Articles by Jerry Brito
Why is self-experimentation effective?
Seth Roberts has a new paper trying to explain the “unreasonable effectiveness” of his self-experimentations efforts. To me it’s more evidence of the rise of the amateur.
The puzzle began in graduate school, where I studied experimental psychology. To learn how to do experiments, I tried to do as many as possible. At the time I had acne. It was easy to measure (count pimples each morning) so I decided to do experiments about it. My dermatologist had prescribed tetracycline, an antibiotic. A few months of self-experimentation showed that tetracycline did not work, which surprised my dermatologist. Later conventional research found that tetracycline often fails. My dermatologist had years of experience. Yet a little self-experimentation by a non-expert found something important that he and other dermatologists did not know.
Unconstrained by groupthink, the need to signal status, or professional regulations, non-expertscan more easily think outside the box.
The what commission now?
President Obama’s “National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform” met for the second time today. They have just three more meetings before the panel releases its recommendations on December 1st. So, what’s the big news out of the meeting? It’s hard to know because the event seems to have gone completely uncovered in the press.
Perhaps internet culture has spoiled me, and maybe we’ll in fact see coverage in tomorrow’s morning papers, but right now, three hours after the meeting ended, I find no trace of coverage. Not from the AP, Reuters, or Bloomberg, and not from NYT, WaPo, or WSJ. The only thing I’ve found is a blog post from The Hill.
What does this tell us about the press? That they don’t think this meeting was that important. At the last meeting, Bernanke and Orszag testified, and it was widely covered. This time mere academics spoke. (Carmen Reinhardt pointed out that gross debt is approaching 90 percent of GDP, that this will drag down the economy, and that this will lead to further debt spiral. She counseled “austerity.”)
What does this tell us about the commission? I don’t want to overstate the point, but I think it says what everyone knows: that presidential commission go nowhere. Name the last presidential commission whose recommendations were heeded by Congress. As Judd Gregg pointed out before he joined the commission,
Numerous commissions have been created by executive order over the years, and their common thread is that none have produced any legislative results. How can they? No one has any real responsibility, or expectation of action, and so their recommendations collect dust on a shelf.
In which case, is the commission simply an election-year detente? Have we postponed seriously dealing with the problem until December so that both parties can avoid having to vote for the painful cuts and likely tax increases that are inevitable? How much worse will things get between now and then?
Kentucky fact of the day
The last Public Policy Polling survey in Kentucky found that more Republicans think Rand Paul (R) is too liberal (17%) than think he is too conservative (12%). (Via Political Wire.)
Ex-Hacker Adrian Lamo Institutionalized for Asperger’s
According to Wired’s Threat Level, noted hacker Adrian Lamo was institutionalized against his will for 9 days last month. He was released with a diagnosis of Aspberger’s. The whole article is an interesting read, but what fascinated me is how folks on the autism spectrum can go for so long without being diagnosed and how they’re surprised when they find out. From the article:
Also anecdotally, people with Asperger’s are frequently diagnosed in adulthood, even into their 50s, according to the U.S. Autism and Asperger’s Association. As in Lamo’s case, the diagnosis often follows a run-in with the police, says Dennis Debbaudt, an independent consultant who trains law enforcement agencies on interacting with people on the autistic spectrum.
Daley’s amusing FOIA revenge
A couple of weeks ago I spoke at the launch of the Congressional Transparency Caucus. A (somewhat weird) idea that was discussed was improving Freedom of Information Act requests for the purpose of helping the dying newspaper industry. Like I said, weird.
In general, though, the FOIA process definitely stands improvement. Once a federal agency receives and complies with a FOIA request, it should not only give the requested information to the requester, but also publish it to its website so it’s available to all. Today, the same in-demand documents can be laboriously requested many times by different individuals.
Transparency Caucus co-chair Rep. Darrell Issa made the interesting suggestion that there might need to be a deliberate delay between when an agency complies with a journalist’s FOIA request and when it publishes it on the web. Otherwise competing journalists will be able to see what the requesting journalist is sniffing around for thereby destroying any investigative scoop. Issa likened his suggestion to a patent or copyright for journalistic ingenuity.
Now comes word that Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago is doing exactly the opposite. To annoy his enemies in the press, his new transparency policy goes out of its way to disclose what all is being FOIA’d and by whom:
In the name of “transparency,” Mayor Daley on Thursday got some measure of revenge against the investigative reporters who’ve made his life miserable by digging up dirt on the Hired Truck, city hiring and minority contracting scandals.
He revamped the city’s new website to include a log of all Freedom of Information Act requests. The list includes the name and organization of each applicant, documents demanded and dates the information was requested and is due to be released.
A new state law merely requires city departments to maintain such a log — not to post it on the Internet to tip investigative reporters about the trail being followed by competitors.
But Daley gleefully declared that he was going “above and beyond what’s required” in the interest of “transparency, openness and the free-flow of information.”
“If you want transparency in government, you have to have this. I’m sorry. This has nothing to do with [getting even with] the Sun-Times, Tribune, media or anything. This is what you want,” Daley said.
This is very amusing. For what it’s worth, I don’t think the government owes journalists or any other profession any special consideration. I also don’t understand why the requester’s identity should be disclosed, either.
Sir Mick on music profits
Via Gruber, here is a new BBC interview with Mick Jagger. He makes a very interesting point about music sales:
But I have a take on that – people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone!
Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone.
So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.
Don’t stop at 1900, though. If you think of the entire history of the world, the notion that you could make an outsized return on making music is a complete aberration.
Facebook’s autism
Until I read Tyler’s book, I never realized that autism had such a bad connotation associated with it, aside perhaps from it being considered a disability with which you wouldn’t want your child diagnosed. Now I see these views everywhere. Here are two from the last day, and interestingly they are both about Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
Jason Calacanis in his email newsletter:
Last year, when I realized that Zuckerberg was an amoral, Asperger’s-like entrepreneur, I told Zynga CEO Mark Pincus that Zuckerberg would try and slit his throat.
Dan Lyons in his Newsweek column:
Based on Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires, it portrays Zuckerberg as a borderline autistic, entirely ruthless conniver.
Perhaps there is a class of folks on the autism spectrum who use their ‘powers’ for evil, and this is where the prejudice originates? And perhaps Zuckerberg’s recent troubles, if he is autistic, stem from misreading Facebook’s users?
How rich are you?
At globalrichlist.com you can enter in your annual income and see how you rank in the world. It’s a wonderful and wonderfully designed site that aims to make you feel rich so you’ll donate to a good cause.
I’m always telling folks who fret about how little they make that we’re not just richer than most on earth, but most that ever lived. Someone making an entry level salary of $35k in DC is still in the top 5% of income earners in the world.
Who would you Twitter pwn?
If you have ever wanted Oprah Winfrey to follow you on Twitter, you might have been able to make that possible early Monday morning, when a software bug surfaced on Twitter’s Web site. … The bug was first revealed by a Turkish man who wanted to tell his friends on Twitter about a band, “Accept,” that he enjoyed listening to. When the man typed “Accept pwns” into the update box on Twitter, he noticed that a user by the name of @pwns was now following him on the site.
That’s from an NYT post on the Twitter bug that allowed one to add themselves to anyone else’s following list. If you could make someone else follow you, who would it be?
Why do we have panel discussions?
Why do we have panel discussions? The format is a peculiar mainstay of Washington policy circles that no longer seems to make any sense.
The first problem is that participants and the audience must congregate at the same time and place. Unlike lectures, which can sometimes be enlightening, you usually get four five minute talks that are too short to adequately treat any subject, but long enough, especially in the aggregate, to bore you to tears. Everyone knows where the panelists stand on the issue, and what everyone wants is for the panel to hurry up and get to the discussion.
Then there are the dumb questions and pontifications from the audience. As a frequent participant in panels (and increasingly less frequent attendee), I can tell you that most audience members who get up to the mic will ask rhetorical questions that are really meant to make a point on one side or the other, adding little to the positions that have already been staked out. Then there are those folks who dispense with the whole question thing and proceed to give their remarks as if they were some overlooked panel member. Why do we do this to ourselves?
As I’ve noted, the valuable part of any panel discussion is the discussion part. Listening to “experts” with differing views have a conversation about a particular topic can be a great way to learn something. And that’s why we have podcasts like Econtalk, BloggingHeads.tv, and maybe even your humble servant’s Surprisingly Free Conversations. Asynchronous and ageographic (is that a word?), you can partake of them any time and any place. Q&A and audience participation can take place in the comments section of a post. Yes, panel organizers will often make recordings available online, but that just highlights the fact that the conversation should have been produced digitally from the get-go.
The explanations I can come up with are that they are a vestige of a pre-internet time of couriers and fax machines in which congregating at the same time and at the same place was the only way to consume these discussions. No doubt these gatherings also served as a great way to meet or catch up with the inhabitants of a particular field or pursuit, and the post-event reception probably remains the only other redeeming quality of panel discussions. As an introvert, though, I see the forced socializing at these events as a bug, not a feature.
Six degrees of Jesus
An intellectually stimulating iPhone and iPad game:
The basics idea behind Wiki Hunt is that you start on a Wikipedia article and try to make it to the target article in as few clicks as possible. You can play a completely random game where Wiki Hunt chooses your start page and your end page, a custom game where you pick the start and end, or my personal favorite: Six clicks to Jesus.
I wonder if something exists like this that automates Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon using the IMDB API. Read the whole article at Touch Arcade.
The best paragraph I’ve read today
On the front page of the New York Times today about formspring.me:
While Formspring is still under the radar of many parents and guidance counselors, over the last two months it has become an obsession for thousands of teenagers nationwide, a place to trade comments and questions like: Are you still friends with julia? Why wasn’t sam invited to lauren’s party? You’re not as hot as u think u are. Do you wear a d cup? You talk too much. You look stupid when you laugh.
Facebook, I can’t quit you?
I am this close to closing my Facebook account. They continue to make incomprehensible changes to their privacy policy and settings, so that it’s completely unclear to me which of my actions will be observable by whom.
A while back there was an app making the rounds that published to the world who visited your profile most frequently. I was identified as a frequent visitor of some friends profiles, and some people were revealed as frequent visitors to my profile. I’m not sure how they determined frequency, but it certainly shattered any conception of anonymous browsing I might have had.
Yesterday I logged in after not having done so in quite a while and was soon presented with a screen that asked me to link my profile with “pages” related to things I had listed in my profile (e.g. my high school’s page, band pages, TV show pages, etc.). There were only two choices given to me: accept “linking” my profile to the dozens of pages Facebook had chosen for me, or choose which pages I wanted to link individually. Not wanting to link to any damn thing, I chose the latter option. I was taken to a screen where all the pages were listed with a pre-checked box next to each one. In order to link to none I would have had to painstakingly uncheck all those boxes. Defaults matter and this was incredibly presumptuous. I closed the window without doing anything and I have no idea if I’m linked to any pages or not.
Now comes word from TechCrunch that a security flaw in Facebook allows anyone to see any of their friend’s live chats as they happen. Unbelievable.
Government regulation is not needed to discipline Facebook. Consumers will grow tired of being jerked around by such an insensitive and juvenile company and will find better service elsewhere. Twitter, for example, has incredibly simple and respectful privacy options.
So what’s keeping me from quitting? I don’t know really. A sneaking suspicion that I’ll miss out on something if I do. An invitation or the ability to easily look up an acquaintance’s email address. But I think I might just be exaggerating. Perhaps like James Sturn has done with the whole Internet, I should quit Facebook for at least a while and report back the consequences. Is there anything valuable I’d be giving up?
Are think tanks still thinking?
Bob Hahn (until recently of AEI) and Peter Passell offer a lesson from the David Frum firing:
While we find this controversy intriguing in its own right (gossip… inside hardball… what could be better?), we think it misses some broader points in the way the market for think tank services is evolving. Over the last two decades, the top-drawer policy shops (AEI and Brookings) are more dependent on proactive fund-raising – and, by no coincidence, are more amenable to playing partisan games and keener to be in the public eye. These changes have, in turn, altered the role of the policy wonks who inhabit the space. First, there is much greater pressure to be visible; occupation of elite real estate like the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal is seen as critical to raising money. And while the think tanks still do a lot of quasi-academic research, they are more inclined to hire pundits with great rolodexes (make that great Outlook contacts). Note, too, that to stay in the limelight, think tanks are adjusting their time horizons. Tomorrow’s issues matter less than today’s. Accordingly, publication in refereed technical journals – especially the ones that make no effort to be journalist-friendly – counts less for promotion and status.
It is difficult to argue with this assessment.
The angry Rorschach movement
The Republican leadership, such as it is, seems to have settled on a strategy of “repeal and replace” for healthcare reform and the coming election. I’m sorry to have to tell them, but even with gains in November, they won’t be able to overcome a veto. The best hope for repeal is if the incumbent president is defeated in 2012 and both the Senate and House are in Republican hands. Good luck with that.
Still, that’s the strategy they’re going to pursue. Not so much because Republicans have any principles, as Dan has been pointing out, but because they want to tap into the anger and discontent that’s manifesting as the Tea Party movement. What I’m afraid of, though, is that the Republicans, and the broader “liberty movement” in general, have little idea of what the Tea Party is all about.
In his latest column, Ron Brownstein describes skepticism about the health care bill, and big government in general, as centered in the white non-college-educated middle class:
Obama has already been hurt by the perception, fanned by Republicans, that the principal beneficiaries of his efforts to repair the economy are the same interests that broke it: Wall Street, big banks, and the wealthy. The belief that Washington has transferred benefits up the income ladder is pervasive across society but especially pronounced among white voters with less than a college education, the group that most resisted Obama in 2008. Now health care could threaten Democrats from the opposite direction by stoking old fears, particularly among the white working class, that liberals are transferring income down the income ladder to the “less deserving.”
Without commenting on the validity of the perceptions he describes, think Brownstein’s right about the demographic provenance of the Tea Party folks. This reminds me of two things.
One is an essay by Michael Brendan Dougherty about the late radical right-wing writer Sam Francis. It was in that article that I first learned about the anti-elitist social commentary of Francis and James Burnham. The gist is that democracy is a sham masking control by a managerial class of elites at the expense of the traditional (read white) working class. Michael’s article is worth a read, and I’ll probably plumb Francis’s and Burnham’s work as I look more into the Tea Party movement.
The other thing I’m reminded of is the 1993 Michael Douglas movie Falling Down. It’s probably not a coincidence this movie came out when it did, sandwiched between the Perot candidacy and the Republican Revolution in Congress. The movie is a garbage heap of cliches, but it anticipates the directionless anger that I see in the Tea Party today.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but let’s just say that it’s a general unease with the siren song of a relatively successful mass movement. I see it luring not just the Republican Party, but the somewhat more intelligent parts of the free market movement as well.
I think I can be forgiven a lack of specificity in my unease since there’s no one who can tell me what exactly the Tea Party is about. Someone recently told me quite astutely that the Tea Party is like Barack Obama’s candidacy, a blank canvas on which we can all project our hopes and aspirations. And that’s what I’m worried about. Well-meaning folks are trying to co-opt the movement for their more-identifiably-pro-liberty ends, but I’m not sure it’s going to be a fit.
The Tea Party seems to be an anti-elite, anti-intellectual, anti-immigrant, populist grab bag of emotion. And while I can’t blame them for the sentiment given how Washington’s been performing as of late, I’m not crazy about the amorphousness of it all.
