Month: March 2018

The wisdom of Ben (Stratechery) Thompson

It seems far more likely that Facebook will be directly regulated than Google; arguably this is already the case in Europe with the GDPR. What is worth noting, though, is that regulations like the GDPR entrench incumbents: protecting users from Facebook will, in all likelihood, lock in Facebook’s competitive position.

This episode is a perfect example: an unintended casualty of this weekend’s firestorm is the idea of data portability: I have argued that social networks like Facebook should make it trivial to export your network; it seems far more likely that most social networks will respond to this Cambridge Analytica scandal by locking down data even further. That may be good for privacy, but it’s not so good for competition. Everything is a trade-off.

Here is the link to the longer piece, to get them regularly you have to pay, definitely recommended, now more than ever.

Monday assorted links

1. The Freedom Party wants to give Austrians (the people, not the economists) the freedom to smoke (NYT).

2. Facebook will now be more reluctant to share with social scientists.

3. The problem of Germany.

4. The Arnold Kling high school memoir.  More people should write pieces of this kind.

5. “You might see chairs thrown amid a torrent of f-bombs, freestyle rapping mid-game, and a never-ending barrage of trash talk. This is the new, online era of chess.”  Link here.

The sons of well-off black families do not do so well

White boys who grow up rich are likely to remain that way. Black boys raised at the top, however, are more likely to become poor than to stay wealthy in their own adult households…

Gaps persisted even when black and white boys grew up in families with the same income, similar family structures, similar education levels and even similar levels of accumulated wealth.

This is pathbreaking work by Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R. Jones, and Sonya R. Porter [full paper here].

The study, based on anonymous earnings and demographic data for virtually all Americans now in their late 30s, debunks a number of other widely held hypotheses about income inequality. Gaps persisted even when black and white boys grew up in families with the same income, similar family structures, similar education levels and even similar levels of accumulated wealth.

The disparities that remain also can’t be explained by differences in cognitive ability, an argument made by people who cite racial gaps in test scores that appear for both black boys and girls. If such inherent differences existed by race, “you’ve got to explain to me why these putative ability differences aren’t handicapping women,” said David Grusky, a Stanford sociologist who has reviewed the research.

A more likely possibility, the authors suggest, is that test scores don’t accurately measure the abilities of black children in the first place.

If this inequality can’t be explained by individual or household traits, much of what matters probably lies outside the home — in surrounding neighborhoods, in the economy and in a society that views black boys differently from white boys, and even from black girls.

“One of the most popular liberal post-racial ideas is the idea that the fundamental problem is class and not race, and clearly this study explodes that idea”…

The NYT piece is by Emily Badger, Claire Cain Miller, Adam Pearce, and Kevin Quealy.  And from the paper itself:

Conditional on parent income, the black-white income gap is driven entirely by large differences in wages and employment rates between black and white men; there are no such differences between black and white women.

Tanzania fact of the day

Since coming to power in the country of 55m on the east coast of Africa in 2015, Mr Magufuli, nicknamed “the bulldozer” from his time as roads minister, has bashed foreign-owned businesses with impossible tax demands, ordered pregnant girls to be kicked out of school, shut down newspapers and locked up “immoral” musicians who criticise him. A journalist and opposition party members have disappeared, political rallies have been banned and mutilated bodies have washed up on the shores of Coco Beach in Dar es Salaam, the commercial capital. Mr Magufuli is fast transforming Tanzania from a flawed democracy into one of Africa’s more brutal dictatorships. It is a lesson in how easily weak institutions can be hijacked and how quickly democratic progress can be undone.

…The main lesson of Tanzania is that constitutions which concentrate power in the presidency can quickly be subverted.

Here is more from The Economist.

Those old service sector jobs (speculative?)

According to no less an authority than Danny Baker, this story is absolutely true.

Harrods in the sixties employed someone to be sacked- surely the best job in the world.

Apparently  the employee was paid to sit among the boxes on Harrods top-floor smoking his pipe and reading the Sporting Life. From time to time a bell would ring and he would be summoned to a department where an irate customer was  being mollified by the Head of the Department.

Let us say today that Lady Ponsonby-Waffles has discovered one of the precious china teacups she recently purchased is chipped.

The Department Head greets our friend with “Lady Ponsonby-Waffles is a most valued customer, your failure to check the quality of her china cups has led to her current predicament, you sir are fired”

Despite Lady Ponsonby-Waffles pleas for mercy, the Head cannot be swayed. Our friend slopes disconsolately to the exit. Lady Ponsonby-Waffles drops her complaint convinced to the store’s determination to enforce the highest standards. Our friend, once passing the Department’s exit, slips back to his Sporting Life and his Pipe, to await the next occasion he would be called upon to be sacked.

Here is the link from Henry Tapper, via Steve Stuart-Williams.

Solve for the music legal equilibrium

Pop superstar Miley Cyrus now being sued for copyright infringement — with damages potentially hitting $300 million.  That is, for one lyric in her hit single, “We Can’t Stop”.  The song is from her fourth studio album, Bangerz, released in 2013.

The lawsuit is coming from Michael May, better known as Flourgon, a Jamaican dancehall artist.  Flourgon had several Jamaican hit singles in the late 1980s and 1990s, and remains an active performer today.

May alleges that Cyrus ripped off his catch-phase, ‘We Run Things,’ which is actually the name of a song written by May.  In “We Can’t Stop,” Cyrus repeats the lyric ‘we run things’ in the chorus.

“We run things/Things don’t run we” are the lyrics of Miley’s single.

In May’s track, the lyrics are: “We run things/Things no run we.”

Here is the full article, via Ted Gioia.

The electoral campaign that is Russia

It’s early March, two weeks before Russia’s polling day, but the presidential election season is already in full swing in Chubulga, a reindeer-herding settlement in north-eastern Yakutia. It’s an hour’s flight to the nearest village, which is itself a further two hours from the nearest asphalt road and 5,000km east of Moscow.

With a population of just three, this district is unlikely to turn the electoral tide. But with election officials desperate to raise turnout and show support for current president Vladimir Putin, no expense has been spared.

So they sent a team of election officials by plane, plus some trudging through the snow.  And this:

Results differ across regions. Some areas allegedly concoct results to show their loyalty to the Kremlin: Putin regularly polls above 99 per cent in Chechnya. In major cities like Moscow and St Petersburg, Putin is so unpopular among the middle class that he wins less than half the vote, despite accusations of voter fraud. In Yakutia, Putin’s last election return of 69 per cent was typical for ­Russia’s far-flung provinces. But the region’s vastness means that the key is maintaining the 75 per cent turnout. As a result, officials have to go further than anywhere else to show democracy in action.

Here is the FT story by Max Seddon, via BaldingsWorld.

Does fake news spread faster on Twitter?

You may recall last week a spate of stories and tweets claiming that fake news spreads further and faster on Twitter.  For instance, there is Steve Lohr at the NYT, who doesn’t quite get it right:

And people, the study’s authors also say, prefer false news.

As a result, false news travels faster, farther and deeper through the social network than true news.

That struck me as off-base, and you can find other offenders, so I went back and read the original paper by Vosoughi, Roy, and Aral.  And what did I find?:

1. The data focus solely on “rumor cascades.”  The paper does not establish the relative ratio of fake news to real news, for instance.  The main questions take the form of “within the data set of rumor cascades, what can we say about those cascades?”

2. It still may (or may not) be the case that real news has its major effects through non-cascade mechanisms.  Most people are convinced of 2 + 2 = 4, but probably not because they heard it through a rumor cascade.

3. Within the universe of rumor cascades, this paper measures average effects.  It does not mean that at the margin fake news is more powerful.  For instance, the rumor “Hillary Clinton is Satan” may have been quite powerful, but that does not mean a particular new rumor can achieve the same force.  2 + 2 = 5 won’t get you nearly as far in terms of retweets, I suspect.

4. Overall the results of this paper remind me of another problem/data issue.  At least in the old days, children’s movies used to earn more than films for adults, as stressed by Michael Medved.  That doesn’t mean you have a quick money-making formula by simply making more movies for kids.  It could be a few major kid’s movies, driven perhaps by peer effects, suck up most of the oxygen in the room and dominate the market.  And then, within the universe of cascade-driven movies, kid’s movies will look really strong and indeed be really strong.  That also doesn’t have to mean the kid’s movies have more cultural influence overall, even if they look dominant in the cascade-driven category.  In this analogy, the kid’s movies are like the fake news.

5. I am not sure how much the authors of the paper themselves are at fault for the misunderstandings.  They can defend themselves on the grounds of not being literally incorrect in their statements in the paper.  Still, they do not seem to be going out of their way to correct possible and indeed fairly likely misinterpretations.

6. The strongest argument for the coverage of the authors’ paper is perhaps the coverage of the authors’ paper itself.  The incorrect interpretations of the result did indeed spread faster and further than the correct interpretations.  I even delayed the publication of this post by a few days, if only to make its content less likely to be true.

Saturday assorted links

1. AMA with Patrick Collison.

2. If Finland is the world’s happiest country, why does it seem so…?

3. How Amazon determines if a streaming investment was worth the cost.

4. A literal world map.

5. “So it could be that Virginia-style favorites are inadvertently doing their opponents a big favor by slowing the pace down to a crawl, essentially giving away some of their talent advantage by allowing more randomness to seep into the game.”  Do generalize that point!  It’s a bit like the old chess adage suggesting that the best way to play for a draw is to play for a win.

Greeting cards aren’t about greeting

Greeting cards and cliché more generally bear witness to the fact that the most banal and the most meaningful regularly coincide, and that something always remains beyond the reach of words. Cliché is a place where life and language resist one another.

By recognising the radical imperfection of language, cliché can help ameliorate the damage it does. The continual return of these stock phrases reminds us that, though language can say ‘I love you’ or ‘Our deepest sympathies’ – which ties the love and grief we feel with all those who have ever, and will ever, love and grieve – it can never completely capture this grief or this love. After which, the universality of our love, our grief, begins to feel less like an act of violent conceptuality and more like an act of community, transposing us into a commune with all the living and the dead.

Greeting cards serve as a reminder that it is often with the clichéd and the ordinary that the fabric of language starts to unravel, and the pulse of life – that which will always remain beyond words – begins to bubble up from beneath.

Here is more, by Daniel Fraser.  Do you prefer that take, or a single tweet on the topic by Robin Hanson?

The revenge of the pecuniary externalities on cryptocurrencies

The town of Plattsburgh, New York, has become the first in the US to place a moratorium on cryptocurrency mining. It’s not an outright ban, at least not yet — it doesn’t affect miners currently operating in the city, just new ones looking to set up shop, and it’s only in place for 18 months.

Why Plattsburgh, New York? It’s simple: the small town has the “cheapest electricity in the world,” as Mayor Colin Read told Motherboard. Mining involves using high powered computers to solve complex problems, and thus be rewarded with cryptocurrency. It generates a lot of heat and uses an inordinate amount of electricity. It makes sense that these mining enterprises would look for places with inexpensive electricity. The problem is that it’s resulted in higher electric bills for everyone else in the town.

Here is the full story, via the excellent Samir Varma.

Titus Levi on *Black Panther*

Titus emails to me:

I had an atypical reaction: I left the theatre feeling very, very sad.

First, for the reasons enumerated here.

Second, because everything good and noble turned out to be incredibly fragile. All it took was an alternate vision of how to use power and Paradise degenerated into civil conflict. Mind you, this is a civil war that lasted only a few hours, but still.

Third, it’s heartbreaking to look up to a place… that doesn’t exist. The whole “what if Africa (or some part of it) hadn’t been colonized?” question unsettled me. We lost so much.

Fourth, T’Challa never told Killmonger, “My father was wrong to abandon you.” Never. And he felt it strongly. Strongly enough to challenge his father in a vision. Why did he say nothing about this?

Fifth, after the civil conflict everything goes… right back to normal. No reconciliation process. No sense for how to address the resentments lingering in the shadows. Nada. That struck me as facile.

Anyway, leave it to me to be a killjoy in response to a feel-good movie.

Agh.