"Applied Rationality Training Regime" #2: Searching for Bugs

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January 2, so I go on to Training Regime Day 2: Searching for bugs where the idea is to look for problems, presumably problems to be rational about but at any rate problems large or small: "In CFAR terminology, a bug is something that systematically goes wrong in your life." And this turns out to be a useful exercise, at least useful in that I hadn't thought enough about how the bugs in my life tend to group together. (And I'd always thought the term started with the dead moth that Hopper's group found after WWII, but it seems Edison was using it in the 1870s.)

  I look over at the kitchen sinks: two of them, small, at right angles to each other in a corner; one tap swivels over either sink and we usually have a dishcloth set on the tap so it can dry out. A long list of things that bug me, just a little bit each day, starts to pour out and then I just think "kitchen layout not well-suited for the current users' workflow." (Most of the time we've lived here has been pandemic time, or we'd have remodelled it already.) So I can list things individually, and I do (not here), but I prefer to think of that as one bug; our use is not the designed-for use and the usability of the kitchen therefore declined when we moved here eighteen months ago, even apart from a couple of physical points of deterioration (knobs, trash bin holder, a couple of hinges.) And yes, it bugs me. (It's possible that the kitchen was badly designed in the first place, but I prefer to think of it as a deterioration; the designer was thinking of something, after all.)

 I look at the messy desk where this laptop mostly sits (except that right now it's on a laptop stand in the hearth-room near the gas-insert fire, which is on) and I realize that the disorganization I see has been a major bug since childhood.... but I can at least see this as an infestation of same-species bugs in workroom (including shelves), garage, entryway, basement, shed, and back to the kitchen. Bug genus entropicus, species itemsOutOfOrderii, and a variety of varieties within that species.

The disorder bug becomes a productivity-failure bug, when I can't (easily) find the items I was going to write about, or when I can't (easily) find the tools or even the glue I was about to use, and so on. My T-shirt saying "organized people are just too lazy to look for things" is a reminder, but I've never fixed this. Aging has not made me more disorganized but it has made it harder to compensate; I can't hold as many items in my head at once as I could forty years ago, and I have less energy to waste. Are those separate bugs? I'd say that I'm getting symbiotic bug-pairs: entropy/mess critters are now coordinating more with entropy/decrepitude critters. It's still all about entropy.

Then there are other bugs of aging, for me and my wife and our little doggie too; my joints ache the way you'd expect for someone who has lost more than two inches in height.  Things work pretty well, except when they don't. I try to compensate with an hour's exercise each morning and with dietary adaptations and supplements and so forth, and this brings out other bugs that live on within the processes of compensation. I have multi-focal glasses, but mostly I do better with one fairly strong pair that I'm using now and an even stronger pair that I pull out for small print, but things don't get better and eventually they get worse. It's all about entropy, and it bugs me many times a day.

 There are items that would be bugs for other people; I'm a geek, and I think of myself as lacking in executive function, social awareness, and so on. Most of the time, for me these are features rather than bugs; it's just the way I always have been, and I like me just fine most of the time. Not always. But I guess things don't qualify as bugs for me unless I'm aware of them crawling around and getting in the way of my current goals.

  But the main bugs for this past year would be misjudgment bugs. For example, I did not expect the disruption of toilet paper supply, and I still don't really understand it: why didn't the businesses which suddenly couldn't use toilet paper, and had people who couldn't go to work, try to make a very little bit of money by redistributing their supply? I assume there's a good reason, but maybe not: maybe it was a regulatory barrier that just stayed up. I don't think I was sufficiently cynical about the WHO, FDA, CDC, Dr. Fauci etc. I suppose I was cynical enough about Trump, since I didn't believe his statements had truth-value to begin with, but back in early March when the Official Word was that masks don't work and you shouldn't be wearing them, I assumed there was a good evidentiary basis for that Word. And so on through the year. As Megan McArdle put it in the Washington Post,

The World Health Organization told us travel bans don’t work, apparently because they harm tourist economies; then we were told masks don’t work, apparently because experts worried that hoarding them would leave health-care workers without personal protective equipment; the public health community fell suddenly silent about the dangers of large gatherings during the George Floyd protests; a presentation to a government advisory committee actually described thousands of potential additional deaths as “minimal” compared with pursuing racial and economic equity; Anthony S. Fauci admitted he’d been lowballing his estimates of the point at which we’ll reach herd immunity.

Well I hadn't been believing Fauci for a while at that point; he does not seem to have credibility as a value, so he has none with me....but I don't understand him. I would like to understand him. There's a sort of model that Scott Alexander proposes, that I want to believe and do partly believe, in A Failure, But Not Of Prediction. Speaking of masks:

Common sense said that they worked. But there weren’t many good RCTs.
We couldn’t do more, because it would have been unethical to deliberately
expose face-mask-less people to disease. In the end, all we had were
some mediocre trials of slightly different things that we had to extrapolate
out of range.

Just like the legal term for “not proven guilty beyond a reasonable
doubt” is “not guilty”, the medical term for “not proven to work in
several gold-standard randomized controlled trials” is “it doesn’t
work” (and don’t get me started on “no evidence”). So the CDC said
masks didn’t work.

 I want to believe that, but it doesn't quite work for me, apart from the challenge-trial rejection which I reject (and I want to understand that mindset). The CDC was saying simultaneously that mask wearing doesn't work, and that health care workers need the masks. That bugs me quite a bit.

 More generally, I still don't have a good model of the "Very Serious People" who assure us that challenge trials are unethical -- it's ethical to forbid people to volunteer to save lives (on net) by risking their own? Since when? I don't even know how to think about that. I was just reading Scott Aaronson's "Distribute the vaccines NOW!" post, which lists the objection and gives the obvious-to-me reply:

5. Human challenge trials wouldn’t have provided much information, because you can’t do challenge trials with old or sick people, and because covid spread so widely that normal Phase III trials were perfectly informative. Actually, 1DaySooner had plenty of elderly volunteers  and volunteers with preexisting conditions. It bothers me how the impossibility of using those volunteers is treated like a law of physics, rather than what it is: another non-obvious moral tradeoff. Also, compared to Phase III trials, it looks like challenge trials would’ve bought us at least a couple months and maybe a half-million lives.

And that bugs me. It bugs me a lot, because I'm just not understanding. I'd have started with setting up challenge trials back in January (Wuhan closed down on Jan 23, and we'd already seen that it was present in the US....and we already had a vaccine, though that's far from the only thing to test. I wanted variolation trials, to begin with, back when I didn't know we already had a vaccine, and I'd have advocated for them anyway: if we know that variolation cases tend to be very mild, then we can be much happier to test vaccines. But I'd have said right off that "here's an alpha test, if it works out we'll have a beta test and then a gamma test and then announce public distribution, but anybody can sign up even for the alpha test if they want to and pass a quiz to show informed consent and can find a spot (i.e., a shot, and a room where you can get gradually increasing variolation exposures) available." If this is irrational, then I admit I'm still irrational; I still think that most of the pandemic so far, and all of it that may follow with a possibly-much-more-contagious strain, was avoidable from the beginning. And this bugs me a lot. (I described my own (fragment of a) healthcare plan way back when... I'd change some things, of course, and I wasn't thinking about the sort of crash Project that would be justified by a pandemic, but I think the principles are the same.)

Well, maybe this just shows the degeneration of an aging geek's brain; maybe it's all entropy after all. Today should surely be recognized generally as Entropy Day: it's the birthday of Rudolf Clausius who came up with the idea, and noted:

1. The energy of the universe is constant.
2. The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum. 

 It's also the birthday (as he celebrated it) of Isaac Asimov, who in his own favorite story (and mine, back when my ABCs were Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Delany, Ellison... ... ... Zelazny) asked The Last Question: "How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?" And perhaps it's worthy of note that it's the 118th birthday of Kane Tanaka, who has been fighting entropy longer than anybody else currently on this planet. And spends every afternoon studying math.

Hmm...I'm not sure I did very well on day#2, but it doesn't bug me very much. I think I've learned a bit, and I guess I've identified some things that will presumably come up in later days, if I get that far. So it goes.

Yeah, the Fed Did It.

(More precisely, the Fed aggravated it; the Fed could have prevented most of it; the extent to which we depend on the Fed's good judgment should shrink, not grow.)

I believe we've been having a three-component economic crisis, each component building on and worse than the one before it, with overambitious or overconfident regulators/legislators making each component far worse than it needed to be. The three components I see are

• the trend-following housing (and financial services) bubble, which the Fed worsened slightly by false reassurances;
• the security-seeking, trend-breaking cash crunch which the Fed worsened greatly by too-tight monetary policy;
• the longer-run tech-based employment recalculation. (All right, the Fed is not guilty here but it mostly hasn't happened yet, and our sensitivity to the mistakes the Fed made this time is growing with time. Cheer up, the worst is yet to come.)

bubble: I've commented on the housing bubble before, and how I think it was worsened by regulators and legislators (and raters) who denied the problem. Investor irrationality was real, but part of that irrationality was the willingness of investors to trust pronouncements by Greenspan and Bernanke, by Barney Frank and others on both sides of the aisle, and of course their willingness to believe that AAA meant "safe". I'm not arguing that interest rates were or weren't too low. (I do not believe that was the problem.) I'm not saying that the regulators were (or are, or will be) stupid or malevolent. I am saying that they were, quite obviously, wrong, and that those who relied on their assurances did very badly. (Those who simply said "prices are rising, I'll bet everything I can borrow that the trend will continue" did exactly as badly; there are always some of those.) I'd fix that (following Arnold Kling) mainly by going back to a world of high down payments. You could still give 100% financing if you wanted, but any federal support (including FDIC guarantees for a bank that offers mortgages) should depend on at least 20% down payment. Leverage would shrink generally, and underwater mortgages would be extremely rare. This would reduce homeownership rates, of course, and that may be regrettable, but it's not obvious that people are helped by encouraging them to make commitments they are likely to break, or be broken by. Of course this version of Kling's reform won't happen; what we're getting instead is expanded trust in that which failed before, to which we add taxpayers having to guarantee more than 95% of mortages, still being pushed on those who can't afford them.

cash crunch: As I've said before, I've become a semi-Sumnerite:

the real problem right now is not a “real” problem. The real problem is a nominal problem. When the growth rate of nominal GDP falls sharply there is always a severe recession. We have a severe nominal shock, a problem which has been understood by economists at least as far back as Hume. At the time, it always looks like the “real problem” was some symptom of the monetary shock, such as financial panic. Thus in the 1930s people thought the collapsing financial system caused the Great Depression, only later did we discover it was too little money.

Investors' efforts to minimize individual risk ended up adding to systemic risk. Actually it seems to me that we knew by February 2008, when Roubini said,

"Cash is king in 2008,"... the U.S. went into recession in December and will stay there for at least a year.

The Federal Reserve under Bernanke ignored what Bernanke had written academically; it brought down interest rates and then declared a "liquidity trap". It did expand the monetary base, but not nearly enough to satisfy demand -- and they neutralized part of their monetary expansion in fall 2008, by paying interest on excess reserves, encouraging hoarding by banks. Cash remained king, mostly because people were worried about too much risk in their portfolios. Here I would agree with Sumner that we should target NGDP (nominal GDP, aggregate cash flow) but I worry that buying Treasury bonds with cash, exchanging one low-risk item for another, might not succeed; we need to cope with people trying to shed risk. The Fed's purchases of mortgage-backed securities seems like a really bad idea: this is not absorbing risk in the sense of variability, it's buying a bet that already failed and attempting to prop up a market that should go downwards because there are too many houses out there for a while. So,

• I'd make NGDP measures tradable in the form of Shiller's trills, creating a permanent market growing to perhaps a billion trills, paying one-tenth of one percent of our GDP, owned by citizens or foreigners but not by our own government.
• Like Sumner, I would announce that we're targeting a 5% growth trend in trill yield (i.e., in NGDP), based on the pre-2008 trend so that if it rises too fast or too slow in one year we compensate the next; this is "level targeting".
• I would give the Fed a stock-bonds-cash portfolio to be rebalanced daily, where the cash can be effectively imaginary (set it at last year's NGDP, most will never be printed) and all stocks are treated equally via a Wilshire Index fund; this rebalancing portfolio is the key difference between me and everybody else, hence probably totally wrong, but it makes sense to me. If investors starts selling stocks, the Fed will automatically buy, or sell if everyone else is buying, so this couple-of-trillion portfolio would automatically tend to stabilize the market. It would probably make money for taxpayers, too.
• How would it stabilize the NGDP trend? When trills (next year's trills; buy them now!) start to fall, the Fed would change the portfolio proportions, giving cash for stocks and perhaps bonds, absorbing risk and satisfying the demand for cash. When trills start to rise above the price level target, the Fed portfolio proportions would change back.
• Actually, I might make this last item more indirect: I might start a prediction market on the proportions required to achieve the actual NGDP target. In effect, I'd be giving knowledgeable parties something to bet on, so that they'd make money by getting it right. I don't want them able to make money by betting on the actual cash value of a trill's annual yield: that's (2008 yield)*(1.05^N), so the "right answer" is known in advance. Bet on the unknown path to that, instead. The Fed would use this prediction market to guide the proportions.

Instead of this, of course, we're giving the Fed a more complex mission as if its people had enhanced credibility. Since their credibility with me has gone way down, I don't find this reassuring.

employment recalculation: Kling talks about recalculation, reallocation of resources including labor in the constant search for "sustainable patterns of specialization and trade", and the unemployment this causes. Sumner acknowledges that some recalculation was required at the beginning, but mostly he just means the structural issues of too big a housing sector (and finance.) Delong and Krugman point to aggregate-demand-based unemployment and say that structural unemployment is on the way, but not yet a big deal. (Of course current unemployment is made worse by underwater mortgages which keep people from moving where the jobs are, and therefore by low-down-payment policies. And it's made directly worse by the cash crunch which motivates companies to sit on their cash, and it's made worse by regulatory uncertainty (and especially health care) and inflation uncertainty. But this is talking about aggregate demand v. structural, with recalculation as part of a slightly different story.)

I'd agree with them all, mostly, but add that recalculation is growing as an issue in a way they haven't (to my knowledge) discussed. My feeling is that overall technological productivity will gradually become the biggest factor in continuing unemployment, in the sensitivity of unemployment rates to (failures in) NGDP trends. I think that our increasing wealth and productivity means that a sharply decreasing fraction of the population is generating stuff we actually need, and a less-sharply decreasing fraction of the population is generating stuff we think we need. When money-trends continue, this doesn't matter because people buy whatever they were planning to buy. When money-trends fail and people want to hide their money, only the essentials keep going and that's a shrinking part of the economy. In the long run, (almost?) all production of goods and services is optional. In the short-to-medium run it would be enough to have the Fed do its job, making sure money-trends continue so people are comfortable buying stuff they want, not just what they think they need. In the long run, we will also need a negative income tax.

My approach to this stuff would be even more drastic, and therefore more unlikely, than my approaches to the preceding problems. So I won't finish this part of this post.

Footnote, since this is stuff that wasn't part of the way I thought through 2008: Aggregate cash flow is NGDP, Nominal Gross Domestic Product, the sum of all the money we pay (or get paid) for all the goods and services we use (and produce). You can divide that by your best guess at an inflation multiplier to get "Real GDP", the theoretical "constant-dollar" value of all those goods and services, but your paycheck and mortgage payment and grocery bill are paid in actual nominal cash flowing around and around, keeping our individual financial plans going by fulfilling the promises that we need to make economics ("sustainable patterns of specialization and trade", as per Arnold Kling) work. If expected NGDP drops, then you're already in a recession. I didn't really follow this argument when Tyler Cowen first recommended Sumner's blog. In the end, it's not that complicated. Think of a zillion spreadsheets carrying business plans and personal plans forward a few years, each projecting current trends. Aggregate cash flow -- that's "Nominal GDP". NGDP. Money. Some of those spreadsheets, some of those plans, will fail and others do better than expected, but generally the aggregate cash flow rises each year as population goes up, as productivity goes up, and as inflation goes on. If it falls or rises a little away from the expected trend implicit in all those individual plans, we adapt. If it falls sharply below trend, then cash isn't going around as expected and plans start failing simply because cash isn't going around: businesses fail and it's not their fault. Things are broken. We have a recession, a bad one.

In fact, people act by plans and promises, betting on their projections, so we get a recession as soon as the expected NGDP growth fails so that people stop buying and employers stop hiring.

Q: That sort of sounds almost convincing. Very odd. But isn't the future causing the present here?

A: Gee, thank you. It's actually close to tautological: expected NGDP is the aggregate of expected cash flow, and your belief that you're no longer going to be able to buy the goods and services you expected to buy will immediately change your behavior, the recession hits as soon as you expect it. So it's your beliefs about the future causing your behavior in the present.

In the current case we had a small recession because a whole lot of investors had believed our regulators and legislators who downplayed the risks of the bubble. They -- the investors -- had believed in the AAA ratings. When they hit reality they bounced, and needed more cash.

Q: But is this the Fed's fault? I mean, apart from Greenspan and then Bernanke denying the bubble?

A: The Fed has a dual mandate: they are supposed to manage inflation and unemployment, by managing the money supply. I'm saying that I mostly believe Sumner: the Fed did expand money somewhat, but they could have avoided most of the pain we've felt if they'd done more. So yeah, it's their fault.

Q: Done more? Done what? Lowered interest rates below zero?

A: Well, first by not paying interest on (excess) reserves, which was and is contractionary. Second, by announcing an inflation target or better an NGDP level-targeting sequence. Third, by expanding their open market purchases; preferably by starting the kind of automatically daily-rebalancing portfolio I described above.

Q: I understand why paying interest on reserves is contractionary; why are they doing it?

A: I don't really understand, but I think it's simply a way to give the banks money so they don't fail, while pretending that it's not Main Street bailing out Wall Street. I'm getting very cynical in my old age.

Ryan Avent of the Economist said

It's getting ever more difficult to avoid concluding that the Fed's inflation target is not the 2% we'd all come to expect, but something much closer to zero. This obviously impacts economic behaviour. The Fed could potentially have a significant effect on conditions simply by letting markets know that it's not actually happy with the current inflation trajectory.

Recently (Sept 2010) Bernanke has said that, with good effect; let's hope he goes further. There's some evidence that it will happen, e.g. Calculated Risk's Fed's Lockhart: The Approaching Monetary Policy Decision Dilemma

I think a consensus is building for QE2 in early November.

But I don't trust Bernanke to follow through, or at least I don't trust the Fed he leads...and that's what it depends on.

Or then again (I hope), maybe not.

Update: I see Avent saying in The perils of prediction: Forget forecasts, trust markets | The Economist that

I like to point out that in June of 2008 the Federal Reserve forecast real GDP growth in 2009 of 2.0% to 2.8%, when in fact the economy shrank in 2009 by over 2%. Of course, this doesn't mean that central banks have no basis on which to make policy. All they need do is look at the evidence in front of them. Markets...

I trust markets a lot more than I trust the Fed.

Perhaps I should note that Sumner does not blame the Fed for failure to predict, as he said in TheMoneyIllusion » The Fed doesn’t have a crystal ball

All the major investment banks with their million dollar Ivy League employees missed this crisis (and its eventual impact), and yet the Fed was supposed to have predicted it? The Fed pays much lower salaries than Wall Street.

Indeed, I wouldn't blame the Fed for the housing bubble recession-trigger at all if Greenspan (and then Bernanke) had simply said "Bubble-detection is not part of my job, I can't help you with that." But this is not what I understood them to be saying.

update: Ah-ha! An actual reputable economist, Nick Rowe, says at least that

If I had my druthers, the Fed would buy stocks. Something like the S&P500 index.

This is not equivalent to saying that the Fed should do a large part of its monetary policy via a rebalancing portfolio somewhat similar to what investment people prescribe for individuals, but it's a start. Yay!

(Or then again, maybe not.)

upd: The same Nick Rowe is quoted approvingly by Brad Delong in Against Money-Financed Fiscal Expansion, For Open Market Operations in Equity Indexes

OK. Start with the Fed buying bridges. That will work. Now, wouldn't it be nice if the Fed could also sell those bridges again later, if it needs to, as it probably will. Bridges aren't very liquid. And, the Fed is good at clipping coupons on bonds, but perhaps not very experienced at collecting tolls on bridges. Hmmm. Maybe if the Fed just bought shares in bridges instead, that would be as good as bridges, but even better from the practical point of view. Hmmm. Why stop at bridges? Why not buy shares in everything? Why not just buy the Wilshire 5000, or some such index?

Excellent. The right index identified, along with the need for later sale; we are close to portfolio rebalancing.

Political Psychoanalysis

I mostly try to ignore articles and blog posts dedicated to the proposition that "my opponents may or may not know it, but their real motivation is ____." Mostly it's ugly, mostly it's unconvincing, mostly it presupposes that the writer has only one kind of opponent. So I mostly skipped Rich's The Rage Is Not About Health Care saying that health-care opposition is really all about racism, sexism, and evilism in general:

the laughs evaporated soon enough. There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. ...the health care bill is not the main source of this anger and never has been. It’s merely a handy excuse. The real source of the over-the-top rage of 2010 is the same kind of national existential reordering that roiled America in 1964. ... The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play.

Well, I assumed that Rich had in fact watched "goons hurl venomous slurs at ... John Lewis", and I thought that was sad but unsurprising; there are nasty people in the world, and I expect some of them to use protests as excuses for being nasty; I also expect that other people in the protest will try to prevent or at least disassociate themselves from bad behavior, and it's hard to get an overall sense of any given group because any given group contains lots of different kinds of people.

So my reaction to Rich's "facts" was a sigh, and my reaction to his "analysis" was...well..... Meh. Skip it, no comment; I don't think I finished scanning it, and didn't click his links.

But then I got a link to Rich's op-ed from someone I care about. Hmm...should I take Rich seriously? Better look for news reports, see if there were protest organizers who commented, look for The Other Side.

I clicked on one of Rich's links, to the Washington Post's 'Tea party' protesters accused of spitting on lawmaker, using slurs:

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus said that racial epithets were hurled at them Saturday by angry protesters who had gathered at the Capitol to protest health-care legislation, and one congressman said he was spit upon.

Apparently that's what Rich thought it wasn't entertaining to watch. Okay, I'd agree. And is The Other Side making excuses? No, it seems the Other Side is in denial.

The key claim -- and cash offer -- seems to be at Big Journalism:

the Congressional Black Caucus claimed the N-word was hurled 15 times. YouTube video shows that at least two of the men in the procession were carrying video cameras and holding them above the crowd. They have not come forth with evidence to show that even one person hurled the vile racist epithet. ... Is it really possible that in 2010, in a crowd of 30 or 40 thousand people — at the center of a once-in-a-lifetime media circus — not one person’s flipphone, Blackberry, video recorder or a network feed caught a single incident? ... the Democrats need a racist Tea Party moment. To stop it in its tracks. That’s why on Saturday they used the Congressional Black Caucus to try to manufacture the false appearance of one. And when they didn’t get it, they did what they always do: they lied..... It’s time for the allegedly pristine character of Rep. John Lewis to put up or shut up. Therefore, I am offering $10,000 of my own money to provide hard evidence that the N- word was hurled at him not 15 times, as his colleague reported, but just once. Surely one of those two cameras wielded by members of his entourage will prove his point.

Breitbart later said he was UPPING THE STAKES

$100K to UnitedNegroCollegeFund if Rep Lewis shows evidence N-Word yelled at CBC at last weeks Capitol #HCR protest.

Well, he has a point. There were of course a whole lot of video gadgets at the scene. If one of them caught the supposedly shouted slurs, then why isn't somebody claiming Breitbart's money? If none of them did...well, this is a problem. I don't think Breitbart's psychoanalysis is any better than Rich's (nor is it obviously any worse), but I am right now not expecting that video to be produced.

Slightly more interesting psychoanalysis at Gay Patriot

While I agree with the general thrust of [Will Collier's] argument, I do have a slight quibble with his recreation of what went on in the Democrats’ strategy meeting. ... They thought that by staging this bit of political theater, it was certain to elicit racist reaction because they really, truly believe that Republicans, especially their most zealous supporters, hate people of color (and sexual minorities). Hence the cameras. If a group of black people walked through a crowd of Tea Party protesters, they were bound to hear a racial epithet. (And when they didn’t find what they expected, they still rushed to the media with the accusations they were prepared to have leveled when they encountered the racism they were certain to find–but didn’t encounter.)

Well, maybe. Or maybe not. I'll add my own psychoanalysis: I think that we all, you and me included, have a strong tendency to adjust our perceptions of the world to fit our preconceptions: it's all about Reconstructive memory: Confabulating the past, simulating the future

The term ‘Rashomon effect’ is often used by psychologists in situations where observers give different accounts of the same event,and describes the effect of subjective perceptions on recollection.

I think it's entirely likely that the people saying they heard the N-word "15 times" are not lying: that's what they remember hearing. We live in worlds of our own creation, to a considerable extent. I'm simply not expecting to see the video.

Update: Perhaps I should note that my original views are not too far from David Kuhn, whoever that is:

Recently, in an ugly scene near the Capitol, some Tea Party protesters reportedly hurled racist epithets at members of the Congressional Black Caucus (including civil rights hero John Lewis). But it's the generalizations that are absurd and self-defeating....

But now I'm not even going that far.

Financial Times on Torture

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal says

Tyler Cowen (where does he ever find the time?) alerts me that the extremely sharp, thoughtful, and witty Clive Crook now has a weblog.

Generally, when something is agreed upon by DeLong and Cowen, I'm likely to find it of value, and so I've tentatively subscribed to CrookBlog. Okay...but in reading a few entries, I find myself stuck on FT.com | Clive Crook's blog: It depends what you mean by "torture":

If anything is torture, simulated drowning is torture. If you need to remind yourself what waterboarding entails, read how the Khmer Rouge did it...Which principled defence of "aggressive questioning" permits simulated drowning but prohibits thumb-screws or the rack?

But I don't need to read how the Khmer Rouge did it. I can watch it performed the way that the Americans do it, as done to a Fox News guy named Steve Harrigan.

So okay, I know what it is. Is it "torture"? Well, gee. Yes, it depends on what you mean by "torture", and some people -- knowing what waterboarding is -- will include waterboarding within "torture", and others won't. What I'm looking at, though, is Crook's If anything is torture, simulating drowning is torture.

This strikes me as fundamentally unserious. Waterboarding is an unpleasant experience which some not-obviously-insane people volunteer for, and don't seem to regret afterwards. (So far as I know, this line excludes both thumbscrews and rack.) We can draw the "torture" line to exclude such things; in that case waterboarding won't be torture, and yet I think we'll have a quite intellectually and morally coherent view of what torture is (and why, in a morality which tries to pay some attention to the Golden Rule, we don't torture.)

I imagine we can also have an intellectually and morally coherent view of torture which does include waterboarding, which we therefore don't do. Maybe we can have an actual discussion of it. However, the post I'm linking does not seem to rise above the "if anything is torture" level. So I have to start my reading of CrookBlog with a down-check on credibility within some domain of discourse whose scope is yet to be determined. That's okay; there are major places where I down-check DeLong, and yet he's still worth reading. But still, it's not a good start, and I read too many blogs.

or maybe not? hmmm..

Mathematics, Economics -- and Bias

Dani Rodrik invites us to:

call me naive, but I also think that Mugabe would not have pursued his policies for this long if he had a better grasp of debt dynamics.

The idea that Mugabe's problem is a lack of mathematical sophistication does, indeed, strike me as naive, and makes me very slightly less inclined to take Rodrik seriously.

In fact, I take Mugabe to be merely an extreme case of the general dictum that the problem with government is that it attracts people who think they should be in charge, including and especially people who love power; this is not a left-vs-right problem, it's why I tend to towards a (leftish, bleeding-heart, centrist) libertarianism (sometimes almost reaching it) on tests of such things, as I've noted before. The fact that Rodrik's mental model of Mugabe pops out with "insufficient math, that's his trouble!" is quite seriously a reason to question Rodrik's mental-model formation.

Update: Tyler Cowen remarks that

By writing "...call me naive" Rodrik is showing a level of self-awareness which seems to be signaling he is not naive.

I would rather say that he is showing a level of critic-awareness which signals that he knows some will label this as "naive", but he is not going to answer them -- he just feels that Mugabe's problem is insufficient math. Rodrik is in general somebody I can't ignore, but (in my model of the world) his credibility is very slightly lower than it was. And this, of course, interests no one but me, but it does interest me...as the long-ago author of Equations, Models, and Programs: A Mathematical Introduction to Computer Science I feel as if I ought to be maximally sympathetic to the math-modeling-in-all-things view...

Then again, maybe not.