Spill all the beans as quickly as possible.  Here is the perspective of one interrogator.  Two key reasons: you don’t signal that torture works on you, and false information can be checked against other sources.  Here is my earlier post posing the question.

Addendum: I am discernibly outraged over torture (read here), but at this point I figure getting people to think about how terrible torture must be will be more effective than simply attacking it.

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Here is the link, and that is via BoingBoing, thanks to Jason van Bruaene for the pointer.

Addendum: Here is an extension of the first idea.

For the curious, and perhaps the prurient, here it is.  I don’t recall having said anything I regretted, but I’m not going to watch it to find out either.  I do talk about barbecue and why terrorism may not be a stable micro-culture.

If you are willing to watch a video, the people are more attractive in the trailer for Serenity.

Let us say that you have been captured and threatened with torture.  You are, for whatever reason, entirely willing to betray the information you hold.  Your primary goal is to avoid pain, and perhaps you positively want to squeal.  How should you present what you know?  I see a few options:

1. Break down immediately, beg for mercy, humiliate yourself, and spill the beans.  (If you talk right away, will they torture you anyway?  And since no further good information can be offered why should they stop?)

2. Go in acting tough, really tough.  At the first sign of serious pain, start crying and switch to strategy #1.

3. Wait until they apply their "best shot" torture, and then talk.  They will feel they have done their job and stop.

4. First offer (or make up) compromising information to show your disloyalty to the cause your torturers are fighting.  Your confession will then be more credible.

5. Say you don’t know anything, try to fight the torture, but break down when you can’t stand it any more.  You can’t fool them, so the best you can do is to actually "go through the wringer."  You are stuck in the pooling equilibrium, and trying to deviate only makes you worse off.

Which of these is the most credible signal that you have told all you know?  Can you do any better than number five?  And how does your best answer depend upon the hypothesized motives of the torturers?  Is there anything you can say to the U.S. to avoid being sent out for rendition?  I do’t see any simple answer here, the question is which behavior your torturers will interpret as an unlikely tactic from a truly determined trickster.

Here is Brad DeLong’s reason number 4 to favor private accounts for social security:

We need to raise our national savings rate. But if we just raise Social
Security taxes, Congress will treat these taxes as general revenue and
spend them. Only by funneling Social Security contributions into some
vehicle that Congressional representatives cannot interpret as a
resource available to fund current spending can we raise the national
savings rate. And private accounts are the best vehicle we can find to
(a) accumulate contributions without (b) allowing Congressional
representatives to seize them as resources available to fund current
federal spending.

That reason receives new support from Nataraj and Shoven who present evidence that:

…the trust fund build-up may not help future generations due to the
adoption of the Unified Budget in 1970. The Unified Budget includes
trust fund receipts as income and trust fund payments as expenditures.
The empirical evidence suggests that attempts to balance the Unified
Budget while the trust funds were generating surpluses has led to
increased government spending and personal and corporation income tax
cuts within the rest of the federal government. There is no evidence of
increased government saving as a result of the trust fund accumulations.

Here is Brad DeLong, on Slate.com, on the new Bush proposal. 

If you don’t like getting your paper rejected before it even reaches peer review, ask David Egilman how to get around the process: In what may be an unprecedented move, when the Brown University researcher’s paper was recently rejected from an occupational medicine journal, he simply bought two pages of ad space and printed the entire article in the same journal.

Here is the full story, and thanks to Newmark’s Door for the pointer.

Addendum: If you care about "Conferences in Everything," try this one.

During his Daily Show appearance Steve Levitt said that in estimating the effect of abortion on crime he controlled for other variables like police and prisons.  Jon Stewart pressed Steve for an explanation of how someone could "control" for other variables – amazingly, Stewart seemed genuinely interested in an answer but, wisely, Steve demurred.  The exchange got me to thinking, What is the shortest, non-technical, yet reasonably accurate explanation of how this is done?

I think the way to go is to use the Frisch-Waugh-Lovell Theorem.  Here’s my attempt:

Suppose you want to figure out the effect of weight on life expectancy.  Heavy people tend to be tall so you have to control for height.  You can do this with a two-step procedure.  First, calculate how height correlates with weight.  Let’s say that you discover that every 1 inch increase in height above say 5’7 correlates with a 5 pound increase in weight; you now subtract from each person’s weight that portion which can be explained by height.  For example, you would subtract 5 pounds from everyone in the data of height 5’8 and 10 pounds from everyone who is 5’9.   Since height doesn’t explain weight perfectly, you are left with a new variable, weight2.  In the second step, you calculate how life expectancy correlates with weight2, since weight2 is "weight after controlling for height" you have now calculated the effect on life expectancy of weight after controlling for height.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that this is what Steve should have said!  (If asked I would have said, "Well, I could tell you that Jon, but then I would have to bore you.")  I’ve opened the comments section if you have some other ideas.

By the way the ubiquitous Steve Levitt will be here on Wednesday, but I repeat myself.