A smart mind is a dangerous thing to waste

When I did my undergrad the USSR was a going concern. The military-industrial complex sucked in a lot of smart grads. Their work would be classified, and would add little to the greater good.

Then came the fall of the wall. For a magical decade smart minds had good work to do.

Somewhere along the way, though, smart minds started working on novel financial instruments, malign pricing innovations, games with insurance plans, and other emergent frauds. Instead of building better bridges and inventing new conservation strategies and clean energy sources, too many of our brightest minds have been investing in complexity attacks.

We need a cultural reform movement that values people not by what the money they take, but by the worth they make. Anyone see signs of this anywhere?

--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

Paul Graham on the price of the App Store

Apple needs to fix the App Store ...

Apple's Mistake

... I suppose Apple has a third misconception: that all the complaints about App Store approvals are not a serious problem. They must hear developers complaining. But partners and suppliers are always complaining. It would be a bad sign if they weren't; it would mean you were being too easy on them. Meanwhile the iPhone is selling better than ever. So why do they need to fix anything?

They get away with maltreating developers, in the short term, because they make such great hardware. I just bought a new 27" iMac a couple days ago. It's fabulous. The screen's too shiny, and the disk is surprisingly loud, but it's so beautiful that you can't make yourself care.

So I bought it, but I bought it, for the first time, with misgivings. I felt the way I'd feel buying something made in a country with a bad human rights record. That was new. In the past when I bought things from Apple it was an unalloyed pleasure. Oh boy! They make such great stuff. This time it felt like a Faustian bargain. They make such great stuff, but they're such assholes. Do I really want to support this company?

Start with allowing Google's products.

--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

Health insurance: we're defeated by a complexity attack

It's time again to play spin the insurance wheel.

This year my employer is offering only a "HRA" (Consumer directed) plan. What we used to call a "medical savings account plan". My employer self-insures, so presumably this saves them money.

So we tried to figure out what plan makes sense. My wife and I are both physicians. I'm a wee bit of a computer geek. We have, between us, at least 35 years of post-secondary education.

The enemy has hundreds of analysts and extensive simulations. They can throw up pages of unreadable and meaningless computer generated descriptions.

It's really no contest. The best we can do is run the provided simulations through optimal, average, and disastrous scenarios and assume that the strange seeming results are accurate. The simulations, of course, don't ask about tax brackets, and they mix pre-tax dollars (our premiums) with post-tax dollars (out-of-pocket expenses).

We can offset the post-tax dollars by gambling on Flex dollars -- but then we run the risk of sending the Flex money back to yet another gambling corporation (and probably, eventually, to my employer).

In the end we'll probably pick the middle option and go light on the Flex.

This, like mobile phone services, is a complexity attack. I'm guessing if I worked this one through I'd put it in the large class of emergent frauds - an echo of the crash of '08.

We must, as a nation, figure out a way to beat this stuff back.

Update: EL has been working with pencil, and it now looks like

• The graphical portion of the simulation is probably wrong.
• Disregarding the graphical part, and parsing out rollover of the "HRA" part, and factoring in various combination of pre-tax and post-tax contributions and Flex guesses the plans are more similar than the appear -- but the numbers may be wrong
• The numbers in one resource are quite different from the simulation/web site numbers. They don't add up. On the other hand, one of the simulation numbers is probably wrong.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: Employment benefit complexity: we are sheep
• Gordon's Notes: The hidden insurance problem: they can play the game better than we can

Update 5/28/10: Our sense of doom was well justified. Midway through the year we found that mental health payments were not handled in the MSA-like plan. They're handled through a separate, traditional, indemnity plan. Since these payments constitute our major healthcare expense, our entire analysis was rendered moot. Needless to say, in all of our review neither my wife nor I saw this in the materials we were given.

AT&T “A List” – the gift that’s not

AT&T markets a new “A List” feature…

Enjoy unlimited calls to and from the phone numbers in your A-List. Your A-List can include valid domestic phone numbers for any domestic service provider - wireless or landline.

I’ve added my corporate conference call number to my AT&T “A List”. The list already includes my home landline and, especially, the Google Voice number that connects me to Canada for free.

Once this is effective my corporate conference calls shouldn’t use any of my minutes (even toll-free calls use minutes).

Since Google Voice and Google Talk combined with the A List mean my whole family uses less than 300 minutes a month, we no longer need our family plan of 1,400. I’ve be fine with only 550 minutes.

Wow! I could drop my bill from $80 to $40. What a great feature …

Ahh. But you know there’s a hook, don’t you?

The A list feature is only available for plans with 1,400 minutes and up.

AT&T isn’t stupid. Crooked, sure. Stupid, no.

The cat brain simulator. Game over?

I used to say that the day we had a computer roughly as smart as a hamster would be a good day to take the family on the holiday you've always dreamed of.

Today, two articles, both, oddly, from The Register (emphases mine) ...

IBM lab builds computerized cat brain • The Register

... IBM said it has already simulated a cat-sized cerebral cortex — the area of the brain that's key to memory, attention, and consciousness — using a massive Blue Gene supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

This feline-scale cortical simulation, which was made with the help of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, included 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses. The simulation ran 100 to 1,000 times slower than real-time, said Dharmendra Modha, manager of IBM's Cognitive Computing unit at its Almaden Research Center, in a blog post.

and from a completely different direction ...

Google Spanner — instamatic redundancy for 10 million servers? • The Register

... According to Dean’s presentation, Google is intent on scaling Spanner to between one million and 10 million servers, encompassing 10 trillion (1013) directories and a quintillion (1018) bytes of storage....

The simulation, presumably, is not actually doing any cat like things. It merely represents a substrate upon which cat like intellect might operate.

So maybe the next step to the hamster-equivalent AI will be long, my prediction of singularity 2100 will hold, Kurzweil will be indeed wrong about 2045, and we really should worry about carbon emissions.

Or maybe not. In which case I hope Kashmir becomes peaceful quickly as I'd like to visit the Lakes before it's too late.

Oh, what does this have to do with Google Spanner? I'll leave that as an exercise.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes 2004: Rat brain flies plane -- organic neural network
• Gordon's Notes: Aaronson critiques Kurzweil and the 2045 Singularity
• SETI, the Fermi Paradox and The Singularity: Why our search for extraterrestial intelligence has failed
• Gordon's Notes: Signs of the singularity: science fiction gives up
• Gordon's Notes: Imagining the Singularity in 1965…
• Gordon's Notes: The Economist predicts an early Singularity through neuroengineering
• Gordon's Notes: Singularity watch: Google maps is now smarter than me

--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

The paradox of 21st century prosperity

I've had a post brewing for weeks that I'm still playing with. It's not quite right, and may never be, but this Reich comment is pertinent ...

Robert Reich's Blog: Obama, China, and Wishful Thinking About American Jobs

... The dirty little secret on both sides of the Pacific is that both America and China are capable of producing far more than their own consumers are capable of buying. In the U.S., the root of the problem is a growing share of total income going to the richest Americans, leaving the middle class with relatively less purchasing power unless they go deep into debt. Inequality is also widening in China, but the problem there is a declining share of the fruits of economic growth going to average Chinese and an increasing share going to capital investment...

I'd love to see either DeLong or Krugman dig into this claim.

See also

• Gordon's Notes 2008 (another Reich article): Tipping points and GD 2.0: speculations and lessons
• Gordon's Notes 2005: David Brin on hierarchical societies
• Gordon's Notes 2005: Neo-feudalism
• Gordon's Notes 2004: Jared Bernstein & Brad DeLong on "Outsourcing": a dialog with interesting commentary
• NY Times 2009: Rich turn to concierge services to find value (and avoid fraud)

The world is going to get bigger

I don’t fly that much these days – maybe 10 flights a year. Yesterday I took one of my longer flights – from Minneapolis to San Francisco. On that flight I again thought about how the world is getting a bit bigger, and that it may get a lot bigger fairly soon.

That’s new. For most of my life the world got smaller. Air fare, especially as a percentage of average income, kept falling. Families spread out. My generation moved to take new jobs.

Air fares aren’t falling any more, and most people’s incomes aren’t rising much. When I consider increased costs of health insurance, my disposable income will be down this year – and I’ve been relatively fortunate.

On the other hand, air fare to Montreal (for example0 has more than doubled in the past nine months. The carriers reduced capacity, bought the competition, and now fly fewer but fuller planes at 2-3 times past fares.

Industry consolidation will continue to boost prices, but so will cap-and-trade carbon tax equivalents. There’s something much bigger coming though…

Energy security body calls for 'urgent' review of impact of oil shortages - Business – guardian

… Swedish academics unveiled their latest assessments of the numbers and came to even more gloomy assumptions. The study from Uppsala University entitled The Peak of the Oil Age estimated that by 2030 the world would be able to rely on only 75m barrels of oil a day, compared with the 105m forecast by the IEA.

Until relatively recently the agency was assuming the output figure would be as high as 120m and it still believes a peak of production could be reached in 2020, while Uppsala believes it might have already been reached…

I made my own “demand/supply peak light sweet” call in 2008 – in which I made wild ass claim that it would be apparent by 2015 that the demand/supply ratio for light sweet crude would cause prices to rise and crash and rise and crash their way to the $200/barrel mark (rise and crash because of secondary recessions, $200 because at that point serious conservation starts to align supply and demand).

Between some kind of carbon-tax-equivalent and “peak oil” of any form, air travel will at least double in cost over the next five years – even as profits continue to be squeezed.

That means a much bigger world to cross for the dispersed families of my generation. Maybe the next generation should stay closer to home base.

High speed rail, by the way, is looking pretty interesting.

Update 11/16/09: A follow-up article by The Guardian’s Monbiot: The one thing depleting faster than oil is the credibility of those measuring it - George Monbiot

Update 11/17/09: It occurs to me that a good measure of how real this stuff is would be to watch how very wealthy and smart people invest. I recall thatWarren Buffett recently bought some railways, and of course I'm not the only eccentric sort to make this connection ...

There are only two fixes for the Apple iPhone App Store

Good essay with links to other good essays ...

Manton Reece: The only 2 fixes for the iPhone platform

... There are a lot of well-intentioned suggestions for improving the App Store, but the result will always be the same until we acknowledge the root problem. The only fix is for Apple to remove itself as gatekeeper, or let us route around them...

Apple is channeling the wrong side of 1984. Apple has become the enemy.
--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

Mobile phone fraud - The accidental data charge and other scams

I experienced this with Sprint and AT&T alike. I now pay $5 or so a month for a the honor of tracking my son's phone use -- that includes disabling his data access.

Here's Pogue's expose

Verizon: How Much Do You Charge Now? - Pogue’s Posts Blog - NYTimes.com:

...Starting next week, Verizon will double the early-termination fee for smartphones...

...The phone is designed in such a way that you can almost never avoid getting $1.99 charge on the bill. Around the OK button on a typical flip phone are the up, down, left, right arrows. If you open the flip and accidentally press the up arrow key, you see that the phone starts to connect to the web. So you hit END right away. Well, too late. You will be charged $1.99 for that 0.02 kilobytes of data...

...Every month, the 87 million customers will accidentally hit that key a few times a month! That’s over $300 million per month in data revenue off a simple mistake!..

...Now, you can ask to have this feature blocked. But even then, if you one of those buttons by accident, your phone transmits data; you get a message that you cannot use the service because it’s blocked–BUT you just used 0.06 kilobytes of data to get that message, so you are now charged $1.99 again!...

“They have started training us reps that too many data blocks are being put on accounts now; they’re actually making us take classes called Alternatives to Data Blocks. They do not want all the blocks, because 40% of Verizon’s revenue now comes from data use. I just know there are millions of people out there that don’t even notice this $1.99 on the bill.”"

For the record, here's a list of the mobile phone scams I know of ...

1. Early termination fees that exceed plausible costs
2. The time eating pointless answering machine messages
3. The "accidental" high priced data fees
4. The surprise fees and taxes with just about any transaction
5. The covert contract renewal with service changes
6. Recipient pays SMS transaction fees
7. The unusable cash card rebate fraud (AT&T settled with NY state on this one)
8. Uninterpretable cell phone bills.
9. Passive revenue from OAN Services and other cramming scams.
10. Unblockable SMS marketing.
11. Long distance interconnect fees.

Add them up and were talking billions of dollars in fraud. These scams didn't have to be planned out, all you need is fertile soil for emergent fraud.

See also:

• Emergence: how entropy and incentives create scams
• Regional airlines, emergent fraud and enlightenment 2.0
• 21st century deception and the evolution of the emergent mind
• Grumpy old boomers: pencil sharpeners, garbage cans, toasters, DVD/VCR combos and emergent fraud
• Head still exploding: The AT&T mobile phone rebate card scam
• John's head explodes: AT&T rebate paid with an AT&T debit card
• AT&T “A List” – the gift that’s not
• A deal with the Devil: We move from Sprint to AT&T and towards an iPhone
• The Empire Strikes Back: complexity, mobile phone plans, and Apple defeated
• Amazon and the evil of cellphone companies
• Phone company posted rates are completely meaningless
• AT&T is a partner to phone scams that target the vulnerable elderly
• AT&T sends more SMS Spam, locusts infest exec underwear
• Annals of idiocy - AT&T spams customers about a TV show

Update 11/17/09: More on how complexity attacks are used by mobile phone companies (and, incidentally, by health care insurance plans).

• Why Economists Love to Study Cellphone Pricing - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
• Looking for a Method in Cellphone Price Madness - NYTimes.com

Update 10/4/10: Verizon gets caught.

--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

I add the despised comment captcha

I dislike Captcha (usually a text recognition test) as much as anyone -- but lately my email has been clogged with notices of blog comments to review. They're almost all spam.

So I had to turn on the Captcha test. If the spambots get bored I'll try turning it off again.

About that health care bill …

Joseph Paduda despairs ….

… I'm really disappointed with the Republicans. They are supposed to be the budget hawks, but instead they've spent their time railing against abortion funding, illegal immigrants, and death panels, along with scientific research and taxes on device manufacturers. Instead of attempting to govern responsibly, they've abandoned all morality in their quest to re-energize the lunatic fringe of their once-dominant party…

… While there's plenty of blame to pile at the door of the Republicans, it is the Democrats who are to blame for coming up with a huge entitlement program set up to do nothing but grow…

Well, yes.

The GOP decided that their one and only mission was to make Barack Obama look bad. That meant this bill would attract no more than 1-2 GOP rebels. That in turn meant no constituency could be offended, which meant no serious efforts to control costs.

If we had a less dysrational electorate, then we’d have a better GOP. But we’re stuck with the GOP we’ve got.

So any bill that can pass will give everyone everything they want.

It’s not even lying. Anyone capable of perceiving reality knows there will be a reckoning. This is about building the arena for the real battle to come.

Not pretty, but that’s modern America. It’s the best we can do, and it’s much better than nothing. In stage II, assuming we get this sausage made, we’ll be talking price.

Reason – it’s more than IQ

Temperament is what you’re born with. Character is what life does with temperament.

Things aren’t so clear with intelligence. It’s very likely that one’s maximal “IQ performance” is largely determined by genes and intrauterine environment, but even so we know that IQ measurements increase with test training. More than that, there are lots of smart people who seem unable to reason rationally.

Reason is more than IQ …

Rational and Irrational Thought- The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss- Scientific American

• Traditional IQ tests miss some of the most important aspects of real-world intelligence. It is possible to test high in IQ yet to suffer from the logical-thought defect known as dysrationalia.
• One cause of dysrationalia is that people tend to be cognitive misers, meaning that they take the easy way out when trying to solve problems, often leading to solutions that are illogical and wrong.
• Another cause of dysrationalia is the mindware gap, which occurs when people lack the specific knowledge, rules and strategies needed to think rationally.
• Tests do exist that can measure dysrationalia, and they should be given more often to pick up the deficiencies that IQ tests miss.

I’m excited by this analysis. I’d have more to say but the full article isn’t available online yet and I can’t find much extended commentary.

I can note that analyses of errors in reasoning are very old – at least as old as Greek analyses of rhetoric. In the 1970s and 1980s several excellent books on medical reasoning and diagnosis characterized common errors of cognition, and in the early 1990s my CogSci grad coursework plumbed the depths. We’ve developed an extensive language for talking about errors in reasoning.

Even so, this recent article’s explicit study of the persistently dysrational (a better term than “arational” or “dysreasonal”) feels like a useful way to reframe the discussion. From Bush to Rumsfeld to Climate change deniers we’ve seen some fairly smart to brilliant people stuck in dysrational modes. If we can understand what produces dysrationalia, and how to intervene in early life, we may take a big step towards enlightenment 2.0 and rational discourse though not universal agreement.

See also: Be the Best You can Be- IQ and reasoning - not quite the same thing

The ultimate take down of the disgraced Levitt and Dubner

The intelligentsia have been engaged for weeks in a ferocious competition to best capture the intellectual and moral vacuity of Levitt and Dubner's latest money churner.

Today, by acclaim, we have a winner -- “SuperFreakonomics” and climate change : The New Yorker - Elizabeth Kolbert. The smashing finale left no doubt ...

... To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness. All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us.

These men traded their reputations for wealth. A worthy trade for them, but they're not paying for the collateral damage

--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)

Next up: AAFP to endorse e-cigarettes

I had a real bad feeling when the American Academy of Family Physicians closed our once excellent web site to public access. So I wasn’t all that surprised by their latest move …

How the World Works – Family Doctors go better with Coke - Salon.com

… directed to this story from the Cleveland Plain Dealer reporting that the American Association of Family Doctors has "a six-figure grant from the Coca-Cola Co. to create content about beverages and sweeteners for the academy's consumer Web site, FamilyDoctor.org."…

… From the AAFP press release: “The Consumer Alliance program is a way of working with interested companies to develop educational materials to help consumers make informed decisions so they can include the products they love in a balanced diet and healthy lifestyle," said AAFP President-elect Lori Heim, M.D., of Vass, N.C…

…The Consumer Alliance program also will create a new source of funding for AAFP, which, in recent years, has broadened its search for funding outside the pharmaceutical industry…”

I just sent these guys over $600 for my 1 year membership – to find out that the AAFP’s consumer health site is doing covert marketing. Next up – the health benefits of e-cigarettes.

Worst bit? Maybe this is an improvement over pharmaceutical funding.

I expect this will be my last year of AAFP membership.

Update: I received a standard response letter signed by AAFP President Lori Heim when I wrote the academy. It included a bit of further context ...

... I would finally note that this is not new territory for the AAFP. Over the past 4 years we have had funding relationships with Pepsi and McDonald's for support of the AIM program - and we have managed them very well in maintaining a positive image for the Academy while advancing our message about fitness, activity, and healthy choices. And Coca-Cola has been a corporate member of our Foundation for several years as well which is why we reached out to them initially.

So why not Philip Morris? These are publicly traded companies -- their mission is not public health. Their mission is to make money from people who buy Pepsi, Coke and McDonald's products.

The AAFP needs a reform agenda. It can't afford to live in the style it's grown accustomed to, so the AAFP needs to radically downsize.

Dems for a rationalist GOP - is there somewhere to donate?

Krugman is very worried about the 2010 triumph of the Tea Party ...

Op-Ed Columnist - Paranoia Strikes Deep - NYTimes.com

Last Thursday there was a rally outside the U.S. Capitol to protest pending health care legislation, featuring the kinds of things we’ve grown accustomed to, including large signs showing piles of bodies at Dachau with the caption “National Socialist Healthcare.” It was grotesque — and it was also ominous. For what we may be seeing is America starting to be Californiafied...

...In fact, the party of Limbaugh and Beck could well make major gains in the midterm elections. The Obama administration’s job-creation efforts have fallen short, so that unemployment is likely to stay disastrously high through next year and beyond. The banker-friendly bailout of Wall Street has angered voters, and might even let Republicans claim the mantle of economic populism. Conservatives may not have better ideas, but voters might support them out of sheer frustration.

And if Tea Party Republicans do win big next year, what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster...

Krugman is not always right. Unfortunately, he's the best prognosticator we've got, even if he's better at forecasting doom than at coming up with practical alternatives (perhaps because we don't have a lot of practical options).

We can't make Palin/Bachman go away, because their constituency is right be afraid. Even if Bachman had lost her Minnesota seat (she almost did, it was surprisingly close) someone else would have taken her raving loon position.

Instead of focusing on the crazies we should be trying to build a Reason-based GOP. Liberal democracies need a dynamic tension between the genetically gifted and the neurotypical, between those who inherit wealth and those who inherit struggle, between the market and the wise, between the thrusting and the compassionate. If the powerful do not get their extra votes, they will crash the system (to their own detriment, but the powerful are not often insightful).

A rationalist GOP won't have my values of tolerance and compassion. It will, however, have a calculated interest in the survival of American (if not human) civilization, in educating productive workers, in reducing unprofitable and uncontrollable wars, and in clean air, water, and even beautiful spaces.

I wouldn't vote for or admire a rationalist GOP, but I would understand and respect its necessity. Without this kind of opposition, without the struggle for power, my Dem party will become a sewer of corruption (No, it's not a sewer yet. If you think it is you've led a protected life).

Today Newt Gingrich is the closest thing to a rationalist GOP -- which is pathetic. As feeble in Reason as he is, he's also powerless and all but forgotten.

We need to rebuild a post-Reagan rationalist GOP -- or we'll be governed by the likes of Palin and Bachman and human civilization will be a smoldering wreck.

Where do we start donating?
--
My Google Reader Shared items (feed)