Hopefully Interesting

To grossly simplify policymaking, when there's a problem there are usually three options available to the government.  You can always ignore the problem.  You can raise money and pay someone to deal with the problem.  Or you can pass laws to force some third party to deal with the problem.  When phrased that way the last often sounds like a bad idea, but if pick a third party that is unpopular or that seems like maybe they ought to be helping with the problem anyway then the specific plans can sound quite appealing.  But I'd argue that there are a couple of reasons to resist the urge to do this even when it sounds like a good idea at first. The first is that by putting a burden on a specific group, you're creating an incentive for people not to join that group.  If you'd prefer that people didn't join that group then this is a pretty good deal.  But often you have a group like, say the people who employ poor people which you don't want to shrink....

Previously I've talked about RRAM, and how non-volatile memory is going to come in and cause lots disruption in computing.  The non-volatile part still looks to be happening but it appears I might be wrong about it being RRAM that does it, though, since now samples of the first standard memory sticks of non-volatile RAM are actually being sent out (PDF), and it's not RRAM like I expected. Rather, its MRAM or magnetic RAM.  That stuff has actually been around for a while, I used some back in '08 when I needed a bit of non-volatile memory I could write to very fast but didn't need a large amount of storage.  That last was the reason it wasn't in wide use, though.  MRAM was fast, and low power, and many other wonderful things.  But each individual MRAM cell was also very big, which meant that you couldn't fit very many of them on a chip.  And that meant that on a bit-by-bit basis it was very expensive.  But recently people have figured out a way to m...

There are lots of ideas and concepts from psychology that I wish more people knew about.  I was reading the first post  of a new blog recently, and I was struck by a thought.  The post talked about two propositions that were both pretty reasonable, but were seldom both believed by the same person because they had different implications for policy.  Someone only believing one or the other could go about their lives believing that their actions were perfect and had no downsides, but believing both meant that you would have to live with having made a trade off, whatever you did.  It occurred to me that this was a perfect example of what a psychologist would call  Cognitive Dissonance  and that since situations like this were so common that the human bias towards trying to resolve cognitive dissonance by changing one's beliefs was actually more problematic than I'd thought. So what is...

Its always seemed to me that complexity is one of the greatest impediments to good government.  This might just be my bias as someone who's studied computer science but not law, but it seems that the two have a lot in common in that you're writing down instructions to be followed in a variety of situations, and the more rules you create the less well you'll be able to predict the consequences of any change, since there are so many possible interactions.  That's a very general critique, though, and thankfully the fact that so many of the pages of law that Congress generates each year are special cases or exemptions means that any two pieces have less chance of interacting than you might suspect at first glance. But I'm not writing this post to talk about complexity and lawmaking in general, I'm here to talk about complexity and democracy, and the special challenges you get in a democratic system when the system of laws becomes more complex. On one hand you ha...

This is almost a followup to the earlier post on inflation , but at times I'll be neglecting some of the complications I mentioned earlier.  If I were a paid teacher I'd feel embarrassed about my pedagogy here, but as I'm just a blogger I'll shrug and move on. When you read in the news that the price of, say, hats has gone up recently do you have any reason to think that there were more or less hats sold recently?  You might think about an individual store raising its prices, resulting in less sales, but things like that seldom happen with a general prices level.  Generally, there are going to be two possible explanations.  It might be that hats suddenly became much more fashionable, and everyone wanted one.  Since people are willing to pay more for hats, shop owners will charge more - and the higher hat prices will cause people to produce more hats too (demand has risen).  Or it might be that a horrible felt plague has...

The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen  is a book by Kwame Anthony Appiah that I read not-so-very-recently, and were it not for a certain laziness ought to have written about immediately.  The author goes over several moral revolutions that have happened in history, times where behaviors that were previously been socially acceptable or even de rigueur  suddenly became socially unacceptable.  The specific examples in the book were dueling and slavery in the UK, and foot binding in China. The thing I found most interesting was that convincing people that certain behaviors was wrong was apparently not very effective at getting people to stop them.  Even when everybody agreed that dueling was in some sense wrong and not something that civilized people ought to engage in, and even after it had become illegal, people were still afraid of other's considering them cowards if they didn't duel.  Likewise with foot-binding, people might have tho...

Well OK, saying that such and such a thing is really treading on unsteady epistemic grounds.  What does it even mean for a number to exist or not exist anyways?  One position that you can take is that things that can be directly measured, like a person's height, exist; but that things that can't be measured, like their height in inches plus their age, aren't things that really exist.  And though people tend to treat and talk about inflation as one of the former, it really matches the later category much more closely. The indomitable Google lists inflation as being "3: A general increase in prices and fall in the purchasing value of money".  That's all well and good, but there's never any general level of prices that you can directly observer.   You always have to combine the increases and decreases in various prices with some system to produce something you can call a general level, and the process is actually very straightforward. First, there i...

Go to the  Wikipedia page on the bloodiest wars in history and look at it for a bit.  Everybody would expect WWII to be on there at the top.  Many people might not realize how many really bloody civil wars China has had, but it stands to reason that with the huge number of people who live there that this might be a significant number.  Most people also wouldn't be surprised that there were bloody conflicts centuries past which they haven't heard of in general.  But look down to conflict #14.  One of the bloodiest wars in human history ended less than a decade ago, and you probably didn't even know that it was happening. I certainly didn't appreciate it as it was happening.  I read the newspaper and knew that there was a war in the Congo, but I didn't have any sense of the scope of it, nor did I really know what the issues involved were.  Finding that list on Wikipedia, though, helped me to realize that I had overlooked ...

I recently saw an article  in Slate which was fine as far as it went, but which prompted me to deliver a bit of a rant at Hacker News about how we talk about income inequality in America, which I've cleaned up a bit and am also posting here. The first thing that annoys me about how most people talk about inequality in America is that people often just use one metric, and ignore all the others.  You could talk about: Total Compensation - including untaxed things like health insurance as well as paychecks and capital gains. Taxed income - which the SSA  confusingly refers to as "Total Compensation", which is income plus capital gains and bonuses but not things you don't pay taxes on. Pure income - your paycheck. Wealth -  how much you have in your bank account plus how much your house is worth. Private consumption - how much you spend each year on stuff for yourself, rent and food and fun things. Total consumption - private consumption plus whatever goods an...

The snow has melted, the Republican candidates are busy beating each other bloody, and with the looming presidential election my thoughts turn to daydreams about my ideal candidate.  This is mostly a blue sky exercise here, some of my beliefs are well outside the mainstream and I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for my favorite policies to be implemented.  But maybe I can do something to help persuade people that these are issues that they ought to care about, like by writing blog posts say. The most important policy issue I see in the US right now where thing aren't currently going the way I'd like is immigration.  It seems to me that we ought to be allowing much more immigration into this country, that this would give some net benefits to the US, and that it would be a huge boon for those allowed to immigrate. At one point the US let many more immigrants in than it does today.  But panic about foreign anarchists  and concern that too many immigrants we...

Something I saw this last week that prompted me to think about dark silicon again was a project Ubuntu is working on, where you have a phone that is mostly a normal Android phone, but when you plug it into a computer screen and keyboard it can act as a full desktop operating system.  Since a modern smartphone is much more powerful than the desktops of ages past, and since we tend to do more and more things on far away servers, this seems like it might be a model for the future of computing.  You computer fits in your pocket and you use it as a phone most of the time, but then you plug it into some sort of dock and it becomes your desktop. But it strikes me that in a future like that you're likely to have a bunch of computational resources sitting there in your phone that only light up when the phone has access to a hefty power source.  Heat dissipation out of the phone will still be a hard limitation since there's no way you can fit a fan in a phone form factor, but th...

Pushing people off of bridges - but only to save the lives of others, of course - has long been one of the staples of debate in moral philosophy.  The original formulation of the famous Trolly Problem  is more or less "Suppose you see an out of control trolley about to run over 5 people.  Is it moral to push a fat person under the wheels if it means that only he will die instead of the 5 others."  This started out as a debate among philosophers, then became a tool for cognitive scientists to use by asking people about this topic in surveys, but often with some variation.  What if the one person is your mother?  What if you throw a switch instead of having to push the person yourself? Researchers have found out many fascinating things about how people respond to moral problems, or at least say they would respond, using this problem.  I'll plug Thinking Fast and Slow here as an excellent overview of modern cognition research in...

Recent events surrounding the Susan Komen breast cancer charity and Planned Parenthood has gotten me thinking about the idea that all publicity is good publicity. It seems to me that there are times when bad publicity can actually be bad and others where it cannot, and that this mostly has to do with the nature of the recipient rather than anything about the details of the scandal. As you might expect, Wikipedia has a long list of instances where scandal has brought people great success, and it seems that these cases have a lot in common. If your primary opponents are obscurity and apathy then the rush of attention a scandal brings can be of huge value. Even if the majority of the people who hear about you are so offended that they don't want to have anything to do with you, some wont' be and through them you'll gain from your new found notoriety. This is why some early 20th century artists explicitly tried to attract the ire of morality crusaders. The crusaders were...

For many years, the major limitations of CPU design have been about power. Back in the day, this wasn't much of a problem. Every year transistors got smaller, which meant that you needed less current to flip them from one state to another, which meant that you could flip them more frequently without doing any more (thermodynamic) work than you had done with the last generation of chips. But then something changed. Leakage current reared its ugly head. As transistors became smaller they also became less substantial. Whereas once the trickle of current that would leak through a transistor when it was off would be tiny compared to the stream it would take to shift it from off to on, as transistors became smaller they became more and more permeable. And to make it even worse, shrinking transistors meant that even if overall power usage remained the same, that power was concentrated in a smaller and smaller area. Something had to give, and it did. After the ill-fated Pentium IV...