Book review: This Is Burning Man by Brian Doherty.
This book gives a description and history of Burning Man that is mostly consistent with what I know of it. I particularly like how he calls it “a social revolutionary movement that is not about fighting authority but is dedicated to working with it”.
He glosses over the inconsistent beliefs in the culture over property rights. He has one brief mention of bicycle theft without much indication of how big a problem it is or how it affects the culture. He occasionally implies it’s considered ok to destroy someone else’s possessions, but doesn’t provide a clear enough description of how much of a cultural difference that is.
He describes some of the disagreements over the what Burning Man should be, including some early disputes over whether it was ok for it to become an art festival, and whether attempts to introduce political advertising fits well with the anti-commercial rules. He suggests that control of the culture is sufficiently decentralized that no small group can decide the answers to those disputes.
The main hint he provides for those hoping to create similar events elsewhere is beyond some minimum level of safety and logistics planning, the success or failure is largely in the hands of participants rather than leaders, and the leaders of Burning Man don’t have a clear idea of how they succeeded.
He suggests that a sense of crisis, mostly due to the hostile environment, helps create a sense of bonding. I think he wildly exaggerates the effects of the physical environment (whose main value is minimizing political objections to Burning Man).
Archive for 2008
This Is Burning Man
Monday, December 29th, 2008
Commons and Transaction Costs
Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008Mike Linksvayer describes a good perspective on why it’s important to have most information in a commons rather than restricted by copyright.
Most economists have a strong bias toward assuming transaction costs are unimportant. Coase has fought this. It sure looks to me like the Coase Theorem ought to be understood as demonstrating that one of the most important tasks for economists is to improve our understanding of how to reduce transaction costs. Economists have invested too much in models which depend on transaction costs being insignificant to easily be persuaded to adopt such a different focus.
Lessig’s book The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World describes why having some commons can be as valuable as having some resources protected by secure property rights, and why it matters for science and technology. But his argument style is designed for ordinary political debates, and doesn’t provide the breadth or power that a good economist would produce when attempting to reform economics.
I have little idea whether Creative Commons will put additional money to good use, but the value of its goals should not be overlooked.
The Soulful Science?
Monday, December 15th, 2008Book review: The Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do and Why It Matters by Diane Coyle.
This book provides a nice overview of economic theory, with an emphasis on how it has been changing recently. The style is eloquent, but the author is too nerdy to appeal to as wide an audience as she hopes. How many critics of economics will put up with quips such as “my Hamiltonian is bigger than yours!”?
The most thought-provoking part of the book, where she argues that economics has a soul, convinced me she convinced me she’s rather confused about why economics makes people uncomfortable.
One of her few good analogies mentions the similarities between critics of evolution and critics of economics. I wished she had learned more about the motives of her critics from this. Both sciences disturb people because their soulless autistic features destroy cherished illusions.
Evolutionary theory tells us that the world is crueler than we want it to be, and weakens beliefs about humans having something special and immaterial that makes us noble.
Likewise, economics tells us that people aren’t as altruistic as we want them to be, and encourages a mechanistic view of people that interferes with attempts to see mystical virtues in humans.
Some of her defenses of mainstream economics from “post-autistic” criticism deals with archaic uses of the word autistic (abnormal subjectivity, acceptance of fantasy). These disputes seem to be a disorganized mix of good and bad criticisms of mainstream economics that don’t suggest any wholesale rejection of mainstream economics. It’s the uses of autistic that resemble modern medical uses of the term that generate important debates.
She repeats the misleading claim that Malthusian gloom caused Carlyle to call economics the dismal science. This suggests she hasn’t studied critics of economics as well as she thinks. Carlyle’s real reason (defending racism from an assault by economists) shows the benefits of economists’ autistic tendencies. Economists’ mechanistic models and lack of empathy for slaveowners foster a worldview in which having different rules for slaves seemed unnatural (even to economists who viewed slaves as subhuman).
I just happened to run across this thought from an economist describing his autistic child: “his utter inability to comprehend why Jackie Robinson wasn’t welcomed by every major league team”.
She tries to address specific complaints about what economists teach without seeing a broad enough picture to see when those are just symptoms of a broader pattern of discomfort. Hardly anyone criticizes physics courses that teach Newtonian mechanics for their less-accurate-than-Einstein simplifications. When people criticize economics for simplifications in ways that resemble creationists’ complaints about simplifications made in teaching evolution, it seems unwise (and autistic) to avoid modeling deeper reasons that would explain the broad pattern of complaints.
She points to all the effort that economists devote to analyzing empirical data as evidence that economists are in touch with the real world. I’ll bet that analyzing people as numbers confirms critics’ suspicions about how cold and mechanistic economists are.
She seems overconfident about the influence economists have had on monetary and antitrust policies. Anyone familiar with public choice economics would look harder for signs that the agencies in question aren’t following economists’ advice as carefully as they want economists to think.
I’m puzzled by this claim:
The straightforward policy implication [of happiness research] is that to increase national well-being, more people need to have more sex. This doesn’t sound like a reasonable economic policy prescription
She provides no explanation of why we shouldn’t conclude that sex should replace some other leisure activities. It’s not obvious that there are policies which would accomplish this goal, but it sure looks like economists aren’t paying as much attention to this issue as they ought to.
She appears wrong when she claims that it’s reasonable to assume prediction market traders are risk neutral, and that that is sufficient to make prediction market prices reflect probabilities. Anyone interested in this should instead follow her reference to Manski’s discussion and see the response by Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitzewitz.
Chinese Stock Risks
Thursday, December 11th, 2008There are lots of small Chinese companies trading on U.S. stock exchanges that look at first glance to be ridiculously underpriced. One reason for the low prices are that it’s harder than you might expect to enforce U.S. law on Chinese companies that have few or no assets in the U.S.
The most blatant example I’ve seen is Eternal Technologies Group Inc, which has ignored a judgment in a lawsuit that seems minor compared to the cash the company reports having, with the result that a receiver has been appointed who is likely to collect some money in ways that badly hurt stockholders who bought before the lawsuit.
Another hint at how little the company cares about stockholders (at least those in the U.S.) is the careless way their press releases are written: “5. Radification of the elecrion of the auditors” (they managed to spell election correctly on the prior line, so it’s not simple ignorance).
I’ve noticed problems with other U.S. traded Chinese companies that leave me uncertain which of them can be trusted. I’ve been trading stocks listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange a fair amount, and haven’t noticed any similar problems there. I presume the stronger cultural and/or legal ties are more effective than anything that can be accomplished by U.S. law.
The Indian Clerk
Thursday, December 4th, 2008Book review: The Indian Clerk: A Novel by David Leavitt.
This book portrays the characters of mathematicians and related society in England circa WWI, although it doesn’t provide much help at understanding the math.
It does a good job of capturing the eccentricities of people who are obsessed with math. One quote that seemed particularly apt: “It’s as if each of the integers is one of his personal friends”, which reminds me of the analysis in Keith Devlin’s book The Math Gene. But this realism means that the characters aren’t sufficiently likable or exciting for me to want such a lengthy story about them.
One aspect of the book which puzzles me is when he suggests Ramanujan died of lead poisoning. He cites A. B. Young as a source of information on Ramanujan’s illness, in a way that suggests that Young supports that diagnosis. So I was surprised when I checked and saw that Young concludes he died of a liver parasite.
Convergence08
Saturday, November 29th, 2008Convergence08 had an amazing number of interesting people in attendance. No one person stood out as unusually impressive – it was more that the average was unusually high for a 300 person gathering. I’ll list many small ideas, which partly reflects the fact that I was trying to sample a wide enough variety of sessions that I didn’t manage to absorb any one presentation in depth.
Genescient is a new company whose founders include SF author Greg Benford. It has a strain of fruit flies bred for lifespans more than 4 times normal, and has used their DNA to identify substances that might improve human lifespan. It sounds like they will soon offer dietary supplements which have little risk and a hope of slowing down aging by some hard to predict (probably small) amount.
Advice from Eliezer Yudkowsky (responding to a concern that transhumanists have few children): don’t reproduce until you can code your child from scratch.
Several ideas from a session run by Anders Sandberg:
- AntiGroupware is designed to remove many social pressures from group decision-making
- Once it’s easy to make copies of people, political campaigns will be run by a large number of copies. [This assumes that democracy can attempt to survive - are copies going to be denied votes?]
- Politicians should be selected from losers of the game Diplomacy [It might be hard to keep them from deliberately losing, but with big incentives winning plus a low probability of any one loser becoming a politician, it might work.]
Ideas from a session run by Milton Huang:
- Keeping Skype video connections open for hours at a time changes remote interactions between two people in ways that make them seem very different from telephone conversations, and more like being physically together
- We should try to implement a way to transmit hugs remotely
- We might be able to make people (especially those with autistic tendencies) experience more empathy via an “empathy machine” that measures and reports on what others are feeling
Global Catastrophic Risks conference
Thursday, November 20th, 2008The Global Catastrophic Risks conference last Friday was a mix of good and bad talks.
By far the most provocative was Josh’s talk about “the Weather Machine”. This would consist of small (under 1 cm) balloons made of material a few atoms thick (i.e. needed nanotechnology that won’t be available for a couple of decades) filled with hydrogen and having a mirror in the equatorial plane. They would have enough communications and orientation control to be individually pointed wherever the entity in charge of them wants. They would float 20 miles above the earth’s surface and form a nearly continuous layer surrounding the planet.
This machine would have a few orders of magnitude more power over atmospheric temperatures to compensate for the warming caused by greenhouse gasses this century, although it would only be a partial solution to the waste heat farther in the future that Freitas worries about in his discussion of the global hypsithermal limit.
The military implications make me wish it won’t be possible to make it as powerful as Josh claims. If 10 percent of the mirrors target one location, it would be difficult for anyone in the target area to survive. I suspect defensive mirrors would be of some use, but there would still be serious heating of the atmosphere near the mirrors. Josh claims that it could be designed with a deadman switch that would cause a snowball earth effect if the entity in charge were destroyed, but it’s not obvious why the balloons couldn’t be destroyed in that scenario. Later in the weekend Chris Hibbert raised concerns about how secure it would be against unauthorized people hacking into it, and I wasn’t reassured by Josh’s answer.
James Hughes gave a talk advocating world government. I was disappointed with his inability to imagine that that would result in power becoming too centralized. Nick Bostrom’s discussions of this subject are much more thoughtful.
Alan Goldstein gave a talk about the A-Prize and defining a concept called the carbon barrier to distinguish biological from non-biological life. Josh pointed out that as stated all life fit Goldstein’s definition of biological (since any information can be encoded in DNA). Goldstein modified his definition to avoid that, and then other people mentioned reports such as this which imply that humans don’t fall within Goldstein’s definition of biological due to inheritance of information through means other than DNA. Goldstein seemed unable to understand that objection.
Automated Market Maker Results
Thursday, November 13th, 2008Intrade versus FiveThirtyEight
Thursday, November 6th, 2008A number of people have compared the final forecasts for the election (e.g. this), but I’m more interested in longer term forecasting, so I’m comparing the state-by-state predictions of Intrade and FiveThirtyEight on the dates for which I saved FiveThirtyEight data a month or more before the election.
Here is a table of states where Intrade disagreed with FiveThirtyEight on one of the first four dates for which I saved FiveThirtyEight data or where they were both wrong on July 24. The numbers are probability of a Democrat winning the state’s electoral votes, with the Intrade forecast first and the FiveThirtyEight forecast second.
| State | 2008-07-24 | 2008-08-22 | 2008-09-14 | 2008-10-01 | |
| CO | 71/68 | 60/53 | 54.5/46 | 67.5/84 | |
| FL | 42/29 | 34.5/28 | 30/14 | 55.2/70 | |
| IN | 38/26 | 34.1/15 | 20/11 | 38/51 | |
| MO | 50/26 | 32.9/13 | 22.1/11 | 42.5/48 | |
| NC | 30/22 | 25/21 | 14/7 | 51/50 | |
| NV | 51.2/49 | 49/45 | 44.9/32 | 55/66 | |
| OH | 65/53 | 50/38 | 40/29 | 53.5/68 | |
| VA | 60.5/50 | 52.3/36 | 42/22 | 59/79 |
On July 24, both sites predicted Florida, Indiana, and North Carolina wrong. FiveThirtyEight got Indiana right on Oct 1 when Intrade was still wrong, but Intrade got North Carolina right on that date (just barely) while FiveThirtyEight rated it a toss-up.
Intrade got Nevada right on July 24 (just barely) while FiveThirtyEight got it wrong (just barely).
For Virginia, Intrade was right in July and August while FiveThirtyEight was undecided and then wrong.
FiveThirtyEight got Colorado wrong on September 14, but Intrade didn’t.
FiveThirtyEight got Ohio wrong on August 22, while Intrade got it right.
Intrade rated Missouri a toss-up on July 24, while FiveThirtyEight got it right.
On September 14, FiveThirtyEight was fooled by McCain’s post convention bounce by a larger margin than Intrade, but by Oct 1 FiveThirtyEight was more confident about correcting those errors.
For states that were not closely contested, there were numerous examples where Intrade prices where closer to 50 than FiveThirtyEight. It’s likely that this represents long-shot bias on Intrade.
In sum, Intrade made slightly better forecasts for the closely contested states through at least mid September, but after that FiveThirtyEight was at least as good and more decisive. Except for Intrade’s Missouri forecast on July 24, the errors seem largely due to underestimating the effects of economic problems – errors which were also widespread in most forecasts for other things affected by the recession.
In the senate races, I didn’t save FiveThirtyEight forecasts from before November 1. It looks like both Intrade and FiveThirtyEight made similar errors on the Alaska and Minnesota races.
[Update on 2009-01-13: contrary to initial reports, they apparently got the Alaska and Minnesota races right, although there's still some doubt about Minnesota.]
On the other hand, Intrade had been fairly consistently (but not confidently) saying since early July that California’s Proposition 8 (banning same-sex marriage) would be defeated. Pollsters as a group did a somewhat better job there by issuing conflicting reports.
Automated Market Maker Changes
Saturday, November 1st, 2008I’ve made a change to the software which should fix the bug uncovered last weekend.
I’ve restored about half of the liquidity I was providing before last weekend. I believe I can continue to provide the current level of liquidity for at least a few more months unless prices change more than I currently anticipate. I may readjust the amount of liquidity provided in a month or two to increase the chances that I can continue to provide a moderate amount of liquidity until all contracts expire without adding more money to the account.
I’m not making new software public now. I anticipate doing so before the end of November.