Olympic regression complexes

As usual my queue of “someone was wrong on the internet” rant fodder is overflowing, but I continue to suffer from elevated levels of dilligaf secondary to chronic outrage fatigue.  Look, the TSA are being sadistic assholes again.  I guess that means only libertarians and (checks federal balance of power) some Republicans will raise a stink, while neocons and (checks federal balance of power) Democrats will snidely dismiss the complaint as “whining”.  So it goes in this best of all possible worlds.

I’m also suffering from fatigue fatigue subsequent to today being deadlift day.  With that in mind, I’ve gotta link to Wil Fleming’s outstanding post on T-Nation today:

• Olympic lift variations to get big

That title is, um, less than encouraging.  It brings to mind absurdities like “Do 3×12 split-stance Zercher kettlebell half cleans with a slow, five-count eccentric to get hyooge!  Look, I said “clean”, it’s Olympic lifting and stuff!”  But Fleming is smart and his article is blindingly clear.  Regression complexes will make you more awesome.  (And somehow, until I watched his videos, I’d never realized that high pulls are a great way to practice scooping the bar.)  I’d give it two thumbs up but, well, hook grip.

On the off-chance that you’re bored by both my minimal political content and by that link, have some metal (you might, er, want headphones if you’re at work):

On public shaming and the expected utility thereof

Via Eric Crampton we discover this post by Timothy Burke:

• The moral of Pierre (Easily Distracted)

It’s long and difficult to do justice with an excerpt, so I’ll quote this teaser and hope that it’ll motivate you to click through:

I heard just a small bit of a story on NPR this morning about “crunch time” in family life, where working parents feel the pressure of getting their kids fed with a decent meal, finished with homework, and to sleep at a reasonable hour, and how exercise and play both tend to fall out of the picture many days.

The segment I heard featured a woman who talked about how she cried when she saw the NPR solicitation for the story on Facebook and another mother who talked about how she didn’t think this is what family life was all about. And then the experts came on and said, “Everybody knows what they’re supposed to do” (in terms of making sure kids get enough exercise and eat well to avoid obesity) and concluded that what we really need to do is figure out why so few people do what they know they’re supposed to do.

In brief and incomplete terms: Burke laments the contemporary nanny discourse in which the Experts blame horrible social phenomena like kids playing too many hours of videogames on “noncompliance”, and then chide the noncompliant — and encourage others to do so as well — for being “a burden on the system”:

If you want an explanation of the meanness of 21st Century American public discourse, for the fractures in the body politic, this will do as a starting place. “Get that guy to wear his helmet, because otherwise he’s going to cost you money.” “Get that woman to lose weight, because otherwise she’s going to cost you money.” “Hassle that couple because their kid plays too many video games and might slightly underperform in school and not make the contribution to net productivity that we are expecting of him.”

We are offered a thousand reasons to complain of other people’s behavior (and to excoriate and loath our own) on the grounds that it will cost us too much. That we should talk about what is good and bad, right and wrong, mostly in terms of the selfish consequences, or at best, in terms of the kind of closeted idea of a collective interest that neoliberalism dare not directly speak of–sort of the nation, sort of the economy, sort of the community, but really none of those directly or clearly.

Now, Dr. Crampton has done an excellent job of phrasing the post in terms of the brilliant diversity of personal utility functions, and if I haven’t persuaded you by now that you should go read Burke’s excellent post in full I’m simply not able to do so.  But I can add one more very speculative wrinkle from the perspective of a glib dilettante physiology nerd.

Burke offers this rebuttal to the idea that we ought to go around shaming each other into what the experts tell us is good behaviour:

“Stop costing me money” in a society that also protects the autonomy of individual choice is a perverse and counterproductive angle of approach: it makes me want to do more of whatever that is up until I’m not allowed to any longer. It is, ultimately, the voice of the Boss, and at least for now, we can still say, most of the time, that the experts and the government and the human resource specialists and the doctors are not the Boss of Me. Small wonder that many policy wonks and technocratic experts flirt so relentlessly with prohibition and restriction as the big stick behind the soft talk.

I’ll offer another: By constantly policing each other, by constantly monitoring our behaviour for and censoring our discourse against anything that might invite expert-mandated criticism from others, we turn ourselves and others into tightly-wound highly-strung chronic stress machines.  This leads to chronic systemic inflammation with nonzero probability, and chronic systemic inflammation is, if not the root of all evil, certainly a top-level directory (and probably a big one, like /usr).  Any cost-benefit analysis of nannyism that doesn’t take into account the health effects of this sort of pervasive stressor, and its downstream pathologia, is incomplete at best.

Little risks

Deep in the misty past I’ve written about the “little risks” of the pervasive surveillance state — it’s not so likely that federal door-kickers are going to come ’round looking for the Jews in your basement, but vastly more likely that your grudge-holding ex will stalk you via government database.  Given the right circumstances, most people can be pushed into vicious, vindictive behaviour, and as Leviathan rolls on it hires more and more “most people” and gives them depressing amounts of power, access, and authority.

Eric Crampton highlights another risk of ubiquitous surveillance:

• When a scam comes together (Offsetting Behaviour)

New Zealand’s finest are warning the users of adult websites the scam, which interrupts a users web session, has nothing to do with them.

The message featuring the police logo appears on their computer screen saying they have been fined for using the x-rated site and need to enter banking details and pay an instant fine.

Police have received a handful of calls about the scam from people believing the message is from them.

Leaving aside the psychological dimension of sex-shaming and secrecy that enables this sort of scam, it simply wouldn’t work if the idea of the police monitoring everyone’s web traffic were preposterous.  (Which it is, for the nonce, for logistical reasons if nothing else.)  But of course Serious People have been discussing sweeping and secret state surveillance powers for years now.

All linky, no thinky

WordPress is getting marginally — I use the word deliberately — more clever at hiding the good post-composition form in favour of the “easy” shit that makes it hard for me to do what I want.  I have sent in my demand for a full refund.  (“Isn’t this service free?”  Yes, quite.)

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In an essay that at least 50% of the population of the Pacific Northwest should read, Megan McArdle argues that

• The problem with libertarian women isn’t libertarian men

Apparently we’re great relationship material, provided that one is willing to put up with nerdery.  (I suspect that Ms. McArdle’s analysis applies to nerds in general.)  Given the sort of person who comments on McArdle’s articles in general, I suspect that this ‘un’s comment section will go from zero to hilarious in about half an hour.

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Next, Eric Crampton takes a kick at the question of whether or not smoking-related lost productivity (ergo income, ergo income tax revenue) counts as an externality:

• Tax maximization, smoking, and the Stalin Gap

I’ll quote for you his thought experiment; you should be able to derive the uncomfortable-to-paternalists conclusion from there:

Consider two people, alike in relevant ways at age 10 and equal in earnings potential, but with different utility functions. So they make different choices.

Mr. A decides that the rat race isn’t for him and decides instead to take a part-time job at 20 hours per week instead of 40. Were he to have worked a full time job, his earnings would have doubled and, because of progressive taxation, his tax payments would have more than doubled. But he’s not on welfare; he just can transform relatively little income into a fair bit of happiness because he really likes leisure.

Mr. B does not enjoy sitting idle; he consumes his leisure by smoking while working a full-time job. Associated health issues reduce his productivity and, as consequence, he earns a quarter less than he otherwise would; his tax payments are then perhaps a third lower than they otherwise could have been. Other sources have a lower wage penalty for smoking; we’ll stick with a big one for present purposes.

Substitute in your favourite “but that’s different!” income-nonmaximizing choices (getting a “fun” degree, working at a non-profit, &c.) for Mr. A’s labour force truancy and see how well you stack up against a workaholic smoker.  Probably you should be ashamed of yourself, and paying higher taxes.

(Will Wilkinson made a similar argument in favour of utility maximization a while ago, and P. J. O’Rourke did the same in a convocation speech he gave, but under the “No Thinky” stricture I simply can’t be arsed to look them up.  I’ve blogged about both of them in the past, so if you’re really curious the search widget’s to your right.)

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Bryan Caplan notes

• Two soul-searching questions

1. Suppose you lived in a society with a massive, age-old injustice.  Think slavery.  Are you the kind of person who would staunchly oppose this injustice anyway?

2. Suppose a colorful, feel-good movement advocating a massive, new injustice suddenly became fashionable.  Think communism.  Are you the kind of person who would staunchly oppose this movement anyway?

and suggests that those who are robust against one form of injustice are probably vulnerable to the other.

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By way of Andrew Sullivan we find Laura Vanderkam doing what Sully calls “uncovering the contradiction” of self-help books:

• The paperback quest for joy

Even the most over-the-top books offer a real benefit: they encourage the virtue of self-examination. To read self-help is to take stock of one’s self and to ask what kind of life one wants to lead.

These are profound issues, and what the genre’s critics sometimes miss, too, is that self-help readers are well equipped to explore them. That’s because the people who buy these books are, like all book buyers, “pretty comfortable,” says John Duff of Penguin. “It’s going to be that middle-class person, reasonably well-educated” and in “very rarefied” company, as “our market for all books is really very limited. Most people stop reading when they leave school.” Those who don’t stop probably have their acts together. Call it the paradox of self-help. “The type of person who values self-control and self-improvement is the type of person who would seek more of it in a self-help book,” Whelan says. “So it’s not the unemployed crazy lady sitting on the couch eating potato chips who reads self-help. It’s the educated, affluent, probably fairly successful person who wants to better themselves.”

So it turns out that people who’re interested in self-improvement are already doing pretty well?  As nethack would say, “I see no paradox here”.

I’m reminded of the standup comic who complains about fit people in the gym.  ”Quit going to the gym; you’re done.”  Not ’til I squat 600, asshat, and then I’ll just want to squat 605.

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Tam does some math — rather, some

• Political calculus

and discovers that

The important point is that now we know that in the Inside-The-Beltway mind, Sandy was far more devastating than Katrina, despite the latter killing 1833* to the former’s 113.

This provides us a handy metric for future use: If you live in flyover country, you’re right around 1/16th of a real person to the bicoastal power elite.

You should click through to discover her sources and follow that footnote.  John Richardson follows up in comments:

According to the Constitution, shouldn’t those of us outside the bicoastal power elite be at least 3/5′s of a person?

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Finally, have some fuckyeah:

• F1300T hillclimb racer (Build Threads)

For some people, modifying an existing car isn’t enough, even completely dismantling one and reassembling it 10x better just won’t satisfy them. Oh no, they just have to show off their amazing amount of talent and build a car from scratch, the jerks!

Fabrication porn?  Oh yes.  Better get a towel before you click through.

More unintended consequences

Airport security theatre is, we are told, intended to make people safer.  Of course, it doesn’t: People who would otherwise be perfectly happy to fly places decide that the numerous indignities visited upon them in the name of the War On Terror are too burdensome, and decide to drive instead.  Driving, as you’ve probably guessed by now, incurs more deaths per passenger-mile:

To make flying as dangerous as using a car, a four-plane disaster on the scale of 9/11 would have to occur every month, according to analysis published in the American Scientist. Researchers at Cornell University suggest that people switching from air to road transportation in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks led to an increase of 242 driving fatalities per month—which means that a lot more people died on the roads as an indirect result of 9/11 than died from being on the planes that terrible day. They also suggest that enhanced domestic baggage screening alone reduced passenger volume by about 5 percent in the five years after 9/11, and the substitution of driving for flying by those seeking to avoid security hassles over that period resulted in more than 100 road fatalities.

(That’s Charles Kenny, quoted from that first link.)

An exaggerated perception of risk leads to dire unintended consequences.  So it goes.

It doesn’t end there.  Eric Crampton reminds us that the dose makes the poison, and in particular that there’s no evidence that light alcohol consumption (by the mother) during pregnancy leads to harm to the fetus.  ”But what’s the harm?”, you might ask, because the idea of accepting light drinking by pregnant women makes you feel uncomfortable.  ”Even if light drinking is more or less okay, no drinking is certainly safer, isn’t it?  It can’t hurt, can it?”  (That’s what’s known as a leading question.)  Crampton first points out that blatantly specious warnings are counterproductive:

Lower decile groups hear the “drink nothing” warnings, dismiss them entirely as nonsense, and go on to drink way too much while pregnant, doing real harm.

“Lower decile” is a curious euphemism.  Lower decile of what?  Intelligence?  There might be some correlation, but it’s not obvious.  Income?  Social standing?  Now we’re getting somewhere.  It’s clear that the zero-tolerance policy on pregnant drinking is built on the foundation of prevailing wisdom and fear of opprobrium — sure, a glass of wine at dinner once or thrice a week probably isn’t going to hurt the baby, but what would the neighbours think?  Crampton continues:

High decile groups hear the “drink nothing” warnings and, adding that to all the other advice they’re given about all the other costly-and-useless rituals they must follow during pregnancy, rationally decide to have fewer kids.

(Emphasis added.)

So at the margins, people who would otherwise like to have children are persuaded by spurious arguments that pregnancy and child-raising should be made more of a pain in the ass than necessary, and choose not to.  D’oh!

Reality is always right

So there’s been an awful lot of discussion on the Big Truck about the GOP’s rather optimistic interpretations of the polls, which gave rise to (among others) George Will gleefully predicting a landslide victory in the electoral college.  Well, there was a landslide EC victory all right, but it didn’t exactly go his way.  It turns out that if you want to use numbers to determine which of two things is larger, you’re probably better off with a Bayesian statistical model rather than a sheer fucking fantasy model.  Just saying “our model predicts such-and-so” only gives you the appearance of credibility until reality intervenes.

People can say whatever they like, of course, and if partisan hacks didn’t spout off nonsense I’d have a lot fewer things to blog about.  Still, it’s about time the truly fantastical ideologues got some push-back.

On a similar note: Remember when Citizens United was going to destroy democracy as we know it because those evil awful one-percenters were going to just buy every election in perpetuity?  I remember that like it was last Monday, which in fact it was.  Yeah, about that:

• Spending by independent groups had little election impact, analysis finds (WaPo — mind the dumbworms)

Spending by outside groups, it turns out, was the dog that barked but did not bite. Obama and other Democrats had long made dire predictions about the potential impact of the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which allowed corporations and unions to spend unlimited money on elections and created a new class of wealthy political groups.

I don’t need to tell you how that turned out, do I?  In the cold light of day it’s clear that voters are a heck of a lot less vulnerable to teh ebil advertisings than the Cassandras among us would like to portend.  Why, it’s almost as if the dire predictions of unlimited plutocracy were mere ideological bloviations after all!

People can say whatever they like, of course, and if partisan hacks didn’t spout off nonsense I’d have a lot fewer things to blog about.  Still, it’s about time the truly fantastical ideologues got some push-back.

Four more years

By way of the commendably-sufferable Andrew Sullivan we find this eyebrow-raising statement by Samuel Goldman:

[T]he premature elevation of Rubio as frontrunner for 2016 is precisely the wrong strategy for building a Republican majority. Rubio is young and charismatic. But he’s a vocal supporter of the Bush-era policies that voters have twice rejected, especially on foreign policy. One lesson of this election is that Americans do not want another war. I doubt their appetite for confrontation will increase over the next four years.

(Emphasis added.)

Horseshit.

If we judge what “Americans” want by what the executive branch has done under Obama, “Americans” are peachy-keen with the idea of (among other things) staying in Afghanistan, incinerating random Pakistani males of military age who may or may not be in the vicinity of where reported terrorists were sighted sixteen hours before the drone showed up, and straight-up murdering without judicial oversight or due process of law American citizens, provided that those American citizens have brown skin and scary Ay-rab sounding names.  ”Americans” in 2008 might have been forgiven for thinking that they weren’t voting for four more years of Bush 43′s foreign policy, but “Americans” in 2012 have no such excuse.

Jonathan Adler puts it succinctly:

It has often been the case that significant political changes can only occur when a President plays against type. So only Nixon could go to China and only George Bush (41) could sign the 1990 Clean Air Act (the largest and most costly environmental statute ever enacted. Perhaps, by the same token, only a Democratic president could legitimize (and in some cases expand) the aggressive anti-terror policies of the Bush (43) Administration, as Obama has done.

“butbutbutROMNEY!“, I hear you cry.  Tango sierra, sugarplum.  Unless you pulled the lever for a third-party candidate I don’t want to hear word one about your so-called anti-war views.  Between drones over Waziristan, bombs over Libya, and “disposition matrices” we have a pretty good view of what you voted for, and I don’t need to know if you voted for Obama or Romney to make that assertion.

By the same token, all you asshats out there who’re pissing and moaning about the size of government and in particular the size of government debt but proudly refused to throw your vote away need to choke on a family-sized can of horse cock.  Don’t let’s pretend that either major-party candidate had either a serious plan for reducing the budget to manageable levels or a serious interest in doing so.  If Obama wanted to do something about the deficit, he’d have endorsed Simpson-Bowles.  If Romney wanted to do something about the deficit, he’d have proposed a plan less fantastical than “extend all the tax cuts, increase military spending, and whatever happens don’t touch Social Security”.  We’ve been kicking this can down the road for a long time, and the only thing that’s changed recently is that in 2005 Bush laced up a pair of soccer cleats for his second term.  And please, people, don’t shout “Obamacare!” in my comments in defence of Mitt Romney’s purported budgetary hawkishness.

In any event, you need to read this piece by Skippystalin most fucking pronto.

Improper composition

Stop me if you’ve heard something like this before:

I tried exercising, but I never lost any weight.  Exercise only works if you won the genetic lottery.  I think I have a hormonal imbalance or something.

This is what’s known among irritatingly-precise philosophy types as the fallacy of composition.  You didn’t try “exercising”,  you tried “balancing on a Wii Fit holding a Shake-Weight for ten minutes a day”.  Still, you’re trying to impute to everything covered under “exercising” — we’ll be generous and include your Shake-Weight adventures — the property that they don’t provoke “weight” loss.  This is plainly false, as anyone who’s ever been glycogen-depleted after sprinting hills for half an hour will tell you.  (Puking after  your tenth sprint will also induce “weight” loss.)  On the other hand, a balls-out “exercise” programme like Boring But Big will (when properly implemented) lead to “weight” gain.

Careful readers will have noticed — and probably correctly interpreted — the snarky-quotes around “weight”.  Yeah, that’s a fallacy of composition as well.  If all you want to do is lose weight, here’s a quick and easy prescription: Drink shots of tequila until you pass out.  You will (probably) eventually come to in a state of moderate to severe dehydration, having lost the weight of whatever amount of water you pissed, puked, and/or sweated out while generating that spectacular hangover you now enjoy.  Worth it?  Didn’t think so.  To achieve your body-composition goals you want to lose fat.  (And if it makes you feel any better, so do I.)  You probably also want to gain weight — provided that the weight in question comes from muscle, bone, and connective tissue (and I doubt you’d be upset if a lot of it came from water and glycogen in your muscles, either).

Discussions of “exercise” for “weight” loss are about as helpful as tits on a spider.  Of course, this is the internet, and just as Rule 34 applies to spiders* we have whole forums full of prats whinging about how “going low-carb” (“I never eat pasta any more, only burgers and fries because of the protein”) and “exercising” (“I do, like, ten kinds of curls after I bench”) “doesn’t work” for them because they’re not juiced to the gills or something.

Similarly, in the various threads of the Higher-Ed Bubble meta-argument we occasionally come across sackcloth-and-ashes lamentations about the fact that investments in “higher education” (or sometimes merely “education”) don’t lead to nirvana, or utopia, or even noticeably higher rates of GDP growth.  Actually, I lied: Mostly we come across blithe assertions unencumbered with data that investing in “education” will lead to Kingdom Come or at least a rising tide lifting all boats, generally countered by posts from Garrett Jones:

• Did nations that boosted education grow faster? (EconLog)

(Spoiler warning — no)

and Katherine Mangu-Ward:

• American schools go on utterly insane hiring spree since 1950.  Kids shrug, continue to do poorly on tests (Reason Hit & Run)

with actual, you know, data to the contrary.  But of course we all know that quantitative evaluations are all limited and stuff.

Well, here’s the problem, cupcake: You’re quantifying investment in education.  (Or, similarly, schools.)  And while having the local SLAC churn out another class of Drama students is great news for Starbucks — more to the point, while having the local SLAC hire another round of administrative executives is great news for the clerisy — neither one is likely to have the same dramatically anabolic effect on the local economy that squats and milk will have on your strength levels.  Mangu-Ward:

America’s public schools saw a 96 percent increase in students but increased administrators and other non-teaching staff a staggering 702 percent since 1950, according to a new study of school personnel by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice….Teaching staff, in comparison, increased 252 percent.

Yeah, the thing about the administrative hierarchy is supposed to be that it’s an actual hierarchy, meaning that many teachers can benefit from the efforts of one administrator.  Similarly, the putative efficiency gains from public — er, organized — education come from the notion that many students can benefit from the efforts of a single teacher.  Oh, sorry!  I keep thinking that public education is for the students’ benefit.  My bad.

On a related note, Bryan Caplan provides

• A bunch of arguments in favour of regressive tuition

I’m going to quote a lot of that post because, quite frankly, it makes me feel good:

New ideas generated by STEM majors are one kind of positive externality.  But the higher taxes paid by lucrative majors also qualify.  There’s a fiscal externality.  The more lucrative your major, the more likely your future taxes are to repay taxpayers for their subsidies.  But the higher the tax rate, the less likely you are to want to pursue a lucrative major.  Cutting tuition for lucrative majors relative to non-lucrative majors is a simple way to correct (or at least mitigate) this externality.

The same goes for employment rates.  Graduates who get jobs pay taxes.  Graduates who don’t get jobs consume taxes.  Once again, there’s a fiscal externality.  Taxpayers benefit if students focus on majors with high employment rates, and avoid majors with low employment rates.  And by almost all accounts, high-income majors are also high-employment majors.

But wait, there’s more.  Alex neglects another important efficiency consideration: signaling.  STEM majors spend a relatively high fraction of their time acquiring real world skills.  Other majors spend a higher fraction simply showing off their intelligence, work ethic, and conformity.  Both are privately rewarding, but the former is far more socially rewarding: Useful skills enrich the world, but signaling mostly just enriches the signaler.

Even if you don’t buy the signaling model, you should also consider the fact that STEM majors have relatively absolute standards.  When more students acquire STEM degrees, more people actually understand STEM.  Other fields, in contrast, have heavily diluted their standards to make room for marginal (and submarginal) students.  As a result, taxpayers are more likely to get their money’s worth for the former than the latter.

(“If you feel confirmation bias for more than four hours after reading an EconLog post, see a doctor.”)

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* You can google that your god damn self.