Delightful Inconsistent

When I got an Econ BS, the joke went that it was a rebellion against my dad, an internal auditor, so as to become his nemesis. Pithy explanation: Internal auditors find people who are falsifying numbers to embezzle or cover up misdeeds. Economists have an unsettling tendency to make up numbers for things that aren't easily quantified, and to hold that you'd be a fool not to cheat if you could get away with it.

I am not that kind of economist; I remain more temperamentally like an auditor. But the reason the joke works (or doesn't work at all) is that I doubt very many people would draw a distinction between what Dad and I do if you hand us a sheet of numbers and ask us to find trends and patterns. (Along similar lines, I tend to identify as a white-hat hacker, or used to, and Dad worked in network security. NEMESIS I TELL YOU, although again we'd pretty much be using the same tools and trying to acheive the same ends.)

However it seems to me my natural enemy as an economist is not actually auditors but dudes who give personal finance advice. I say dudes because they have an extra layer of unexamined privilege on top of the other glaring oversights that characterize personal finance advisors. I imagine personal finance advisors are very helpful when they have wealthy, individualized clients, but when they try to talk about what the average person should do, they tend to enter a fantasy land where tradeoffs don't exist and human beings aren't rational actors. (Central tenet of microeconomics: the average human being is a rational actor and makes purchasing decisions based on what they believe will most benefit them, although not always with perfect information).

Today on NPR, I heard one of them literally say it should be easy for someone to save $600 a month by cutting out lattes.

WHAT KIND OF LATTES ARE YOU DRINKING

But also maybe I need those lattes to stay awake and do my job, without which I have no income to save? Or if I don't buy those lattes, I can't hang out at the coffee shop and use the free wifi, or meet with business associates? Or maybe I'm counting on that daily serving of calcium in a form that is easily absorbed, without which I would develop costly osteoporosis? I'm just spitballing, here.

Also, man, your definition of investment as deferred consumption . . . I don't even know where to start with that. The extent to which that is a preposterous definition of investment rapidly approaches infinity.

I've always had trouble with questions like "are you an optimist or a pessimist." Part of that is my general trouble with binaries. I can say that I reject binaries, because that feels proactive, but I don't reject them; I'm not taking a stance. When I say binaries at large don't work for me, I mean they don't make sense or accurately describe my intellecutal landscape. This is not resolved by making them scales. On a scale of one to 10, how optimistic are you? 6, I always answer six. It doesn't matter what the question is, 6.

6 is my internal mental code for "not quantifiable but I'm being polite." I use other numbers when I need to get something. Say 2 so they'll leave you alone, say give me medicine right now if I need medicine your numbers are pseudomathematical bullshit. Let's be honest about our shortcuts. You are trusting me or not and numbers are not evidence of dispassion.

I don't like answering "realist" to "optimist or pessimist" because I don't see either of these viewpoints are more or less realistic. There are ups and downs. I don't like answering "centrist" to "liberal or convservative." In the US, centrist means either conservative trying to not look like an asshole or liberal trying to make a point about Europe. "are you a revolutionary or do you like the status quo" not particularly. "Practical" introduces value judgements, "utilitarian." Might as well say "I'm correct. That's what I am. I'm someone who has the best ideas about things."

It occurred to me overnight that my status is "salvager." In the way that means I will carefully restore this battered antique and the way that means I am looking at an aftermath and trying to figure out whether there is a section worth sifting through or whether it's trash I can't sell. In a way that means sometimes cut and run but to another junk heap.

At all times, I feel like this is a disaster. Often a pretty one, out in the open air. With dangerous buried bits. With valuable buried bits. With struturally important remains. I will help out and pick through and smash and be hungry. And it's mine. It's no one's and mine.

Is that optimistic or pessimistic? Revolutionary? Conservative?

If you grew up in Dallas - really in Dallas, not a suburb of Dallas; a few blocks from the Texas Theater, where Oswald was arrested - if every day to get to and from high school, you drove down the motorcade route, through Dealey Plaza, past the grassy knoll, under the triple underpass which your great grandfather designed - and if you were someone with a mind for puzzles and espionage, it goes without saying that you spent some time pondering the assassination of President Kennedy.

I do not subscribe to a particular conspiracy theory, nor do I entirely discount the idea of a second shooter. In a sense, I find it more interesting to not solve the mystery; solutions of mysteries are my least favorite part of mysteries, and are why I tend to avoid the genre. This is a strange way to think of a non-fictional criminal investigation, where I should hope for justice, but the assassination has been so mythologized that I have trouble understanding it as an event that happened to real people. The days leading up to the assassination, real people. The days after the assassination - the funerals, the mourning - real people. The assassination?

I do believe wholeheartedly that there was a coverup. More accurately, that there were several coverups. I believe this because I understand bureaucracy. Especially law enforcement bureaucracy. If I were to describe policing organizations, I would start with the word obfuscatory. I would immediately add "self-protecting." This is even when national security isn't involved. Classification of documents is only one way of covering your ass; bureaucracies have dozens. And a lot of people want their asses covered when a routine parade goes as south as straight to hell.

I note the investigational similarities to the similarly unsolved Jack the Ripper case. Similarly overlapping jurisdictions of law enforcement agencies, similarly involved in turf wars, similarly not doing a great job of sharing evidence or waiting patiently. Similar high level of press coverage. Similar political pressures to get this embarrassing thing put to rest.

In other words, I am open to hearing about JFK conspiracy theories, in a way I am not open to theories by 9/11 truthers. I don't necessarily believe the theories, but I could be thought of as a hobbyist or collector of them.

However, something I've noticed lately in a lot of the second gunman theories - specifically second gunman on the grassy knoll - is that their clincher tends to be "the brain and blood matter flew backward and landed on the rear of the car." And therefore the shot had to come from the front.

The problem with this as a clincher is that the car is not a stationary object.

It seems stationary if you watch the Zapruder film, because Zapruder is panning to keep the car in the center of frame. And some digitally modified versions of the film remove the jitter to keep it extra centered, so that you can really see the head whipping back and the particulates landing on the rear of the car.

Which is driving forward.

Which means that in fact what's happening is that the blood is staying in roughly the same place, and the car is - are you following me here? There's an observer effect that's fucking up frame of reference.

There is also a beating heart and a circulatory system which was under tight pressure but now has a leak. When I pop a blister and the fluid shoots up, that doesn't imply a second needle inside my foot.

A physicist could work all this out and maybe tell me about the relative velocity of the car, added to the velocity of pumping blood. A physicist might even use eigenvectors. (Probably the physicist would use other matrix manipulations, but one doesn't often get the chance to say "eigenvectors".) The physicist might say that according to math, additional velocity is needed to explain the distance the blood traveled relative to the car, velocity perhaps imparted by a bullet fired from a grassy knoll.

But at present, I don't find "look at the video" sufficient or convincing.

This month, Smithsonian-Pew came out with the results of a survey of 1000 US adults, asking "From kindergarten through 12th grade, what one subject should schools emphasize more than they do now?" The results, not surprisingly, broke down like this:

30% Math
19% English
11% Science
10% History/Civics
6% Arts
4% Computers
20% Other (in which econ ties with gym and religion at 2% each and foreign language ties at 1% with anti-bullying)

790 adults of America: I disagree. History and science people? Well done.

I love math. I am a mathy person. I wound up with a bachelor of science instead of a bachelor of arts basically by accident, as a side effect of taking a lot of math classes for the heck of it. I think there is a level of math literacy that is necessary for living a sensible life (as opposed to wandering in a fog of superstition and instability). I am horrified when I find out I am talking to someone who doesn't understand probability, can't glance at a statistic and tell whether it's plausible, can't estimate an object's height, and so on. I am even now referring to quantitative survey data. Numbers: they give us useful information and we are better off if we understand what they are saying.

But realistically, do I think most people - even most professional scientists - particularly need to know calculus? I don't. If you can get through Algebra I, usually taught sometime around age 13, you're probably ok. Some geometry/trig is nice. The stuff beyond that - matrixes, derivatives, fourier transformations, and all the rest - you're not really going to use unless it's your field. You need it if you're designing an airplane. You need it if you're responsible for managing the power grid of a city. The people who want to do that stuff aren't going to be doing it with just a high school degree.

So by that measure of "more" math, I don't think we need more math. Does "more" math instead mean we need to teach the early, basic stuff like addition, but teach it more? Well, I do think people are a bit stupid about fractions, inexplicably. Percentages, similarly. A lot don't seem to understand what a square root (or cube root) represents in a practical sense. It would be nice to get that cleared up.

However, I sincerely doubt that the more math people are thinking much beyond "math is important!" I doubt the more math people have looked at how much math is already in the average school curriculum. I doubt the more math people have looked at our test scores in math. I think what we're seeing is a knee-jerk "math!" response to any stiumulus. There's a contemporary cultural idea that math is a magical key that unlocks all understanding of science and technology, and the shortcut to science, technology, innovation, and wealth is therefore more math.

This is about like saying that the key to being well-read is studying more grammar. I notice that Susie isn't particularly literate, so we should make sure she knows that "walked" is a past participle.

I think this partly because on this same survey of 1000 adults, only 47% knew electrons are smaller than atoms. Let me repeat that: less than half of the adults surveyed knew that electrons are smaller than atoms. Fewer than half knew that lasers aren't made of sound waves. These are true-false questions and answering randomly should give you 50% correct.

Being better at math doesn't tell you about electrons. It doesn't tell you about experimental design. It doesn't tell you how photosynthesis works and whether this is the way solar panels operate. It doesn't tell you why making a car run on gas is so much easier than making a car run on anything else. It doesn't tell you about heritability, and whether you're going to have your father's hairline, and why. That's the stuff you have to learn slowly, a bit at a time, through lots of exposure; you can't shortcut science. Breakthroughs come because someone looks at minutia, because they get curious about how something works, and maybe because they draw a paralell to some other thing they found interesting.

So sure, math is important, but not more important than having legible handwriting, or knowing the history of the civil rights movement, or knowing that Afghanistan is nearer to China than to Egypt. When I get into an argument with someone over big political priorities, it's not because we disagree about math; it's because they don't know the average income of a person in Arkansas, or whether a particular quote comes from Shakespeare, the Bible, or a recent scientific paper. To know stuff, you have to know stuff. You have to be able to know when somebody says "this is just like Watergate" that it is or it isn't. You have to be able to know when somebody says Iran is in league with Iraq whether that's likely given their histories. You have to be able to know when somebody tries to sell you a low-fat olive oil that olive oil is 100% fat.

Math is the easiest thing to teach. It's the easiest thing to test. It has exactly one right answer, always, and you can look through the steps someone took to get to their wrong answer and point and say "there you go; there's the problem." Math is clean in a way nothing in the world is clean. Math does not give a damn about your home life. Math does not threaten or undermine your religion or your political beliefs. Math is, to an extent, sudoku puzzles (which do not themselves involve math). Math is being able to call a color kelly green instead of emerald green, and do it with confidence.

If there are a lot of people wandering around in the world, not sure whether to trust the government or a doctor, unable to get jobs beyond a retail level, making decisions about where to live, what to eat, how to vote, feeling unhappy and alone and pointless, math is not going to save them. Math alone is not going to bring them peace. Science, literature, geography, history, civics, logic? They might.

I work in media, whether it's as a writer, as a filmmaker, or as a captioner who covers sports, the stock market, and congress. These are all areas where big money numbers get thrown around, and people say things like "a million dollars isn't all that much anymore." Or "$5 million is nothing. What could you do with $5 million?"

And on the one hand, there are things I could not make for a million dollars; I couldn't afford to buy all the materials I would need, and pay all the crew members, and rent all the equipment, and launch a marketing campaign. And if I were a sports player getting offered a $5 million contract when somebody who does the same thing, but worse than me, is getting paid $50 million, I would have some grounds to renegotiate. Money is, after all, relative.

But I try to remind myself every once in a while that if somebody handed me a million dollars, free and clear, I could pay myself my current annual salary for 25 years. I make the median U.S. family income.

So no, actually, a million dollars is still a lot of money.

Since my birthday is the 6th and my cousin Scarlett's is the 9th, it is not unusual for the family to celebrate them both at one dinner, which in this case meant two cakes last night. And they were both layer cakes, so as I pointed out to Ciro, he actually made four cakes.

Ciro: I made four cake layers which I assembled into two cakes.

Romie: So what you are saying is you made six cakes.

In any case, I had cake for breakfast and then a different cake for tea.

My best friend is seven months pregnant and weighing the different post-delivery sleeping arrangements. Since a pillar of our friendship is our status as research buddies, co-sleeping studies have been on my mind, and the role of inference in interpreting data.

With co-sleeping, the studies are all over the place. By and large, if a study is conducted in a country where co-sleeping is not the norm, co-sleeping is found to increase infant mortality by a statistically significant margin. If, on the other hand, a study is conducted in a country where co-sleeping is the norm, it will find that co-sleeping decreases infant mortality and has various beneficial add-ons.

(Incidentally, although I'm saying "statistically significant" it's still a small difference. This being babies, we're in "any risk is too much" territory.)

Attempts to reconcile these studies mainly involves a throwing up of hands and an assumption that this cannot be resolved until we generate more data, and/or a knowing nod that means "the bias of scientists is affecting their studies."

There's a third possibility, though, because all of these co-sleeping mothers exist in a cultural context. It is possibly that all the studies are in fact showing that babies are more at risk when their mothers are people who go against social norms. Presumably, a significant percentage of non-mainstream mothers have a higher tolerance for risk, and/or have complicating factors that make them behave oddly, and/or prize their own autonomy to an unusual degree. Any of those things could increase the mortality rate of their babies.

This is not exactly a welcome conclusion, since I am myself often at odds with the mainstream, although it is perhaps more optimistic to say I am a leading indicator. Still, I prefer it to the notion that scientists all around the world are routinely making amateur mistakes in their data collection.

Incidentally, for future trend watchers, my current favorite ice cream flavor is banana, and I'm into geometric ceilings and watercolor.

The Globe Magazine ran an article today about spanking, which is one of those polarizing subjects I don't really take sides on, mainly because "spanking" is an ambiguous term that can mean everything from "light swat that doesn't pink the skin" to "repeated assault with a cudgel until it breaks", and partly because people on both sides tend to make claims I don't find credible. Given that in the 70s and early 80s better than 94% of Americans spanked their children (data pulled from article), and I interact with many of these children as adults, I can't say there are many who spanking "warped." At the same time, while "spare the rod, spoil the child" makes for a catchy adage, I can't think of a single time when I learned to do or not do a thing because of punishment or threat of punishment; the lesson I took and still take is "hide it better."

Apparently, I am not unusual in this. Skinnerian conditioning just doesn't work on people outside a lab setting, not in a straight line "learn exactly this lesson from this stimulus." We're too complex, and our worlds are too. I can't even seem to learn "don't try to grab things out of the oven without a hot pad," and that's a perfect application of pain (burning) following an undesirable behavior without delay and without exception. And, indeed, according to the article, experiments on spanking have shown it's entirely ineffective. Entirely. Hundreds of experiments, hundreds of studies. Spanking doesn't work. Parents who spank their children often think it's wrong to do so, but also view it as "the nuclear option" that will get through to a toddler when nothing else will. And yet it doesn't. (There is a single study on the other side, but it has never been published; it is not rigorous enough to pass peer review.)

Of course, the other punishments won't get through either. It turns out to be nearly impossible to punish a toddler. You can hurt them. You can make them sad. But they won't learn "no" from it, not for a really long time. They will eventually, but it is like teaching tricks to a cat. There's no point in escalation of punishment, and there's no point in getting angry about it. Toddlers simply require an almost unbelievable amount of repetition before "no" sinks in. It's easy to forget, because they learn "yes" behaviors so quickly - new words, new motor skills, new perceptual and social techniques.

It makes sense to me that this would be true. The kind of learning a toddler does requires great courage and outlandish levels of perseverance. In order to learn to walk, you have to fall down and hurt yourself over and over again, and be completely unfazed by this. It will take months and maybe years of trying and failing before you can so much as say the names of the people you depend on for everything, and during your failed attempts you will be alternately misunderstood, ignored, shhhhhed, and treated as embarrassing. You will do it anyway. To do the kind of learning necessary to develop into an adult, you have to be basically immune to negative feedback.

I suspect this is applicable to adults as well - that the frame of mind that learns "yes" quickly would learn "no" very slowly, and the mindset that learns "no" quickly would only gradually accept a "yes." When I am on my guard against risk, I'm going to require overwhelming proof before I deviate from what I already know will work. We already know that people in stressful situations adhere more strongly to routine, to such extremes that they might burn to death rather than climbing out a window when the door is blocked. Which is not to suggest a "no" state of mind does not have its place; I probably don't need to keep bugging my boss when my boss has asked once to be left alone, and "ouch, you're hurting me, stop" doesn't need further experimentation.

On the other hand, in my creative life, I am nearly immune to "no." My rejection notices certainly run into the hundreds, and possibly into the thousands if one includes auditions and elevator pitches. Yet I continue to write things and to show them to strangers or place them on the internet or read them on stage, where they should theoretically subject me to ridicule. I should, by now, have learned that I am not a good writer, and yet I continue to think that I am a good writer and that people will like what I create. This is also valuable, theoretically. It is more unambiguously valuable if I'm trying to learn a new language, where I'm going to sound like an idiot for a very long time and make the same mistakes over and over and over, or if I'm trying to build up a muscle, or if I want to pick up a new instrument.

Would punishment or mockery help me learn Italian or learn to stand on my head or learn to play the ukelele faster? I'm going to say no. No and no and no. I do sometimes wonder if this has gone awry with my narrative work, which I keep advocating with a certainty that borders madness.

I've been lackadaisically prepping for the Monday draft of my fantasy baseball league (which is for work, which is something I do on the clock, because my workplace is a loving workplace). I am deliberately not putting much effort in, because I ration the stuff in my life I'm allowed to count or chart. Given half a chance, my little sabermetric heart will expand like a balloon to eat my life; I have to pick and choose my analytics so I can keep that stuff crammed down like a tiny wrinkled walnut. For the good of us all.

But I did look up how many fiction feature films were submitted to Sundance in 2011 compared to how many were accepted, and it's about a 32:1 ratio. Which on the face of it makes me hopeful, because I can be better than 31 people at least some of the time. Those odds are more forgiving than most magazines I sub to, by a factor of around 6.

On the other hand, they're fake odds, because some of the films accepted aren't really submitted; if something has $20 million and a lot of stars, it's not just sticking a burned DVD in an envelope and crossing its fingers. Going up against other manuscripts subbed to a magazine, I'm at a disadvantage to the handful of people more famous than me. Going up against other films, I'm at a disadvantage against people stratospherically more famous than me, with ludicrous amounts of money.

I think I'm cheered up, but I'm not sure whether I am cheered up. I think I am.

The past few days, I have had several math-based flashes of insight, in which I realize that a phenomenon I have observed over time could also have been predicted in advance if I'd thought the numbers through. I don't know why; I haven't particularly been thinking about math, or even doing sudoku puzzles. I have been counting out loud when I exercise, as a shortcut to warm up my voice before I go on air, but I can't imagine it's related. I've also been listening more, and listening more actively, to music than usual, and more drawn to the piano, but I think this is coincident rather than causal.

My realization today was to do with the fact that I know vastly more straight-identified bisexuals than gay-identified bisexuals. Past explanations I've heard for this have made some assumptions I don't like - mainly that it's easier for bisexuals to conform to social pressure and live hetero, and that if a bisexual is in a gay relationship it's safer for them to identify as gay so as not to be stigmatized from that community after already being left out of a number of hetero traditions. This makes sense, although it's pessimistic, but is contrary to my lived experience; I've known too many straight-identified and gay-identified bisexuals who are vocally bisexual, and I don't think they/we are doing it to be cool, considering it mostly makes us seem uncool and pointlessly non-conformist, and makes people wonder if we're unhappy in our current monogamous relationships, since there's a perception that bisexual equals polyamorous. We do not, in other words, try to pass. Rather the opposite. Which would not make sense if we mostly went straight or hid as gay to avoid social pressures.

The argument usually goes that to be really bisexual you'd have to date a roughly equal number of men and women and have a roughly equal chance of ending up with a man or a woman in the end, and since that doesn't usually happen, most bisexuals are "experimenting" or "spicing things up" but are only serious about one gender. There is a certain amount of bitter lesbian "I've dated a lot of bisexual girls and they all wound up with guys, so I don't date bisexuals now" - and these women are not lying about the number of bisexual girls they've dated who wound up with guys. That's real; it happens.

However, I don't think it happens because bisexual women get out of college and into "the real world" and suddenly realize they wanted men all along. What I think happens is math.

The generally accepted figure is that 9 out of 10 people are straight. That means that even if I'm equally interested in both genders, perfectly 50/50, the share of people I meet who are likely to be attracted to me is 90% heterosexual. Since I'm not dating theoretical people, but real people, that 9 out of 10 is going to be a more significant predictor of my relationships than my no-preference preference. In order to date 50/50, I have to actively seek out environments where the ratio of lesbians is greater than in the general population. Places like theater and visual arts and women's colleges, places where "all those crazy girls go lesbian." If I'd rather train as an engineer or a teacher, I'm out of luck.

Bisexuals exist, is what I'm saying. They're not secretly straight. They're just in a world where most of their choices are.