convinced that his heretofore silent victim is in fact innocent. So credible torture requires that those who resist the now more severe torture must find compensation in the form of less information revealed in the future. In the end the informed victim is no worse off and this means that the torturer is no better off.
Once you account for that what you are left with is that there is more suffering inflicted on the uninformed who has no alternative but to resist. And this only makes it more difficult to continue torturing once the victim has demonstrated he is innocent. That is, the original commitment problem is only made worse.
Ingenious new support for that view:
The mighty insect colonies of ants, termites and bees have been described as superorganisms. Through the concerted action of many bodies working towards a common goal, they can achieve great feats of architecture, agriculture and warfare that individual insects cannot.
That’s more than just an evocative metaphor. Chen Hou from Arizona State University has found that the same mathematical principles govern the lives of insect colonies and individual animals. You could predict how quickly an individual insect grows or burn food, how much effort it puts into reproduction and how long it lives by plugging its body weight into a simple formula. That same formula works for insect colonies too, if you treat their members as a collective whole.
And this is not just an accounting trick. If you take a “colony” of, say, 100 people and and measure how much energy their bodies use it would be 100 times the energy that a single body uses (duh.) But a single animal that weighs 100 times as much as a human uses only 100^(3/4) ≈ 32 times as much energy as a single human. There are economies of scale within a single organism but not across.
Except with ant colonies. The mass to energy ratio of the colony as a whole follows the same law that governs indivduals of non-colony animals. Via Not Exactly Rocket Science.
It’s been blog fodder the past week.
In other words, to pull off a successful boast, you need it to be appropriate to the conversation. If your friend, colleague, or date raises the topic, you can go ahead and pull a relevant boast in safety. Alternatively, if you’re forced to turn the conversation onto the required topic then you must succeed in provoking a question from your conversation partner. If there’s no question and you raised the topic then any boast you make will leave you looking like a big-head.
It makes perfect sense. First of all, purely in terms of how much I impress you, an unprovoked boast is almost completely ineffective. Because everybody in the world has something to boast about. If I get to pick the topic then I will pick that one. If you pick the topic or ask the question then the odds you serve me a boasting opportunity are long unless I am truly impressive on many dimensions.
And it follows from that why you think I am a jerk for blowing my own horn. I reveal either that I don’t understand the logic and I am just trying to impress you or I think that you don’t understand it and I can fool you into being impressed by me.
Via kottke.org
And this is what I sometimes worry about: do I put them back on top of the stack? Do I put the bowls back in the empty front spot on the shelf? Because if I do that, then guess which dishes are going to get reached for the next time? That’s right, the same ones.
I think about this every time I put our dishes back in the cupboard. I assumed it was just me and that I was crazy.
The worry is that the dishes in regular rotation will depreciate faster than the ones that get stuck at the bottom of the stack. I would say that if this was a potential problem then you have more dishes than you need. Do you go a month without a single day in which you work your way to the bottom? Then you can safely get rid of a number of dishes equal to the number that never gets used.
Maybe you have occasional large gatherings and the extra dishes are there just for those occasions. Then it would seem that the question turns on a comparison of the time it takes before the difference in wear is noticeable and the frequency of these gatherings. Still I would say the trade-off is non-existent. First, unless you are buying really cheap dishes, the time span we are talking about here is measured in years not months. You can always rent dishes for your party.
Second, we are talking about just a few extra dishes. Forcing them into the rotation will indeed ensure uniformity. Now they will all be dented and scratched. Again, renting is the remedy if your concern is the impression you make on your guests.
When you search google you are presented with two kinds of links. Most of the links come from google’s webcrawlers and they are presented in an order that reflects google’s PageRank algorithm’s assessment of their likely relevance. Then there are the sponsored links. These are highlighted at the top of the main listing and also lined up on the right side of the page.
Sponsored links are paid advertisements. They are sold using an auction that determines which advertisers will have their links displayed and in what order. While the broad rules behind this auction are public, google handicaps the auction by adjusting bids submitted by advertisers according to what google calls Quality Score. (Yahoo does something similar.)
If your experience with sponsored links is similar to mine you might start to wonder whether Quality Score actually has the effect of favoring lower quality links. Renato Gomes, in his job market paper explains why this indeed might be a feature of the optimal keyword auction.
The idea is based on the well-known principle of handicaps for weak bidders in auctions. Let’s say google is auctioning links for the keyword “books” and the bidders are Amazon.com plus a bunch of fringe sites. If Amazon is willing to bid a lot for the ad but the others are willing to bid just a little, an auction with a level playing-field would allow Amazon to win at a low price. In these cases google can raise its auction revenues by giving a handicap to the little guys. Effectively google subsidizes their bids making them stronger competitors and thereby forcing Amazon to bid higher.
Of course its rare that the stronger bidder is so easy to identify and anyway the whole auction is run instantaneously by software. So how would google implement this idea in practice? Google collects data on how often users click through the (non-sponsored) links it provides to searchers. This gives google very good information about how much each web site benefits from link-generated traffic. That’s a pretty good, albeit imperfect, measure of an advertiser’s willingness to pay for sponsored links. And that’s all google would need to distinguish the strong bidders from the weak bidders in a keyword auction.
And when you put that all together you see that the weak guys will be exactly those websites that few people click through to. The useless links. The revenue-maximizing sponsored link auction favors the useless links and as a consequence they win the auction far more frequently than they would if the playing-field were level.
(To be perfectly clear, nobody outside of google knows exactly how Quality Score is actually calculated, so nobody knows for sure if google is intentionally doing this. The analysis just shows that these handicaps are a key part of a profit-maximizing auction.)
Renato’s job market paper derives a number of other interesting properties of an optimal auction in a two-sided platform. (Web search is a two-sided platform because the two sides of the market, users and advertisers, communicate through google’s platform.) For example, his theory explains why advertisers pay to advertise but users don’t pay to search. Indeed google subsidizes users by giving them all kinds of free stuff in order to thicken the market and extract more revenues from advertisers. On the other hand, dating sites, and some job-matching sites charge both sides of the market and Renato derives the conditions that determine which of these pricing structures is optimal.
Cheap Talk 
