Category: Games
How many time zones does America need anyway?
Allison Schrager writes:
This year, Americans on Eastern Standard Time should set their clocks back one hour (like normal), Americans on Central and Rocky Mountain time do nothing, and Americans on Pacific time should set their clocks forward one hour. After that we won’t change our clocks again—no more daylight saving. This will result in just two time zones for the continental United States. The east and west coasts will only be one hour apart. Anyone who lives on one coast and does business with the other can imagine the uncountable benefits of living in a two-time-zone nation (excluding Alaska and Hawaii).
And why?:
It sounds radical, but it really isn’t. The purpose of uniform time measures is coordination. How we measure time has always evolved with the needs of commerce. According to Time and Date, a Norwegian Newsletter dedicated to time zone information, America started using four time zones in 1883. Before that, each city had its own time standard based on its calculation of apparent solar time (when the sun is directly over-head at noon) using sundials. That led to more than 300 different American time zones. This made operations very difficult for the telegraph and burgeoning railroad industry. Railroads operated with 100 different time zones before America moved to four, which was consistent with Britain’s push for a global time standard. The following year, at the International Meridian Conference, it was decided that the entire world could coordinate time keeping based on the British Prime Meridian (except for France, which claimed the Prime Median ran through Paris until 1911). There are now 24 (or 25, depending on your existential view of the international date line) time zones, each taking about 15 degrees of longitude.
Now the world has evolved further—we are even more integrated and mobile, suggesting we’d benefit from fewer, more stable time zones. Why stick with a system designed for commerce in 1883? In reality, America already functions on fewer than four time zones. I spent the last three years commuting between New York and Austin, living on both Eastern and Central time. I found that in Austin, everyone did things at the same times they do them in New York, despite the difference in time zone. People got to work at 8 am instead of 9 am, restaurants were packed at 6 pm instead of 7 pm, and even the TV schedule was an hour earlier.
There is more here.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch on *Average is Over*
Here is one excerpt:
“If you’re not a good [chess] player,” Cowen writes, “the fact that you studied with a top teacher doesn’t mean a thing. … There is nothing [in chess] comparable to the glow resulting from a Harvard degree: Announcing ‘I studied with Rybka’ [a powerful chess engine] would bring gales of laughter, since anyone can do that. … The company selling Rybka tries to make its product replicable and universal, whereas Harvard tries to make its product as exclusive as possible. Now, which model do you think will spread and gain influence in the long run?”
Before you answer that, consider this: A year of tuition, room and board at Harvard will set you back more than $50,000. You can get a copy of Rybka for about $50.
The full piece is here.
How the machines will pick the best workers in the future
From Aki Ito, here is a a good discussion of a new innovation, related to some trends I discussed in Average is Over:
To aid that search [for better workers], Juhl this month will begin using an online video game designed to track, record and analyze every millisecond of its players’ behavior. Developed by Knack in Palo Alto, California, Wasabi Waiter places job-seekers in the shoes of a sushi server who must identify the mood of his cartoon customers and bring them the dish labeled with the matching emotion. On a running clock, they must also clear empty dishes into the sink while tending to new customers who take a seat at the bar.
Using about a megabyte of data per candidate, Knack’s software measures a variety of attributes shown in academic studies to relate to job performance, including conscientiousness and the capacity to recognize others’ emotions. Knack’s clients will also see a score estimating each applicant’s likelihood of being a high performer.
As for another company:
…The patterns gleaned since the company’s founding in 2007 have debunked many of the common assumptions held by recruiters, Evolv executives say. For example, a history of job-hopping or long bouts of unemployment has little relationship with how long the candidate will stay at his or her next job, according to Evolv’s analysis of call center agents.
“As human beings, we’re actually pretty bad at evaluating other human beings,” said David Ostberg, vice president of workforce science at Evolv. “We’re making sure people are using the right data, instead of the traditional methods that were previously thought to be valid but big data’s showing are not.”
And:
New York-based ConnectCubed has also developed software to determine the personality and cognitive abilities of job applicants that, at its largest clients, is tailored for that specific company. ConnectCubed has existing workers at those businesses complete its video games and questionnaires so the behavioral profiles of the star employees serve as a benchmark for who managers should hire in the future.
“When new people apply, you can say, wow this guy has all the makings of our top salesmen,” said Michael Tanenbaum, chief executive officer and co-founder of the service. “These are things that are impossible to measure from a resume, especially with educational backgrounds that are often more determined by socioeconomic status than your innate ability.”
To be sure, Knack and ConnectCubed, which say they can predict high-performers across a broad set of workers, haven’t been around for long enough to track, over time, whether their technologies actually are improving the quality of the employees their clients hire or those businesses’ bottom line.
The article is interesting throughout.
Nobel Offices
Here is a panoramic peek inside the offices of a number of Nobel prize winners, including Al Roth for economics. More interesting than it sounds with lots of Easter eggs.
Hat tip: Justin Wolfers.
Do Americans favor debt ceiling conditionality?
I don’t think there should be a debt ceiling at all, and I also don’t favor conditionality on raising it, as I don’t think hostage-taking leads to better policy in the long run or even in the short run for that matter. Yet it seems to me this is an under-reported angle on the recent controversies:
Americans by a 2-to-1 ratio disagree with President Barack Obama’s contention that Congress should raise the U.S. debt limit without conditions.
Instead, 61 percent say that it’s “right to require spending cuts when the debt ceiling is raised even if it risks default,” because Congress lacks spending discipline, according to a Bloomberg National Poll conducted Sept. 20-23.
That sentiment is shared by almost three-quarters of Republicans, two-thirds of independents, and a plurality of Democrats. Just 28 percent of respondents backed Obama’s call for a clean bill that has no add-on provisions.
The Bloomberg article is here, and I would say this means the Republican strategy may be working somewhat better, and be less insane and out of touch, than its critics often suggest. (I do, by the way, understand that the framing of the initial question is going to influence the poll results significantly.)
As they sometimes say, it is time to elect a new people.
Bets, beliefs, and portfolios: some further observations on the theses of Bryan Caplan
Bryan Caplan thinks that portfolios don’t reveal much about actual beliefs,. Here is one of his arguments:
Even prominent Nobel prize-winning economists admit they follow simple rules of thumb when they invest. So unless people’s beliefs are carved in stone, how could portfolios possibly reveal much about their beliefs? Tyler is a case in point: He changes his mind a hundred times a day, but he follows a simple financial strategy that hasn’t varied in years.
I view it differently. I don’t trade in public markets but I vary my allocations by changing how much money I spend and how to allocate my time. Perhaps not coincidentally, this puts me square into the world of classical finance theory as represented by “the mutual fund theorem,” with a static equity portfolio of fixed proportions and some unique covariances on my human capital. I call that rationality not inertia.
Bryan, you will note, is a founder of the theory of rational irrationality, which suggests you become more rational as the private stakes from your decisions go up. These days he is wishing to argue that the truly small stakes reflect what you really think, through the lens of mental accounting and compartmentalization. Of course that would undercut or at least drastically relativize his earlier theory. I say he has made a large and successful career bet — much bigger than any of his piddly ante monetary bets — on the theory of rational irrationality, so he must really agree with me after all.
It also happens that Bryan’s emphasis on simple rules of thumb will work against his interest in person-to-person bets as a metric of authenticity. If you don’t change or examine your overall portfolio very often, that means some reasonably wide range of portfolios is a matter of indifference or near indifference to you, if only because fine-tuned improvements are hard to find. (Do you really give matters a re-ponder when a firm in your portfolio pays dividends?) In that case, however, the small bets won’t be authentic either. One could compartmentalize one’s personal bets quite easily and say to oneself — whether consciously or not — “I can make this small bet: it still keeps my overall portfolio within that broad range of indifference.” Which indeed it does. The bet is then undertaken for expressive reasons, which is fine, nothing against that, but for me it is more fun to cheer for Tony Parker (without betting on him). I think of these small personal bets as akin to sports loyalties most of all and not as a unique window into our real beliefs.
The small person-to-person bets pay off (or not) in terms of pride, including for some people the pride in betting itself. One relevant substitute is to attempt to produce pride using your own internal mental accounting of your own predictions and so we must make the broader portfolio comparison. What the $$ betters are signaling is a lack of vividness for their own internal mental worlds. In my mind, I’m already betting an optimal amount of pride through my own mental accounting. Maybe some of us are already betting too much internal pride on external events; after all, the variance of pride introduces some new exogenous risk into life and perhaps we should be trying to move in the opposite direction toward greater pride indifference to external events. That is what the Stoics thought.
Most of all, I fear that Bryan’s results are coming from an asymmetric approach where he applies positive observation to large portfolios and normative recommendations to small bets. Bryan could go for a “positive vs. positive” comparison, in which case he would point out that people trade and adjust their large portfolios all the time, but don’t make small bets on public policy nearly as much. Alternatively, he could try a “normative vs. normative” comparison, in which case would you sooner recommend that people drop their inertia for their large portfolios or for their small ones? To even raise such a question is to answer it.
Do you want to find out “what a person really thinks”? Look at whom they married, how much money they spend, and how they devote their time. That is the most important portfolio of them all.
Just don’t bet that Bryan and I are going to agree anytime soon.
What’s the most intellectual joke you know?
That query is from AskReddit, the link is here, and here are a few of the nominations:
It’s hard to explain puns to kleptomaniacs because they always take things literally.
And:
Jean-Paul Sartre is sitting at a French cafe, revising his draft of Being and Nothingness. He says to the waitress, “I’d like a cup of coffee, please, with no cream.” The waitress replies, “I’m sorry, Monsieur, but we’re out of cream. How about with no milk?”
And:
Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel, and Noam Chomsky walk into a bar. Heisenberg turns to the other two and says, “Clearly this is a joke, but how can we figure out if it’s funny or not?” Gödel replies, “We can’t know that because we’re inside the joke.” Chomsky says, “Of course it’s funny. You’re just telling it wrong.”
I don’t find that latter one funny at all, as they are telling it wrong.
The pointer is from Jodi Ettenberg of Legal Nomads fame.
What are your picks? You get mine every day.
Probably not good news markets in everything
For US$249 a company in the United States is promising to send curious and competitive players of computer games an unusual headset. The device, the company claims, will convert electronic gamers into electronic-gamers. At the touch of a button, the headset will send a surge of electricity through their prefrontal cortex. It promises to increase brain plasticity and make synapses fire faster, to help gamers repel more space invaders and raid more tombs. And, according to the publicity shots on the website, it comes in a choice of red or black.
The company is accepting orders, but says that it will not ship its first headsets to customers until next month. Some are unwilling to wait. Videos on the Internet already show people who have cobbled together their own version with a 9-volt battery and some electrical wire. If you are not fussy about the colour scheme, other online firms already promise to supply the components and instructions you need to make your own. Or you could rummage around in the garage.
Here is more, with further interesting points, via Michelle Dawson.
21-minute video interview with Thomas Schelling
You will find it here, recently recorded. Hat tip goes to Daniel Klein.
Acceleration chess (also known as Progressive chess)
White moves first, but then Black gets to move twice. Then White gets to move three times in a row, then Black four times in a row, then White five times in a row, and so on, with continuing escalation as the game proceeds. You cannot move your King through a check or play another move while your King is in check. If, in the middle of your sequence, you give check, you lose any remaining moves in your sequence and your opponent moves and enjoys his full sequence.
Here are a few observations:
1. Games will end rather quickly.
2. 1.d4 appears to be a stronger opening move than 1.e4; can you see why? For one thing, White is threatening to start his next threesome with Bg5, for another his King has some breathing space against some possible checks on f2. (If Black plays d5 and Nf6 in turn, consider the counter of e4, e5, and Bb5+. With the next “fivesome” of White he is threatening to advance pawns to e6 and g6 and take on f7. Qd3 and then Qf5 is another possible threat sequence.)
3. It is often good to give check on the last move of your sequence, if only to tie the hands of your opponent for one move.
4. Sometimes a more exposed King gives you a stronger position, because then the approach toward your King creates a check and ends the sequence of your opponent. This also means that pawn promotion should not always be to a Queen.
5. The Knight is often better on h3 rather than f3.
“Acceleration chess” is my phrase. And for the dedicated foursome there is “accelerated Bughouse.”
I thank several individuals at Jane St. Capital for relevant observations on this game plus a bit of play.
Do Lacanians understand the third derivative?
I continue to read from Bruce Fink’s A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis Theory and Technique. Here is another bit of interest:
…Lacanian analysis seeks to keep the analysand off guard and off-balance, so that any manifestation of the unconscious can have its full impact.
When fixed-length sessions are the norm, the analysand becomes accustomed to having a set amount of time to talk, and considers how to fill up that time, how best to make use of it. Analysands are very often aware, for example, that the dream they had the night before about their analyst is what is most important to their analysis, yet they try to fit in plenty of other things they want to talk about before they get to the dream (if they get to the dream). They thus attempt to minimize the importance of the dream in their own eyes, minimize the time that can be devoted to associating to it, or maximize the amount of time the analyst gives them. Analysands’ use of the time allotted to them in the session is part and parcel of their larger neurotic strategy (involving avoidance, neutralization of other people, and so on), and setting session length in advance merely encourages their neurosis.
The variable-length session throws analysands off guard, to some extent, and can be used in such a way as to encourage the analysand to get right to the good stuff.
I know some of you are making fun of me, but this is not the least interesting book I have read this week (though I would not want to base very much on it).
Toward a model of the therapist
In working with neurotics, the therapist must always express a desire for patients to continue, even if he or she feels that these patients have completed their work. Such patients will break off when their own desire to move on has become strong enough and determined enough.
…This obviously implies that the analyst is an actor or actress who plays a part which does not necessarily convey his or her “true feelings.”…The analyst may find a patient unpleasant and annoying, but of what use is it to let the patient know this? The patient may very well react to an expression of the analyst’s antipathy by leaving analysis altogether, or by trying to make him- or herself pleasant and interesting to the analyst, censoring certain thoughts and feelings which he or she thinks might annoy the analyst, instead of getting down to true analytic work. Counterproductive reactions to say the least! The analyst must maintain a position of desire — desire for the patient to talk, dream, fantasize, associate, and interpret — regardless of any dislike he or she may have for the patient.
That is from Bruce Fink’s often quite interesting A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis Theory and Technique, which I suppose also doubles as management advice.
By the way, here is today’s (closely related) David Brooks column. Alex passes along this link.
How do you build immunity from choking? (a meditation on Carlsen and Kramnik)
Yesterday Magnus Carlsen and Vladimir Kramnik each played decisive chess games in the Candidates’ tournament, for the right to challenge Vishy Anand for the world championship title. Carlsen held the tiebreaker, so he had only to match Kramnik’s result — draw or win — to proceed to the match with Anand.
Both lost. Uncharacteristically, both fell into time trouble. Both made bad mistakes even after time trouble was over. The chess world was shocked.
Arguably both choked.
Yet Kramnik has won several world championship matches, including against Kasparov, and Carlsen rose to world #1 at a very young age of course.
How does one become immune to choking?
If you have mastered stages 1 through n, presumably you still can choke at stage n + 1. Carlsen had never played in a world championship or candidates’ match before. In 1997 Kasparov choked when he had to play an improved Deep Blue, a machine.
Is there mean-reversion in choking and immunity to choking? If you play at a supremely confident level at the very top, nine times in a row, do you forget how to handle pressure and eventually revert to choking? Immunity against choking can wear off, or holding a title and having to defend it can raise the fear of choking through a kind of endowment effect (Bobby Fischer).
Does a string of confident winning raise the stakes more rapidly than you can master a rising choke, thus bringing you to n + 27 too quickly? (The Miami Heat just lost a 27-game winning streak.) Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak has proven so hard to break, as there is always a new and tougher choking margin.
Or can one ascend to n + 3 with sufficiently strong margins of error that perhaps the fear of choking is never overcome and remains in the background for when tougher situations come along? Or one can ascend to n + 3 if everyone chokes along the way; someone must be choking least but still you are always a choker.
Under one theory, you become immune to choking at stage n + 2 only by at least once choking at stage n + 2 and then, on another occasion, overcoming your choke. I call this the LeBron James theory. Can it be that such loss/win experiences are required periodically and not just once up front?
The lessons are that it can be difficult to overcome choking, and that a complex mix of losing and winning may help you more with choking than simply lots of winning.
Why a coach should be ambiguous
Remember how Mr. Miyagi taught The Karate Kid how to fight? Wax on/Wax off. Paint the fence. Don’t forget to breathe. A coach is the coach because he knows what the student needs to do to advance. A big problem for coaches is that the most precocious students also (naturally) think they know what they need to learn.
If Mr. Miyagi told Daniel that he needed endless repetition of certain specific hand movements to learn karate, Daniel would have rebelled and demanded to learn more and advance more quickly. Mr. Miyagi used ambiguity to evade conflict.
An artist with natural gift for expression needs to learn convention. But she may disagree with the teacher about how much time should be spent learning convention. If the teacher simply gives her exercises to do without explanation her decision to comply will be on the basis of an overall judgment of whether this teacher, on average, knows best. To instead say “You must learn conventions, here are some exercises for that” runs the risk that the student moderates the exercises in line with her own judgment about the importance of convention.
The “austerity” of 2011-2012 in the United States
It turns out that much more of it was phony than many people had realized. From David Farenthold, this is from today’s Washington Post:
To sketch the bill’s biggest impacts, The Washington Post focused on the 16 largest individual cuts. Each, in theory, sliced at least $500 million from the federal budget. Together, they accounted for $26.1 billion, two-thirds of the total.
In four of those cases, the real-world impact was difficult to measure. The Department of Homeland Security officially declined to comment about a $557 million reduction. The Department of State, the Department of Agriculture and the Federal Emergency Management Agency — whose cuts totaled $1.9 billion — simply did not answer The Post’s questions despite repeated requests over the past month.
Among the other 12 cases, there were at least seven where the cuts caused only minimal real-world disruptions or none at all.
Often, this was made possible by a little act of Washington magic. Agencies got credit for killing what was, in reality, already dead.
Here is the article, and I did chuckle at the last paragraph.