Perverse incentives

Bruce Schneier has written an article on perverse security incentives. The concept of a perverse incentive comes from economics, where it refers to an incentive that, deliberately or accidentally, rewards inefficient or bad behaviour.

Such "perversely" inefficient behaviour isn't necessarily bad. It's an economic term focusing on a single aspect of the human condition: a rather narrow view of economic efficiency. Spending money on taking Granny to the doctor instead of selling her to the glue factory would, according to some definitions, count as inefficient, and therefore love, loyalty, affection and kindness might be counted as "perverse incentives". This isn't a bad thing -- we'd all be a lot happier if we admitted that we're all pervs in one way or another, and besides it's not the job of economists to make value judgements. Their job is to tell us how efficiently we're spending, or making, money, and it's our job to make the value judgements that, all things considered, Gran's got a few more years left in the old bird, and besides one day we'll be that old too.

So remember that while perverse incentives are often harmful as well as inefficient, this isn't necessarily the case. Schneier discusses the case of a store who fired an employee for stopping a shop-lifter escaping with hundreds of dollars of stolen food. Sounds ridiculously stupid, yes? But not if you look at the big picture: a few hundred dollars worth of food is nothing compared to the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars the store could be liable for if the staff member tackled and injured an innocent customer, or if the thief pulled out a weapon and killed somebody. As Schneier explains (and so many of the commenters on the blog fail to grasp), "You Will Not Attack Shop-Lifters" is a security measure: it protects the store against worse consequences than a backpack full of groceries being stolen.

For the same reason, banks typically have a strict No Heroics rule. It's not worth the life of a teller to save the insurance company from suffering a slightly lower profit in one quarter. This sort of economic reasoning comes hard to most people. It comes hard to me -- even knowing all the reasons why it would be stupid to put yourself in danger for somebody else's profit, the very thought that thieves are getting something for nothing offends every fibre of my being[1]. As a species, we have a deep hatred of cheaters who break the social contract (unless it is Us breaking the contract against Them -- we're a moral species, but also a hypocritical species).



[1] As a 19 year old, when I was young and invincible, one of my fellow uni students and I almost walked into a bank robbery in progress at a bank on Melbourne University campus. We saw these two masked gunmen, and came *this close* to deciding to tackle them when they came out of the bank. Fortunately, we decided to walk around the building once first, and if the robbers were still there, then we would tackle them. They weren't. Back

Tiger and piglets

This mother tiger is raising piglets:


The photo is genuine, and despite gags about it ending in tears when momma gets a little peckish, the tiger herself was raised by a pig and is very unlikely to turn on "her" babies. It's a good example of animal psychology: the tiger isn't likely to be fooled by the tiger skins on the piglets, especially once they skins have been washed a few times and lose any residual tiger scent, but it shows that some animals learn what to consider prey and what not to.

Although the above situation was artificial in the sense that human beings manipulated the tiger to raise the piglets, such situations sometime occur in the wild. True stories (and some not-so-true) of human children being raised by wolves are common. Less common but still well-documented include cases of predators raising babies of their usual prey species, for example the well-documented case of a lioness in Kenya that tried to raise no fewer than three baby antelopes.

Five years old forever

Sara Robinson writing on Orcinus has an interesting take on why fundamentalist conservatives have such a warped relationship with masculinity.

Over the years, my online ex-fundie community has spent a lot of time puzzling over the ways in which fundamentalism arrests the moral, social, emotional, intellectual, and sexual development of anyone who embraces it. (And I could argue that, inasmuch as fundamentalism is authoritarian religion, this observation may well hold true for political and social authoritarians as well.) Specifically, we've come to a consensus that the belief system traps people somewhere around the age of five or six -- and keeps them there for as long as they continue to believe.

[...] Authoritarian followers crave someone who will keep things ordered and safe, someone who will provide and protect and set firm rules and boundaries; someone all-powerful and all-knowing who can teach you right from wrong and keep the harsh parts of the world at bay. Someone, in short, who looks like Daddy looked when you were about five years old.

[Right-Wing Authoritarians] RWAs would far rather curl up in Daddy's lap -- even if it means abandoning reason and taking the occasional spanking -- than try to deal with the world by themselves, on adult terms. This is also why RWA family and community relationships (as Lakoff has explained) are necessarily hierarchical. These people still need parents around, because they don't feel emotionally safe without the presence of a strong authority figure. Egalitarian relationships terrify them, because there's nobody in charge to make the rules and set the boundaries that keep people from hurting each other.

For all their loud talk about responsibility and freedom, these RWAs are terrified of taking responsibility, of being free. That's why they're always looking for somebody else -- the government, Daddy, "Community Values", God -- to tell them how to behave: because they know that, left to their own devices, they'll get it wrong wrong wrong.

Hey, we're all human. We all make mistakes and get things wrong. Adults -- regardless of mere age in years -- learn from their mistakes. Some mistakes are so serious that you can't learn from them, you can only atone for them. And some mistakes are too serious to even atone for them. But adults try, they take responsibility. RWAs avoid responsibility, blame others, deny that they did anything wrong. It's hard enough to get a 61-year-old boy-president to admit that "mistakes were made", let alone to admit who make them.

Being terrified of freedom, the freedom to make mistakes, RWAs are constantly looking for a Real Man to protect them -- except they can't tell the sizzle from the sausage. Talking the talk is more important than walking the walk. Republicans will tell anyone who listens how much they "support the troops", and admire the brave men and women of the armed forces who commit war crimes sacrifice themselves for their country -- and then these same chickenhawks dump on actual warriors like John Kerry and triple-amputee Max Cleland, preferring instead to give their support to a faux-warrior who used his Daddy's connections to get a cushy job in the National Guard, and when even that was too much bother, he simply went AWOL during wartime.

( [...] Remember the fuss over Jet Pilot Action Figure Bush's "package"? Damn fool didn't loosen his straps before getting out of the jet. Nobody else on the deck had his crotch trussed up like a Christmas goose; and to them, he looked like a rookie idiot. But Chris Matthews practically had an orgasm on-air while watching him prance and strut.) The fact that so many mainstream and conservative media guys are suckered by this posturing shows that they don't really have a clue about what a Real Man looks like -- though, somewhere deep down inside, they're pretty sure they don't qualify. That's why they're so easily wowed by men who can put on the costume and make it look good.

Why religion?

Why religion?

Good question, and one that I don't have a good answer for. I suspect that there is no single answer, that the varies from culture to culture, from religion to religion, and naturally for individual to individual.

One problem that we have in discussing religion is that our mental model is overwhelmingly based on the one (and rarely two) religions we're familiar with: in the West, Christianity or Judaism. But while popular, the great monotheistic religion of the desert (judeo-christian-islam) is only one religion out of many.

At Dangerous Intersection, Erich Vieth warns against accepting uncritically simple explanations for religion that are based on stereotypes or outright falsehoods. For example:

The claim: Religion allays anxiety
Why it’s not true: It generates as much anxiety as it allays: vengeful ghosts, nasty spirits and aggressive gods are as common as protective deities.

False awakenings

I'm interested in the various tricks our brain plays on us while we sleep. Actually, "tricks" is not the best description -- I think a better description for such things as sleep paralysis and night terrors would be "bugs", as in software bugs.

I've never experienced either of those, but I have -- once -- experienced false awakening. I awoke in my bed early one morning. Although my bedroom seemed completely normal, exactly the way it should, there was something wrong: a subtle, uncanny, terrifying sense of wrongness. Nothing that I could see, or hear, but I knew, I just knew with every fibre of my being, that there was something dreadfully wrong and terrifying. The feeling grew and grew until I felt that my heart would explode, and then I woke up, in my bed again.

Except, there was something wrong, and again I was flooded by an overwhelming sense of dread -- until I woke again, in my bed.

This happened no less than six times, and each time I was lucid enough to realise that the previous time must have been a dream, but never enough to realise I was still dreaming. Only after I woke for the sixth time did I actually wake and realise the entire experience was a dream.


The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli, 1781. See also here and here.

Insecure and fearful

A friend recently posted a small gift from the United States of America to Mrs Impala. It arrived wrapped in (among other things) a plastic bag from a fabric store called HANCOCKfabrics.

Plastered on the bag in large letters, at least as big as their various advertising, is:

God Bless America!

A tad insecure, don't you think? I mean, honestly, if there is a God, do you really think he'll be up in Heaven thinking "I was going to visit rains of frogs and rivers of blood on the Americans because of their invasion of Iraq, but now that I've seen that plastic bag, I'll give them another thousand years of world power instead"?

Are (were) all superpowers as fearful and insecure as the Americans? I suppose they probably were. All that flag waving and "the sun will never set on England" and parades in Red Square and triumphs and arches, I think it's all just a way for people to deny the fact that This Too Shall Pass. I knew governments and kings played this silly game, but this really brought it home to me that the fear goes all the way down.

Dominance rituals, the President and the Terrorist

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz has published a review of "Ariel Sharon: An Intimate Portrait" by Israeli journalist Uri Dan. Dan was the former adviser, close confidant and friend of the late Israeli Prime Minister Arial Sharon.

In the book, Uri Dan discusses a meeting between Sharon and US President Bush, and Bush's fantasy for what he would do to Osama bin Laden if he every got his hands on him. Because I'm trying to keep this blog nannyware-safe, I'll just point you here for the description of what Bush would do if he caught bin Laden. But here's a couple of hints:

The President used to be a frat boy.

There's some serious analysis as well, not just cheap gags. Dominance and sexuality are intimately linked in our species.

(An interesting aside: in the book, Dan also hints obliquely that Palestinian President Yassar Arafat may not have died of natural causes, and that Sharon may have been involved.)

Being secure and feeling secure

Bruce Schneier has written an excellent essay on why we human beings so often get security wrong: we worry about the wrong thing, protect against minor risks while ignoring major threats, and otherwise have our feelings of security diverge radically from our actual security.

(See also Schneier's blog entry about it.)

Panic

Bruce Tognazzini, known for writing about computer user interfaces, also writes about non-computer interfaces and man-machine interaction. He wrote an essay about how the design of John Denver's light plane killed him. Here he writes about panic and how it interacts with technology like scuba gear, airplanes, and computer mice.

Dorothy Lawrence

Living in a relatively civilized society in 2006, it is easy to forget how much social change has occurred in recent times. It was a little less than a century ago, in 1914, that 19 year old Dorothy Lawrence disguised herself as a man in order to join the British Army and act as a war reporter.

Her secret life lasted only ten days, before she gave herself up. But it isn't her experiences during the war that I refer to, but her tragic end. For in 1925, Dorothy Lawrence claimed she had been raped by her church guardian and was institutionalised as insane. She remained in the institution for the rest of her life, dying in 1964.

Details are sketchy, and I suppose one must allow the possibility that she really was insane, and that she hadn't been raped at all. That would be the comforting interpretation: a poor troubled lass, imagining sexual assaults, and being locked up for her own protection.

But how much more likely is it that, in 1925, the only "evidence" that she was insane was that she, a mere 30 year old woman, accused her church guardian of rape? Such a crime would have been unthinkable, and therefore only a mad woman could have thought it.

It may be that woman who are raped are treated badly by our justice system, but at least we've come this far: we no longer assume that an accusation that dear old Father Bill or Reverend Smith must, by definition, be a sign of insanity.

Conscientious Rejector

American army officer First Lieutenant Ehren Watada is the first American commissioned officer to publically refuse deployment to Iraq. Last June, the 28-year-old Hawaiian native announced his refusal to deploy on the grounds that the invasion and occupation of Iraq is illegal.

He now faces a court martial on one count of "missing troop movement" and four counts of "conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman", and could be sentenced to up to six years jail. He was interviewed by Kevin Sites:

SITES: You know on that note, Lieutenant, let me read you something from a speech that you gave in August to the Veterans for Peace. You had said at one point, "Many have said this about the World Trade Towers: never again. I agree, never again will we allow those who threaten our way of life to reign free. Be they terrorists or elected officials. The time to fight back is now, the time to stand up and be counted is today." Who were you speaking about when you said that?

WATADA: I was speaking about everybody. The American people. That we all have that duty, that obligation, that responsibility to do something when we see our government perpetrating a crime upon the world, or even upon us. And I think that the American people have lost that, that sense of duty. There is no self-interest in this war for the vast majority of the American people. And because of that the American soldiers have suffered.

There really is a detachment from this war, and many of the American people, because there is no draft, or for whatever reason, because taxes haven't been raised, they don't have anything personally to lose or gain with this war, and so they take little interest.

[snip]

[WATADA:] You know I think that [Congressman] John Murtha came out a few months ago in an interview and he was asked if, with all his experience, in Korea, and Vietnam, volunteering for those wars -- he was asked if he would join the military today. And he said absolutely not. And I think that with the knowledge that I have now, I agree. I would not join the military because I would be forced into a position where I would be ordered to do something that is wrong. It is illegal and immoral. And I would be put into a situation as a soldier to be abused and misused by those in power.

STIES: In your speech in front of the Veterans for Peace you said "the oath we take as soldiers swears allegiance not to one man but to a document of principles and laws designed to protect the people." Can you expand upon that a little bit — what did you mean when you said that?

WATADA: The constitution was established, and our laws are established, to protect human rights, to protect equal rights and constitutional civil liberties. And I think we have people in power who say that those laws, or those principles, do not apply to them — that they are above the law and can do whatever it takes to manipulate or create laws that enable them to do whatever they please. And that is a danger in our country, and I think the war in Iraq is just one symptom of this agenda. And I think as soldiers, as American people, we need to recognize this, and we need to put a stop to it before it's too late.

Naturally the comments to the article are running red-hot, with many, many people accusing Lieutenant Watada of being a traitor and deserter. The first comment made, from "glassart@pacbell.net", is typical of many of those opposed to Watada's actions:

I feel that a person that has voluntarilly [sic] joined the military and now refuses to go where assigned, during a military conflict is basically a traitor/deserter in the face of the enemy and should be treated as such. I had voluntarilly [sic] joined the military (US Air Force) during the Viet Nam conflict, so I have great feelings toward this, I did not believe what was going on at that time, but I did not shirk my duty to my country and the ideas of the constitution and Declaration of Independance [sic]. That is what I was fighting for. So as far as I am concerned this person is a deserter in the face of the enemy.

What a lovely example of contradictions! "Glassart" claims to have opposed the Vietnam war at the time, but to have volunteered regardless. Perhaps he believed that the Constitution and Declaration of Independence requires American citizens to stop thinking for themselves, shut down their higher faculties, and be suckers for the power-hungry rulers of the nation.

As a former military person (officer? pilot? desk jockey? the guy who sweeps the aircraft hanger floor? he doesn't say) he surely must know that a soldier in Washington can't possibly be deserting "in the face of the enemy" when that enemy is thousands, or even tens of thousands, of miles away. He uses that term twice, so it is important to him, but he doesn't know what it means. He calls the Vietnam War a "conflict", which is another sign of a chickenhawk: cheer the war on, but refuse to call it what it is. I'm guessing he wasn't a pilot, but one of the many air force personnel who never came within cooee of combat.

Then there is post number four, from "tilden44mobley", a twenty-year veteran of obeying orders like a good storm-trooper, a guy who was in Iraq in 1991 and says he knows weapons of mass "distruction" are still in Iraq. I can imagine the tens of thousands of American troops in Iraq right now turning on him and saying Are you calling us liars? Are you saying we can't do our jobs?

But this is the most significant comment of all:

I have lost many friends to the defense of our freedom. He discraces thier memory evertime he puts on the uniform. [sic]

In other words, blame the messenger. Don't blame the liars and con-artists who sent his friends off to die for nothing. Don't hold the crooks and cheats responsible -- instead, blame those who discover that you've been cheated.

It has been said that there is a sucker born every minute, and this common trait of shooting the messenger is an enormous factor in that. The powerful know, in fact they rely on the fact, that the people they lie to and cheat and actively harm are often their strongest defenders. Naturally there are limits to how far you can go before even the dimmest Joe Redneck loses faith, but those limits are pretty high. If there was one trait of Homo sap that has lead to misery and strife, it is the habit of actively supporting the manipulators and cheats, even after they've been revealed for what they are.

Lucky socks

Thought for the day:

I find it appalling and terrifying that a species capable of creating and deploying weapons of mass destruction panics because it can't find its lucky socks on a Thursday morning. -- Mrs. Impala

The power of ridicule

Blogger Brian Flemming quotes a reader discussing the power of ridicule to make serious social changes:

I think we should not underestimate the power of embarrassment. The book Freakonomics briefly discusses the way the Ku Klux Klan lost its subscribers, and the example is instructive. A man named Stetson Kennedy, almost single-handedly it seems, eroded the prestige of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s by joining them and then leaking all of their secret passwords and goofy lingo to the people who were writing "The Adventures of Superman" radio show. Week after week, there were episodes of Superman fighting the Klan, and the real Klan's mumbo jumbo was put out all over the airwaves for people to laugh at. Kids were playing Superman vs. the Klan on their front lawns. The Klan was humiliated by this, and was made to look foolish; and we went from a world in which the Klan was a legitimate organization with tens of millions of members – many of whom were senators, and even one president – to a world in which there are now something like 5,000 Klansmen. It's basically a defunct organization.

Autism and psychopathy

Cory Doctorow from BoingBoing discusses autism and psychopathy, and intriging research that suggests that neither of these are mental disorders as such.

Flat daddy

The US military has started giving the families of servicemen life-size cardboard cutouts of the troops, called "Flat Daddy" and "Flat Mommy". This is, apparently, at the request of the troops' families.

From the Boston Globe:

[Kay] Judkins said the cutout has been a comfort since her husband was deployed in January.

"He goes everywhere with me. Every day he comes to work with me," said Judkins, who works in a dentist's office. "I just bought a new table from the Amish community, and he sits at the head of the table. Yes, he does."

You can just see the denial in her eyes as she says that. "Yes, he does." Judkins even takes the cutout to confession. I wonder what she thinks a cardboard cutout has to confess.

This, surely, is the behaviour of a woman who is already thinking of her husband as dead even while he is still alive. If she's this neurotic while he's merely away, how is she going to act if he actually does die?

Check out this picture of "Flat Daddy" Lt. Col. Randall Holbrook and his children, and tell me that these kids aren't disturbed by the whole thing. Keep in mind that this was surely the best, most flattering photo the photographer could take.

More here and commentary from BoingBoing here.

Bag Lady syndrome on the rise

MSN Money discusses "Bag Lady syndrome", the (semi-)irrational fear felt especially by women that they could easily end up penniless and on the streets. And not just working and middle class women: according to the article, even wealthy and successful women like Lily Tomlin, Gloria Steinem, Shirley MacLaine and Katie Couric have admitted to this fear.

Homelessness is not, of course, unique to the USA, but for a developed nation, America suffers greatly from an epidemic of homelessness. The lack of government or social safety nets makes financial security a matter of "not-so-easy come, easy go", and the US has Third-World levels of economic inequality and poverty: a tiny percentage of mega-rich sitting at the top of a pyramid of many insecure and nervous middle-class and an even bigger base of working class people who are one pay cheque away from the streets.

I think that it is very telling that this anxiety is becoming more comment at the moment. Consumer debt, already at dangerous levels in the USA, is rising, there is great uncertainty in the housing market, banks are offering insane loans, and the political Right is crying The Sky is Falling over Social Security. The increasing levels of financial insecurity and anxiety are surely a factor in the American move towards religious fundamentalism.

(Link thanks to Boing Boing.)

All the options

William Edmundson, writing for the Leiter Report, discusses the "Madman strategy" of Richard Nixon, and how it relates to the current ugliness in the Middle East, where Republican shrills for the neo-cons clamour for war.

Edmundson quotes the NY Times, which reported a US official complaining about the intelligence community's insistence that there is no evidence Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons:

"When they say there is 'no evidence,' you have to ask them what they mean, what is the meaning of the term 'evidence'?"

And this from the same political party which criticised President Clinton for his duplicity about "sexual relations", and campaigns on Moral Values. (Yeah -- evil, wicked morals. But still morals.) Which is worse, lying about a bit of hanky-panky between consenting adults, or starting an unnecessary war and killing thousands?

Obviously it is the hanky-panky.

Edmundson continues:

In the same story, Newt Gingrich is reported to explain what "evidence" means:

"When the intelligence community says Iran is 5 to 10 years away from a nuclear weapon, I ask: 'If North Korea were to ship them a nuke tomorrow, how close would they be then?'"

And if peaches were tomatoes, then peach jam would taste just like napoli sauce.

Of course, if Gingrich really believed that, he would have to consider what if North Korea (or Pakistan, or China, or Russia) has shipped Iran hundreds of nukes, and they're planted all over the USA right now. Obviously the answer is, the US has no choice but to surrender unconditionally to Iran.

Of course, if Iran made such a claim, you can bet that Gingrich, like the US official, will suddenly remember just what evidence means, and start declaring that there is no evidence that Iran has nukes.

It shows you just what we've come to, when we find ourselves hoping against hope that the US president is only pretending to have the morals of a stoat.

Moral vacancy

In September 2004, E.L. Doctorow wrote a powerful essay about the moral vaccuum in the heart of President Bush the Younger. Since then, events have shown that Doctorow was right on the money.

I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our 21-year-olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-Day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.

But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the weapons of mass destruction he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man.

He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.

But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the 1,000 dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be.

They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life . . . they come to his desk as a political liability, which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq.

Powerful stuff.

Thanks to the Leiter Report.

What's bad is good

Developing Intelligence reviews Steven Johnson's book, "Everything Bad Is Good For You".

"Everything Bad" makes the provocative and controversial claim that the changes to popular culture over the last fifty years which have been decried by many as signs of the demise of society and the collapse of civilization (think music videos and sound-bites) are reponsible for the drastic increases in IQ seen over the last century.

The significant upward shifts in IQ over the last fifty or sixty years have never been explained satisfactorily. Johnson's book suggests that the every-increasing speed of pop culture forces us all, but especially children, to engage in mental calisthenics, so to speak.

No untermenschen here

Juan Cole discusses degrees of human-ness:

Israeli officials have already showed us how Arabs can be reclassified away from a full "human" category that they clearly, in the view of the Kadima government, do not deserve.

For instance, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Dan Gillerman angrily denounced Kofi Annan for neglecting this key fact. The Guardian reports, 'Mr Gillerman said "something very important was missing" from Mr Annan's speech: any mention of terrorism. Hizbullah were "ruthless indiscriminate animals", he told reporters.'
[...]
Israeli Deputy Consul General for San Francisco, Omer Caspi, said of the Lebanese and Palestinian publics concerning Hamas and Hizbullah members, "We say to them please remove this cancer off your body and soul before it is too late."

Caspi did not specify whether members of Hamas are leukemia and those of Hizbullah melanoma, or the reverse.

I admire Cole's good taste in failing to mention der Untermensch. I, on the other hand, have no such restraint. With a good quarter of my recent family tree dying in the Hitler's concentration camps, I know what it is like to have a powerful enemy intent on treating you as a disease. I'd just like to reach out the hand of friendship to the Untermenschen of Lebanon and wish them peace and prosperity, and remind Israel that you reap what you sow.