The 4-7-8 Measured HexaHexaFlexagon, and its State-Machine Graph

A basic hexaflexagon is a paper hexagon, made of six triangles -- but it obviously has layers, and there are odd fold-lines and paper edges showing in between the triangles. Here you can see two of them folded out of graph paper, with side 1 showing for the one on the left and side 2 for the one on the right. Each is in what I'm calling state "12", meaning that those are the two sides directly accessible.

 If you pinch one of those edges and poke the opposite edge inwards then you can fold the outside down and make it into a single thick triangle, with the center becoming the top vertex. I take the one on the right, showing the "2" side. Gently tug that vertex and you can pull it apart, revealing a third side to the flexagon; in this case it's actually numbered "3". Here:

Finish pulling it out, flatten it, and you'll be in state "23"; side 1 has disappeared, i.e. it has been folded to the inside, and sides 2 and 3 are now accessible:

 That's at least a "trihexaflexagon", and it's a "hexahexaflexagon" if there's also a fourth, fifth, and sixth side concealed in the middle. In this case, they're all right in there. For a hexahexa you can look up and use a "Tuckerman traverse" (described at the previous link) to visit all six sides, but I like thinking in terms of the graph I've put in the illustration.

   Central Cycle: Starting from side 2 and thus choosing to fold side 1 inwards, I moved to side 23 as shown, and I could then start from side 3 to fold side 2 inwards, reaching state 13...and then continue back to state 12, and round and round it goes. If you decorate the sides, you'll see peculiar things happen as the inside becomes outside, especially if you punch holes through some state (e.g., in the center, as a face's mouth) which disappear in other states. This is true even for the trihexaflexagon. This one, however, is a hexahexaflexagon, so I also have

   Peripheral Cycles: I could have chosen a different edge to pinch, and I'd have exposed side 5, reaching state 25. (Of the six edges, three will get me to side 3, three to side 5.) Similarly if I'd started with side 1 on top, I could have chosen to reach state 13 or 15. Those four states (13, 15, 23, 25) are the states reachable from state 12, as you see on the graph, and (12,15,25) makes a peripheral cycle....an epicycle. Each central-cycle state has its own epicycle: if I start in state 23 I can reach an epicycle using side 4, and state 13 gets me to one involving side 6.

This graph doesn't describe the full behavior of the flexagon; as I said, things change when the center changes places with the outside. Still it's a useful summary, and I invented it (I have no idea how many other people have done so, but I never saw it before I came up with it), and I like it, so I wanted to put it in a post.

Folding a strip of paper into one of these isn't hard, and you'll find lots of YouTube tutorials showing how to do it. Mostly they either say to measure a 60-degree angle, or simply to get a feel for folding overlapping equilateral triangles. I've done that, but I like measurement. I like numbers, and I like the fact that if you have an equilateral triangle whose sides are of length 8 (in whatever units you like) and it's pointing straight upwards, then one vertical line splits it into two equal right triangles whose sides are almost exactly 8, 4, and 7. Seven? Why seven, you ask? Well, Pythagoras says sqrt(8^2-4^2) = 6.92820... and seven is well within the margin of error you get by folding, anyway. 

Side-note: It's also nice that at least for me, it evokes my use of those triangles whenever I do Dr. Weil's 4-7-8 breathing exercise -- which definitely does not put me to sleep in 60 seconds, but like other patterns of conscious breathing gives me a way to defocus, refocus, and generally talk to my autonomic nervous system....if you have the habit of doing a specific breath pattern as part of relaxing/getting ready to sleep, then that association can help. Any ritual helps, but a breathing ritual can help more. Hooray for pranayama! So part of my own relaxation routine includes drawing those two triangles, one with each hand: inhale throughout the 4 side, turn at right angles and hold throughout the 7 side, then turn towards the beginning and exhale throughout the hypotenuse. 4-7-8.

 So does it actually help in making flexagons, at least as you're getting a feel for how to do it without any lines at all? You be the judge. Here's a piece of graph paper ruled in quarter-inch squares:

The length is 11 inches, and for a simple trihexaflexagon I want 5 1/2 base-lengths (you'll see why, as we go) so the baselength is exactly 2 inches, 8 squares. So I count 7 squares down, draw an 11" midline, 7 more squares, and slice myself a rectangle that will be (7/4)*2= 3.5"x11". Mark it at the 2", 4", 6", 8", and 10" points and add the lines you see: the ruler is there to show you that the diagonal triangle sides we're creating really are 2", i.e. the triangles really are equilateral. Number the sides, fold along the midline and glue the halves together, then slice off the incomplete triangle from each end:

As you can see, the back side of the glued strip shows the triangles that were on top.  (At this point, it would be best to fold back and forth along each of the edges to crease them, but I'm not doing that because I want to control the highlights as I take pictures.)

 The front says 1,2,2,3,3,1,1,2,2,3, and we want to hide side 3 so we fold the first pair of 3s to face each other, like so:

and then the next pair, like so:

The remaining 3 is on the other side of that final 1, and we want it to face the 3 we can see, so we slide the visible 3 under the 1:

And now we turn it over:

and fold it in, and glue the two blank sides to get:

Now I crease each edge back and forth both ways so that the edges fold readily, and even force them into a stack of equilateral triangles:

And now they can fold...so I fold back and forth for a few minutes and then decorate. As you can see, I've drawn a happy face on side 1 but there are three corners lopped off:

This time I fold through to side 2, and put a sad face....

and on to side 3...

Flexagons are fun. Finicky and frustrating, if you're as clumsy as I am, but gently folding back and forth over and over again to loosen the folds does eventually help. Just keep trying. I have made flexagons out of cereal-box cardboard...hard to fold. And out of toilet paper...even harder.

 And the six-sided version is just the same except (surprise!) for having twice as many sides...so you can either start with larger paper, or glue strips together to make a longer strip, or make smaller triangles as shown here, where I use only 10"x1.75" for 19 triangles, front and back:

After folding and gluing the halves shown, you fold the 4s together, the 5s together, and the 6s together -- you'll then have a single strip which looks much like the starting point shown above, and if you fold the 3s together it will come into a hexagon with the blank triangles ready to glue as we did here. Decorate, punch holes with a manual hole punch and see where they go, mark the insides of each side and watch them go out. Look for patterns. Always. The world needs more patterns. And the world needs more silliness. And that's all I'm gonna say....

or then again, maybe not. (But it is for now.)

On Being A Geek

  There are different kinds of geeks, but I have a general impression about where I fit in. My general impression is that a lot of us identify ourselves loosely as
     -- "Mildly autistic, I suppose," or as
     -- "Somewhere on the autism spectrum--aren't we all?" or as
     -- "Maybe a little bit Aspie?--one-sided, long-winded speech about a favorite topic, while misunderstanding or not recognizing the listener's feelings or reactions -- that's me!" or simply with
      -- "I might be ADHD, the symptoms do seem -- hey, look, a squirrel!".

   So, I do have that general impression, but I don't really know a lot of geeks in the first place... there's daily variation for me, and I mostly like people one or maybe two at a time, but most days for me don't involve physically seeing anybody I don't know, and I like it this way. In fact my days don't usually involve talking in person or by phone with anyone outside my family except for my partner/coauthor. Yes, I have a family...once upon a time we were both not going to parties, and we decided to not-go-to-parties together, and we did eventually admit to our families that we'd gotten married, and our five kids are grown up now.  There's daily variation for me, but I couldn't possibly have a social life like that of the people I know or the characters I find in books. As one of the T-shirts my wife chose for me puts it,

You Read My T-Shirt.

That's enough social interaction
for one day.

   I can deal with the world much better in written form. (I don't even do all that well with television or movies. Standard-length YouTube videos and even TED talks I can handle, but after a while I'd much rather go read a book. My wife chooses movies that she thinks I'll get through, and is almost always right.)

   Normally I don't think about this, I just live with it, and I've been really quite happy with my life as it is...there are daily joys in seeking and re-examining the patterns that I find all around me, and in the people that form the most important of those patterns. And I think I have the strengths of my weaknesses, in the sense that if I hadn't been the kind of small child who sits in a field reciting the powers of 2, who sits under his Mommy's study table with ever-growing stacks of interlinked encyclopedia volumes, I might never have earned a PhuD in Computer Science. (Perhaps I'm wrong about that; my 3 brothers have science PhuDs, without my sort of issues. But I still think I have the strengths of my weaknesses.) In any case, I have been thinking lately about being "mildly autistic, I suppose" and I wanted to collect some links and notes, presenting five views from five bloggers: the (non-autistic) uber-geek Eric Raymond, the probably-mildly-autistic cultural-economist Tyler Cowen, the autistic tumblr-user alice-royal, the probably-mildly-autistic psychiatrist/rationalist whose pseudonym is "Scott Alexander", and .... well ... me, of course.

   First, let me start with Eric Raymond's recent post on Autism, genius, and the power of obliviousness. He has a very simple and logical explanation for the cognitive advantages often associated with autism, what I'm calling "the strength of my weaknesses":

Yes, there is an enabling superpower that autists have through damage and accident, but non-autists like me have to cultivate: not giving a shit about monkey social rituals.

Neurotypicals spend most of their cognitive bandwidth on mutual grooming and status-maintainance activity. ... The neurotypical human mind is designed to compete at this monkey status grind and has zero or only a vanishingly small amount of bandwidth to spare for anything else. Autists escape this trap by lacking the circuitry required to fully solve the other-minds problem; thus, even if their total processing capacity is average or subnormal, they have a lot more of it to spend on what neurotypicals interpret as weird savant talents.

Non-autists have it tougher. To do the genius thing, they have to be either so bright that they can do the monkey status grind with a tiny fraction of their cognitive capability, or train themselves into indifference so they basically don’t care if they lose the neurotypical social game.

  I think that works, to a considerable extent, as an explanation linking at least two major aspects of autism. I gave up young on "monkey status games" that I really couldn't play, or even figure out when I'd won or lost points; it's not that I don't care at all, it's certainly not that I denigrate "monkey social rituals", it's just that this has never been an option. So when it crops up, I shrug and move on. I do keep stumbling over this:  most people's statements about most subjects, especially politics but really truly most subjects, seem to be ways to reinforce their status within the Right Group. As Robin Hanson keeps explaining,
"much of our behavior is poorly explained by the reasons we give, and better explained as ways to signal abilities, loyalties, etc."  Depressingly often, that's by talking about how evil+stupid are the members of the Wrong Group and anyone who fails to despise them sufficiently. I shrug and move on. I'd probably have tried for group status, if I could have, but I can't figure out the signals -- even professionally. It's not just a question of status. My father and his father were people people with many acquaintances, people to call on or be called by...a support network. My wife's grandfather turned out to be another with an even wider circle; he wanted to introduce me to people, and gave up in frustration with "You're smart but you have no ambition." For him, a condemnation; for me, just the way things are.  I should have tried harder, but I wouldn't have gotten much farther. Let me put it this way:

  I think that everybody has a whole lot of pattern-handling machinery, and finds joy in finding patterns. That's a fundamental part of being a primate: "monkey curiosity" -- I'm happy being a monkey. There are large-scale patterns and small-scale patterns, patterns with lots of symmetry and patterns with lots of chaotic semi-structure...your brain is not a general-purpose processor so much as it is a collection of immensely complicated interlocked machines with enough plasticity to adjust and complement one another. Something like that.

  I think that "normal" people, "neurotypical" people in all their atypical variations, have pattern-handling machinery for partial processing of the normal chaos of Life and other people. This involves (at least) selective focus, switchable selective focus: when you walk into a room full of other people, Gentle Reader, you can probably get an instant idea of who's there and what's going on. You can listen to a conversation while being sort-of aware of other things going on. You're not overwhelmed; you're seeing and being seen.

   Part of that partial-processing pattern-handling machinery, some of that selective focus, is defective or absent in a lot of us, including me. So we're probably not gonna be seen at the party in the first place. So we'll be doing other things, and our pattern-processing machinery will be shaping itself around patterns that you don't think about very often. And of course we'll get good at what we do over and over. So it goes.

 Second, I want to think about a book-length happy-happy version of autistic superpowers. (That's not quite fair, but almost.) Here are semi-random clips from Tyler Cowen's The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy (clips in order, but without the page numbers because I'm copying and pasting from the Kindle app -- which I originally installed in order to read his "Great Stagnation" ebook.)

Autistics are information lovers to an extreme degree and they are the people who engage with information most passionately. When it comes to their areas of interest, autistics are the true infovores, as I call them....

Often autistics seek out work that satisfies their passion for information, whether it involves designing new software for a library, conducting a scientific experiment, or ordering ideas in the form of a book or a blog....

The notion of “ordering information” may sound a little dry, but it is a joy in our everyday lives, whether you are autistic or not. It should be familiar to anyone who has enjoyed alphabetizing books on a shelf, arranging photos in an album, finishing a crossword puzzle, or just tidying up a room. It’s not that anyone sits down and says “I want to do some ordering now,” but rather we are interested in specific features of our world. We have become infovores to help make the world real and salient for us. Ordering and manipulating information is useful, fun, alternately intense and calming,...

  "Useful, fun, alternately intense and calming" --- Yes! That's Me-Me-Me! (He says excitedly. Pause for calm; I think I'll sort some data.) And Cowen thinks that's what modern society is all about...the world is becoming autistic, and that's a good thing:

In essence we are using tools and capital goods—computers and the web—to replicate or mimic some of the information-absorbing, information-processing, and mental-ordering abilities of autistics....

Economists have studied our species as homo economicus, and some decades ago, when my social science colleagues investigated our game-playing nature, homo ludens was born. Today a new kind of person creates his or her very own economy in his or her head. The age of homo ordo is upon us.... ... ...

First, many autistics are very good at perceiving, processing, and ordering information, especially in specialized or preferred areas of interest... Second, autistics have a bias toward “local processing” or “local perception.” For instance an autistic person may be more likely to notice a particular sound or a particular piece of a pattern, or an autistic may have an especially good knowledge of detail or fact, again in preferred areas of interest. To set off those two features for emphasis, the cognitive strengths of autism include: Strong skills in ordering knowledge in preferred areas Strong skills in perceiving small bits of information in preferred areas...

  That sounds like a way of pointing out that "we don't get the big picture very well" isn't all that bad. Indeed, in writing with a co-author it's not just that my co-author has always done all the presentations: he writes almost all of the words, I write almost all of the code, we both discuss both. He's the "top-down" guy, I'm the "bottom-up" guy. Cowen continues later:

autistics ... are better at noticing details in patterns, they have better eyesight on average, they are less likely to be fooled by optical illusions, they are more likely to fit some canons of economic rationality, and they are less likely to have false memories of particular kinds. Autistics are also more likely to be savants and have extreme abilities to memorize, perform operations with codes and ciphers, perform calculations in their head,

  Details..yeah. It has obvious advantages for a programmer, scientist, writer, certainly. And I'm not any kind of a savant, but I remember that when my dad said that I had to write to family friends to say I'd gotten married, I sent off postcards saying "you probably don't even remember me but..." and one replied "Sure I remember you. What's 1/2 of 1/512?" For me that was pre-K. (I always liked the powers of 2, and my small granddaughters have at least learned to count in binary on their fingers.) Cowen does admit that there are disses to go with the advantages:

A cognitive problem is that many autistics are easily overwhelmed by processing particular stimuli from the outside world. This problem is related to the aforementioned strength of local perception.

Some researchers view autistics as having perceptual equipment turned either “very on” or “very off” rather than modulating at the more typical ranges in between.....

  And both of those say to me that my selective filters don't work properly. If you and I both go into the Paleolithic underbrush, we both start noticing different kinds of plants but you back off because your selective focus works: you remember the context of sabre-tooth tigers. I learn more about plants to eat than you do, until I get eaten. But in the modern world I don't (usually) get eaten, and I just end up having learned more about plants. More Cowen:

It is common, though by no means universal, that autistics have difficulty with speaking intelligibly or that they are late talkers or that they understand written instructions better than spoken instructions. Some researchers include “weak executive function” (a bundled function of strategic planning, impulse control, working memory, flexibility in thought and action, and other features) as part of the cognitive profile of autism. Other research focuses on the question of “weak central coherence,” or failure to see the “bigger picture.” But it seems these are secondary traits, more common in autistic subgroups than in autism per se.

  Well, they're certainly characteristic of at least one member of any subgroup that includes me. I'd say there are indubitably many paths to different-but-overlapping sets of symptoms identifiable as "autism", and failure-of-focus (or perhaps uncontrolled focus) is quite central to my subgroup.

Third, here's a discussion of what people think of when they hear "the autism spectrum" mentioned, contrasted with an image of what it "actually looks like" (from inside, evidently):

[Image 1: A simple, linear line drawn in red, with a cross bar at the beginning and end of the line. The beginning cross bar is labeled “mild autism” and the end cross bar is labeled “severe autism”.]

[Image 2: A circular representation of the colour spectrum, similar to the wheel colour picker in Photoshop. The different colour sections on the wheel are labeled, but each colour also bleeds into the next. The red portion is labeled “speech”, the yellow “social ability”, the green “stimming”, and the blue “executive functioning”....Within each colour section, the dots may be closer to the center or closer to the edge, indicating the severity of impairment... ... The yesterday dots indicate that the autistic person was verbal, stimming with toys, and forgetting steps in their routine. The today dots indicate that the autistic person is verbal with communication aids, unable to leave their house, and that they don’t know where to start when it comes to their routine or completing tasks..

In other words, each of the four segments of alice-royal's circle is being used as a one-dimensional scale, making a four-dimensional image overall although dimensions are pretty strongly correlated. Okay, that's not how I would do it, as I'll show later, but I certainly sympathize -- and it's better than having only one scale. However, part of the circle discussion really bothers me: "none of these points are necessarily negative....There is no such thing as ‘mild autism’ or ‘high-functioning’ autism, and those labels are actually inherently ableist." Oh, please. The points in the picture include not only "unable to leave house" but "self-harming stims". Hmm... that gets me to my final source.

  Fourth,  "Scott Alexander" (pseudonym) the blogging psychiatrist/rationalist, saying recently in Against Against Autism Cures | Slate Star Codex

On the one hand, about half my friends, my girlfriend, and my ex-girlfriend all identify as autistic. For that matter, people keep trying to tell me I’m autistic. When people say “autistic” in cases like this, they mean “introverted, likes math and trains, some unusual sensory sensitivities, and makes cute hand movements when they get excited.”

On the other hand, I work as a psychiatrist and some of my patients are autistic. Many of these patients are nonverbal. Many of them are violent. Many of them scream all the time. Some of them seem to live their entire lives as one big effort to kill or maim themselves...

If we're going to use the word "autistic" to refer to the whole range, which we do, then "mild autism" is a useful description for a lot of us. "Ableism" is not the issue. And there's no fixed boundary between autistic and neurotypical; current research claims "to make an incontrovertible case that the genetic risk contributing to autism is genetic risk that exists in all of us," and I guess I believe that. There are so many mechanisms involved, and they can go a little bit wrong in so many ways, and so badly wrong in quite a few...

Apart from that issue, I like the circle, but as I said that's not how I would do it. It's not how I do do it.

  Fifth, is me. I want to extend the list of issues ["speech", "social ability", "stimming", "executive function"]; I'll add "repetitions" and "sensory issues". Then, instead of a coloured circle, I want a star figure or even a stylized exoskeleton that I see myself stepping into.

1. The head-helmet is executive function, with goggles and headphones for sensory issues. (Yes, sensory issues apply to much more than the head; this is my diagram, okay?) 
2. The arms are the externals, speech on the right and social ability on the left. (That's Social Function On The Right Side of The Brain, symbols on the left side of the brain.) 
3. The legs are internals, repetitions and stimming: stimming for the left leg, repetitions on the right. 

  Got that? Now: imagine the head-helmet somewhat shrunken and unbalanced in a Needs Help to Keep On Track sort of way, with fairly heavy Prefers Darkness goggles and Doesn't Do Well With Noise headphones. The right arm is long and a bit floppy with sentences that go on and on and on in all directions without paying much attention to the head...but some. The left arm is a bit stunted in a Sorry Not Gonna Reach Out To You If I Don't Know You Already, and I Have Real Trouble Recognizing Your Face Unless I see You Every Day For Quite A While sort of way. The legs are nearly normal, with the right leg's repetitive misbehaviour almost entirely inside the head (isn't that a fun image?) and the left leg wanting to pace back and forth -- and seek out blog entries, and do brief Google-searches of random topics like rocket stoves and bioponics and sci/tech advances of 1656 which was my old debit card's PIN and was the year that Christiaan Huygens invented a good enough pendulum clock to have both minute and second hands, and that Cyrano de Bergerac invented the semi-modern sci-fi story -- and the ramjet, within it. (My new PIN is even better, but that's purely numeric, not history. I'm a very very boring person.)

  There's daily variation for me, but that's the image to hold -- on a pretty-good day, and they are indeed pretty good days, I'm a happy geek. Limited, aware that other people don't seem to have the same limits, but happy nonetheless. And today is a pretty good day, even if I get distracted trying to think of what my exoskeleton left and right legs are reminding me of and then have to look up Papyrus of Ani; Egyptian Book of the Dead [Budge]

[And I reply], "Besu-Ahu" is the name of my right foot, and "Unpet-ent-Het-Heru" is the name of my left foot.

  Other people don't seem to do that, or understand why I do, but it's not a major problem, and today is a pretty good day. And my exoskeleton is actually helpful, expressing a role that I can make myself play as well as a default status. I can visualize myself stepping into it...I can even adjust it a bit and then step into it, deciding to stretch my left arm and pull in the right, be somewhat more social with better-focused sentences or step out into a Maker Faire crowd in the sun. Or I can relax it a bit, consciously giving my inner geek a rest, being only what he needs to be for a while.

  On a pretty good day, I can walk into a party, and if somebody wants to talk about computers or about something technical then I can focus on that and I won't have any idea of what else is happening or how long we've been talking. If nobody talks to me, I may be able to stand near somebody I know, and see what happens. Or I may just stay for a couple of minutes with an intangible glass wall between me and the rest of the room, and then I go in search of silence. But it's all about seeking patterns, finding delight in many but being overwhelmed by others. On a not-so-good day, I'm overwhelmed at the start and I just need to read a book, or investigate some random topic within Wikipedia or with Google's aid (sometimes making models with cardboard and duct tape), or just play FreeCell over and over and over. Or just sit in the dark, in silence. And I'm perfectly okay, as long as that option is available.

  Is there an overall pattern? Maybe: I believe that lack-of-selective-focus is the key for my kind of geek; it leads to being-overwhelmed-by-detail and thus executive function failure (can't track projects, it's even hard to plan a day); it leads to being unable to not-hearing what I ought to be listening to, even as I fail to tune out sensory stuff (I'm listening to the ticking of a clock; I like it); it leads to being overwhelmed by most social situations; it leads to a failure to clip my sentences (okay, this sentence is deliberate, but I'm remembering a 9th-grade biology teacher reading my first sentence aloud, gasping dramatically for breath when he reached a comma somewhere on the second page, then going on....); it leads indirectly to being the kind of infovore I am. I do need help...everybody needs help sometimes. I have had help, a great deal of it. And I'm grateful.

   And have I made mistakes, to fit the theme of this particular notes-to-me blog? Yes, of course. Everybody should probably seek ways to push their limits, a little at a time. I do...but I should have tried harder at various stages to widen my own circle of support. (When I say "everybody should do X", it's usually not so much a particular moral judgement about X as it is a guess that whatever you value, doing X is likely to help you get there.) People like me, people with executive-function problems, should seek people who will help them stay on track, and careers with tracks they can stay on. I sort of did, but I didn't understand what I was doing; I probably should have asked my wife (or somebody), forty years or so ago, to ask me at each day's beginning for a one-sentence summary of what I hoped to do, and then to ask me at each day's end for a similar summary of what I'd done. Something like that, with variations as time went by...just to help me stay on track. I should have recognized that at least part of my being a bad lecturer was probably not something I could learn to fix, not as an adult. Parents of geeky kids should probably promote geeky socializations, like role-playing games and robotics clubs... I suspect that if my parents had thought in those terms, or even had those terms to think in half a century ago, I'd have done better developing the limited people-skills I have. As it is, I am who I am. That's the Exodus Pi-verse, Exodus 3:14. But maybe it's better to use the phrasing suggested by Popeye the Sailor Man:

(Or then again, maybe not. I try to find my limits, and go beyond them. Occasionally it seems to work.)

Update: Less than a day after I posted, Peter Gray (psychologist) posted on ADHD, Creativity, and the Concept of Group Intelligence | Psychology Today

The groups containing an ADHD student were far more likely to solve the problems than were the control groups! In fact, 14 of the 16 groups (88%) containing an ADHD student solved both problems, and none (0%) of the 6 control groups did. This result was significant at the p < .0001 level, meaning that there is less than one chance in 10,000 that such a large difference, with this many groups, would occur by chance.

What is going on here? ...

And the moral appears to be that We need the neurotypicals and they need us. Very nice.

Thoughts on Greece, and us

A large part of what holds Greece back, and us as well, is fairly described as rent-seeking--manipulation of public power for private profit, one way or another. In Greece, as in the Latin America of my childhood, it's much more likely to take the form of simple corruption: imagine (as I was told in Greece last week) an underpaid government official who approves environmental permits, and who provides faster service for those who provide extra money. And then he slows down the uncompensated permits sharply, to encourage the trade. It's not that he is lazy or works few hours, it's not even that there are too many such officials -- all that is often said but seems to be wrong. It's simply that his work product tends to detract from actual GDP, even as it's added at "cost" to official GDP. If he weren't doing that, Greece would be richer.

Other kinds of rent-seekers include those who profit from government-imposed monopolies, like the Athens taxi-drivers now striking, unpredictably blocking port and airport. Rent-seeking is a pretty broad category in my mind. I suppose that all countries end up with issues of regulatory capture and indeed of crony capitalism; government makes rules, and these rules will tend to promote the interests of those who have something to offer to the rule-makers, or some credible threat they can make. That interest-promotion is "rent," paid to the people who've managed to make some government power into their own property, legally or not.

I spent last week on Spetses, with various extended-family events relating to my granddaughter's baptism. It's interesting and educational to listen to Greeks and Greek-Americans talking about their fiscal crisis; I'd hoped to get some time specifically listening to Yannis Ioannides and Anna Hardman, and did, but not enough for real understanding. Yannis' basic Greece-is-not-bankrupt statement surprised me considerably (see Ioannides Says Greece Not Bankrupt, Must Change Economy: Video - Bloomberg). He thinks Greece really can pay its debts -- and he thought that even before the ’Restricted Default’ deal of this week, so I presume he thinks his case has been strengthened. He's an advocate for the austerity measures, which I suppose makes him one of the Serious People of whom Paul Krugman said this week in 1937! 1937! 1937! - NYTimes.com that

OK, so we’re going to demand harsh austerity in the debt-crisis countries; and meanwhile, we’re also going to have austerity in the non-debt-crisis countries. Plus, the ECB is raising rates. So demand will be depressed in both crisis and non-crisis economies; this will lead to a vigorous recovery through … what? The Serious People are determined to destroy all the advanced economies in the name of prudence.

I'm mostly on Krugman's side there; we're combining monetary policy from the ECB which may be reasonable for Germany but not for Greece, along with drastic contractions of an uncomfortably the-beatings-will-continue-until-morale-improves flavor. Or so it seems to me. But Yannis isn't supporting austerity to reassure bond markets as Krugman says; Yannis thinks that the "austerity" (including the deregulation of taxi medallions being protested) is part of breaking or at least limiting the rent-seeking system. Well, I'm not sure he or Anna ever said "rent-seeking" but that's my understanding of what they did say, and when I look for related material online I find things like BusinessInsider's querying a member of the `professional "elite" class' of Greece, who said

We want the Greek economy reformed. An end to the of unimaginable waste of taxpayers money,...cronyism and corruption. A much smaller and reformed public sector... A pursuit and prosecution of presently wide spread tax evasion practices. The above would immediately provide us with a considerable primary surplus, enabling us to keep repaying our debt, an obligation we wish to honour. ... Unfortunately it appears that the average Greek, does not view things the same way.

That certainly sounds like the viewpoint of the Greeks with whom I spoke. And how big is the corruption problem? Well, Transparency International said

The Greeks paid an average of €1,355 ($1,830) in bribes [in 2009] for public services such as speeding up the issue of driver's licenses and construction permits, getting admitted to public hospitals or manipulating tax returns, ... Bribes paid for private sector services such as lawyers, doctors or banks were even higher...

So really, Yannis and those he supports (to the extent that I understand what's going on here) are not so much engaged in economics as in political action aimed at restructuring Greek culture. Otherwise, the bailouts fail. In The Painful Arithmetic of Greek Debt Default | e21 - Economic Policies for the 21st Century I see

How does corruption limit the capacity for tax and spending reform? Tax avoidance, which relies on bribery to avoid prosecution, is a national pastime in Greece – the envelope used in the bribe even has its own name, the “fakelaki,” confirming the age-old adage that the Greeks “have a word for it.” Bribery is so rampant in Greece that real estate developers’ method of obtaining cheap land is to burn down public land, squat on the burned parcels, and pay off public officials to permit this. Greece’s forest fires, particularly in the Peloponnese in 2007, have been a source of public outrage for years, and yet the developers continue to squat on the land with impunity. Is a society that permits that sort of lawlessness capable of tax reform?

Maybe. Maybe not. I respect Yannis, but if the average Greek doesn't believe in it to begin with, I don't see a happy ending to this story.

Corruption is by no means the only problem, and an end to rent-seeking would not necessarily make Greece fit comfortably into the Eurozone. Clearly, little Greece will never be the target of the ECB's monetary policy. Krugman, in Anatomy of a Euromess, said that

Spain’s troubles are not, despite what you may have read, the result of fiscal irresponsibility. Instead, they reflect “asymmetric shocks” within the eurozone, which were always known to be a problem, but have turned out to be an even worse problem than the euroskeptics feared.

David Beckworth took Krugman's analysis and extended it in "Optimal Currency Area" terms within Eurozone Periphery and the Euro, saying

If a region’s economy is not in sync with the currency union’s business cycle and the above listed shock absorbers ("flexible wages and prices, factor mobility, fiscal transfers, and diversified economies") are absent then it does not makes sense for a country to be a part of the currency union. Instead, the country should keep its own currency which itself will act as a shock absorber.

It's no great surprise to see that in his graphs, Greece ends up as the most ill-placed. But I believe that part of the "austerity" program is intended to increase the flexibility of the job market (by pruning job protection programs, as has been tried before) and maybe, if the austerity programs are accepted, maybe things will work out. For a while. Public Pensions and Labor Force Participation: The Case of Greece

The pension system of Greece is a representative case of the “Mediterranean welfare state”, which is characterized by extensive segmentation, very high payroll tax rates, and yet inadequate pension benefits. In order to explain this paradox we construct an economic–demographic model. We show that in the period 1980–2000, the segmentation of the system and the very low labor force participation rates of the Greek economy have resulted in very high payroll tax rates in relation to the current level of benefits. On top of these problems, the expected adverse demographic developments in the period 2005–2050 will render the pension system completely unsustainable.

Still, the near-term need is to cut the rent-seeking (including corruption) and collect the taxes and shrink the regulatory/welfare state. Maybe. And can it be done? Well, my own approach in Greece, even more than in the US would be:

automate, eliminate, simplify, outsource.

Almost all of a government's functionality should be virtual... Well, maybe I will make a separate post about that, sometime.

Meanwhile, a little more time has been bought. The Economist remarks that

the biggest risk to the euro zone is that its leaders will begin thinking that they've solved the problem. As growth figures worsen in coming months, markets will once again become antsy. Euro-zone officials had better be preparing for a way to convince them anew that they want this thing to work.

And I go back to the pattern I established last winter, of exercise and education

This morning I spent 45 minutes trying to pound a few modern Greek words and phrases into an aging memory; until a month ago, this would have required a major effort of willpower, but lately I've been doing it every day with no problem...

As I commented to my son's mother-in-law, see-gah-see-gah mah-THAY-no, which I think means "little by little I'm learning;" since her response was "bravo, Tom, ah-krih-VOS!" (precisely), maybe it does. And maybe I will eventually learn some economics too. Or then again, maybe not.

Rating Birds and Birders

In early December, my brother Pete sent a link to a Birder's World article about BirdsEye, his new iPhone app. Well, his along with a few collaborators. I Googled a bit and found that Kenn Kauffman, who wrote the guide, said in a Birder's World interview that

I got involved because one of the principal people doing this project is an old friend of mine. Pete Myers was one of the three guys running the project. He’s been a friend of mine since the mid-1980s. We were both working for the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia at the same time, and then he went on to National Audubon. There was a period when I was the associate editor of American Birds magazine, back when Audubon was publishing that, and Pete was the Vice President for Science at Audubon. So I got to go out in the field with him frequently. He’s one of these scary intelligent people. [Laughs] Sort of existing at a higher plane and, you know, just frighteningly intelligent but also a really nice guy, fun and down to earth....

I have not yet found what crimes Kenn Kaufman has committed that Pete must be using for blackmail, but I'm working on it. Meanwhile, Pete just sent a Macworld review (4.5 out of 5 mice), which is nice, and he says they're working on an extension of BirdsEye that will allow birders to submit data as well as using the existing database. And I was thinking about that, and urging him to make it all available as RDF, e.g. via Triplify, and also to try to make sure that failure is tracked as well as success...just generally filling the role of Aggravating Younger Brother. But seriously it would be really neat to be able to say "species S seems to be disappearing from location L" simply because usually-successful searchers clicked to say they were searching, clicked (or closed the app, or just left location L) to say they were giving up, but didn't click to indicate success. And I was driving to the DMV to return some license plates, and spent a little time thinking. So, here is what I would try to do.

Version 0: let's say that the competence of a birder is measured as sightings per hour, and the difficulty of a species (in a given location) is measured as hours per sighting. Each of these are roughly normally distributed, I hope, so we can convert them into IQ-style scores (multiply by 15/stdev, then add 100-mean; you now have a mean of 100, stdev of 15 for competence(birder) and for difficulty(species,loc), respectively.) It's effectively a normalized score in a game of hide-and-seek, where birders seek and birds hide.

Now you can say that sightings and searchers are not all the same. Version 1: a normalized sighting is ranked higher if it's a hard bird to spot, lower if it's easy; just multiply the base value by difficulty/100. A normalized hour of search is ranked higher if it's a competent birder, lower if it's me: multiply the base value by competence/100. Now we can say that the competence of a birder is measured as normalized sightings per actual hour (you get more credit for harder birds), and the difficulty of a species in a given location is measured as normalized hours per sighting (you get more credit for being sought by more skilled birders). Put this in an equation-solver, maybe hand-coded 'cos it's too big for a spreadsheet but probably there's a package out there that will iterate to a solution.

What sort of data is needed? For each search (that's while the app is running in a particular location) you have a searchID, and you remember who the user is, where it is, how long it is, and what species are being sought--and found. That's a basic event. The rest follows. Maybe.

This is indubitably a Bad Idea, but maybe a version 2 or 3 or more could have actual value.

Or then again, maybe not.

Update: (Jun 3) Notes on the Immense Importance of this, at Count your chickens (and robins and pigeons ...), urge researchers:

Dr Elizabeth Boakes, lead author of the study from the Division of Life Sciences at Imperial College London, said: "The lack of recent data on common species and areas of low biodiversity is extremely concerning -- we need people's help to record the birds they see, however commonplace, on bird-watching websites. We think this kind of citizen science will be key to future conservation research. "People may not think that they are helping much by recording the date they saw a pigeon in central London, say, but actually it could make a big difference as we do not know what threats species might encounter in the future. We also urge websites to standardise data entries, for example asking that sightings are directly plotted onto an online map -- it takes a long time to read through people's personal blogs!