Greetings, Macaroni Munchers.
A lot of my friends are concerned about buying food from too far away, in the interests of both helping out the local economy and of reducing fossil fuel consumption. It's a scary thought about how much our food supply depends on non-renewable resources like transportation fuel, and it's appealing to have the visceral connection to what you eat that you can get only from being able to visit the place where your food grows.
Agriculture and the Developing World
The unfortunate consequence of favoring domestic produce, however, is that you deprive the developing world of the much-needed foreign exchange which comes from agricultural exports. In fact, in non-industrialized areas of the third world, pretty much the only thing they produce that we consume is food.
A typical Nicaraguan farm worker earns about $.25 an hour (a quarter the minimum wage of neighboring Costa Rica). The cost of living there may be quite low, but still I'm disgusted by the fact that they could pick coffee for 8 hours and not earn enough money for a singe espresso shot in an American café.
By insisting on buying domestic food, we're just driving developing-world wages down farther. There are plenty of options for Americans: they don't all need agricultural work to stave off extreme poverty. Giving meaningful work to developing nations promotes the sense of coöperation which leads to good feelings and peace.
Dependence on developing nations for food can also lead to peace-making policy. You're less likely to invade another country if you need the food they produce to survive.
Aside: I'm being overly-dramatic. Americans consume on average 3790 calories per day (although some of that is spoilage), so losing even a third of food imports wouldn't spell widespread famine. At the same time, you're less likely to go to war with an entrenched trading partner; the European Union may have ushered in an age of post-historicism, now that individual countries are so economically entwined that it would be sillier than ever to go to war.
Fuel Costs by Sea and Land
Trade and peace aside, many of my friends want to consume as little fossil fuel as possible in getting their food delivered, so they're careful to buy only from locally-grown produce. However, raw distance-from-home is a poor tracker of fuel consumed, since freight by sea is so much more efficient than by land. Let's figure out just how much more efficient it is to ship a container one mile by sea than by land.
By land, a typical mileage rating for a semi truck carrying a 53-foot trailer is about 6 miles per gallon. Page 5 of this document has all of the relevant information: an ultra-sized container ship traveling at 22.5 knots burns 180 tonnes of fuel per day, and carries 10 000 twenty foot-equivalent units of cargo. After a little math, we find the ship transports the same 53-ft container at 44 miles per gallon.
A ship coming to the United States from Chile burns about the same amount of fuel per container as a semi truck traveling about 700 miles, and if people drive 8 miles to the grocery store to buy 50 lbs of groceries in a car rated at 30 miles per gallon, they burn as much fuel per grocery item as that container ship from Chile.
Conclusions
Before jumping on the "local food" bandwagon, please consider the impact of shunning the developing world. Also, consider biking, busing or walking to the grocery store when possible if you're really interested in reducing fossil fuel consumption.
Bon Appetit!
Showing posts with label humans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label humans. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Killer Cellphones?
"Pronto? MoshiMoshi? Hello?"
I was reading Digg today, which pointed me to an article speculating that cellphones are causing "colony collapse disorder," the name for an alarming phenomenon whereby the majority of honeybees in every colony are mysteriously disappearing. (By the way, this isn't jsut about the honey bees produce. The value of their crop pollination is in the billions per year; would anyone like to post a comment with a more exact figure?) The article sounded interesting until they went off the deep end by vilifying cellphones with a few cherry-picked debunked claims:
Traffic Dangers
We have lots of evidence that cellphones impair driving ability. A University of Utah study found that cellphone conversations impair about as much as a .08% blood alcohol content, the threshold for the legal drunk-driving limit in many North American states. The World Health Organization says talking on a cellphone while driving increases your risk of accidents by a factor of 3 to 4. Taking a 100-mile drive decreases your life expectancy on average by about one hour, i.e., it has and LED of one hour (see posts with the tags LED and EDD for more, or this one which introduces them). Talking on your cellphone bumps the LED up to three or four hours, meaning that the driving-related risk starts to overcome the old-age-related risk you'd incur anyways if you call people while driving.
Other than impairing driving ability (and repetitive stress injuries from thumb-typing), cellphones aren't going to hurt you. Let's take a look first at the physics of cellphones (which will show them to be benign) and then take a look at the epidemiology of cancer among cellphone users, citing the most thorough study ever done, which happens to be Danish (Long Live Fear-Dispelling Vikings!).
The Physics of Cellphones
Cellphones communicate by broadcasting microwaves to cell towers. They use one of two frequency ranges: either about 850 MHz (the PCS band) or about 1900 MHz (the cell band). The peak power of a cellphone's transmission is about 2 Watts, so the amount it broadcasts into your head isn't more than about 1 Watt.
There are three potential concerns which make cellphones potential health risks: heat, chemical damage, and brain interference. Let's assess each potential risk.
Of Cellphones and Sunbeams
It turns out many of you non-hat wearers heat your head with electromagnetic radiation on a daily basis. A fusion-powered blob of gases over 100 million km away bakes your melon with an intensity of over 1000 Watts per square meter on a cloudless day. If the cross-sectional area of your head is about 3% of a square meter, that means the sun warms your head with over 30 times the power intensity of a cellphone. If cellphone-related heat can cause damage, so can the sun.
Mutagenic Conversations?
The next most commonly-feared etiology of cellphone-related cancer is through the photons in the microwaves causing genetic damage by affecting our DNA. However, the energy in even the highest-energy cellphone photons is far too low: a 1900 MHz photon has an energy of less than 8 microelectronvolts: about 100 000 times less energetic than the kind of photon needed to make any chemical change. At body temperature, random thermal fluctuations give every molecule constant kicks of over 25 millielectron volts: over 1000 times as powerful as a cellphone photon. No cellphone is going to turn you into a toxic avenger.
Nokia Mind Control?
I've seen one more way in which fear-mongers propose that cellphones could harm you:. They think it's possible that the pulses of electromagnetic energy could interfere with brain functions. It's true that neuroscientists use pulses of transcranial magnetic energy to temporarily (and, we hope, reversibly) poke an area of gray matter to try to figure out what it does. Could cellphones be doing the same?
Again, the relative magnitudes are way off: neuroscientists use field strengths around 10 Tesla, while cellphones typically have much smaller magnetic field strengths: around 50 Gauss or 5 mTesla (1 Tesla = 10 000 Gauss: one of those Metric System anomalies). Once again there's a yawning, factor-of-1000 gulf between the strength of a cellphone and the effect size needed to make worrying sane. It's even worse when you take into account the fact that the energy associated with a magnetic field goes as the square of the field strength, so it's more like a factor-of-1-million difference between what a cellphone is and what we'd worry about.
Epidemiology
By now, it shouldn't surprise you to find that the most extensive study done on cellphones (the Danish one I alluded to) "found no evidence for an association between tumor risk and cellular telephone use among either short-term or long-term users." The study followed 420 095 persons for up to 21 years each, and saw that cancer rates were not higher than among the population in general. Breath a sigh of relief, and don't believe the fear-mongers who say cellphones are risky.
What about studies which show a correlation between cancer and cellphone use? There's a dirty little secret in science called publication bias. In a nutshell, it's precisely those stories which seem to defy common thinking which seem most newsworthy, get the most press, and get published. In cases where there's a lot of public interest and attention, it's a good policy to disregard studies with small sample sizes, since there are probably 20 unpublished small studies with null results for every 1 study with a stunning effect that's significant at the 5% level.
Conclusions
I don't know that much about bees, but cellphones are safe to humans, provided that their attention isn't needed elsewhere and that it doesn't over-stress them to have a cellphone. It's not totally outrageous to guess bees might be confused by cellphones, since the Earth's magnetic field is only about 0.3 Gauss. I'm not an expert of bee navigation, but it shouldn't be to hard to experimentally verify the connection between active cellphones and bee death. In the meantime, color me skeptical, especially considering that the article repeats loony fears.
I was reading Digg today, which pointed me to an article speculating that cellphones are causing "colony collapse disorder," the name for an alarming phenomenon whereby the majority of honeybees in every colony are mysteriously disappearing. (By the way, this isn't jsut about the honey bees produce. The value of their crop pollination is in the billions per year; would anyone like to post a comment with a more exact figure?) The article sounded interesting until they went off the deep end by vilifying cellphones with a few cherry-picked debunked claims:
Chilling. Let's go into an account of how much damage a cellphone can do, and let me cite a few studies of my own.Evidence of dangers to people from mobile phones is increasing. But proof is still lacking, largely because many of the biggest perils, such as cancer, take decades to show up.
Most research on cancer has so far proved inconclusive. But an official Finnish study found that people who used the phones for more than 10 years were 40 per cent more likely to get a brain tumour on the same side as they held the handset.
Equally alarming, blue-chip Swedish research revealed that radiation from mobile phones killed off brain cells, suggesting that today's teenagers could go senile in the prime of their lives.
Traffic Dangers
We have lots of evidence that cellphones impair driving ability. A University of Utah study found that cellphone conversations impair about as much as a .08% blood alcohol content, the threshold for the legal drunk-driving limit in many North American states. The World Health Organization says talking on a cellphone while driving increases your risk of accidents by a factor of 3 to 4. Taking a 100-mile drive decreases your life expectancy on average by about one hour, i.e., it has and LED of one hour (see posts with the tags LED and EDD for more, or this one which introduces them). Talking on your cellphone bumps the LED up to three or four hours, meaning that the driving-related risk starts to overcome the old-age-related risk you'd incur anyways if you call people while driving.
Other than impairing driving ability (and repetitive stress injuries from thumb-typing), cellphones aren't going to hurt you. Let's take a look first at the physics of cellphones (which will show them to be benign) and then take a look at the epidemiology of cancer among cellphone users, citing the most thorough study ever done, which happens to be Danish (Long Live Fear-Dispelling Vikings!).
The Physics of Cellphones
Cellphones communicate by broadcasting microwaves to cell towers. They use one of two frequency ranges: either about 850 MHz (the PCS band) or about 1900 MHz (the cell band). The peak power of a cellphone's transmission is about 2 Watts, so the amount it broadcasts into your head isn't more than about 1 Watt.
There are three potential concerns which make cellphones potential health risks: heat, chemical damage, and brain interference. Let's assess each potential risk.
Of Cellphones and Sunbeams
It turns out many of you non-hat wearers heat your head with electromagnetic radiation on a daily basis. A fusion-powered blob of gases over 100 million km away bakes your melon with an intensity of over 1000 Watts per square meter on a cloudless day. If the cross-sectional area of your head is about 3% of a square meter, that means the sun warms your head with over 30 times the power intensity of a cellphone. If cellphone-related heat can cause damage, so can the sun.
Mutagenic Conversations?
The next most commonly-feared etiology of cellphone-related cancer is through the photons in the microwaves causing genetic damage by affecting our DNA. However, the energy in even the highest-energy cellphone photons is far too low: a 1900 MHz photon has an energy of less than 8 microelectronvolts: about 100 000 times less energetic than the kind of photon needed to make any chemical change. At body temperature, random thermal fluctuations give every molecule constant kicks of over 25 millielectron volts: over 1000 times as powerful as a cellphone photon. No cellphone is going to turn you into a toxic avenger.
Nokia Mind Control?
I've seen one more way in which fear-mongers propose that cellphones could harm you:. They think it's possible that the pulses of electromagnetic energy could interfere with brain functions. It's true that neuroscientists use pulses of transcranial magnetic energy to temporarily (and, we hope, reversibly) poke an area of gray matter to try to figure out what it does. Could cellphones be doing the same?
Again, the relative magnitudes are way off: neuroscientists use field strengths around 10 Tesla, while cellphones typically have much smaller magnetic field strengths: around 50 Gauss or 5 mTesla (1 Tesla = 10 000 Gauss: one of those Metric System anomalies). Once again there's a yawning, factor-of-1000 gulf between the strength of a cellphone and the effect size needed to make worrying sane. It's even worse when you take into account the fact that the energy associated with a magnetic field goes as the square of the field strength, so it's more like a factor-of-1-million difference between what a cellphone is and what we'd worry about.
Epidemiology
By now, it shouldn't surprise you to find that the most extensive study done on cellphones (the Danish one I alluded to) "found no evidence for an association between tumor risk and cellular telephone use among either short-term or long-term users." The study followed 420 095 persons for up to 21 years each, and saw that cancer rates were not higher than among the population in general. Breath a sigh of relief, and don't believe the fear-mongers who say cellphones are risky.
What about studies which show a correlation between cancer and cellphone use? There's a dirty little secret in science called publication bias. In a nutshell, it's precisely those stories which seem to defy common thinking which seem most newsworthy, get the most press, and get published. In cases where there's a lot of public interest and attention, it's a good policy to disregard studies with small sample sizes, since there are probably 20 unpublished small studies with null results for every 1 study with a stunning effect that's significant at the 5% level.
Conclusions
I don't know that much about bees, but cellphones are safe to humans, provided that their attention isn't needed elsewhere and that it doesn't over-stress them to have a cellphone. It's not totally outrageous to guess bees might be confused by cellphones, since the Earth's magnetic field is only about 0.3 Gauss. I'm not an expert of bee navigation, but it shouldn't be to hard to experimentally verify the connection between active cellphones and bee death. In the meantime, color me skeptical, especially considering that the article repeats loony fears.
Monday, April 9, 2007
Coöperative Democracy
Greetings, citizens.
Today I'm going to talk about ways in which we can improve democracy by changing the way in which we vote. Specifically I'm going to point out a few flaws in the widespread "plurality" system of voting, then I'm going to promote an alternative: approval voting.
What's Broken?
Before I go into my proposed changes, let me persuade you that there is room for improvement in the current system, especially vis-a-vis vote splitting. Vote splitting is what allowed the Nazi party to take power in Germany, and what let LePen into the final round of the 2002 French presidential elections. In both cases, the majority of the electorate detested the above ultra-conservatives, but since the right was united their total vote count was large enough to give them disproportional power.
A similar situation happened in the 2006 Canadian federal election, where only 36% of Canadians voted for the Conservatives, but since there is only one significant right wing party and there are three left-wing parties the Conservatives took power.
Problems with Plurality?
Vote-splitting is a problem in any democracy where the winner is determined by a plurality, or first-past-the-post system. Since the candidate with the most people voting for them is the one that wins, one of the most tragic ways to lose a pluralist election is to have many good politicians agree with you. I suppose in some ways the threat of splitting the vote might be a good thing in that it encourages politicians with similar platforms to amalgamate, fostering simplicity; but this small good in my opinion is outweighed by occasionally electing extremist governments which don't reflect the will of the people.
However, given that there are going to be a few maverick politicos who refuse to take up another's banner, the reasonable parts of the political spectrum will become crowded with egotists whose best chance at getting ahead is by sabotaging their fellows' images, and politicians adopting unreasonable views will enjoy unsplit votes and my be able to wield disproportionate power.
The poor voter's only recourse is to vote tactically: to give power to a lesser evil to defeat a greater evil. Such tactical voting systems result in meta-stable power structures with all the appeal of a prisoner's dilemma; let's look for something better.
Alternative 1: Approval Voting
My favorite alternative to a plurality system is approval voting. Under approval voting, each voter is given a list of checkboxes next to the names of each candidate. She checks off each candidate which meets her approval. The candidate with the highest approval rating wins the election.
Under this system, one can check just one box (if one approves of just one party), one can check a whole range of boxes corresponding to parties that are all compatible with the voter's views (perhaps along with a few one-issue parties to show support without throwing away a vote), or one can officially show disgust with the entire slate by leaving all boxes empty, indicating that the voter trusts none of the meager offerings this year.
Aside from solving the vote-splitting catastrophe, approval voting discourages mud-slinging among politicians, since discrediting others doesn't behoove politicians as much. Politicians can build platforms partially atop of one another: one could declare "my views are similar to the popular Mrs. X's (which are reasonable and well-considered), with the distinction that I would pander less to the unions than she" without fearing vote-splitting disaster. It would finally make reason and politics more miscible than oil and water: it would be a genuinely good strategy to adopt good policies regardless of "whose turf" they belong to.
It goes without saying that the two-party fiasco of the United States (which in my opinion has done harm by dividing the nation into tribes) could be instantaneously remedied by approval voting: if any new party could win power through good centrist policy with bipartisan support, I would expect a lot less extremism in American politics. Sane policy is awaiting your approval.
Alternative 2: Borda Count
Another vote-counting system is to allow each voter to rank each candidate, potentially letting unranked candidates tie for last. While this method seems appealing since it allows voters to give more information than even approval voting, it suffers from complexity and from odd consequences of tactical voting, as will be described.
Assume that, like any current ballot, a Borda-count ballot has a few big shot politicians and alongside a motley crew of amateurs. The tactical voter who wants to maximize her chosen big shot over the other predominant big shot will rank the former first and the latter last, filling in the middle positions with dimwits whom everyone knows won't get elected. The trouble is: I don't trust voters to rank the filler politicians randomly: perhaps there will be a tendency to rank the unknowns from #2 at the top of the page through #(n-1) at the bottom. This will mean whichever dimwit #1 at the top of the ballot (who will be ranked #2 by pretty much every tactical voter) will have a higher voting score than either of the two leading choices (who will get a roughly 50-50 split between first and last place from each tactical voter) and we'll elect only dimwits. That would be horrible!
Borda himself acknowledged the Borda count's vulnerability to tactical voting. From Wikipedia (so beware the source):
Conclusions
So far, my favorite system of vote counting is approval voting. It gives everybody an equal say, remedies vote-splitting, is invulnerable to tactical voters and encourages collaboration among politicians. Let's start adopting this simple yet powerful method for expressing one's political opinion, and let the reasonable, collaborative, centrist policy begin.
PS: More on Voting Systems
Alas, there is no one perfect method of voting which allows voters to express a nuanced set of preferences, and always elects the best candidate under any criterion. Mathematicians have thus gone berserk in their search for esoteric methods for determining who gets elected; each one is "optimal" for a given view of what should be. If you're interested in the diversity of vote counting systems out there, take a look at the following Wikipedia articles (I'm just amazed by how many there are):
Today I'm going to talk about ways in which we can improve democracy by changing the way in which we vote. Specifically I'm going to point out a few flaws in the widespread "plurality" system of voting, then I'm going to promote an alternative: approval voting.
What's Broken?
Before I go into my proposed changes, let me persuade you that there is room for improvement in the current system, especially vis-a-vis vote splitting. Vote splitting is what allowed the Nazi party to take power in Germany, and what let LePen into the final round of the 2002 French presidential elections. In both cases, the majority of the electorate detested the above ultra-conservatives, but since the right was united their total vote count was large enough to give them disproportional power.
A similar situation happened in the 2006 Canadian federal election, where only 36% of Canadians voted for the Conservatives, but since there is only one significant right wing party and there are three left-wing parties the Conservatives took power.
Problems with Plurality?
Vote-splitting is a problem in any democracy where the winner is determined by a plurality, or first-past-the-post system. Since the candidate with the most people voting for them is the one that wins, one of the most tragic ways to lose a pluralist election is to have many good politicians agree with you. I suppose in some ways the threat of splitting the vote might be a good thing in that it encourages politicians with similar platforms to amalgamate, fostering simplicity; but this small good in my opinion is outweighed by occasionally electing extremist governments which don't reflect the will of the people.
However, given that there are going to be a few maverick politicos who refuse to take up another's banner, the reasonable parts of the political spectrum will become crowded with egotists whose best chance at getting ahead is by sabotaging their fellows' images, and politicians adopting unreasonable views will enjoy unsplit votes and my be able to wield disproportionate power.
The poor voter's only recourse is to vote tactically: to give power to a lesser evil to defeat a greater evil. Such tactical voting systems result in meta-stable power structures with all the appeal of a prisoner's dilemma; let's look for something better.
Alternative 1: Approval Voting
My favorite alternative to a plurality system is approval voting. Under approval voting, each voter is given a list of checkboxes next to the names of each candidate. She checks off each candidate which meets her approval. The candidate with the highest approval rating wins the election.
Under this system, one can check just one box (if one approves of just one party), one can check a whole range of boxes corresponding to parties that are all compatible with the voter's views (perhaps along with a few one-issue parties to show support without throwing away a vote), or one can officially show disgust with the entire slate by leaving all boxes empty, indicating that the voter trusts none of the meager offerings this year.
Aside from solving the vote-splitting catastrophe, approval voting discourages mud-slinging among politicians, since discrediting others doesn't behoove politicians as much. Politicians can build platforms partially atop of one another: one could declare "my views are similar to the popular Mrs. X's (which are reasonable and well-considered), with the distinction that I would pander less to the unions than she" without fearing vote-splitting disaster. It would finally make reason and politics more miscible than oil and water: it would be a genuinely good strategy to adopt good policies regardless of "whose turf" they belong to.
It goes without saying that the two-party fiasco of the United States (which in my opinion has done harm by dividing the nation into tribes) could be instantaneously remedied by approval voting: if any new party could win power through good centrist policy with bipartisan support, I would expect a lot less extremism in American politics. Sane policy is awaiting your approval.
Alternative 2: Borda Count
Another vote-counting system is to allow each voter to rank each candidate, potentially letting unranked candidates tie for last. While this method seems appealing since it allows voters to give more information than even approval voting, it suffers from complexity and from odd consequences of tactical voting, as will be described.
Assume that, like any current ballot, a Borda-count ballot has a few big shot politicians and alongside a motley crew of amateurs. The tactical voter who wants to maximize her chosen big shot over the other predominant big shot will rank the former first and the latter last, filling in the middle positions with dimwits whom everyone knows won't get elected. The trouble is: I don't trust voters to rank the filler politicians randomly: perhaps there will be a tendency to rank the unknowns from #2 at the top of the page through #(n-1) at the bottom. This will mean whichever dimwit #1 at the top of the ballot (who will be ranked #2 by pretty much every tactical voter) will have a higher voting score than either of the two leading choices (who will get a roughly 50-50 split between first and last place from each tactical voter) and we'll elect only dimwits. That would be horrible!
Borda himself acknowledged the Borda count's vulnerability to tactical voting. From Wikipedia (so beware the source):
In response to the issue of strategic manipulation in the Borda count, M. de Borda said "My scheme is only intended for honest men".Let me know if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that there's no advantage to voting tactically in an approval voting system: if you don't like a candidate, there's never an incentive to endorse her, and if you do, you should always endorse her. The only potential for failure might happen if a few "single-issue" parties (like the marijuana party) get more approval than any other; if this is the case thought than the leading parties clearly have missed the wishes of the electorate and deserve what's coming to them.
Conclusions
So far, my favorite system of vote counting is approval voting. It gives everybody an equal say, remedies vote-splitting, is invulnerable to tactical voters and encourages collaboration among politicians. Let's start adopting this simple yet powerful method for expressing one's political opinion, and let the reasonable, collaborative, centrist policy begin.
PS: More on Voting Systems
Alas, there is no one perfect method of voting which allows voters to express a nuanced set of preferences, and always elects the best candidate under any criterion. Mathematicians have thus gone berserk in their search for esoteric methods for determining who gets elected; each one is "optimal" for a given view of what should be. If you're interested in the diversity of vote counting systems out there, take a look at the following Wikipedia articles (I'm just amazed by how many there are):
- Vote counting system
- Approval voting
- Bloc voting
- Borda count
- Condorcet method
- Coombs' method
- Copeland's method
- Cumulative voting
- D'Hondt method
- Droop Quota
- Dynamically Distributed Democracy
- Election threshold
- Hare Quota
- Highest averages method
- Instant-runoff voting
- Kemeny-Young method
- Largest remainder method
- Party list
- Plurality voting
- Preferential voting
- Proportional approval voting
- Range voting
- Ranked pairs
- Sainte-Laguë method
- Schulze method
- Single Transferable Vote
Monday, March 19, 2007
The Google Hype-Meter
Greetings, West Nile mosquito-swatters.
I hope that by now you will be familiar with my style of putting over-hyped risks in their place. But how do you determine how over-hyped a problem is? Today I'm going to introduce a new metric to assess how out-of-proportion a particular death threat is: the Google Hits per Annual Fatality or GHAF metric.
Google and Hype
First of all, let me admit that reducing such a nebulous idea as "hype" to a number is an inexact science at best. However, I happen to be an inexact scientist: the perfect blogger for the job.
The people who post web content are not representative of the human race as a whole, so if there's something which netizens preferentially talk about, Google is going to reflect that bias. However, in most cases this bias will distort reality by at most about a factor of 10, so any enormous differences in the whole-world hype devoted to certain risk factors should be also present in a subject's Internet chatter. Luckily, some small risks are so enormously exaggerated that even an inexact measure like the GHAF can find them with confidence.
Calculating the GHAF
So, if we're agreed that Google hits will approximate the amount of talk on a subject, we can divide the number of hits by the annual death rate of a scare to get the GHAF, a relative measure of how much that particular problem has been overblown. Let's take a look at a few real-world examples of the GHAF.
Raw Data
The GHAF hype metric has a huge variability. It is a few thousand time greater for West Nile in the US than for malaria in Africa. Working from the assumption that most human life should be treated with roughly the same degree of care, these wildly differing GHAFs indicate that we spend far too much time worrying about the wrong things. With the GHAF, we can measure just how skewed our fears are.
The above list is far from exhaustive; does anybody want to look into adding traffic deaths or killer bees? I've set up a wiki page to keep track of the GHAFs of various risks. Feel free to add to it!
In any case, there's a huge variation in how much hype a risk gets compared with the actual danger involved. I realize there are only so many articles one can read about a certain risk before becoming inured to it, so one would expect the GHAF to be lower for real risks as not as much press will go to the millionth victim as to the first. However, the number of Google hits a risk gets is not even an increasing function of associated body count, showing that our problems run deeper that just weariness over old news.
Conclusions
I've already introduced two new measures of danger, the life expectancy decrease (LED) and the equivalent driving distance (EDD). However, these measures only ask how dangerous an activity is; they do not report how much that danger has been magnified by the media. With the GHAF, we can quantify just how out-of-proportion the hype is around a certain fear, and perhaps allow this measure of exaggeration to shape policy.
I look forward to your additions to my wiki page. What will my intelligent readers discover?
I hope that by now you will be familiar with my style of putting over-hyped risks in their place. But how do you determine how over-hyped a problem is? Today I'm going to introduce a new metric to assess how out-of-proportion a particular death threat is: the Google Hits per Annual Fatality or GHAF metric.
Google and Hype
First of all, let me admit that reducing such a nebulous idea as "hype" to a number is an inexact science at best. However, I happen to be an inexact scientist: the perfect blogger for the job.
The people who post web content are not representative of the human race as a whole, so if there's something which netizens preferentially talk about, Google is going to reflect that bias. However, in most cases this bias will distort reality by at most about a factor of 10, so any enormous differences in the whole-world hype devoted to certain risk factors should be also present in a subject's Internet chatter. Luckily, some small risks are so enormously exaggerated that even an inexact measure like the GHAF can find them with confidence.
Calculating the GHAF
So, if we're agreed that Google hits will approximate the amount of talk on a subject, we can divide the number of hits by the annual death rate of a scare to get the GHAF, a relative measure of how much that particular problem has been overblown. Let's take a look at a few real-world examples of the GHAF.
Raw Data
- Malaria in Africa (GHAF = 1.5, 3 million Google hits [1] per approximately 2 million annual deaths [2])
- Cancer in the United States (GHAF = 94, 54 million hits [3] per 570 280 annual deaths: page 1 of [4], .pdf warning: 6 MB)
- West Nile Virus in the United States (GHAF = 5 500, 911 000 hits [5] per 165 annual deaths [6])
- vCJD, the human disease from eating a mad cow, worldwide (GHAF = 81 000, 1.4 million hits [7] for 139 cases over 8 years [8] - see my blog entry for an editorial[9])
- Alligator Attacks in the United States (GHAF = 293 000, 461 000 hits [10] per 1.57 annual deaths [11] - possibly the fatality rate is underestimated by this list and possibly a lot of the Google hits came from attacks on non-human targets)
The GHAF hype metric has a huge variability. It is a few thousand time greater for West Nile in the US than for malaria in Africa. Working from the assumption that most human life should be treated with roughly the same degree of care, these wildly differing GHAFs indicate that we spend far too much time worrying about the wrong things. With the GHAF, we can measure just how skewed our fears are.
The above list is far from exhaustive; does anybody want to look into adding traffic deaths or killer bees? I've set up a wiki page to keep track of the GHAFs of various risks. Feel free to add to it!
In any case, there's a huge variation in how much hype a risk gets compared with the actual danger involved. I realize there are only so many articles one can read about a certain risk before becoming inured to it, so one would expect the GHAF to be lower for real risks as not as much press will go to the millionth victim as to the first. However, the number of Google hits a risk gets is not even an increasing function of associated body count, showing that our problems run deeper that just weariness over old news.
Conclusions
I've already introduced two new measures of danger, the life expectancy decrease (LED) and the equivalent driving distance (EDD). However, these measures only ask how dangerous an activity is; they do not report how much that danger has been magnified by the media. With the GHAF, we can quantify just how out-of-proportion the hype is around a certain fear, and perhaps allow this measure of exaggeration to shape policy.
I look forward to your additions to my wiki page. What will my intelligent readers discover?
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Beam Me Up to Heaven?
Greetings, friends.
You've heard a lot about risk evaluation so far from me, like why drinking a 2L bottle of soda is millions of times more dangerous than getting your head blown off while twisting the pressurized cap. Today I'm going to tackle an interesting problem in (soon-to-be-)practical philosophy: the ethics of teleportation. If I've done my job right, at the end of this post you will either fear death and teleportation, just teleportation, or neither of them.
What is Teleportation?
First, let me be specific as to what I mean by teleportation. The (now) hypothetical teleportation machine I'm going to talk about would work like this. You walk into a room, and your body is deconstructed while it's scanned, such that the position and composition of every molecule in you body is recorded. (I think that a fair amount of lossy compression would still have the subject live on the other side. Imagine a world with different transport ticket classes: First Class teleportation introducing relatively little distortion by using a full Yottabyte to store your body's information, but Coach using less bandwidth but leaving you feeling not quite right - like a low-bitrate MP3.) On the other side of the world, or years in the future (if you trust the data medium you're recorded on) your body is reconstructed, and you walk away fresh as a daisy.
Teleportation vs. Death
Here's the catch. How confident are you that walking into a room and getting taken apart molecule-by-molecule would feel any better because a suitable (even a perfect) copy of you walks out the door of a machine somewhere else? Suppose other people start teleporting and claim they didn't feel a thing wrong. Is that really any consolation? A perfect copy of my friend would behave just like a friend that didn't feel anything wrong. But how do I know that my actual friend didn't just subjectively die in the scanning room?
Most of my friends consider my reluctance about teleporting a little on the quirky side. They use it as evidence that I believe in a soul, which wouldn't get passed on to the copy stepping out of the teleport receiver. Even some of my friends who declare to believe in souls wouldn't mind being teleported as long as people did it all the time without any obvious side effects. (Maybe that makes sense. If souls don't have physical locations, why would it matter if the physical location of the block of matter "in contact with" the soul were to change locations?) Still, I think that getting my molecules ripped apart would feel pretty much the same regardless of the quality of the clone of me which stepped out into another time and place.
Death as Teleportation
If you agree with pretty much everyone I've talked to, you'd say I'd be kooky to eschew teleportation because of its potential metaphysical consequences. If so, you shouldn't be afraid of dying either. Here's why: parallel universes are very likely. Check out the Wikipedia entry on "scientific" multiverses. There are tons of reasons to think that the sum total of reality is much bigger than the observable universe. Here are some reasons to suspect "reality" has more than what we could ever possibly observe:
Copies and Immortality
It's extremely likely that not only do perfect copies of you exist somewhere, but also that every reasonable permutation of matter exists, including ones where you have e.g. different social status. If you're not squeamish about teleportation and you bought my arguments about the plurality of possible existences, then you have to believe that even if "Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men" disassemble you as thoroughly as a teleporter scanner would, "One short sleepe past" you'd wake in a reality where everything was the same, except some ridiculous circumstance would conspire to make you actually survive.
If the "many worlds" theory is correct, you wouldn't even have to be physically transported to another place as part of the immortality process. Check out the thought behind quantum immortality if you're interested in more on this.
Practical Issue: Subjectivity/Objectivity Mismatch
I'm more skeptical about my subjectivity being transported with my copy than I am about the plurality of the universe. Luckily, if multiverse #3 holds, I don't have to worry about the teleporter/subjectivity problem at all.
As long as the "many worlds" idea is correct, I think I'd be able to experimentally verify my reluctance to teleport myself, but only subjectively. That's because if I tried to teleport myself, no matter how hard I tried, my subjectivity would be forced down the quantum branches in the universe into realities where I wasn't able to be destructively scanned due to a freak occurrence. This will happed subjectively to everyone, but all of your friends will be able to teleport just fine from your point of view, just like it's possible for your friends to die in your world even though you might subjectively be immortal.
You May Be the Only Person Who Cannot Teleport in the Future
Therefore, let me warn every one of you: there's a chance we're living in a multiverse where nobody will ever be able to teleport subjectively, because every time they try their subjectivity will be forced down some bizarre path where they didn't actually get killed. If you find yourself unable to teleport in the future even after having teleported many times before, it will mean "you" were born a clone from a teleportation machine, and your subjectivity won't be able to fit through a teleportation machine any more easily than a teleportation virgin's.
Conclusions
Be prepared for a future where all your friends can teleport without issues, but you are never able to. Be prepared for finding that teleportation doesn't work for you even if it has in the past: this just means your subjectivity started when you stepped out of a teleport receiver.
In either case, you will have evidence of the "many worlds" interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, but you'll never be able to objectively prove it. My advice: keep quiet about it, or they'll think you're crazy. Maybe if you turn Amish you'll be able to hide your existential conundrum.
I'll give a closing note to financial houses. I'm interested in buying a "solipsism fund:" a financial instrument where lots of us (like, millions of us) pay into a pot, and the people surviving split the interest on this cash every year they live. If we are all subjectively immortal, there's no better investment. And no, I don't want a fixed stipend for the rest of my life - I want to be filthy rich if I have to live to be as old as the Wandering Jew. PS - please keep the recipient list anonymous until only I am left, so that others don't have an incentive to do away with me early.
You've heard a lot about risk evaluation so far from me, like why drinking a 2L bottle of soda is millions of times more dangerous than getting your head blown off while twisting the pressurized cap. Today I'm going to tackle an interesting problem in (soon-to-be-)practical philosophy: the ethics of teleportation. If I've done my job right, at the end of this post you will either fear death and teleportation, just teleportation, or neither of them.
What is Teleportation?
First, let me be specific as to what I mean by teleportation. The (now) hypothetical teleportation machine I'm going to talk about would work like this. You walk into a room, and your body is deconstructed while it's scanned, such that the position and composition of every molecule in you body is recorded. (I think that a fair amount of lossy compression would still have the subject live on the other side. Imagine a world with different transport ticket classes: First Class teleportation introducing relatively little distortion by using a full Yottabyte to store your body's information, but Coach using less bandwidth but leaving you feeling not quite right - like a low-bitrate MP3.) On the other side of the world, or years in the future (if you trust the data medium you're recorded on) your body is reconstructed, and you walk away fresh as a daisy.
Teleportation vs. Death
Here's the catch. How confident are you that walking into a room and getting taken apart molecule-by-molecule would feel any better because a suitable (even a perfect) copy of you walks out the door of a machine somewhere else? Suppose other people start teleporting and claim they didn't feel a thing wrong. Is that really any consolation? A perfect copy of my friend would behave just like a friend that didn't feel anything wrong. But how do I know that my actual friend didn't just subjectively die in the scanning room?
Most of my friends consider my reluctance about teleporting a little on the quirky side. They use it as evidence that I believe in a soul, which wouldn't get passed on to the copy stepping out of the teleport receiver. Even some of my friends who declare to believe in souls wouldn't mind being teleported as long as people did it all the time without any obvious side effects. (Maybe that makes sense. If souls don't have physical locations, why would it matter if the physical location of the block of matter "in contact with" the soul were to change locations?) Still, I think that getting my molecules ripped apart would feel pretty much the same regardless of the quality of the clone of me which stepped out into another time and place.
Death as Teleportation
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice [....]"-- John Donne, Meditation XVII
"Soon, some by teleportation. The 'better language' has me in Costa Rica right now."-- Me
If you agree with pretty much everyone I've talked to, you'd say I'd be kooky to eschew teleportation because of its potential metaphysical consequences. If so, you shouldn't be afraid of dying either. Here's why: parallel universes are very likely. Check out the Wikipedia entry on "scientific" multiverses. There are tons of reasons to think that the sum total of reality is much bigger than the observable universe. Here are some reasons to suspect "reality" has more than what we could ever possibly observe:
- Space is big. We don't really know how big it is - but if it's at least 10^10^29 units big (What really kills me is that when you do orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude, the "units" could be 1 femptometer or 13.7 billion light years, and it wouldn't make a difference to the "29" part! If you use units 10^80 times bigger, you'd change the exponent from 10^29 to (10^29) + 80: insignificant.), then it's likely that there's an exact copy of you somewhere out there, given the number of possible arrangements of atoms in a universe 13.7 billion light-years across (which is all you can see at this point, so the seperate universes would be effectively identical). Because of quantum fluctuations these universes would diverge, but if space is at least 10^10^29 big, there would always be some universe out there identical to ours in every way.
- Baby universes might exist. If universes typically aren't that big, you might still have copies. Some physicists think that some universes constantly spawn children universes (here "universe" means contiguous volume of space), resulting in an exponential growth in the total possibilities explored by reality. In this case, you're guaranteed to have an exponentially-increasing number of exact copies of yourself elsewhere. You might not be able to reach these copies even in principal, but they would still exist.
- The "Many-Worlds" interpretation of Quantum Mechanics might be correct. You might have heard that making a measurement of a particle changes that particle in a fundamental way. Quantum computers are hard to make because to make a big one, you have to carefully avoid measuring anything while the computations are running. In this case, "measuring" doesn't mean "recording the measurement," it just means letting some information about the quantum computer's state influence the outside world. But, what counts as "outside" and "inside"? Nature doesn't draw a boundary around the quantum computational mechanism, saying "OK, you particles can interact with all particles in the quantum computer, but as soon as you interact with those particles in the computer case, the show's over." If you assume there's only one reality, you have to conclude that there's something special about our minds that collapses possibilities: whenever information about the state of a quantum computer leaks out into the world which could potentially be observed by a mind, the quantum possibilities collapse, and you're left with a classically-behaving system. (Alternatively, some physicists propose that large enough quantum systems spontaneously de-cohere with no mind needed, but it's not clear how "large enough" should be so defined yet. Every experiment done so far has the definition of "large enough" coincide exactly with "big enough to contain a mind.") If you find it hard to swallow that the atoms making up your mind have special "waveform-collapsing" powers, an appealing alternative is the "many worlds" interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, which suggests that possibilities never collapse, they just multiply. In this case, reality always branches whenever a particle makes a quantum decision. Reality always branches so that what you observe is consistent with the branch you took, which is why it appears that you collapse possibilities through observation: you're just forced to go along with a single outcome. So, if a particle in a superposition state decides to be spin-up or spin-down and you interact with it, you will be split into two and exist in two different non-interacting worlds: one where you observed the particle to be spin-down and one spin-up. Since quantum interactions happen all the time, the "many" in "many worlds" in like the "big" in "big bang": a serious understatement. There are so many exact copies of you floating around, it's ridiculous.
Copies and Immortality
Death be not proud, though some have called thee--John Donne, Holy Sonnet X
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
[....]
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.
It's extremely likely that not only do perfect copies of you exist somewhere, but also that every reasonable permutation of matter exists, including ones where you have e.g. different social status. If you're not squeamish about teleportation and you bought my arguments about the plurality of possible existences, then you have to believe that even if "Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men" disassemble you as thoroughly as a teleporter scanner would, "One short sleepe past" you'd wake in a reality where everything was the same, except some ridiculous circumstance would conspire to make you actually survive.
If the "many worlds" theory is correct, you wouldn't even have to be physically transported to another place as part of the immortality process. Check out the thought behind quantum immortality if you're interested in more on this.
Practical Issue: Subjectivity/Objectivity Mismatch
I'm more skeptical about my subjectivity being transported with my copy than I am about the plurality of the universe. Luckily, if multiverse #3 holds, I don't have to worry about the teleporter/subjectivity problem at all.
As long as the "many worlds" idea is correct, I think I'd be able to experimentally verify my reluctance to teleport myself, but only subjectively. That's because if I tried to teleport myself, no matter how hard I tried, my subjectivity would be forced down the quantum branches in the universe into realities where I wasn't able to be destructively scanned due to a freak occurrence. This will happed subjectively to everyone, but all of your friends will be able to teleport just fine from your point of view, just like it's possible for your friends to die in your world even though you might subjectively be immortal.
You May Be the Only Person Who Cannot Teleport in the Future
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,-- Rudyard Kipling, If -
But make allowance for their doubting too:
Therefore, let me warn every one of you: there's a chance we're living in a multiverse where nobody will ever be able to teleport subjectively, because every time they try their subjectivity will be forced down some bizarre path where they didn't actually get killed. If you find yourself unable to teleport in the future even after having teleported many times before, it will mean "you" were born a clone from a teleportation machine, and your subjectivity won't be able to fit through a teleportation machine any more easily than a teleportation virgin's.
Conclusions
Be prepared for a future where all your friends can teleport without issues, but you are never able to. Be prepared for finding that teleportation doesn't work for you even if it has in the past: this just means your subjectivity started when you stepped out of a teleport receiver.
In either case, you will have evidence of the "many worlds" interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, but you'll never be able to objectively prove it. My advice: keep quiet about it, or they'll think you're crazy. Maybe if you turn Amish you'll be able to hide your existential conundrum.
I'll give a closing note to financial houses. I'm interested in buying a "solipsism fund:" a financial instrument where lots of us (like, millions of us) pay into a pot, and the people surviving split the interest on this cash every year they live. If we are all subjectively immortal, there's no better investment. And no, I don't want a fixed stipend for the rest of my life - I want to be filthy rich if I have to live to be as old as the Wandering Jew. PS - please keep the recipient list anonymous until only I am left, so that others don't have an incentive to do away with me early.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Making Future-Proof Policy
Greetings, fellow nerds.
Today I'm going to address an emerging problem for policy-makers: how to exploit all the latest tech without getting bogged down in implementation details. I'm going to make the case that governments should adopt an adjudicating rather than a micro-managing role in some kinds of service provision.
Today's Tech is a Moving Target
Ours is an age of innovation. The rate of innovation has never been so fast. There's a yawning gap between the cutting edge of (especially) information technology and typical technology usage. As tech speeds up, I see this problem getting worse, not better. Do we want to perpetually wait around for bright ideas to crawl their way through the legislature? Or, do we want an adaptive system where better solutions to public problems can be implemented and rewarded instantaneously? How would such an unregulated system work?
Examples: Road Construction and Power Distribution
I've already given an outline on how we could get the private sector to automatically implement any useful tech in terms of road durability and safety in the form of bonds which annually pay the holder an amount proportional to the good that was done to the community. See my 21st century capitalism post at the bottom for more details.
I'm going to argue that we should trade in our monopsony/monopoly electrical power distribution system for a free market system with fluctuating prices for the same reason. As soon as a new gizmo which does things better gets invented, you should be able to just plug the sucker in and start making cash.
Case in Point: Cold Dutch Ideas
Recently, a Dutch research agency suggested that refrigeration warehouses should turn off their refrigerators during the day (nature article and ZDNet summary) in an idea called "night wind". Excess wind power is generated at night and might get wasted if nobody used it. Since it's OK for some refrigerated goods to vary in temperature a couple of degrees, you would let your warehouse warm up a bit during the day, but get cooled right off at night using green power through a grid that didn't happen to be at peak.
Let's review some of the steps you'd need to go through to put this idea into practice given the current power system.
I think letting the price of power float is a much better idea, so long as any approved entity can buy or sell energy to the grid. We already have "time of use" power meters which record the time of day each kWh of energy was used. Usually, energy at peak hours costs a high fixed rate while energy at off-peak hours is much less expensive - often less than half as costly.
Suppose we took the time-of-day concept one step farther and let electrical power be traded like any other commodity. Then, the steps needed to get warehouses to take advantage of extra power would be:
Free Market Benefits
There are six benefits to this system:
Conclusions
A market-based power-distribution system has the advantage of instantaneously adding incentives exactly where they would be with an ideal policy system. There would be no lumbering lag between technological innovation and implementation: if it will make money, do it.
Ensuring that financial incentives are aligned with the good of humanity is what 21st century capitalism is all about. Policies where every party has the same goals makes us work together to the benefit of all, harnessing our uniquely human gift of capitalism to do good.
Today I'm going to address an emerging problem for policy-makers: how to exploit all the latest tech without getting bogged down in implementation details. I'm going to make the case that governments should adopt an adjudicating rather than a micro-managing role in some kinds of service provision.
Today's Tech is a Moving Target
Ours is an age of innovation. The rate of innovation has never been so fast. There's a yawning gap between the cutting edge of (especially) information technology and typical technology usage. As tech speeds up, I see this problem getting worse, not better. Do we want to perpetually wait around for bright ideas to crawl their way through the legislature? Or, do we want an adaptive system where better solutions to public problems can be implemented and rewarded instantaneously? How would such an unregulated system work?
Examples: Road Construction and Power Distribution
I've already given an outline on how we could get the private sector to automatically implement any useful tech in terms of road durability and safety in the form of bonds which annually pay the holder an amount proportional to the good that was done to the community. See my 21st century capitalism post at the bottom for more details.
I'm going to argue that we should trade in our monopsony/monopoly electrical power distribution system for a free market system with fluctuating prices for the same reason. As soon as a new gizmo which does things better gets invented, you should be able to just plug the sucker in and start making cash.
Case in Point: Cold Dutch Ideas
Recently, a Dutch research agency suggested that refrigeration warehouses should turn off their refrigerators during the day (nature article and ZDNet summary) in an idea called "night wind". Excess wind power is generated at night and might get wasted if nobody used it. Since it's OK for some refrigerated goods to vary in temperature a couple of degrees, you would let your warehouse warm up a bit during the day, but get cooled right off at night using green power through a grid that didn't happen to be at peak.
Let's review some of the steps you'd need to go through to put this idea into practice given the current power system.
- Some researcher thinks it up.
- Political will is mustered to look into the study.
- The specifics of which warehouses could use no diurnal refrigeration (possibly season-dependent) are compiled by a central authority.
- New regulations have to be developed and approved.
- Businesses are notified of discounts (or worse yet - income tax incentives) available for night-only refrigeration.
- Enforcers patrol the warehouses which signed up to make sure they don't use their refrigerators at night.
I think letting the price of power float is a much better idea, so long as any approved entity can buy or sell energy to the grid. We already have "time of use" power meters which record the time of day each kWh of energy was used. Usually, energy at peak hours costs a high fixed rate while energy at off-peak hours is much less expensive - often less than half as costly.
Suppose we took the time-of-day concept one step farther and let electrical power be traded like any other commodity. Then, the steps needed to get warehouses to take advantage of extra power would be:
- Somebody notices power is more expensive in the day, so she turns off the refrigerators during the day.
- Profit!!!
Free Market Benefits
There are six benefits to this system:
- Consumers would have financial incentives to cut back electricity usage when it's most scarce.
- The market would be able to decide exactly when price-dependent operation is worthwhile. Personally, I would say "no" to lightbulbs which dim when power is expensive, but "yes" to a fridge which works most when power is cheap, and "definitely" to a plug-in hybrid car which guzzled late-night 2¢-per-kWh hydro power. No extra laws needed!
- Power generation systems would be rewarded for producing electricity when it's most needed (potentially making solar power more financially-feasible in hot and sunny areas - solar needs all the financial help it can get).
- If somebody developed a large battery for leveling out peak usage, they would be able to make a quick buck right away. No need for proving the thing first: just buy low and sell high. No public investment risk would be involved, and peak prices would go down as peak supply increased, as if by magic.
- The financial incentives for long-distance power cables (such as HVDC) would be immediately apparent, and if they were economical, would be built quickly by profit-seeking companies.
- There would finally be some elasticity in demand for power. Trying to match generation with consumption is one of the biggest causes of damage to power equipment causing blackouts. If systems become over-stressed, prices would go up and everyone who had a smart air conditioner would instantaneously decrease the load on the critically-stressed system.
Conclusions
A market-based power-distribution system has the advantage of instantaneously adding incentives exactly where they would be with an ideal policy system. There would be no lumbering lag between technological innovation and implementation: if it will make money, do it.
Ensuring that financial incentives are aligned with the good of humanity is what 21st century capitalism is all about. Policies where every party has the same goals makes us work together to the benefit of all, harnessing our uniquely human gift of capitalism to do good.
Thursday, February 8, 2007
Mad about BSE
Greetings, fellow nerds.
This will be just a quick post about the relative risks between the "mad" and the "cow" in mad cow disease. In truth, the danger "tainted beef" poses to us is so small that as a consumer, you should forget about mad cow disease entirely: it's a waste of neurons. I'd even feel guilty making you read this post if it weren't for the fact that it exposes the sensationalism behind mad cow disease reporting.
Assessing Mad Cow Lethality
Mad cow disease in cows is called bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), and to date there have been at least 188515 reported cases of it worldwide. Common sense suggests that there are a whole lot of unreported cases too, considering the incentives farmers have to keep things quiet. The disease humans contract by eating infected cows is called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), and there have been a total of 170 confirmed cases worldwide. This number is probably not exaggerated (in fact the false positive rate for vCJD might be rather high), so you might think of 170/188515 (or about 900 per million) as an upper bound on the chances of contracting vCJD from eating an entire mad cow. However, probably not all of the 188515 cows were consumed in their entirety, which means that 900 per million might be a good ballpark figure as to the actual transmission rate from eating a whole cow.
If there are roughly 250 lbs of meat per cow, and if a typical beef meal has a quarter pound of meat, the odds of catching vCJD from a single meal of infected beef are 900 in a billion. When you consider that in the time period the 188515 cows were detected, the UK (the country hardest-hit by BSE) produced about 100 million cows, the risk of getting vCJD from eating one randomly-chosen UK beef meal is about 2 in a billion.
No Consensus among Academics
Why aren't I just reporting what the medical journals say about BSE to vCJD transmission rates? Because these estimates are all over the place. This study in the journal "Risk Analysis" by Eric Grist shows that there's nothing like consensus regarding the risk of a human contracting vCJD from eating an infected meal: published transmission rates vary from 0.9 in a billion to 7 in a thousand (c.f. my estimate of 900 per billion based on case numbers). The "Risk Analysis" article continues on to point out that the 7 in a thousand measure is obviously inconsistent with observed vCJD infection rates. (Thank you, Dr. Grist!) Perhaps even researchers are prone to sensationalism, especially if the said sensationalism might result in extra funding.
New Risk Metrics
We need better units for analyzing risks. It's hard to grok these raw numbers without an everyday context, so I'm going to introduce two new metrics:
Driving cars is a risky activity that most of us have come to terms with. Driving therefore provides an ideal reality check that helps us put new risks in perspective. This DOT report (page 8 of the .pdf) shows that there are about 14.6 vehicular fatalities for every billion miles traveled. The EDD of a new risk is the length of the car trip with the equivalent level of risk. For example, the EDD of the untested UK beef meal is (2 per billion * 1 billion miles / 14.6) = 720 feet; less than one Manhattan city block. Again, if the beef was in a fast food meal, the EDD from the extra calories is over 6400 miles: greater than the radius of the Earth.
Conclusion: Calories Matter More than Prions
If you spent more than 5 seconds worrying about contracting vCJD from beef, even at the height of the mad cow scare in the UK, you've been had. Also, if you think a fast food meal saves time, you should consider the 2.7-day lifespan decrease it brings (unless you're underweight - see my blog entry). It's true that the risk was unknown at the time (so maybe caution was indicated), but I'm getting sick of people worrying about false alarms, especially when there are more pressing issues which aren't getting enough attention.
I'm also disillusioned with the media, although I can see their point. Nobody will buy a paper saying "Get Off Your Butt and Get Healthy," but "New Plague Risk Sweeps the Nation: Will YOU Die?" has more zing.
As new crises come up in the news, I'm going to try to keep up with the LED and EDD metrics for them. With any luck, they'll catch on as popular reality checks for how risky a new terror actually is.
This will be just a quick post about the relative risks between the "mad" and the "cow" in mad cow disease. In truth, the danger "tainted beef" poses to us is so small that as a consumer, you should forget about mad cow disease entirely: it's a waste of neurons. I'd even feel guilty making you read this post if it weren't for the fact that it exposes the sensationalism behind mad cow disease reporting.
Assessing Mad Cow Lethality
Mad cow disease in cows is called bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), and to date there have been at least 188515 reported cases of it worldwide. Common sense suggests that there are a whole lot of unreported cases too, considering the incentives farmers have to keep things quiet. The disease humans contract by eating infected cows is called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD), and there have been a total of 170 confirmed cases worldwide. This number is probably not exaggerated (in fact the false positive rate for vCJD might be rather high), so you might think of 170/188515 (or about 900 per million) as an upper bound on the chances of contracting vCJD from eating an entire mad cow. However, probably not all of the 188515 cows were consumed in their entirety, which means that 900 per million might be a good ballpark figure as to the actual transmission rate from eating a whole cow.
If there are roughly 250 lbs of meat per cow, and if a typical beef meal has a quarter pound of meat, the odds of catching vCJD from a single meal of infected beef are 900 in a billion. When you consider that in the time period the 188515 cows were detected, the UK (the country hardest-hit by BSE) produced about 100 million cows, the risk of getting vCJD from eating one randomly-chosen UK beef meal is about 2 in a billion.
No Consensus among Academics
Why aren't I just reporting what the medical journals say about BSE to vCJD transmission rates? Because these estimates are all over the place. This study in the journal "Risk Analysis" by Eric Grist shows that there's nothing like consensus regarding the risk of a human contracting vCJD from eating an infected meal: published transmission rates vary from 0.9 in a billion to 7 in a thousand (c.f. my estimate of 900 per billion based on case numbers). The "Risk Analysis" article continues on to point out that the 7 in a thousand measure is obviously inconsistent with observed vCJD infection rates. (Thank you, Dr. Grist!) Perhaps even researchers are prone to sensationalism, especially if the said sensationalism might result in extra funding.
New Risk Metrics
We need better units for analyzing risks. It's hard to grok these raw numbers without an everyday context, so I'm going to introduce two new metrics:
- Life Expectancy Decrease (LED)
- Equivalent Driving Distance (EDD)
Driving cars is a risky activity that most of us have come to terms with. Driving therefore provides an ideal reality check that helps us put new risks in perspective. This DOT report (page 8 of the .pdf) shows that there are about 14.6 vehicular fatalities for every billion miles traveled. The EDD of a new risk is the length of the car trip with the equivalent level of risk. For example, the EDD of the untested UK beef meal is (2 per billion * 1 billion miles / 14.6) = 720 feet; less than one Manhattan city block. Again, if the beef was in a fast food meal, the EDD from the extra calories is over 6400 miles: greater than the radius of the Earth.
Conclusion: Calories Matter More than Prions
If you spent more than 5 seconds worrying about contracting vCJD from beef, even at the height of the mad cow scare in the UK, you've been had. Also, if you think a fast food meal saves time, you should consider the 2.7-day lifespan decrease it brings (unless you're underweight - see my blog entry). It's true that the risk was unknown at the time (so maybe caution was indicated), but I'm getting sick of people worrying about false alarms, especially when there are more pressing issues which aren't getting enough attention.
I'm also disillusioned with the media, although I can see their point. Nobody will buy a paper saying "Get Off Your Butt and Get Healthy," but "New Plague Risk Sweeps the Nation: Will YOU Die?" has more zing.
As new crises come up in the news, I'm going to try to keep up with the LED and EDD metrics for them. With any luck, they'll catch on as popular reality checks for how risky a new terror actually is.
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
21st Century Capitalism
Greetings, fellow nerds.
Today, we're going to examine a cornerstone of our western world: capitalism. I'm going to first give a brief history of capitalism starting from its evolutionary roots which set us aside from other animals, then I'll settle down into a rant about what I think is wrong with our current implementation of capitalism, and finally I'll give a few specific ideas about how we can tweak public policy so that capitalism achieves its goals better.
Capitalism and Humanity
Capitalism, and its relative friendship, set us apart from the majority of the animal kingdom. I don't believe that early humans were categorically smarter than other animals; even today's humans would have a hard time without cooperation.
Imagine if you were dropped on a desert island without having had any kind of education. (This is really impossible, because humans need nurturing to develop properly, but stay with me.) I doubt you'd be able to do better than the New Caledonian Crow, which can fashion its own tools (National Geographic video link) even out of metal (significant, since metal hasn't been around long enough to develop instincts involving it). You may counter by saying that this crow probably learned form another crow; that's exactly my point though. Individually, we're puny, but together we can build spaceships and make good cheese.
We specialize, we discuss things and we pass on knowledge to others. Why? It's more than having selfish genes; we are happy to forge friendships and help people totally unrelated to us. It's more than the herd mentality; I've met my share of loner humans, and besides I don't think sheep specialize. We share, lend things, trade, and educate each other because we live in a social construct where we can expect roughly the same degree of favors given to us as we give to others. (Doing nice things without reciprocity is a bad evolutionary strategy. However, the reciprocity needn't come directly from the people you help; doing good without expecting anything in return provides evidence to others that you're not a psychopath; see below.) In small groups, reciprocation is mediated by friendships, where we (usually) keep some sort of tally as to how nice the partner has been to us. We don't numerically quantify the favors our friends do us, although your typical human sees one-sided friendships as unhealthy, as if there must be some deeper, twisted exchange going on.
Genetically,We're All Cold, Calculating Psychopaths
I don't mean to suggest that we're consciously cold, calculating psychopaths who use each other for common gain. Our genes shape us to be good-natured towards each other, and it's a good thing too. Imagine if you knew somebody who appeared friendly most of the time but had a few Jekyll and Hyde moments. You'd steer clear of that shady character, and never want to engage in friendly behavior with them. Moreover, you'd tell your friends to watch out for the creep. As a result, being a conscious psychopath is a poor strategy in the long term, since others won't trust you enough to be friendly with them.
However, if our genes keep us behaving civilly towards one another all the time, we're less prone to the slip-ups that betray psychopaths. If we can demonstrate that we always help our friends, more people will want to be friends with us. We don't have to be cold, calculating psychopaths on a conscious level; our genes do a much more consistent job for us without our conscious minds having to bother.
Does understanding the selfish reasons behind friendship make one cynical about human nature? In some ways, knowing that we're hard-wired to do good does exactly the opposite. What do you think?
Money and Friendship
Money becomes necessary when the group of people you want to collaborate with becomes too large to develop a personal relationship with everyone. Money lets you have strangers do friendly things towards you, and to earn it you (usually) have to do friendly things to others. Money is impersonal, quantified, anonymous, fungible friendship, in the sense that it keeps track of the favors you're owed from any member of your trading community.
Capitalism and Human Evolution
Capitalism (if you extend its definition to include its instinctual analogue, friendship) is what lets us specialize, and gives us the incentive to work together to produce all those wonderful creations only large groups of (mostly) cooperative humans have been able to do. Without capitalism, we'd be brawling in the muck.
Language is also one of the fundamental abilities humans have that sets us apart from other animals (if, indeed, we are set apart as far as we style ourselves). Language, however, is mostly useless without capitalism (in the sense I've defined it). Without capitalism, you have no framework within which to trust the speaker. Without capitalism, you have no specialized skill set to describe to others. Without capitalism, you have little incentive to divulge information (especially information about food, mates, etc.), so you probably wouldn't bother. Therefore, language evolved to make us better capitalists; without capitalism language would confer little benefit. Either capitalism predated language in our history or there was so much synergy between the two that sorting out who came first is moot.
People also talk about the "theory of mind" as being important in human evolution. Having a theory of mind means that you try to predict what other entities around you know, often by putting yourself in their shoes and wondering what you would do in the same situation. Clearly, having a theory of mind is useful to both capitalists (for outfoxing your fellows) and speakers (so you can relate exactly what the listener needs to hear given what they already know), so it's no surprise that humans excel at guessing what others are thinking. However, having a theory of mind can also be useful in purely competitive (i.e., non-capitalist) contexts: ravens (but not most birds) notice when something (like food) captures the attention of other animals, and even the odd octopus has demonstrated that it is aware of how others see it. However, these animals lack capitalist tendencies (and therefore have no incentive to develop language), which are the true sine qua non of humanity in evolutionary contexts.
Current Issues with Capitalism
If capitalism really is the Promethean panacea I've proposed, why is everybody complaining about it? Let me list a few possibilities, and suggest a couple of remedies.
A few days ago, a total stranger picked a bunch of grapes for me. She set these grapes on a truck in Chile, which proceeded to a port where a monumental ocean-going vehicle waited. This floating steel mountain's sole purpose it to get things to where people want them; in my case it crossed the Equator and continued to an undisclosed location in North America. Total strangers unpacked the grapes, checked them for damage, and then placed them in a location where I could easily reach them for my culinary enjoyment.
By now, you've probably guessed what I'm up to: I've described what we'd consider to be the most mundane of commercial transactions: buying Chilean grapes. However, all the people involved in the chain of events (most of them total strangers to me) performed well-orchestrated diverse tasks for my benefit and enjoyment. If the context were anything but commercial, I would be touched to the brink of tears by the selfless generosity implicit in shipping me grapes out of season. Yet, somehow, in the monetized context of buying grapes from a local supermarket, it's unnatural to feel gratitude to the ship's crew or the shelf stocker - it's all in a day's work for them, and that somehow nullifies the joy I'd feel from having all these people slave away for my benefit.
Does it have to be that way? I'm going to give an exercise to my readers. For the next week, please try, at least once a day, to feel the connection you have to the millions of people who help you through the messy web of financial transactions we call an economy. Just for a split second, imagine that they were all doing you favors without letting money enter into the picture. Then open your eyes, and ask yourself if you really have to ignore the fact that all these people are conspiring to do you good just because you're paying them for it.
If your assignment rings false, we should try to find out why. I bet that financial transactions, by default, don't tickle the "friendship detector" circuits in our brains. Possibly we don't feel that friendship glow at the market because friendship with total strangers is impossible. It's also possible that brands have taken center stage in stores; give me a show of hands: who finds it easier to remember the brand of a product you bought than the name of the person who sold it to you? It's hard to feel friendship with a faceless company (although many people try).
Why not try to get to know the local shopkeepers a little by name? Maybe entering into a friendly relationship will give your instinctual friendship detector a face to latch onto, and maybe some of the gratitude you feel for the stuff you buy will brush off a little onto the human. You'll have your instinctual craving for mutual support reinforced at the same time as getting low, low prices. (Prices are ridiculously low because of specialization: imagine how hard it would be to travel on foot to Chile to grow your own February grapes.)
I promised this post would lead to practical suggestions; here's the first:
Quirky Staff, not Faceless Drones
I bet not many corporate executives are going to read this blog, but if they do (or if you know one - remember the power of talk), maybe suggest to them that instead of having sales-force employees follow the replaceable-parts model (i.e., interchangeable, single-faceted, lowest-common-denominator automata), they should show a little more personality, especially if they work in small enough units that customers might recognize them in subsequent visits.
I was a regular at Enterprise Rent-a-car until I got a car, and let me tell you, that company understands the benefit of human interfaces. Even though the company Enterprise might be a monolithic, faceless mega-corp, the employees I talked to at the branch were all charismatic, genuine-personality outgoing types. It's true that they were made to recite wrote-learned phone greetings, but other than that visits were all fun-loving chutzpah. I don't know exactly how to foster that kind of environment, but staid companies might do better if they encouraged their staff to be lively and idiosyncratic enough to make customers see them as people.
Marginally Legal, Inc.
Let's consider the second problem with contemporary capitalism: capitalist institutions often do things against the public good. I haven't mentioned law yet, but let me try to describe it as succinctly as possible. Capitalism:friendship :: law:enmity. I'm not suggesting that capitalism is intrinsically good and law bad. However, law and enmity both keep you from doing bad things to other humans; the former uses explicit codes while the latter uses the same level of thought as friendship (i.e. feelings of attraction/repulsion based on how you've been treated).
Enmity is the necessary mirror of friendship: it's the instinctual process which makes you try to be a pain to those who do you disservice. It's also a good game-theoretic strategy to demonstrate that pissing you off makes you a formidable enemy for an analogous reason to why psychopathy is a bad strategy: if people know you have a mean side, they'll try to avoid crossing you.
Law and capitalism are based on opposite reinforcement mechanisms, though, so when government meets private industry strange things can happen. Typically, corporations will do for themselves as much good as possible while narrowly avoiding getting sued. It's usually a good thing that laws change slowly: anarchy is just democracy with constant elections and one voter. However, when corporations can take advantage of this sluggishness through loopholes, capitalism can lead to technically-legal injustices. Moreover, using negative reinforcement (law) on entities that respond best to positive reinforcement (corporations) is a recipe for trouble: public-private incentives aren't going to magically align themselves without help.
There's a way to resolve the root problem caused by the negative/positive reinforcement mismatch between government and corporations:
If governments encourage companies to do as much good as possible, such that their rewards are proportional to the good they do, we can resolve the negative vs. positive reinforcement conundrum.
Practical Example: Road Bonds
Right now, governments set certain requirements in terms of what they would like in a road: they want it made of X material with Y safety feature, and it should last Z years. The company's reward is not affected at all by the value given to the public by the road, so long as the government's contractual expectations are met. If the road doesn't meet expectations, the government can try to sue the construction company for breach of contract: a long and inefficient process. Even in the best cases, the company has no incentive to build a road which will last longer than Z years (indeed they wouldn't want it to last any longer than Z years, since they're in the construction business), and all safety and durability research has to be done by the government body who decides the specifications of the road to build. Research isn't free, and it's hard for public institutions to make the correct call in terms of what research needs to be done.
Scrap the meets-contract/doesn't-meet-contract model. We can do better. Imagine an incentive system like this. When a government wants a road built, the incentive they offer is in the form of a transferable bond. The bond would pay the holder annually according to a formula like so:
Annually, pay $A if the road is usable, but deduct $B per cubic foot of pothole in the road (averaged over the year), $C per vehicle-hour of delay due to repair, $D for every human life lost on this road due to traffic accidents on this road and E% of the costs to drivers arising from damage to their vehicles due to accidents. If, in any year, the road is not usable or the net value of this payment in negative, this bond is valueless for all subsequent years.
Let the government choose B-E, and issue the bonds to the company which accepts the contract for the lowest value of A. Then, the private sector would be able to use new road durability and safety technologies where they make sense in terms of public benefit, without the government having to test any materials or make any policy regarding the specifics of what materials to use. In this case the lowest bidder won't be the one that does the crappiest acceptable job, it will be the one able to maximally align public and private interests, since it benefits exactly when the public does.
In turn, the construction company has the incentive to make durable, safe roads so as to collect the maximum reward from the bonds. By making the bonds transferable, companies good at construction (but maybe not inspection or maintenance) could sell the bonds to investment firms. The better the job they did the more money they could potentially make in the sale.
Governments are bad at details. If you reward results instead of punishing breeches, you align interests and harness the power of that uniquely human tool: capitalism.
Conclusions
Capitalism (including friendship) is more than just what makes being human so good; in many ways capitalism is the fundamental trait that distinguishes humans from other animals. It's vital for our policy makers to understand what capitalism really is and how to harness it to pull our 21st century in the right direction: towards the fellowship, harmony and cooperation. If you like the idea of aligning interests using rewards proportional to benefits, or if you like the concept of being friendly in your commercial transactions, try them out by all means, but also please talk about them. A million cocktail parties could change the fate of the world.
Today, we're going to examine a cornerstone of our western world: capitalism. I'm going to first give a brief history of capitalism starting from its evolutionary roots which set us aside from other animals, then I'll settle down into a rant about what I think is wrong with our current implementation of capitalism, and finally I'll give a few specific ideas about how we can tweak public policy so that capitalism achieves its goals better.
Capitalism and Humanity
Capitalism, and its relative friendship, set us apart from the majority of the animal kingdom. I don't believe that early humans were categorically smarter than other animals; even today's humans would have a hard time without cooperation.
Imagine if you were dropped on a desert island without having had any kind of education. (This is really impossible, because humans need nurturing to develop properly, but stay with me.) I doubt you'd be able to do better than the New Caledonian Crow, which can fashion its own tools (National Geographic video link) even out of metal (significant, since metal hasn't been around long enough to develop instincts involving it). You may counter by saying that this crow probably learned form another crow; that's exactly my point though. Individually, we're puny, but together we can build spaceships and make good cheese.
We specialize, we discuss things and we pass on knowledge to others. Why? It's more than having selfish genes; we are happy to forge friendships and help people totally unrelated to us. It's more than the herd mentality; I've met my share of loner humans, and besides I don't think sheep specialize. We share, lend things, trade, and educate each other because we live in a social construct where we can expect roughly the same degree of favors given to us as we give to others. (Doing nice things without reciprocity is a bad evolutionary strategy. However, the reciprocity needn't come directly from the people you help; doing good without expecting anything in return provides evidence to others that you're not a psychopath; see below.) In small groups, reciprocation is mediated by friendships, where we (usually) keep some sort of tally as to how nice the partner has been to us. We don't numerically quantify the favors our friends do us, although your typical human sees one-sided friendships as unhealthy, as if there must be some deeper, twisted exchange going on.
Genetically,We're All Cold, Calculating Psychopaths
I don't mean to suggest that we're consciously cold, calculating psychopaths who use each other for common gain. Our genes shape us to be good-natured towards each other, and it's a good thing too. Imagine if you knew somebody who appeared friendly most of the time but had a few Jekyll and Hyde moments. You'd steer clear of that shady character, and never want to engage in friendly behavior with them. Moreover, you'd tell your friends to watch out for the creep. As a result, being a conscious psychopath is a poor strategy in the long term, since others won't trust you enough to be friendly with them.
However, if our genes keep us behaving civilly towards one another all the time, we're less prone to the slip-ups that betray psychopaths. If we can demonstrate that we always help our friends, more people will want to be friends with us. We don't have to be cold, calculating psychopaths on a conscious level; our genes do a much more consistent job for us without our conscious minds having to bother.
Does understanding the selfish reasons behind friendship make one cynical about human nature? In some ways, knowing that we're hard-wired to do good does exactly the opposite. What do you think?
Money and Friendship
Money, you got lots of friends-Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jr., "God Bless the Child"
Money becomes necessary when the group of people you want to collaborate with becomes too large to develop a personal relationship with everyone. Money lets you have strangers do friendly things towards you, and to earn it you (usually) have to do friendly things to others. Money is impersonal, quantified, anonymous, fungible friendship, in the sense that it keeps track of the favors you're owed from any member of your trading community.
Capitalism and Human Evolution
Capitalism (if you extend its definition to include its instinctual analogue, friendship) is what lets us specialize, and gives us the incentive to work together to produce all those wonderful creations only large groups of (mostly) cooperative humans have been able to do. Without capitalism, we'd be brawling in the muck.
Language is also one of the fundamental abilities humans have that sets us apart from other animals (if, indeed, we are set apart as far as we style ourselves). Language, however, is mostly useless without capitalism (in the sense I've defined it). Without capitalism, you have no framework within which to trust the speaker. Without capitalism, you have no specialized skill set to describe to others. Without capitalism, you have little incentive to divulge information (especially information about food, mates, etc.), so you probably wouldn't bother. Therefore, language evolved to make us better capitalists; without capitalism language would confer little benefit. Either capitalism predated language in our history or there was so much synergy between the two that sorting out who came first is moot.
People also talk about the "theory of mind" as being important in human evolution. Having a theory of mind means that you try to predict what other entities around you know, often by putting yourself in their shoes and wondering what you would do in the same situation. Clearly, having a theory of mind is useful to both capitalists (for outfoxing your fellows) and speakers (so you can relate exactly what the listener needs to hear given what they already know), so it's no surprise that humans excel at guessing what others are thinking. However, having a theory of mind can also be useful in purely competitive (i.e., non-capitalist) contexts: ravens (but not most birds) notice when something (like food) captures the attention of other animals, and even the odd octopus has demonstrated that it is aware of how others see it. However, these animals lack capitalist tendencies (and therefore have no incentive to develop language), which are the true sine qua non of humanity in evolutionary contexts.
The Octopus: Not a Capitalist
Current Issues with Capitalism
If capitalism really is the Promethean panacea I've proposed, why is everybody complaining about it? Let me list a few possibilities, and suggest a couple of remedies.
- People don't feel the love when making economic transactions.
- Governments and capitalist institutions often do not share a common agenda.
A few days ago, a total stranger picked a bunch of grapes for me. She set these grapes on a truck in Chile, which proceeded to a port where a monumental ocean-going vehicle waited. This floating steel mountain's sole purpose it to get things to where people want them; in my case it crossed the Equator and continued to an undisclosed location in North America. Total strangers unpacked the grapes, checked them for damage, and then placed them in a location where I could easily reach them for my culinary enjoyment.
By now, you've probably guessed what I'm up to: I've described what we'd consider to be the most mundane of commercial transactions: buying Chilean grapes. However, all the people involved in the chain of events (most of them total strangers to me) performed well-orchestrated diverse tasks for my benefit and enjoyment. If the context were anything but commercial, I would be touched to the brink of tears by the selfless generosity implicit in shipping me grapes out of season. Yet, somehow, in the monetized context of buying grapes from a local supermarket, it's unnatural to feel gratitude to the ship's crew or the shelf stocker - it's all in a day's work for them, and that somehow nullifies the joy I'd feel from having all these people slave away for my benefit.
Does it have to be that way? I'm going to give an exercise to my readers. For the next week, please try, at least once a day, to feel the connection you have to the millions of people who help you through the messy web of financial transactions we call an economy. Just for a split second, imagine that they were all doing you favors without letting money enter into the picture. Then open your eyes, and ask yourself if you really have to ignore the fact that all these people are conspiring to do you good just because you're paying them for it.
If your assignment rings false, we should try to find out why. I bet that financial transactions, by default, don't tickle the "friendship detector" circuits in our brains. Possibly we don't feel that friendship glow at the market because friendship with total strangers is impossible. It's also possible that brands have taken center stage in stores; give me a show of hands: who finds it easier to remember the brand of a product you bought than the name of the person who sold it to you? It's hard to feel friendship with a faceless company (although many people try).
Why not try to get to know the local shopkeepers a little by name? Maybe entering into a friendly relationship will give your instinctual friendship detector a face to latch onto, and maybe some of the gratitude you feel for the stuff you buy will brush off a little onto the human. You'll have your instinctual craving for mutual support reinforced at the same time as getting low, low prices. (Prices are ridiculously low because of specialization: imagine how hard it would be to travel on foot to Chile to grow your own February grapes.)
I promised this post would lead to practical suggestions; here's the first:
Quirky Staff, not Faceless Drones
I bet not many corporate executives are going to read this blog, but if they do (or if you know one - remember the power of talk), maybe suggest to them that instead of having sales-force employees follow the replaceable-parts model (i.e., interchangeable, single-faceted, lowest-common-denominator automata), they should show a little more personality, especially if they work in small enough units that customers might recognize them in subsequent visits.
I was a regular at Enterprise Rent-a-car until I got a car, and let me tell you, that company understands the benefit of human interfaces. Even though the company Enterprise might be a monolithic, faceless mega-corp, the employees I talked to at the branch were all charismatic, genuine-personality outgoing types. It's true that they were made to recite wrote-learned phone greetings, but other than that visits were all fun-loving chutzpah. I don't know exactly how to foster that kind of environment, but staid companies might do better if they encouraged their staff to be lively and idiosyncratic enough to make customers see them as people.
Marginally Legal, Inc.
Let's consider the second problem with contemporary capitalism: capitalist institutions often do things against the public good. I haven't mentioned law yet, but let me try to describe it as succinctly as possible. Capitalism:friendship :: law:enmity. I'm not suggesting that capitalism is intrinsically good and law bad. However, law and enmity both keep you from doing bad things to other humans; the former uses explicit codes while the latter uses the same level of thought as friendship (i.e. feelings of attraction/repulsion based on how you've been treated).
Enmity is the necessary mirror of friendship: it's the instinctual process which makes you try to be a pain to those who do you disservice. It's also a good game-theoretic strategy to demonstrate that pissing you off makes you a formidable enemy for an analogous reason to why psychopathy is a bad strategy: if people know you have a mean side, they'll try to avoid crossing you.
Law and capitalism are based on opposite reinforcement mechanisms, though, so when government meets private industry strange things can happen. Typically, corporations will do for themselves as much good as possible while narrowly avoiding getting sued. It's usually a good thing that laws change slowly: anarchy is just democracy with constant elections and one voter. However, when corporations can take advantage of this sluggishness through loopholes, capitalism can lead to technically-legal injustices. Moreover, using negative reinforcement (law) on entities that respond best to positive reinforcement (corporations) is a recipe for trouble: public-private incentives aren't going to magically align themselves without help.
There's a way to resolve the root problem caused by the negative/positive reinforcement mismatch between government and corporations:
If governments encourage companies to do as much good as possible, such that their rewards are proportional to the good they do, we can resolve the negative vs. positive reinforcement conundrum.
Practical Example: Road Bonds
Right now, governments set certain requirements in terms of what they would like in a road: they want it made of X material with Y safety feature, and it should last Z years. The company's reward is not affected at all by the value given to the public by the road, so long as the government's contractual expectations are met. If the road doesn't meet expectations, the government can try to sue the construction company for breach of contract: a long and inefficient process. Even in the best cases, the company has no incentive to build a road which will last longer than Z years (indeed they wouldn't want it to last any longer than Z years, since they're in the construction business), and all safety and durability research has to be done by the government body who decides the specifications of the road to build. Research isn't free, and it's hard for public institutions to make the correct call in terms of what research needs to be done.
Scrap the meets-contract/doesn't-meet-contract model. We can do better. Imagine an incentive system like this. When a government wants a road built, the incentive they offer is in the form of a transferable bond. The bond would pay the holder annually according to a formula like so:
Annually, pay $A if the road is usable, but deduct $B per cubic foot of pothole in the road (averaged over the year), $C per vehicle-hour of delay due to repair, $D for every human life lost on this road due to traffic accidents on this road and E% of the costs to drivers arising from damage to their vehicles due to accidents. If, in any year, the road is not usable or the net value of this payment in negative, this bond is valueless for all subsequent years.
Let the government choose B-E, and issue the bonds to the company which accepts the contract for the lowest value of A. Then, the private sector would be able to use new road durability and safety technologies where they make sense in terms of public benefit, without the government having to test any materials or make any policy regarding the specifics of what materials to use. In this case the lowest bidder won't be the one that does the crappiest acceptable job, it will be the one able to maximally align public and private interests, since it benefits exactly when the public does.
In turn, the construction company has the incentive to make durable, safe roads so as to collect the maximum reward from the bonds. By making the bonds transferable, companies good at construction (but maybe not inspection or maintenance) could sell the bonds to investment firms. The better the job they did the more money they could potentially make in the sale.
Governments are bad at details. If you reward results instead of punishing breeches, you align interests and harness the power of that uniquely human tool: capitalism.
Conclusions
Capitalism (including friendship) is more than just what makes being human so good; in many ways capitalism is the fundamental trait that distinguishes humans from other animals. It's vital for our policy makers to understand what capitalism really is and how to harness it to pull our 21st century in the right direction: towards the fellowship, harmony and cooperation. If you like the idea of aligning interests using rewards proportional to benefits, or if you like the concept of being friendly in your commercial transactions, try them out by all means, but also please talk about them. A million cocktail parties could change the fate of the world.
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