Mechanics and Mystics, Less Seriously

Everything I Know I Learned From Sesame Street (apparently). Check out this video of a Mechanic and a Mystic interpreting a large blue circle. I'll let you guess which one is which.

For the Mechanic who loves working in the kitchen, here's a cutting board specially tuned to the mechanic's mindset.

Life-Saving Immorality?

Your taxpayer dollars at work.

Brad DeLong thinks that taxing people in order to prevent an asteroid from destroying the human race is entirely appropriate and moral. He quotes Bob Murphy, on the other hand, as disagreeing:

[T]here is a general moral prohibition against violating another person's rights.... Volokh's... point should be obvious: Just because an asteroid threatens to destroy all human life, that alone is not sufficient to justify violating people's rights. [...] The reason DeLong finds Volokh's views "insane" is that Volokh has elevated his precious political principles to such a height that they trump the survival of the human race. What an ideologue!

DeLong summarily rejects this sort of thinking, summarizing his view as follows:

[...] the sabbath was made for humanity; humanity was not made for the sabbath.

Commentor Daniel Kuehn has a lot to say in response to this position, and particularly to the logic of the position:

If you start where they do - axiomatically defining what a "right" is and defining "immorality" as being the violation of that right - then both the Volokh and Murphy version of the argument follows naturally.

The problem is not the logic itself - that logic is simple enough. The problem is their decision to apply that logic to this circumstance. Deductive logic is a tool - we have long since passed the point where we can claim that it deserves any deeper epistemological priority. [...]  Logic is not a tool for them, as most careful thinkers know it should be. For them it is a path, not to truth contingent on assumptions [I would prefer to refer to this as consistent reasoning or logical validity - N], but to some deeper absolute truth. [...] So to expand on your concluding thought, deductive logic is a tool for humanity, and not the other way around.

Tad Brennan points out that, far from being a primarily political debate, the conflict here is between purely deontological ethics and purely consequentialist ethics, and that the latter lends itself to some problems, as well:

If you eschew lexically-ordered side-constraints, then you have a very pure form of consequentialism. And that's not a bad thing! Some of my best friends espouse pure consequentialism! 

But pure consequentialism can generate some pretty repellent hypotheticals of its own (catalogued by Bernard Williams and others: false conviction of the innocent; harvesting organs from the unwilling; torture of children; etc. etc.).

When people recoil from the consequences of pure consequentialism and consider adopting categorical prohibitions on, e.g., the torture of children, this does not seem to me ipso facto insane.

Finding the right balance of ethical views for the Christian is never as simple and easy as it seems, which is why Christian maturity is a big deal. But this is a circumstance when, again, I don't think Christianity came come down on the side of moral libertarianism.

PS - For those looking for a quick summary of deontology vs. consequentialism in terms we can all understand, may I suggest Mark White, aka The Comics Professor, on the morality of Captain America, Iron Man, and Spiderman!

Looks Like

Just a quick bit that I'd never really noticed before. For those of you of a Reformed and Presbyterian background, hopefully this will make you laugh.

Have you ever noticed that Tedd and Paul Tripp (pictured below)

Look an awful lot like Mario and Luigi?

 Spooky.

Skepticism about Scepticism

Would that be Meta-Scepticism? Sckepticism? Bueller?

In any case, this post is a response to a piece by the Venerable Gentleman in which he describes his attitude toward modern science, and nutritional science in particular.  Aside from a link to a story in the Atlantic, the post essentially consists of a rationale and a rejection. The rejection indicates that the Venerable Gentleman (VG hereafter) is unconvinced of the unhealthfulness of drinking, smoking, highly processed food products, or saturated fats of any sort; it also includes a passing stab at Pasteur's germ theory.

The rationale is a bit more forceful:

The physical sciences are indeed brilliant and beautiful in harness, yoked to goals above themselves. But when these are abandoned in the name of Progress, we arrive at the same result as that of the coachman who to speed his horses onward cut their traces: the situation is certainly a vast improvement from their perspective, but the passengers had rather hoped to arrive at Brighton before tea-time.

The argument is that the sciences must be reigned by the Queen of Sciences, Theology.  Unless it is thus bound, it's conclusions are of little value or interest to VG.

But frankly, I'm not convinced.  I don't for a moment believe VG consumes Velveeta because the science that tells him it's unsafe has galloped in unbridled fashion from its theological roots. Why not? Because the only reason we've come to believe Velveeta is food at all is that science told us so.

It was modern physical science, which VG argues has little value in its modernist form, which invented highly processed foods and trans-fats. It was modern physical science which convinced our parents and grandparents' generations that these new inventions were healthy and good, contributions to human advancement thanks to the scientific age. And it is modern physical science which continues to argue that the sources of culinary and olfactory satisfaction for hundreds of generations prior to this scientific era are now dirty, dangerous, and outdated; we should turn to the modern Prometheus's of dietary engineering to provide us new, more potent, more sterile, and more safe forms of food and drink.

No, if I may offer a not-too-seriously-suggested narrative of my own, VG distrusts claims against processed food because his mother gave it to him when he was a wee lad, and his mother wouldn't give him something unsafe. He distrusts claims against the vittles which he loves because he loves them, not because he believes them more moral in character. But these claims are largely made by those outside the mainstream of physical science, those who see science as serving Mammon (meaning corporate profits) as master, a critique far more in line with what VG offers than with his opponents.

Perhaps he has reason to distrust mainstream science, too. After all, his cigar-chomping lush of a grandfather (whose character and very existence I have totally fabricated here) lived to the age of 95 before dying in a sword fight with a pirate, so the causal effect cannot be all that strong, can it? (unless we consider drinking and smoking as contributing factors to encounters with pirates, which come to think of it...)  In any case, though, while VG is free to follow or ignore such advice as he pleases, I must insist that he not try to hide his preference behind the curtain of Theology. I'm on to you, wizard.

Social Science, Mad Science?

I love this recent news story. A respected psychologist at Brown University has shown that simple stimulus-response experiments with known results still produce the expected response (although with a weaker correlation) even if the stimulus happens after the fact. That's right, folks, precognition!

In one experiment, students were shown a list of words and then asked to recall words from it, after which they were told to type words that were randomly selected from the same list. Spookily, the students were better at recalling words that they would later type.

In another study, Bem adapted research on "priming" – the effect of a subliminally presented word on a person's response to an image. For instance, if someone is momentarily flashed the word "ugly", it will take them longer to decide that a picture of a kitten is pleasant than if "beautiful" had been flashed. Running the experiment back-to-front, Bem found that the priming effect seemed to work backwards in time as well as forwards.

The article says the effect was "small but statistically significant," meaning it's pretty unlikely that the relationship is due to happenstance.  That's not scientific proof of precognition, by any stretch, but it does mean the results are worth taking a look at, and others are.

A skeptical approach to the paper that I found pretty interesting can be found here.  I think the take-home point is great:

The real lesson? This is the level of methodological scrutiny every paper should receive, and not just the ones you think are crazy:[...]

But beyond that, I think this article also sums up one of the main reactions to the paper:

I don't believe a word of it because a) let's face it, it's about precognition [...]

Some would say that it is appropriate for scientists to be particularly skeptical about anything supporting stuff we "know is wrong" like paranormal activity. If we think of science as a Bayesian process (which I think we should, but that's a post for another time), then we are essentially updating our beliefs about different explanations of the world as new data arrives.  Our beliefs don't, and shouldn't, shift to whatever the latest results say, because we have a lot of prior knowledge that matters for how we form our beliefs.

That said, though, a Bayesian view of science also implies that total certainty doesn't exist, and that no matter how wacky or far-fetched a theory may seem, we never rule it out completely. We might want to prioritize and spend as little time as possible exploring things that contradicts our prior expectations, but the Dana Skully Scully refrain "It's scientifically impossible!" isn't an acceptable argument in a scientific setting. The sciences don't get to be so dogmatic.

PS - Happy Thanksgiving, folks!

Accountability Moral and Economic

The real guilty party.

Reader kenestral passed along this article, which highlights the occasional tension between moral and economic obligations. It seems in Obion County, Tennessee, if you don't want the local fire department to be on call, you don't have to pay for it. This seemed all well and good to resident Gene Cranick until his house caught fire:

I thought they’d come out and put it out, even if you hadn’t paid your $75, but I was wrong.

They did respond to calls from a paying neighbor.

This was a really thought provoking article for me. If I were calling the shots at the fire department, I probably would have put the fire out anyway, thus validating Cranick's attempt to be a free-rider supported by the payments of his neighbors. It's not OK to let people's homes burn.  But if I were in charge of investigating the fire department, as you know had to happen, I'd probably not accuse them of any wrongdoing. They fulfilled their contracted duty.

The author of the article, Daniel Foster, sees this as a pretty good argument for providing fire-fighting services to anyone in the jurisdiction, and just charging them through a tax (that is, nobody gets to opt out).  In one sense I tend to agree, but that left me wondering how this was different from the Obama Health Care plan, which I don't like. After talking it over with my wife (who has better economics instincts than I do, despite never having taken a class on the subject), we concluded that the main difference is that there is nobody else offering to put out fires; if you wanted to use another service to put out fires, too bad, there's nobody.  No amount of money is going to be enough to get someone else to provide fire-fighting services. That's not true when it comes to doctor's office visits, checkups, and prescription drug provision. Now, if Obama had proposed a plan for universal catastrophic health insurance (with correspondingly high deductible), then it would be a lot more like public provision of fire departments. I might be OK with that health insurance system, too.

But what this really got me wondering about was Cranick's homeowner's insurance. Do they have to pay out despite the fact that he could have gotten fire-fighting protection, but didn't?  How can you even get homeowner's insurance on a house that isn't covered by the local fire department?  If I'm the insurance company, I probably wouldn't sell to a guy who won't join the local fire department club, no matter how much he tries to reassure me "oh, they'll come anyway, trust me." They don't make premiums high enough for that kind of nonsense.

On the other hand, might Cranick be able to argue that he offered to pay them the cost of fighting the fire ex post, and they refused?  Could he say it's really their fault everything he had burned to cinders?  I suspect this wouldn't fly, but I really don't know. 

The gist is, I guess, that I don't agree with the fire department's call, but I'm having trouble drumming up sympathy for someone victimized by his own poor choices. Not too much of a surprise, I guess, since we've learned years ago from Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom (via Freakanomics coauthor Stephen Dubner) that economists are evil.

David Henderson offers a libertarian response here. Tyler Cowen is not moved.

Scholarly Critique Fail

To their minds, little of what takes place on college campuses today can be considered either "higher" or "education." They blame a system that favors research over teaching and vocational training over liberal arts.

 This is the main thrust of an interview at the Atlantic with the authors of the book Higher Education? (and yes, the question mark is part of the title). The authors do not like faculty who care about research to the point of avoiding teaching, an attitude I can sympathize with. Here is an excerpt on the perils of the Publish of Perish mentality:

The problem is that there are just too many publications and too many people publishing. This is true even in the hard sciences. If there's a research project on genetics in a lab, they will take certain findings and break them into eight different articles just so each researcher can get more stuff on his or her resume.

And many of the publications are too long. A book on Virginia Woolf could be a 30-page article. Somebody did a count of how many publications had been written on Virginia Woolf in the past 15 years. The answer is several thousand. Really? Who needs this? But it's awfully difficult to say, "Here's knowledge we don't need!" It sounds like book burning, doesn't it? What we'd say is that on the scale of priorities, we find undergraduate teaching to be more important than all the research being done. 

So far, so good. But they also have some very particular ideas about what constitutes good vs. bad ways to pick a college to attend. The bad way, in their view, is to go to college for signaling purposes:

[...] go to a prestigious college, and when you graduate the world will know you went to Princeton or Stanford. It doesn't matter what happened in the classroom as long as you have that brand behind you. Claudia and I were up at Harvard talking to students, and they said they get nothing from their classes, but that doesn't matter. They're smart already—they can breeze through college. The point is that they're going to be Harvard people when they come out.

So what do the authors advocate instead?

The second reason to go to college is get a good liberal arts education.

Wait, really? Liberal Arts? I thought having people write volume upon volume about Virginia Woolf was a bad thing. So why would we train students to do the same thing by having them read those very volumes? Or is this not what the authors mean by a liberal arts education?

There are two ways to look at it. First of all, freshmen come in at age 18. Let's suppose they've decided to major in sports management. What's an 18-year-old going to do in a freshman course in sports management? I've attended some undergraduate business courses. The students are young; they don't have business experience. Really very little is imparted.

To me this sounds more like an argument for skipping college and going into the workforce than anything else. Is that what they mean?

In our economy, they're not really ready for you until you're 28 or so. They want you to have a number of years behind you. [...] Besides, young people today are going to live to be 90. There's no rush.

The economy wasn't ready.

Oh. Nope, apparently the modern economy can't handle young people. Their labors aren't going to get them anywhere when they're young no matter what they do. So what should young people be doing with their time?

The second way to look at it is that liberal arts, properly conceived, means wrestling with issues and ideas, putting the mind to work in a way these young people will only be able to do for these four years. And we'd like this for everyone. They can always learn vocational things later, on the job. They can even get an engineering degree later—by the way, in two years rather than four.

This sounds like a good plan... for high school. But I don't quite see how it's an effective plan for college unless we are planning to greatly multiply the volumes of Virginia Woolf for these students to wrestle with, assuming they have any interest in doing so. Even if college were much cheaper than it is now (they do have a nice comment on massive borrowing for college, which at least for non-vocational, non-investment schooling is a pretty poor idea), many students would rather work at low wages than hang out wrestling with books they don't care about. Are they wrong to feel this way?

Good teaching is not just imparting knowledge, like pouring milk into a jug. It's the job of the teacher to get students interested and turned on no matter what the subject is. Every student can be turned on if teachers really engage in this way. [...] Some people say to me, "Your students at Queens, are they any good?" I say, "I make them good." Every student is capable of college.

No. I have to stop you there. Not every student is capable of college. I went to the local Vo-Tech in high school, and met some people who would not have been able to keep up with college level coursework at the local state college. Period. And they knew it. They knew they'd be frustrated and tired and hate every minute of it no matter how enthusiastic or capable the teachers. And you know what? It was OK.

They were studying something they found somewhat appealing, like computer repair or auto mechanic work or graphic design or what-have-you. They were learning something they could understand and appreciate and be good at that would also pay the bills, and possibly even leave them some free time to explore their side interests. And that's fabulous. I've had a fair number of students who I think would live happier, healthier, and possibly even wealthier lives if they stopped trying to finish college because everybody-who's-anybody-has-a-college-degree, and instead learned a trade. Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame made a similar point here (second video), and there are some interesting links on the subject here.

Do I think liberal arts education can serve the consumption and productivity goals of students? Absolutely, given the right students (and there are a lot of them). I think we could do even better to have capable, demanding, well-trained, and enthusiastic teachers of these topics starting in high school and continuing into liberal arts schools for those so inclined. But I think we would do a lot better at promoting real higher education if we stopped pretending that "higher" means "top of the line but somehow still accessible to everybody." That's a waste of the students' time, creativity, and enthusiasm in too many cases. Those are resources we should take more care in managing.

(Craig Newmark comments briefly and to the point on the same article)

PS- Here's hoping the economy is finally ready for this:

Astro-physics

Seriously, modern physics and astronomical sciences hurt my brain. Here are four reasons why.

Time travel could be real, involve portals

Excerpt:

Einstein’s theory’s of relativity only precludes travel at the speed of light, he never said anything about travel faster than light. Of course it will still take an incredible amount of energy, but crucially not an infinite amount.

Now it turns out that a little technique called quantum tunneling is used by electrons orbiting around atoms to instantly move from point A to point B without passing through the space in between.

If we could utilize a similar process and "quantum tunnel" through the barrier of the speed of light, we might just be able to travel faster than light, but never actually have to travel at the speed of light to get there.

It only looks like gravity smashed your face into that sidewalk

Excerpt:

“For me gravity doesn’t exist,” said Dr. Verlinde, who was recently in the United States to explain himself. Not that he can’t fall down, but Dr. Verlinde is among a number of physicists who say that science has been looking at gravity the wrong way and that there is something more basic, from which gravity “emerges,” the way stock markets emerge from the collective behavior of individual investors or that elasticity emerges from the mechanics of atoms.

Afraid of an asteroid strike? That's small potatoes

Excerpt:

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have detected a blue star called HE 0437-5439 they say was unceremoniously expelled from the Milky Way and is now hurtling through space at 1.6 million miles an hour. Scientists say his rates as one of the fastest of the 16 so-called hypervelocity stars they've discovered since 2005.

Aliens probably use text message acronyms, too

Excerpt:

''Whatever the life form, evolution selects for economy of resources,'' said Gregory Benford. ''Broadcasting is expensive, and transmitting signals across light years would require considerable resources.''

Writing in the journal Astrobiology, the Benfords claim that an alien civilisation would strive to reduce costs, limit waste and make its signalling technology efficient.

Friday Video Extravaganza

Today we're mashing it up, so check out the musical mash-ups below the break.

Is Economist Robin Hanson a Supervillain?

Robin Hanson of GMU has a recent post arguing that survivalists play an extremely valuable role in society, despite the conventional view that they are crackpots.  He seems to be doing so because he sees them as kindred spirits to those who, like Hanson himself, wish to be preserved via cryonics. Their brilliance remains unappreciated by a society that values signals and expressions of loyalty to particular groups above actually doing things to save lives both now and in the distant future. (Of course, one could view Hanson's posts as merely attempts to signal that these views belong in the "intellectually respected" club, but if we all spend all our time accusing each other of signaling, what kind of signal would that send?)

I go back and forth in my view of survivalists themselves. I think it's pretty clear that they overestimate the risks they are reacting to, and their political and social beliefs are often difficult to comprehend. On the other hand, talking about the end of the world can make for fascinating reading, and I sometimes I think society in general underestimates the chances that things could go terribly, horribly wrong.

But the debate over survivalists isn't what struck me about this post. What struck me is Hanson's argument for why the survivalists might not be as nutty as they seem:

The world faces existential risk, i.e., a risk that the world will die.  Such a death is bad not only for those who live here now, but also for vast future generations who might descend from us now.  Cultures and ethnicities face related risks.  By preparing to save themselves under various disaster scenarios, survivalists also tend to make their culture, ethnicity, and world a bit less likely to die.  An effort for which future generations should be quite grateful. [emphasis added]

Hanson's argument is that survivalists might not be much benefit to society right now--in fact, they probably hold current society in disdain and avoid outsiders where possible. But the true beneficiaries of their peculiar brand of risk aversion are the untold future generations who might not exist without the efforts of lunatics and maniacs.

I've heard this argument before, of course. The stakes are described in the graphic novel Watchmen:

Each step had to be taken carefully, constantly striving to keep in mind the enormous scale of what was at stake! The Earth. Humanity. All we've ever known... "end of the world" does the concept no justice. The world's present would end. Its future, immeasurably vaster, would also vanish. Even our past would be cancelled. Our struggle from the primal ooze, every childbirth, every personal sacrifice rendered meaningless, leading only to dust, tossed in the void-winds.

Save for Richard Nixon, whose name adorns a plaque upon the moon, no human vestige would remain. Ruins become sand, sand blows away... all our richness and color and beauty would be lost... as if it had never been.

That's right, Robin Hanson is channeling the World's Smartest Man, Adrian Veidt, also called Ozymandias.

But the parallels don't stop there. Hanson prides himself on seeing the world differently from most people, realizing that most of our beliefs about the world are wrong when we get a more external perspective. Homo Hypocritus, he calls the human race. Man the hypocrite. Ozymandias agrees: "Hitler said people swallow lies easily, provided they're big enough."

Which of the two, Hanson or Veidt, said this?

An intractable problem can only be resolved by stepping beyond conventional solutions.

Or this?

I have a passion, a sacred quest, to understand everything, and to save the world.

They could have come from the same mind, if not the same voice.

But what does Adrian Veidt do in Watchmen? Oh yes. Saves the world. Through mass murder. Not that anyone who could do anything about it found out until after the fact:

"Do it?"  Dan, I'm not a Republic Serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my master stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago.

Robin Hanson wants to save the world, but how? By educating people? Maybe. Maybe something else. "Canaan is devastated, Ashkelon is fallen, Gezer is ruined, Yendam is reduced to nothing, Israel is desolate and her seed is no more, and Palestine has become a widow for Egypt... All the countries are unified and pacified," says mighty Ozymandias.

Now, I have no reason to believe Robin Hanson is planning to clone human psychics or wipe out whole cities. But then no one had reason to believe Ozymandias was really the world's greatest supervillain, either. Just because I might over-estimate the probability doesn't mean the risk isn't there.

I guess that makes me a survivalist after all.

Friday Video Extravaganza

Today is the kickoff of OU's Humans vs. Zombies game 2010, so hit the jump for some key tips for surviving.

Your Esteemed Author Is Officially...

 

That is all.

Dying Majors?

What follows is a response to this article, which describes 10 college majors the author believes are in permanent decline. While I would always advise taking a grain of salt with any opinions about higher education published on a site named 'Online Degree Programs,' I think the idea of education moving away from these areas is interesting enough to comment on. My interpretation is pretty much guided by a single principle: The primary purpose of an undergraduate degree is a signal of innate ability.

Philosophy and the Classics. The article claims the number of people majoring in these areas is down. They don't offer any real data, but do provide some anecdotal evidence. Personally, I find it unlikely that these are permanently shifting down. My reasoning is that most BA degrees from Arts & Science colleges pretty much send the same signal to the potential employers regardless of the major. The ability to think, to read carefully, to do busywork that requires literacy and numeracy--these are the main things employers need to see from an undergraduate degree. Almost no one with a BA uses technical skills learned from the major in a work environment, they're all learned on the job. In this sense, Philosophy and Classics are just two flavors of the same signaling device, along with Political Science, Mathematics, English, and of course Economics. The only way these majors are actually on their way out is if students are look for more vocational training in their college curriculum. Personally, I'd like to see more people in vocational training than in traditional college studies, but I doubt this is a long run trend. More likely the relatively unimpressive economic performance of the last decade has inclined people toward more targeted skill sets. If the economy returns to the average growth we saw from 1950-2000 (and we have no reason to think it won't), I suspect this trend will reverse itself.

<insert people group here> Studies and Social Work. I'm honestly not surprised American Studies (as the article calls it) are on their way out, despite my previous statement about the BA as a generic signal. The key difference is that programs focusing on specific people groups are narrowly focused enough that they don't necessarily represent utilization of the broad skill sets of more conventional BA's, but they're still vague enough that not everyone knows what skills do get utilized (and this probably varies depending on which program at what school we're talking about). I think the article makes a good point: a literature or history degree sends a more easily interpreted signal, so these departments seem likely to absorb faculty and students from American Studies (those that don't fall victim to the recession, that is). Social Work is a bit more surprising, but much that they do could be absorbed by Psychology departments, and that degree is broad enough to appeal that if social work doesn't turn out that great (or the low pay gets annoying), there are other job prospects.

Journalism. Given the recent construction of the new Temple of Apollo Journalism College building on my own campus, I find this one a bit hard to believe. It's true that newspapers are a dying breed. Free content news sources that make use of internet technology are primarily going to replace the one or two print editions per day/week that make up the newspaper business model. Even TV news is probably going to be supplanted by sources that provide information online as it develops. But there will always be people willing to pay for information condensation and filtering (and perhaps more importantly, there will always be those who want to advertise to those who want this service). I suspect that journalism schools will shift the media tools they teach--newsprint is out and blogging is in. But as the technology makes getting information out there easier, the skills needed to attract a readership and keep them interested over time will probably have an increased demand, not a reduced. People are going to need a way to signal that they're not just armchair reporters.

Foreign Languages and Humanities. Foreign language is sort of a mislabeled degree in the first place, since the goal is always to learn not just the language of a culture but their history, customs, and common modes of thinking as well. For English speakers, this has long been largely a matter of recreation, since most other cultures are willing to adapt to the English speaking world in order to conduct business. And in as much as they are known to be matters of recreation, they don't send as good a signal as many other BAs. However, the next 20 years could easily see the rise of China and India to rival the current big 3 economic powers (US, EU, and Japan). For that matter, recent events have suggested that the staying power of the EU is not what we previously thought, so we could see a massive leveling of the playing field across eastern and western hemispheres. If this is the case, then I think we'll see two groups of people doing a lot of studying in foreign languages and humanities (or letters as it's called here): a renewal of recreational education as international trade leads to renewed growth, and people shooting for influential positions in multinational corporations. That's right, I think trade contracts in the mid-21st century are going to depend a lot on corporations playing to local loyalties in a way not yet seen. I see a lot more future tension between globalization and xenophobia, and familiarity with the national personality might be the signal a corporate vice president needs to tip the scales in their favor.

These beliefs could be way off base. I don't think online degree programs will ever make up a large share of the higher ed market, much less replace current universities (although I think current universities will absorb a lot of techniques from these programs). So take my predictions with a grain of salt, and we'll see how I did in 2030.

Friday Video Extravaganza

First, we have the alphabetical stylings of *Sir* Patrick Stewart:


Now, to get more funky with it, Autotune the Infomercial starring the SlapChop:


If you thought that was impressive, wait until you see Super Mario take on the four part harmony of Queen:


And finally, the piece de resistance, a song with no language but plenty of lyrics... Prisencolinensinainciusol:


You're welcome, Internets.

The Essence of Oligopoly II

No commentary necessary.

Links are Good for You

As are the following:

Jon Stewart

Saturated Fats

Everything Bad

Please feel free to submit your own links regarding what is good for you.

How NOT to Deceive with Statistics

Fox "News" Is Bad At Its Job Edition

First of all, the least you could do before running something on the air like this --


-- is have someone just look at the screen and tell you if the numbers add up to 100% (plus or minus a 20% margin of error, perhaps?).

Second, if you've made a mistake like the one above, you might want to double check and make sure you don't do this:




That's right, apparently Fox's source managed to poll 193% of Republicans. Priceless.

The Essence of Oligopoly

In the Microeconomics course I teach, I make the point that in perfectly competitive markets, firms don't pay attention to each other. Farmer Tim doesn't care if Farmer Drew grows more soybeans or slashes his prices. Farmer Drew just doesn't matter enough for anyone else in the market to waste their energy.

In an Oligopoly market, on the other hand, when the market sees news like this:

Asking for Orange Juice on American Airlines May Violate Federal Law - "An American Airlines stewardess having an extremely bad day flipped the frak out on a first class passenger for asking for a glass of OJ [...]"

It responds kinda like this:

Delta Offers Gold Status to Victims of Psychotic American Airlines Stewardess

Priceless.

How to Deceive with Statistics

Really Obviously Lying edition

Dear Ivy League Schools,

It makes sense that you want to fudge on the proportion of full-time faculty in order to improve your rankings. It also makes sense that you don't want to pay huge fines for reporting false numbers to the government.

What doesn't make sense is expecting that you can successfully satisfy both of these desires. Perhaps none of your administration has taken introductory economics, so let me give you taste: Human beings face constraints. We have many desires, but cannot satisfy all of them. This is what creates the thing we call choice. Your choice was look good to US New & World Report or look honest to US Department of Education. If you try to do both, you'll accomplish neither.

If you're going to report conflicting numbers, make sure at least one set is not publicly available.

My Typical Week in Images

Sunday: Church Day


Monday: Back To Work Day


Tuesday: 2:8 House Lunch Day


Wednesday: Teaching Day


Thursday: Research Day


Friday: Academic Seminar Day


Saturday: Who Knows What Will Happen Day