Google decay: Custom search engines

If you're a longtime user of Google properties, it's not unusual to come across abandoned and neglected properties. Weed infested, broken glass, 404 errors - the works. Google's Detroit.

Today's example comes from the once proud edifice of Google Custom Search. I use several custom search engines, some for work and some for personal use - including healthcare analytics, special needs, medicine, and my stuff. Custom Search Engines come from the glory days of Google, before G+ and the end of Data Liberation.

The standard custom search page references Google homepage and 'add this search engine ...'

Google's homepage / iGoogle was a victim of G+. The 2nd link goes to ...

"Temporarily unavailable", as in the lifetime of the observable universe.

The latter page has a link that sometimes does nothing, sometimes produces a 404 error.

Hard times in Google town.

If you want to visit more Google decay, check out the custom gadgets directory. There are some scary properties in there...

illumiNITE Reflective Wind Pants: a weirdly unique product

Have you ever tried to buy high visibility wind pants? Something in bright orange for example?

Good luck with that. Ninja black is the rule. The one exception I’ve found is the illumiNITE Reflective Pant. Yeah, it’s black (sigh), but at least it shows up very brightly when exposed to headlights. That’s better than everything else I’ve seen — and the $45 price is very competitive. I just bought a pair and they seem well made — they’re my new small stuff sack bike/walkabout pants. The only downside is they don’t pack into an enlarged pocket, in fact they only have one zippered back pocket.

I’ve bought two other IllumiNITE products — a pair of running tights (company don’t have much of a modeling budget, they fit better than they do in the picture and I’m no model) and a pair of pants that are, sadly, no longer available. The pants are a real loss — two pockets and ankle zippers, comfortable loose fit but shaped enough to stay out of the way. I wear ‘em skiing, bicycling and running; they’ve held up for years.

IllumiNITE could do with a bit more business — I don’t see their stuff outside of their web site. They’re a funny little enterprise …

llumiNITE ink is a time-saving, easy to use all in one ink that eliminates the measuring and mixing associated with traditional reflective mediums. This means that we can add reflectivity to rolled goods, and create garments with large reflective areas rather than strips and dots. You've heard this story before--We liked the product so much we bought the company!

We operate out of a historic mill building in Fall River, MA--a city with an apparel and textile tradition that dates back to the industrial revolution. Our aim is to be friendly and accessible. Because we're a small company, it's likely that when you contact us you'll be speaking to one of our principals. Here’s a little introduction to the crew …

 Half of the crew is missing the descriptive text …

Apple and healthcare -- what if Cook went for the ring?

Everyone expects Apple to soon sell some personal monitoring device like the suspiciously defunct Nike Fuel Band. We remember that the “revolutionary” iPod was just another MP3 player [1]; we expect something like that.

We expect it, and we expect to yawn. It will be overpriced and the value proposition will be even less clear than the soon-to-be-ex-iPad value prop.

But what if Cook surprises? What if he’s tired of being Apple’s accountant? What could Apple do to surprise us?

No, Apple wouldn’t do some kind “electronic health record” type thing. They’re not that dumb. But Apple is powerful enough to get, for example, both Cerner and EpicCare to use an Apple supported direct-to-patient connection channel. It would entirely proprietary of course, but it would be big. The rest of the HCIT industry would follow along. Apple could build the elder-care infrastructure I’ve imagined (and make use of the iPhablet-displaced iPads). There’s a lot of room to play if one stays clear of both the medical device regulatory framework and the brutal economics of the provider-oriented market.

Personally, I expect FuelBand 2. But if any Apple creativity has survived Cook’s executive salary boosts and Jobs wage-suppression scheme there is room for surprise.

- fn - 

[1] The revolutionary bit was iTunes and CD ripping to go with the iPod. All forgotten now. The first iPhone blew my mind, but some of the early PalmOS phones sorta kinda had the idea. Apple invents more than Microsoft (Samsung learned to follow from the master), but it also builds on what’s before.

Salmon, Picketty, Corporate Persons, Eco-Econ, and why we shouldn't worry

I haven’t read Picketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. I’ll skim it in the library some day, but I’m fine outsourcing that work to DeLong, Krugman and Noah.

I do have opinions of course! I’m good at having opinions.

I believe Picketty is fundamentally correct, and it’s good to see our focus shifting from income inequality to wealth inequality. I think there are many malign social and economic consequences of wealth accumulation, but the greatest threat is likely the damage to democracy. Alas, wealth concentration and corruption of government are self-reinforcing trends. It is wise to give the rich extra votes, lest they overthrow democracy entirely, but fatal to give them all the votes.

What I haven’t seen in the discussions so far is the understanding that the modern oligarch is not necessarily human. Corporations are persons too, and even the Kock Brothers are not quite as wealthy as APPL. Corporations and similar self-sustaining entities have an emergent will of their own; Voters, Corporations and Plutocrats contend for control of avowed democracies [1]. The Rise of the Machine is a pithy phrase for our RCIIT disrupted AI age, but the Corporate entity is a form of emergent machine too.

So when we think of wealth and income inequality, and the driving force of emergent process, we need to remember that while Russia’s oligarchs are (mostly vile) humans, ours are more mixed. That’s not necessarily a bad thing - GOOGL is a better master than David Koch. Consider, for example, the silencing of Felix Salmon:

Today is Felix's last day at Reuters. Here's the link to his mega-million word blog archive (start from the beginning, in March 2009, if you like). Because we're source-agnostic, you can also find some of his best stuff from the Reuters era at Wired, Slate, the Atlantic, News Genius, CJR, the NYT, and NY Mag. There's also Felix TV, his personal site, his Tumblr, his Medium archive, and, of course, the Twitter feed we all aspire to.

Once upon a time, a feudal Baron or Russian oligarch would have violently silenced an annoying critic like Salmon (example: Piketty - no exit). Today’s system simply found him a safe and silent home. I approve of this inhuman efficiency.

So what comes next? Salmon is right that our system of Human Plutocrats and emergent Corporate entities is more or less stable (think - stability of ancient Egypt). I think Krugman is wrong that establishment economics fully describes what’s happening [2]; we still need to develop eco-econ — which is not “ecological economics”. Eco-econ is the study of how economic systems recapitulate biological systems; and how economic parasites evolve and thrive [3]. Eco-econ will give us some ideas on how our current system may evolve.

In any event, I’m not entirely pessimistic. Complex adaptive systems have confounded my past predictions. Greece and the EU should have collapsed, but the center held [4]. In any case, there are bigger disruptions coming [5]. We won’t have to worry about Human plutocrats for very long….

See also

• Princeton Study: U.S. No Longer An Actual Democracy
• Justice Stevens Suggests Solution for ‘Giant Step in the Wrong Direction’
• Economist Receives Rock Star Treatment
• Transcending Complacency on Superintelligent Machines. Hawking, Russell, Tegmark and Wilczek
• The Piketty pessimist | Felix Salmon
• Frustrations of the Heterodox - Krugman

and from my stuff

• Ants, corporations and the great stagnation 12/2011
• Speculation: The corporate ecosystem and American stasis 11/2010
• Corporate growth and the unexpected triumph of central planning 11/2012
• The debt ceiling: Can Goldman Sachs win if the US defaults? 4/2011. 
• Mass disability goes mainstream: disequilibria and RCIIT 11/2011
• The limits of disaster predictions: complex adaptive systems 2/2007
• Fermi Paradox: The solution set is stable 3/2013
• Apologetics: God and the Fermi Paradox 11/2010 (Sort of related :-)
• Sympathy for Economists 8/2013
• The new history is deep history 4/2010. Democracy is but the blink of an eye.

- fn -

[1] I like that 2011 post and the graphic I did then. I’d put “plutocrats” in the upper right these days. The debt ceiling fight of 2011, showed that Corporations and Plutocrats could be smarter than Voters, and the rise of the Tea Party shows that Corporations can be smarter than Voters and Plutocrats. Corporations, and most Plutocrats, are more progressive on sexual orientation and tribal origin than Voters. Corporations have neither gender nor pigment, and they are all tribes of one.

I could write a separate post about why I can’t simply edit the above graphic, but even I find that tech failure too depressing to contemplate.

[2] I don’t think Krugman believes this himself - but he doesn’t yet know how to model his psychohistory framework. He’s still working on the robotics angle.

[3] I just made this up today, but I dimly recall reading that the basic premises of eco-econ have turned up in the literature many times since Darwin described natural selection in biological systems. These days, of course, we apply natural selection to the evolution of the multiverse. Applications to economics are relatively modest.

[4] Perhaps because Corporations and Plutocrats outweighed Voters again — probably better or for worse.

[5] Short version — we are now confident that life-compatible exoplanets are dirt common, so the combination of the Drake Equation (no, it’s not stupid) and the Fermi Paradox means that wandering/curious/communicative civilizations are short-lived. That implies we are short-lived, because we’re like that. The most likely thing to finish us off are our technological heirs.

The Einstellung effect: simple truths we cannot see.

Epistemic closure (in political thought). Confirmation bias [6]. Availability heuristic (Kahneman System 1). Premature cognitive commitment. Even, perhaps [5], delusion. These are all forms of cognitive bias [1].

They drive me nuts [7]. Not because I have a problem with the concept of cognitive bias, but because I always know I’m missing something obvious.

It’s just out there. A better solution to a problem, something I’m doing wrong and can’t see it, a problem I don’t even know I have. Something in my blind spot that’s closing fast. An opportunity, a threat an ….. argggggggghhh!

Ok, I’m back. Do you know how hard it is to find a paper bag in 2014?

Cognitive bias is why, more than most people I know, I’m always seeking criticism. That includes anybody, often not a friend [2], who is happy to tell me why I’m an idiot. Every so often see what I missed, and the joy of that correction more than compensates for minor tweaks of my thick skin.

So I’m happy to point to a new entry in the ‘what am I missing’ category — the Einstellung Effect. This is best described in a SciAm article that’s available from the 1st author’s web site (pdf, see also 2008 academic pub). Bilalić and McLeod’s work adds neurophysiology to one version of premature cognitive closure; a tantalizing connection given how much we seem to think with our bodies [3].

Their recent research has explored cognitive error in expert chess players whose very expertise leads them to errors more naive players would avoid. They seem to have adopted their visual cortex to solve certain thinking problems [4], and thus to be afflicted by the visual processing adaptations that evolved for the physical world (emphases mine)…

Why Good Thoughts Block Better Ones, Bilalić and McLeod, SciAm March 2014

…  Building on Luchins’s early work, psychologists replicated the Einstellung effect in many different laboratory studies with both novices and experts exercising a range of mental abilities, but exactly how and why it happened was never clear. Recently, by recording the eye movements of highly skilled chess players, we have solved the mystery. It turns out that people under the influence of this cognitive shortcut are literally blind to certain details in their environment that could provide them with a more effective solution. New research also suggests that many different cognitive biases discovered by psychologists over the years—those in the courtroom and the hospital, for instance— are in fact variations of the Einstellung effect.

… the mere possibility of the smothered mate move was stubbornly masking alternative solutions… infrared camera revealed that even when the players said they were looking for a faster solution—and indeed believed they were doing so—they did not actually shift their gaze away from the squares they had already identified as part of the smothered mate move.

I think of Delusion as an extreme manifestation of the Einstellung effect. Given our emerging understanding of autism and schizophrenia as similar manifestations of a neural network injury, I wonder if we’ll find connections between delusional beliefs and visual networks…

- fn -

[1] I love Wikipedia’s “List” articles; I suspect Google’s Knowledge Graph loves ‘em too. See also Wikipedia’s recursive Lists of Lists of Lists. 

[2] My favorite corrector is an app.net correspondent who I don’t know enough to claim as a friend, but who is a wonderfully cordial correspondent. That’s the best of all.

[3] An extraordinarily brilliant college roommate, who was later disabled by a schizophrenia like disorder, first suggested this to me in 1981. So the modern literature did not surprise me. Incidentally, he subsequently acquired a PhD and joined a NASA research facility. He found a way around his disorder.

[4] No, I cannot resist thinking of using GPUs to solve parallelism problems faster than CPUs.

[5] I personally think of delusion as an extreme form of cognitive closure; and I think it’s far more common than the psychotic disorders. An area ripe for research.

[6] Via the Einstellung article, a fantastic quote from one Francis Bacon’s 1620 Novum Organum:

“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion . . . draws all things else to support and agree with it. And though there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects or despises, or else by some distinction sets aside and rejects.... Men ... mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, though this happen much oftener, neglect and pass them by. But with far more subtlety does this mischief insinuate itself into philosophy and the sciences, in which the first conclusion colours and brings into conformity with itself all that comes after.”

Bacon always amazes. I’d declare him “father of cognitive science” for this quote alone. “Epistemic closure” is not new …

[7] This isn’t a new obsession. As a first year med student @1982 I devoured a 1970s text on clinical diagnosis that listed common cognitive errors, beginning with confirmation bias. This book has been rewritten many times since, alas the title and author are lost to my memory.

Beijing Genomics Institute - the second coming of eugenics

Via Funny Times [1], I came across allegations of a confident eugenics program (emphases mine):

NEWS of the WEIRD - Current News

Beijing Genomics Institute scientists are closing in on a technology to allow parents to choose, from several embryos, the one most likely to yield the smartest offspring. London’s Daily Mail (in January, referencing recent work in Wired, The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker) explained that BGI will have identified high-potential mathematics genes (by mapping the cells of geniuses) so that researchers can search for those among a couple’s array of embryos...

… One Chinese researcher acknowledged the “controversial" nature of the work, "especially in the West," but added, "That's not the case in China."

Eugenics is more accepted in Asia and Eastern Europe than in the west, but eugenics acceptance is growing quickly here. On the other hand, “Funny Times” and “News of the Weird” are not exactly the New York Times.

Tracing the sources I came across an article I read a year ago on Zhao Bowen, a young genius who dropped out to join China’s prestigious Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI)…

Why Are Some People So Smart? The Answer Could Spawn a Generation of Superbabies | Science | WIRED

… Zhao’s goal is to use those machines to examine the genetic underpinnings of genius like his own. He wants nothing less than to crack the code for intelligence by studying the genomes of thousands of prodigies, not just from China but around the world. He and his collaborators, a transnational group of intelligence researchers, fully expect they will succeed in identifying a genetic basis for IQ. They also expect that within a decade their research will be used to screen embryos during in vitro fertilization, boosting the IQ of unborn children by up to 20 points. In theory, that’s the difference between a kid who struggles through high school and one who sails into college….

Hmmm. I suppose “closing in” is only a bit of a stretch on “within a decade” - within allowable parameters of a comic news site. So it’s not surprising the BGI web site doesn’t yet have an explicit page on embryo selection (termination of the inadequate) for higher IQ.

It’s an interesting site to browse though. The English and Japanese pages feature Euro models — including an array of Aryan blondes. (They don’t know you’re not supposed to use blondes in eugenics programs.) I couldn’t find any retail services on the Chinese site — that’s curious. Maybe wealthy Chinese like to use English language web sites?

BGI does market one screening test that sounds ominous on first glance …

Genetic Testing for Reproductive Health | BGI Health

… Hearing impairment is a common disease in which the congenital form accounts for approximately 60% of the cases. Conventional hearing tests exhibit low coverage and low accuracy. Genetic Testing for hearing impairment allows timely and accurate identification of newborns or adults carrying the susceptibility genes of hearing impairment and late-onset hearing loss…

Except they claim this is “neonatal” testing. China might be (for the moment) good with selective abortion, but infanticide is another matter.  Their most suspicious publicly available page shows in my browser with an IP address rather than a text url:

Preimplantation Genetic Screening/Diagnosis (PGS/PGD) | BGI Health

… Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) detects and avoids the transfer of embryos with genetic abnormalities with the aim of increasing the IVF pregnancy and delivery rates…

… reduce the risk of miscarriage increasing the likelihood of success which benefits the patients emotionally and can help them to avoid costly efforts for repeat in vitro fertilization attempts should failure occur

…. Rigghhhtt. This one is winking so hard it’s gonna sprain an eyelid.

The second eugenics age is well underway.

[1] Comic relief for commie collectivists. It’s always funnier when the GOP is in power.

Exercising hard as an old person - one year of CrossFit

Dave Foley, who is 67 to my 55, describes what it’s like to run hard as a senior citizen …

Silent Sports: Getting along with getting old Part II

… Age tends to level the competitive playing field. Guys who trained fanatically 20 years ago, logging 100 miles a week, may not be able to run 50 miles over a seven day period now. Years of hard running does take a toll.

However, if you put in 40 miles weekly at a comfortable pace in the 1980s, it is quite likely you can still log about the same weekly mileage.

Those tortoises, who routinely got bested by the hares they faced in their youth, may now find themselves shooting past those one-time speedsters. And those newcomers, who didn’t even start running until they were in their 40s, they’ve got fresh legs and may now be racing past the ancient tortoises and hares.

… Stretching is optional, but the first steps of a run must be gentle ones. If timing a run is important, then slowly jog a half mile before clicking the watch on…

… No running at all for the last two or three days before a competition. In this way you actually may arrive at a race site with absolutely no muscle stiffness. Don’t be deceived. No matter what your brain tells you, you are still as old as the Rolling Stones…

… Banish all thoughts of “No woman is gonna beat me” because they can and they will.

… the leg muscles of senior runners fatigue before their lungs. That means that when your aching quads won’t push you any faster, you’re likely still able to easily converse with other runners….

… The race to the finish is no longer a venue for heroic sprints. If you haven’t been practicing sprinting, don’t try or your hamstring is apt to split open like the skin of bratwurst on a hot grill…

… Seconds after crossing the finish line, expect to have a race official hovering next to you saying, “Are you O.K.?” Apparently old guys who race hard look awful….

… we can avoid most injuries by listening to our bodies. And since those daily runs burn up calories, we can eat more than our sedentary peers and still stay trim. Although our bodies may ache a little, most days it feels good to be out running. And if the science is correct, we are going to enjoy longer, healthier lives as runners.

… sone days I feel young and my feet seem to fly down the road. A nine-minute mile on these days feels no different then the sixes I once ran…

I suspect Dave still felt kind of middle-aged at 55. Me, my kids tell me I’m already ancient. Even so, my routine exercise intensity has never been higher. Sure, I’ve been stronger and faster — but even at my most active I didn’t do CrossFit level intensity week after week. Unlike Dave, because I was less active previously,  I can keep setting “personal bests” even as I get older. It’s not that time is running backwards, it’s that I’m getting closer to my biological potential even as it declines. I’ll probably hit the limit this coming year, but  think I can manage that. For now it’s good to be stronger and faster than I was 10 years ago. I’m even learning to run - an activity I avoided in favor of everything else.

I can’t speak for the incredibles who compete in CrossFit Masters (starts at 45, 60+ is all one group), but there are a few rules that I follow to try to stay out of trouble. For exercises that specify “Rx" weights, I aim for 70-80% of the women’s Rx. Years ago I had a bad back, so I’m careful with technique and deadliest; I’ll add reps if I feel too strong. I’m not embarrassed to use the women’s bar when that makes sense, and “no woman is gonna beat me” is laughable. I’m regularly beaten by some women who are themselves over 40.

Most of all I pay attention to what hurts. I’ve been nursing a right medial tendon ache for a couple of months, so I go easy on that one. On chin-ups I’ll “band up” and do more with my left arm - go for more reps with more bands.

There are some things I can’t dodge. I’m lucky to have good knees, but when those go I’ll have to pass on to something else. It’s  hard to do CrossFit without squats (it should be called SquatFit).

Not yet though. Maybe I’ll get another year …

Encyclopedia Britannica lives - at least on iOS

As a kid I wanted to read the encyclopedia - from A to Z. We couldn’t afford an encyclopedia though, so I had to make do with the dictionary [3]. 

So when Britannica, which had more or less skipped the CD era [1], went on the web I was an early customer [2]. They struggled technically though, and by 2006 I dropped my subscription. After 2008 I mostly forgot about them.

It turns out they’re still around, supposedly making money [7] and still charging a $70 subscription for access to most articles (current news topics are often free). That’s a bit steep, especially since a link from our kids school gives me full access to the “High School” version. [5] (Alas, my ancient Britannica Dashboard widget [4] can’t be configured to use that URL.)

On the other hand, the iOS app subscription is only $15/year, and all devices for the purchaser’s Apple ID can use the subscription. On my kid’s parental controlled iPhones the entire content is accessible without authentication needed [8].

So I signed up [6]. For now I’m an EB subscriber/user again; hope they last a few more years.

see also

• Winona and why I ended our Britannica subscription 10/2006
• Encyclopedia Britannica Dashboard widget and firefox search plugin 8/2005. Still works.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica - Google integration 6/2007 I think this ended.
• Britannica Online’s suicidal site redesign 12/2008. That was a bad move.
• Britannica finally goes social 6/2008. They shut the main blog a few months ago, but their ‘on this day’ feed still operates.

- fn -

[1] MacKiev World Book, by the way, is $30 on the App Store. I bought the DVD for $40 in 2012 - but I have to confess kids have not used it as much as I’d hoped.

[2] According to a 2005 post of mine, I used to prefer 1990s Britannica’s manually maintained index of web sites to Yahoo’s. This was back in the Alta Vista era. I know I was a paying customer from at least 2001-2006 - at about $70 a year.

[3] Much later I bought a complete set of the 1911 Edition. That is very cool browsing.

[4] Mavericks lets me assign multiple desktops to my secondary vertical display, so that’s where my Dashboard sits. When I want to park a doc in that display I swipe Dashboard away.

[5] I wonder if the school is supposed to post that redirect publicly. I don’t want to get them in trouble, so you’ll have to explore on your own. I can’t see any difference between High School version and public version.

[6] Auto-renews. Note you can manage these subscriptions from your iPhone - go Settings - Store and then Apple ID and tap around.

[7] Given the amount of broken stuff on their web site that can’t be a ton of money.

[8] I found some links that would take me to the web; those opened in Safari and were blocked. So no obvious backdoor.

What you sign up for when you pay Virgin Mobile Canada for phone services

I've once again gone through the tricky process of setting up a Virgin Mobile Canada prepaid account on an unlocked AT&T iPhone. This time I paid more attention to the contract I signed. It was remarkable what rights I've given Virgin Mobile:

... Unless you decline or withdraw your consent at a later date, you agree that Virgin Mobile, Bell Mobility, Bell Canada, Bell ExpressVu, Bell Media, Bell Aliant, The Source and their affiliates may .... send you communications by any means, including electronically ... products and services of our third party marketing partners; 

virginmobile.ca/marketingpreferences

(b) Telemarketing and Automatic Dialers: Unless you decline or withdraw your consent at a later date, you agree that Virgin Mobile may contact you by phone at your mobile number (and/or at any other contact numbers which you provide from time to time), and using automated dialing and/or announcing devices, to inform you of new offers and promotions, including but not limited to telemarketing messages. If you do not wish to receive such communications or allow the use of your information for these purposes, please call 1-866-580-3625 to change your preferences. 

... virginmobile.ca/textalerts for further information or to block premium short code messages.

So in addition to paying for these services, we also agree to be spammed, texted, and telemarketed to. If you provide your landline number when asked for contact information [1] needed to verify the account, then that's fair game for telemarketing as well.

And the carriers wonder why we hate them ... (ok, so they don't wonder.)

[1] I didn't, and I gave them my Yahoo pure-spam(r) account. But I still need to turn off the texting spam and the telemarketing on the mobile number. Some of this may not be legal in the US, Canada is not famed for consumer protection.

Late revelation -- Doom of the Face

I have the face of a Disney villain.

This came to me as a slowly unfolding personal revelation after reading Emily Matchar’s humorous essay on “Bitchy Resting Face” …

Memoirs of an Un-Smiling Woman - Emily Matchar June 2013

… I struggle with what comedic YouTube-ers Broken People recently termed “Bitchy Resting Face" (hereafter known as BRF). Their PSA-style video introduces us to the plight of women who look sad or pissed off for no reason. Women whose boyfriends always ask them "what's wrong?" Women whose apparent unfriendliness earns raised eyebrows from store clerks. Women who just look, well, bitchy. Even though they’re not…

… My eyes, naturally almond-shaped, can look as if I'm narrowing them in suspicion. My mouth, when not actively smiling, settles into a rather grim line…

… At one of my first jobs, a more senior co-worker pulled me aside to ask why I looked so unhappy. "If you're having an issue, this office is a safe space for you to talk," he said.

I wasn't having an issue. I was just thinking about getting a cup of coffee…

… BRF, I've discovered, has its advantages. I've traveled the world solo, and very rarely been bothered. While female friends with more friendly, open faces report the standard street harassment - cat calls, men badgering them for dates, butt pinching - I float along in my own bitch-face bubble…

… I live in Hong Kong, one of the densest cities on earth, where turning your face into a blank mask is simply a tool of urban survival…

The first person I thought of while reading Emily’s story was a female friend and colleague who I’d once thought of as unhappy and disapproving. When she smiled it was a great pleasure; which is probably why her friends and colleagues often looked for ways to make her smile. Because, despite the first impressions, she was and is a kind, thoughtful and compassionate person.

Orwell and Lincoln were wrong, we don’t get the faces we deserve — at least not entirely. But I’ll get to that part.

The second person I thought of was me, and over the course of a few weeks I enjoyed the agreeable experience of having another piece of the puzzle of mortal existence fall into place. Of course this was not entirely good news, and it would have been better to have figured this out twenty years ago, but solving the puzzle of life is a hobby of mine. After 50 new discoveries are rare, so I particularly appreciated this one.

Of course I’m a guy, so I can’t call it BRF. I’ll have to call it VRF - for villainous resting face (ARF is not quite right - I think I look stern, harsh and disapproving rather than angry). Close set narrow and sunken eyes, small mouth and weak chin, post-CrossFit lean and hungry … yeah, kinda scary. Villainous. No wonder airport security always looks twice.

I wasn’t always this way. As a young adult I was a magnet for cult recruiters — innocent and gullible (though I was neither - faces mislead). Now, though I’m less harsh than my childhood self, no cultist would give me a second look. Over the years photos show my face changing, much as the NYT described.

Faces, as we know, bring a certain kind of destiny. Many a (sometimes disastrous) political career has been made by a strong jaw. There are few lean, beaky and weak jawed faces running publicly traded corporations or nations (Tyler?). So there’s something to be said for knowing one’s face — denial has its advantages, but I prefer to see things as they are.

Of course “seeing things as they are” is the kind of thing we villains do. We make the hard choices others avoid, walk the shadows that must be walked, accept the responsibility for the greater good, grasp the … 

Hmm. Maybe I do deserve this face. Truth to tell, I do have some villainous henchman potential, and the usual weathered and worn experiences.

Deserved or not, we must either adjust to our faces or get plastic surgery (My Emily would laugh at that one — and then have me committed). Emily Matchar moved to Hong Kong, where her face worked for her. In my case there’s something to be said for teleconferences and working remotely. I do better as the Vizier and Henchman in the corporate shadows than as the face of the company. If I go the entrepreneurial route I would need a money-raising partner or avoid VCs and banks. When I lead teams I have to opt for “stern but fair” rather than “noble and true”. When I talk I have to find ways to laugh or smile — hopefully without the maniacal bit. That’s especially true with my kids — they tell me my “mildly disapproving look” is the glare of doom. 

If I have to find a job … well, the interview is a bit of an uphill battle. Not quite sure what to do about that.

On the bright side, solicitors leave my doorstep quickly.

I need a word for the willful failure of reason

Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow is a brain dump of his research career and speculations about mind. The Wikipedia description isn't bad ...

... dichotomy between two modes of thought : System 1 is fast, instinctive and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The book delineates cognitive biases associated with each type of thinking, starting with Kahneman's own research on loss aversion. From framing choices to substitution, the book highlights several decades of academic research to suggest that people place too much confidence in human judgment...

The thing I like about Kahneman's framework is that it explains how smart people can do "dumb' things. System 1, for example, correlates well with IQ test results; people with a strong System 1 answer quickly and correctly. System 1 is snappy, fun, and easy. It's snap judgment and gut instinct.

System 2 though, System 2 is hard work. It takes time to train it. System 2 is graphics software without hardware acceleration; it's no fun.

Both Systems can give correct answers, but while Kahneman recognizes the power of System 1, his true love is the plodding logic of System 2. One of the more interesting chapters of the book is a rough heuristic for making predictions using System 1 instinct adjusted by Systems 2 logic.

For what it's worth, I think of myself as having a reasonable System 1, but a really good System 2.

Which brings me to the word I want; a word for people who have a strong System 1 but a weak System 2. I want a word for the Paul Ryans and GWBs of the world.

The word isn't "dumb" or "stupid". It's a word for a character flaw rather than a cognitive limitation, a word for someone who has the power to reason well but chooses not to practice it. It's a word for willful intellectual laziness.

Anyone have a good word? A knowledge of Latin might help...

How could we create an evidence-based classification of disorders of the mind?

The software/hardware metaphor is usually considered as misleading as every other model of mind we've come up with.

I don't agree. My guess is it's an unusually good model -- one rooted in the physics of computation. Anything sufficiently complex can compute, which is, souls aside, the same as running a mind...

... in an alternative abstract universe closely related to the one described by the Navier-Stokes equations, it is possible for a body of fluid to form a sort of computer, which can build a self-replicating fluid robot ...

... A central insight of computer science is that, whenever a physical phenomenon is complex enough, it should be possible to use it to build a universal computer ...

Our minds have emerged to run on our desperately hacked and half-broken brains - in hundreds if not tens of thousands of years. In evolutionary terms that's insanely fast (and did it really never happen before?). Minds route around damage and adapt, as much as they can, to both adolescent transformation and adult senescence; they run and run until they slowly fade like a degraded hologram. It's no wonder minds are so diverse.

When that diversity intersects with the peculiar demands of our technocentric world we get "Traits that Reduce Relative Economic Productivity" -- and we get poverty and suffering. We get disease, and so we need names.

We need names because our minds can't reason with pure patterns -- we're not that smart. With names we can do studies, make predictions, select and test treatments.

Names are treacherous though. Once our minds create a category, it frames  our thinking. We choose a path, and it becomes the only path. It might be a good path for a time, but eventually we have to start over. Over the past ten years researchers and psychiatrists have realized that our old "DSM" categories are obsolete.

So how could we start over? One approach, informed by the history of early 20th century medicine, is to classify disorders by underlying physiology. That's where terms like 'connectopathy' come from, and why we try to define mind disorders by gene patterns.

We need to do that, but lately I've wondered if it's the wrong direction. If minds really are somewhat independent of the substrate brain, then we may find that disorders of the substrate only loosely predict the outcomes of the mind. Very similar physiological disorders, for example, might produce disabling delusions in one mind and mere idiosyncrasies in another.

So maybe we need another way to attach labels to patterns of mind. One way to do this would be to create a catalogue of testable traits for things like belief-persistence, anxiety-response, digit-span, trauma-persistence, novelty-seeking, obsessiveness, pattern-formation and the like. My guess is that we could identify 25-50 that would span traits that are currently loosely associated with both normal variation and TRREPs like low IQ, schizophrenia, and autism. Run those tests a range of humanity, then do cluster analysis and name the clusters.

Then start from there.

 See also:

• Be the Best You can Be: Rebooting pyschiatry: time for a new set of disorders (2013)
• Gordon's Notes: The evolutionary history of minds (2008)
• Be the Best You can Be: Redefining mental retardation and autism - the revolution ahead (2006)
• Be the Best You can Be: Very annoying: the diagnostic criteria for Asperger's are not all that useful (2005) - this was part of the body of work that led to retiring the diagnosis of "Asperger's Syndrome"

Why geezers hit the gym (warning - for mature audiences only)

Today's CrossFit workout was open 14.2. With low weights and bands I sort of got through part of the 3rd round. The world record is over 21 rounds - without accommodations of course.

I don't think I'm gonna win the CrossFit games. Worse, at my age, the future trend is not positive.

So why do we newly-old folk do this kind of thing? 

I can only speak for Emily and me - and Judith Warner I suppose. We know the mean "ideal" human lifespan is about 88, and we know that the 2-3 years preceding death are often very difficult. A few years ago I figured, based on my current age and health and family history, that 85 was a pretty good target. 

A target, not a goal. A goal is something to exceed, a target is something to hit. Hitting that target, adjusted downwards over time by illness and chance, is my plan for dying well like my dog rather than badly like most Americans.

When I hit that target I won't be doing chest-to-bar, or overhead squat, or even running. Years before I'll have dropped out of CrossFit. Maybe I'll still be walking, swimming, and shuffling xc skies on artificial snow. The trick, which I'm working on, is figuring out how to die about then. Maybe I'll celebrate my 85th with some base jumping.

That's about 30 years from now, and 30 years doesn't feel very long at all. It's gonna go fast.

Which is why we do crazy stuff now -- because that door is closing. It's the way we play the great game.

See also:

• Gordon's Notes: Nasty, brutal, short - the life of most humans (2007) Paleolithic times.

Mobile carrier SMS pricing created the messaging lottery - and WhatsApp won it

If mobile carriers priced MMS/SMS messaging as a dumb pipe data service, there'd be no WhatsApp. But mobile carriers wanted short term revenues, and lack of competition and contract lock-in (inflated switching costs) meant individual carriers could generate enormous margins on simple texting. Network effects and Prisoners Dilemma (game theory) meant that if a significant number of carriers could make money that way many could do it.

Which in turn drove the creation of a data-only messaging service industry, and made WhatsApp the winner of the alt-MMS lottery (feels very late 90s, which ends in tears).

Markets are weird.

I wonder when Facebook's Messaging service will interoperate with WhatsApp's service - and if iMessage would ever play along. I've always assumed Apple used the threat of iMessage Unleashed to keep its mobile partners in line, but that may be less useful now.

Vanguard and Fidelity: When did civilization collapse again?

I must have been asleep when civilization collapsed. Anyone know the date?

I say this because I haven't done much with our mutual funds for a few years -- just tweaked 'em periodically. Most of the purchases have been through my employer -- 401K, ESPP, and so on. 

Recently though I decided to do some realignment and cleanup at Vanguard and Fidelity. The results were ... interesting.

At Fidelity I discovered two of our larger funds were now in some kind of semi-frozen legacy mode. Sometime in the past few years Fidelity switched from managing mutual funds to managing only brokerage funds. Our mutual funds can be sold and we can do exchanges, but I don't think we can buy new shares (or at least it's not obvious). We have to move them into new brokerage accounts -- presumably without a tax event.

I'm sure Fidelity sent us some kind of notification, and I'm sure it was intentionally obscure. Why did they do this? I presume to avoid regulation or increase fees. I'm very sure they didn't do it for our benefit.

Ok, over to Vanguard. I'll see if I can get some olf-fashioned deposit slips ... 

The page you're trying to reach is currently unavailable

Oookaayyy. I better report that ....

... hang....

Hmm, let's see what happens when I try to deposit ...

Ahh, yes. The world financial collapse and the Zero Lower Bound. Vanguard (and Fidelity) don't earn any interest on US Treasuries, so they don't want me to buy any more. The "protection" is to prevent them losing so much money they have to "break the buck" and return less than $1/share.  That's probably what induced the non-reportable bug with deposit slips.

Between them Vanguard and Fidelity manage $3-4 trillion. A trillion isn't what it used to be, but it's still a fair amount of money. Enough money that our family investments are just noise. The megafunds don't work for us any more.

I guess we'll just have to wait for hackers to use our stolen credentials to empty our accounts. At least then we won't have to beg Vanguard and Fidelity for some attention.

Update: 

Thinking about this, I think it's a tiny artifact of the huge wealth concentration of the past thirty years.

When Emily and I first started putting money in mutual funds there was a market of self-managed investors. I'm guessing 5-10% of the population could put non-retirement money into mutual funds and wasn't wealthy enough to hire a full time professional money manager.

Flash forward to 2014. 0.5% of the population now holds most of our wealth -- and they almost all have professional money managers. About 98% is going to have money in home and retirement and cash. The fraction of the population that manages its own non-retirement mutual fund money is very small -- too small to be a market.

Supplement:

It's not the focus of this post, but for reference here's Fidelity's response on their reorg. Their response is not inconsistent with the hypothesis that ending their mutual fund accounts let them raise more fees (trading is a bad way to invest, but a good way to pay fees) and perhaps dodge regulations.

Fidelity started offering brokerage accounts, so customers can trade Fidelity and non-Fidelity mutual funds, stocks/ETFs, precious metals, CDs, and other fixed income products within the same account. In a mutual fund only account you can only trade Fidelity mutual funds.

You will not lose any benefits by moving your assets into a brokerage account, there are no fees to do that. There are also no account maintenance fees for brokerage accounts. Moving your assets in-kind from a mutual fund only account to a brokerage account is not a taxable event. We will continue to keep the cost basis of your positions.

FWIW, we decided to move the Fidelity US Treasury MM funds to a Vanguard Prime MM account -- mostly for sake of simplification and because the Treasury MM accounts look like they won't come back. We'll either move the S&P or liquidate and pay taxes. Overall we're continuing to slowly shift to Vanguard as the (slightly) lesser of the two evils.