MisEntropy [notes]

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[misentropy]

statistical discrimination

“Statistical discrimination” is the term used to describe the practice of judging people by reference to the overall characteristics of the group to which they belong. For example, the once common practice of redlining – charging more for services, such as credit, to people who live in a particular area without regard to their own specific credit history – was outlawed in the United States by the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977.

Injustice to individuals is inherent in any application of statistical discrimination. Even if it is true that the redlined district displays higher rates of default than the general population, some, perhaps many, individuals who live there could be relied on to pay their debts. Moreover redlining certainly had the effect, and may have had the intention, of discriminating against African-Americans. Statistical discrimination may in practice be a mechanism for indirectly implementing policies which if instituted openly would be illegal or otherwise unacceptable. We may wish the police to be more effective in clearing up crimes, but we don’t want them to do this by “rounding up the usual suspects”.[5] A civilised society treats people as individuals, not as drawings from a statistical distribution.

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[misentropy]

entanglement

As it turns out, it matters a great deal what surplus consists of. This is because things have a grip on human action. The archaeologist Ian Hodder theorised the hold of things on people as ‘entanglement’: grain’s degradation draws people into a continuous process of care and management – shovelling, aerating, cleaning and so on. But things’ hold on people goes beyond the practical: they also generate different futures and different subjectivities. Through its visibility and its accessibility, paired with the need for a rapid turnover, grain stored above ground made the future more controllable, a future amenable to taxation and regulation. The flexibility of the fermentation process, as well as the multiplication of separate vats, on the other hand, meant that wine storage fostered an open-ended future, one characterised by responsiveness and opportunism. And our interaction with the material world also shapes us, as social agents, as humans. The farmer accumulating grain knowingly or unknowingly adopted the disposition of a conservative owner (one of the ‘haves’); the vintner with a large wine cellar took on the stance of a speculative entrepreneur (always on the lookout for a good deal). Taking things seriously in all their diversity and idiosyncrasy helps us better understand people as historical actors.

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[misentropy]

adversarial growth

Mass tragedies can teach groups of people how to avoid or mitigate them in future. Such “adversarial growth” helps explain why commuters in Hong Kong wore masks before any covid-19 cases had been reported. Most credit the territory’s scarring experience with sars, which included tragic mistakes. But it also raised the profile of doctors. A record number of students applied to study medicine. The government added isolation wards in hospitals, trained infection specialists and stockpiled ppe.

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[misentropy]

platform constitutionalism

Perhaps most important, the new owner could turn TikTok from a social-media service to a digital commonwealth, governed by a set of rules akin to a constitution with its own checks and balances. User councils (a legislature, if you will) could have a say in writing guidelines for content moderation. Management (the executive branch) would be obliged to follow due process. And people who felt their posts had been wrongfully taken down could appeal to an independent arbiter (the judiciary). Facebook has toyed with platform constitutionalism: it once let users vote on privacy changes (mostly as a pr stunt) and now has an “oversight board” to hear user appeals (a more serious effort). But the social network introduced these only in response to mounting criticisms. Drafting rules at the outset might make them more credible.

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[misentropy]

Tullock Paradox

Most striking, they found no link between democracy and graft. This challenges the “Tullock paradox”, which holds that firms can get away with smaller bribes in democracies because politicians and officials have less of a lock on the system than those in autocratic countries, and so cannot extract as much rent. Such findings will doubtless be of interest to corruption investigators and unscrupulous executives alike. 

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[misentropy]

capital obsolescence

The authors build a model in order to assess how this effect on beliefs might influence the recovery from covid-19. After a very severe initial economic shock from the pandemic, output recovers but does not return to the previous growth trajectory. Part of that long-run depressing effect can be accounted for by “capital obsolescence”: the fact that some of the existing capital stock can no longer be used as efficiently as before, or at all. Office space, for instance, may be used less intensively, as a precaution. But people also revise down their expectations of the return on future investments because they expect pandemics to become more likely. This leads to less investment, other things equal, and slower growth. In the long term gdp is as much as 4% below its pre-crisis level. The authors reckon that the present discounted value of losses associated with capital obsolescence and changing beliefs may be as much as ten times larger than the cost of the initial shock. And most of the long-term loss stems from revisions to beliefs.

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[misentropy]

digital twin

This pair of bright-yellow quadrupeds look a bit like dogs, prompting one to be nicknamed Fluffy and the other Spot (which latter moniker is also the official name given to this model of robot by the firm that manufactures them, Boston Dynamics, a subsidiary of SoftBank). The pair are not there to amuse the factory’s human workers, though, but rather to perform an important task that Ford hopes will save it a ton of money. With laser scanners mounted on their backs, Fluffy and Spot can scamper around the 200,000 square-metre plant collecting data. Those data will be employed to build a detailed computer model of the entire manufacturing operation. This sort of model is called a digital twin, and Ford’s engineers will use it to work out how to rearrange the production line to produce a new gearbox.

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[misentropy]

sensitivity vs. specificity

The standard of criminal proof is demanding because the injustice from punishing the innocent is perceived to be greater than the injustice of freeing the guilty. And the injustice of denying someone a deserved university place more serious than the injustice of admitting someone who should not really be there. We might all agree that in judging guilt it is more important to minimise the statistician’s type II error – accepting the hypothesis when it is false – even at the expense of the type I error – rejecting the hypothesis when it is true. Medical testing similarly distinguishes the sensitivity (avoidance of false negatives) and specificity (vulnerability to false positives) of its procedures, and attempts to measure them.

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[misentropy]

defined-benefit vs. defined-contribution plans

“Law of the letter” (August 8th) reported on the state of the United States Postal Service and highlighted a simple truth about financial transparency: the cost of defined-benefit retirement plans for public-sector workers is unknowable. Costs generally exceed forecasts and returns generally lag behind them, so initial estimates are often too low. Since defined-benefit plans kick the can of the liability into the future, the full cost of funding those pensions becomes someone else’s problem.

Defined-contribution plans, however, make the cost transparent today. Understanding true costs will help public-sector organisations like the post office price their services better to promote a sustainable business model.

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[misentropy]

attentional control cues

But here in Northern California, which is a hot bed of mind-body disciplines and alternative ways of looking at the world, I’ve had plenty of Buddhists come to me seeking help in their sport, and I have plenty—probably a few times a month, expert meditators, in whatever discipline—come to me for the same reason. They’re unable to use their Buddhism (or meditation, or mindfulness, or whatever they’re calling it) to assist them in their sport.

And I’ve discovered that’s because as good as those disciplines are, they’re just over there as a generic form of mental control. What’s missing is the application directly to their specific sport, which we call ‘attentional-control cues.’ Like: what do you look at when you’re on the tennis court? What do you think about when you’re on the golf course? What should you look at when you’re on the balance beam, as a gymnast? All those are missing in generic meditation and Buddhism.

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[misentropy]

adversarial testing

He will focus specifically on the topic of "adversarial testing" in which developers challenge top-performing systems with examples that they suspect will trip up the systems, thus revealing their weaknesses.

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[misentropy]

received vs. perceived support

Mr Kaniasty, the professor, has found that “received support” that might come in the form of a donation is less important for psychological outcomes than “perceived support”, the feeling that people can rely on their neighbours. As Codogno came out of lockdown in June, the degree of compliance with distancing rules—necessary for recovery—was astonishingly universal. The parish priest, Monsignor Iginio Passerini, was taken aback during confession to hear a young boy list among his sins that of having lowered his face mask outdoors.

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[misentropy]

constructive patriotism

Where conservatives often claim to love their country uncritically—or “unambivalently”, as Ronald Reagan recommended—progressives are likelier to talk of using America’s strengths to correct its weaknesses. For John Lewis, the last titan of the civil-rights movement, non-violent protest was a patriotic act. Until recently, Democrats tended to worry more about threats to free speech than, say, clamping down on flag-burners. Political scientists call this “constructive patriotism”. In the 1930s and 1940s, when Franklin D. Roosevelt united the left and centre-right to defeat poverty and fascism, it was the dominant kind. For Adlai Stevenson, the party’s presidential nominee in the 1950s, patriotism was expressed not in “short, frenzied outbursts of emotion”, but the “tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime”.

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[misentropy]

bias blind spot

As I explored in my book The Intelligence Trap, intelligent and educated people often have a “bias blind spot”, believing themselves to be less susceptible to error than others – and the exponential growth bias appears to fall dead in its centre.

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[misentropy]

Kessler Syndrome

Perhaps the biggest difference between space war and terrestrial war is how long the consequences can last. Much of the debris from China’s 2007 test, for instance, will still be in space at the turn of the next century. The more debris, the greater the likelihood of accidental collisions with other satellites, which generates more debris in turn. Enough debris could lead to a chain reaction known as Kessler syndrome, which could render entire swathes of near-Earth space unusable for decades.

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[misentropy]

expiring vs. permanent skills

Every field has two kinds of skills:

Expiring skills, which are vital at a given time but prone to diminishing as technology improves and a field evolves.

Permanent skills, which were as essential 100 years ago as they are today, and will still be 100 years from now.

Both are important. But they’re treated differently.

Expiring skills tend to get more attention. They’re more likely to be the cool new thing, and a key driver of an industry’s short-term performance. They’re what employers value and employees flaunt.

Permanent skills are different. They’ve been around a long time, which makes them look stale and basic. They can be hard to define and quantify, which gives the impression of fortune-cookie wisdom vs. a hard skill.

But permanent skills compound over time, which gives them quiet importance. When several previous generations have worked on a skill that’s directly relevant to you, you have a deep well of relevant examples to study. And when you can spend a lifetime perfecting one skill whose importance never wanes, the payoffs can be ridiculous. Anything that compounds over decades usually is.

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[misentropy]

fuel loading

This year California had its driest February on record (though matters improved a bit later), leading to a build-up of flammable dead wood. But ill-judged policies have made the forests more vulnerable too. The decades-long approach of suppressing wildfires stops modest blazes from removing flammable undergrowth. The resulting “fuel loading” has turned California’s forests into tinderboxes.

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