Kiss of Fire
First, full disclosure: Barbara Nitke is my friend.
Barbara is an exquisitely sensitive photographer whose self-imposed mission is to record lovers at the precise moments when they exchange power, trust and intimacy. Her work (best exempified in her book Kiss of Fire) is not porn; her photos are tinged with sexuality but they’re rarely overtly sexual. On the other hand, they won’t be easy for everyone to look at. Often they depict dominance, submission and pain. Always they depict love. It’s not the naked bodies that jump out at you; it’s the naked souls.
Barbara’s new show, Illuminata: Are You Curious?, opens on Thursday, November 11 at the Art At Large gallery in New York. If the photos aren’t to your taste, you can still go to support Barbara’s courageous lawsuit against John Aschcroft and the Communications Decency Act.
Margins of Error
The usually indispensable electoral-vote.com, which I check eagerly every morning, today contains the following howler:
Remember that Zogby saying PA is a (47-47) tie means the pollster is predicting that there is a 95% chance that the true score for each candidate falls in the range 43% to 51%, no more and no less.
Of course it means much more; for example it means that the candidates are substantially more likely to be about one point apart than to be about four points apart. But electoral-vote.com compounds the error:
All the battleground states are statistical ties. A couple of percent lead means nothing
Acutally, as no reader of marginalrevolution.com will need to be told, the candidate with a 2% lead among those surveyed, if that lead is within the reported “margin of error” has less than a 95% chance, but still greater than a 50% chance, of having the lead among the public at large (ignoring, of course, all of the potential problems with surveys other than sampling error.)
Since everyone knows this, it’s hardly worth pointing out, except for the fact that these silly statements about margins of error have become ubiquitous in the press, and it’s worth asking why. Surely it must be obvious to all reporters and most readers that it’s better to have a two point lead in the polls than a two point deficit. So why does everyone keep saying otherwise?
The Difference Between Men and Women
What’s the most effective pickup line on a college campus? Psychologists Elaine Hatfield and Russ Clark had actors (independently judged to be attractive) approach students of the opposite sex with a variety of lines and recorded their success rates. The lines were:
1) I’ve been noticing you around campus and I find you attractive. Would you go out with me tonight?
2) I’ve been noticing you around campus and I find you attractive. Would you come over to my apartment tonight?
3) I’ve been noticing you around campus and I find you attractive. Would you sleep with me tonight?
The success rates, as reported separately in two of my favorite popular science books, Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works and David Barash and Judith Lipton’s Myth of Monogamy:
| Will you go out with me tonight? |
Will you come over to my apartment tonight? |
Will you go to bed with me tonight? |
|
| Male Respondents | 50% | 69% | 75% |
| Female Respondents | 50% | 6% | 0% |
Protectionism, Right and Wrong
Slate asked all of its regular contributors and staff to explain who they were voting for and why, and posted the responses here. I responded as follows:
If George Bush had chosen the racist David Duke as a running mate, I’d have voted against him, almost without regard to any other issue. Instead, John Kerry chose the xenophobe John Edwards as a running mate. I will therefore vote against John Kerry.
Duke thinks it’s imperative to protect white jobs from black competition. Edwards thinks it’s imperative to protect American jobs from foreign competition. There’s not a dime’s worth of moral difference there. While Duke would discriminate on the arbitrary basis of skin color, Edwards would discriminate on the arbitrary basis of birthplace. Either way, bigotry is bigotry, and appeals to base instincts should always be repudiated.
Bush’s reckless spending and disregard for the truth had me almost ready to vote for Kerry-until Kerry picked his running mate. When the real David Duke ran against a corrupt felon for governor of Lousiana, the bumper stickers read, “Vote for the crook. It’s important.” Well, I’m voting for the reckless spendthrift. It’s important again.
A thoughtful e-correspondent disagrees: “I cringe every time Kerry or Edwards step up the protectionist rhetoric, not because its morally wrong but because it’s bad economics.”
My response:
The Jim Crow laws in the South were bad economics for whites. By refusing to trade with blacks, they retarded their own economic progress. But that wasn’t the primary reason to oppose those laws; the primary reason was that they were wrong. I think protectionism is a lot like that.
Posting in October
October 27, 2004: If Dylan Thomas hadn’t drunk himself to death in 1953, he might be celebrating his ninetieth birthday today, perhaps with a successor to the grand and glorious poem he wrote to celebrate his thirtieth.
He left us with a small number of poems so heart-wrenching that I cannot read them, even for the two hundredth time, without all of the symptoms of an emotional crisis. Take In Country Sleep, where a father reassures his daughter that she has nothing to fear from fairy tale villains—but only from the Thief who comes in multiple guises to take her faith and ultimately to leave her “naked and forsaken to grieve he will not come”. In Country Sleep was a standard bedtime poem in our house, and my daughter soon learned to anticipate “the part where Daddy cries”.
Then there’s the prose. Nobody is better at nostalgia and grief for time’s relentlessness:
The lane was always the place to tell your secrets; if you did not have any, you invented them. Occassionally now I dream that I am turning out of school into the lane of confidences when I say to the boys of my class ‘At last, I have a real secret!’
“What is it? What is it?”
“I can fly!”
And when they do not believe me, I flap my arms and slowly leave the ground, only a few inches at first, then gaining air until i fly waving my cap, level with the upper windows of the school, peering in until the mistress at the piano screams, and the metronome falls to the ground and stops, and there is no more time.
And finally there’s the voice, the great booming melliflous irresistible voice lovingly preserved by Caedmon on about a dozen CDs that you will thank yourself for buying. The Caedmon collection includes a performance of the haunting “play for voices” Under Milk Wood narrated by Thomas himself; for an even greater treat, get the BBC Radio version with Richard Burton—or listen to it on the web. (Warning: Do not rent the highly regrettable movie version with Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.)
For a brief 39 years, as Time held him green and dying, Dylan Thomas spun words and images of surpassing beauty that will live as long as the English language. May he rest in peace.
Portraits of Greatness, Addendum
In my post about Alexandre Grothendieck, I pointed readers to the streaming video of a brilliant lecture by Colin McLarty. I ought also have pointed to McLarty’s even more brilliant paper as well.
Pricing Madness
A new paper from Jeff Campbell and Ben Eden looks at prices of grocery store items and finds that:
1) The more recently a price has changed, the more likely it is to change again, even if you don’t count temporary sale items.
2) The dispersion of newly set prices is not less than the dispersion of all prices.
Point 1) runs contrary to what pretty much any sticky price model predicts; point 2) runs contrary to what you’d expect if stores were trying to bring their prices into line with the rest of the market.
If you’re looking for a resolution of all this, don’t come to me. I’m still working on why the gas station down the street offers senior citizen discounts on Wednesday afternoons.
And while we’re at it: How come a sandwich at the airport deli costs me twice as much as a sandwich at the deli down the block, but they’ll both sell me a newspaper for the exact same price?
Portraits of Greatness
Alexandre Grothendieck, born in 1928, was the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century and arguably the greatest of all time. Between 1958 and 1972 he reformulated the fundamental concepts of geometry —concepts like point, space and covering (as in, “the northern and southern hemispheres cover the entire earth”) so completely that it is no longer possible to imagine what geometry would be about if Grothendieck had never lived.
In this endeavor, he collaborated with several of the world’s finest mathematicians who put their own research agendas on hold for the privilege of attending Grothendieck’s daily seminars, fleshing out his ideas, and committing them to paper. The resulting documents, totalling over 10,000 pages, revolutionized geometry, arithmetic and algebra by viewing all of mathematics from a height of abstraction at which subjects blend together, every unnecessary detail is stripped away, and essential truths are almost automatically revealed.
Today he lives alone in a cabin in the Pyrenees, tending a garden and refusing visitors.
It’s been over 30 years since Grothendieck’s abrupt retreat from civilization, and for most of that time I’ve been waiting for someone to write his biography. This is, after all, a compelling story. Its hero is a brilliant eccentric described by everyone who’s known him as a man of indescribable charisma. (It was this legendary charisma, no less than the brilliance and clarity of the Grothendieck vision, that lured so many first-rate mathematicians away from their own research for the sake of the grand collaboration.) Besides his mathematical work, he’s given us several thousand pages of introspective autobiography, philosophy and theology, including a several-hundred page proof of the existence of God. (The thrust of the argument, as I understand it: We all have dreams, don’t we? And what could dreams be, if not messages from God? And how could God send us messages if he didn’t exist? Q.E.D.)
It’s a story touched by many of the defining events of the twentieth century: a father who died in Auschwitz, a leadership role in the antiwar and counterculture movements of the late sixties, and a career abandoned at its height partly to protest NATO’s role in the funding of mathematical research—and then, to add to the drama, decades of isolation punctuated by cryptic pronouncements and long rambling screeds that, in the opinion of many former friends and colleagues, indicate he’s gone stark raving mad.
The telling of this tale is long overdue but it looks like the waiting is over. Allyn Jackson’s superb two-part article has appeared here and here, and a full length book (by Winfried Scharlau) is apparently in the works. There is also a brilliant lecture by Colin McLarty on Grothendieck’s philosophy of mathematics. Both McLarty’s and Jackson’s pieces require some mathematical sensibility. It remains to be seen whether someone will distill the Grothendieck story down to the comfort level of, say, the average New Yorker subscriber while remaining true to the spirit and breathtaking beauty of the Grothendieck revolution.
Democracy: Theory and Practice
Amid all the scaremongering about a nailbitingly close election with a disputed outcome, it is worth observing that if you really believe in democracy, and if the election is close, then it doesn’t much matter who wins. The theory of democracy (stripped down to bare essentials, and omitting all sorts of caveats that I could list but won’t) is that the guy who gets more votes is the better guy. Surely, then, it follows that the guy who gets only slightly more votes is only the slightly better guy. And if one guy’s only slightly better than the other, then a miscount is no great tragedy.
You might have a strong preference for one candidate over the other, but if you have an overriding preference for democracy (“Let the majority rule, even when I’m in the minority”), then you can stop worrying about miscounts. Surely there’s not much difference between a world where Bush gets 3 more votes than Kerry and a world where Kerry gets 3 more votes than Bush. If Bush is the rightful president in one of those worlds, he’s got to be darn close to rightful in the other.
Quote of the Day
Al From, head of the Democratic Leadership Council, quoted in the New York Times: “If we lose, we are going to have to find an answer to the question of how we are going to keep this country secure.” I was kind of hoping they would give that question some thought if they win.
Tour Boat Veterans for Truth
My friend Nathan Mehl, having blogged his way through Vietnam, has posted a spectacular photo gallery with a title so clever I had to steal it for this post.
Too Many Books?
This year’s Man Booker Prize, Nobel Prize for Literature, and Pulitzer Prize for fiction have now all been awarded for works I will never read, and next month’s National Book Award is certain to follow suit. Which causes me to wonder whether the world’s got enough books already. I own hundreds of novels that I will never have the time to read. If these were the only copies on earth and a fire destroyed half of them, my life would not be signifcantly impoverished.
Of course there are great novels that have brought me a lot of pleasure—most recently, Ian Pears’s An Instance of the Fingerpostand Donna Tartt’s The Secret History come to mind—(warning! Do not read the Amazon reviews of Fingerpost; they give away the ending!). But the opportunity cost of reading a great novel is reading some other great novel, so if either of these had gone unwritten, I’d probably have some other wonderful book to recommend.
There’s an important economic point here: The vast rewards that go to successful novelists can grossly overstate the social value of their work. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code has sold over 6 million copies and almost surely earned its author over $20 million. But if The Da Vinci Code hadn’t been written, some other now-unnoticed book might have taken its place as the blockbuster of the year, and readers would have been almost as happy.
Writing a book is not like growing an orange. If you grow the best orange in the world, the second best orange still gets eaten. But if you write the best book in the world, the second best book loses a lot of readers. So the market price of an orange is an excellent reflection of its true social value, whereas the bulk of Dan Brown’s $20 million is only an excellent reflection of what he was able to divert from some
other author to himself.
Status, Stress and Sex Ratios
The presidents of the United States have had, collectively, almost half again as many sons as daughters ((148 to 102 if I’ve counted correctly). Far more strikingly—because the sample size is so much larger—the people listed in Who’s Who have, collectively, about 15% more sons than daughters. (For the latter statistic, I rely on the testimony of the biologist Robin Baker, writing in his remarkable book Sperm Wars.)
Why do high-status parents have more sons? Presumably because high-status sons can give you lots of grandchildren (Baker points to an ex-emperor of Morocco with 888 children). A daughter is far more likely to give you about the average number of grandchildren. On the other side, low-status boys die childless more often than low-status girls. (On average, boys and girls have the same number of offspring—they must, because each offspring has one mother and one father. But girls are clustered around the average, while boys veer off to both extremes.)
So if you want a lot of grandchildren (and whether you want them or not, your genes do) you’ll want sons if you’re near the top of the status heap and daughters if you’re near the bottom.
Now: What’s the mechanism to accomplish all this? One suggestion from the biologists—and one that makes very good sense to an economist—is that a pregnant woman’s body, in deciding how much to invest in nourishing the embryo, takes account of the parents’ status and the embryos’ sex. High status mothers give more nourishment to male embryos; low status mothers give more nourishment to female embryos; better nourished embryos are more likely to be born alive.
How can a process as involuntary as nourishing an embryo respond to conscious information like the status of the father? Well, how can a process as involuntary as sweating with fear respond to conscious information like the approach of a tiger? Clearly this kind of thing happens all the time. More fundamentally, decisions like how much to nourish your embryo are among the most important economic problems the body ever faces. Is it really plausible that the body would simply throw away highly relevant information when it’s making a decision like that?
Incidentally, this ties into my earlier post about stress and daughters. There is evidence that stressed parents, like low-status parents, have more daughters, presumably for the same reason: stressful circumstances, like low-status parents, tend to depress reproductive success.
Quantum Game Theory, Revisited
My post on quantum game theory ignited something of a firestorm over on crookedtimber.org, where the badly confused Daniel Davies asserts (quite mistakenly) that the quantum mechanism I described allows players to communicate, making it unsurprising that they can beat a coordination game.
The followup posters are in some instances equally confused, though there are excellent responses from several, most notably Glenn Bridgman.
Here’s the analogy that I hope will clarify all the issues:
Suppose you and I sit in separate rooms. Once per minute, we each receive a red or green tennis ball through our mailslots. When we look at them, they’re always opposite colors. We know this, for example, because we each write down the sequence of colors we see and compare them afterward.
The same thing happens if I wear sunglasses. My vision appears to be affected not a whit, and we always see opposite colors.
Ditto if you wear the sunglasses.
But whenever we both wear sunglasses, we invariably see balls of the same color.
Something very like that happens in quantum mechanics. It works with electrons instead of tennis balls, and the correlations are less than 100%, but in every essential aspect, this is the story.
Notice that we can use this mechanism to win the dog/cat game. (The game again: We are each asked one question: “Do you like dogs?” or “Do you like cats?” . We win if our answers differ, unless we were both asked about dogs, in which case we win if our answers match.) All we have to do is agree to leave off the sunglasses when we’re asked about cats, put them on when we’re asked about dogs, answer yes when we see a red ball, and answer no when we see a green.
Now it is Daniel Davies’s position that there’s nothing extraordinary about this; of course we can win— because we’re exchanging information.
But we’re not. And for those who think we are, here is my question: You take off your sunglasses (or put them on, as you prefer). A ball comes through the slot. You notice it’s red. What information has been exchanged?
Sometimes correlation does too imply causation
Correlation, as we all know so well, does not imply causation. But sometimes it comes damn close.
For example: Parents of daughters are more likely to divorce than parents of sons. When I wrote and then rewrote about this odd fact in Slate, I got hundreds of emails from readers protesting that daughters might not cause divorce. Maybe some third factor causes both divorce and daughters.
There’s even a clear candidate for that factor: Stress. It’s well established that in many species, stressed populations produce unusually many female offspring. If the same is true in humans, then perhaps both daughters and divorce are the products of exogenous stress.
The problem with that theory is that it’s arithmetically implausible. To explain even a small correlation between daughters and divorce, you’d have to make pretty extreme assumptions about the effects of stress.
For example: Suppose half of all parents are stressed, stressed parents have 55% girls and a 50% divorce rate, and unstressed parents have 45% girls and a 25% divorce rate. Those are much stronger effects (especially on the boy/girl ratio) than anyone could actually believe. Nevertheless, even with these strong assumptions, we get a 36.25% divorce rate among parents of girls and a 38.75% divorce rate among parents of boys—not a very big difference. So the stress theory just doesn’t hold water.
The general point is that before you attribute a correlation to some mysterious (or non-mysterious) third factor, it’s worth pulling out an envelope, flipping it over, and jotting down some numbers. If your numbers have to be ridiculous to get the result you want, you probably need a different theory.