Why Church Going Guys Don't Have It That Bad With Women

The Man Who Is Thursday:

For all the complaints I have made about the bad dating advice, grotesque naivete about female sexuality and indifference to the plight of single men you will find in the contemporary church, I have to admit that guys in my situation are in fact in a lot of way a lot better off than their secular counterparts. These are the reasons:

1. The effects of female hypergamy are much muted.
2. There are more girls in church than guys.
3. Church girls are more likely to be virgins (or at least have low numbers of partners).
4. Church girls have been prescreened for good character.
5. Conservative churches will still shame women for infidelity and divorce (usually).

In short, church going guys have better dating chances than secular guys, and when they do find someone they want to marry, they are more likely to have a successful marriage.

Read the whole thing.

As a churchgoing single guy myself, why do I feel simultaneously hopeful and without excuse?

(HT Robin Hanson via Tyler Cowen)

John Calvin As Behavioral Economist?

Tyler Cowen:

Tomorrow marks the 500th birthday of John Calvin. If you read John Calvin you will find a great deal of what we now call behavioral economics.

He wrote about non-convexity:

For there is no medium between the two things: the earth must either be worthless in our estimation, or keep us enslaved by an intemperate love of it.

Here is one reason why there is "evil" in the world:

Whatever be the kind of tribulation with which we are afflicted, we should always consider the end of it to be, that we may be trained to despise the present, and thereby stimulated to aspire to the future life. For since God well knows how strongly we are inclined by nature to a slavish love of this world, in order to prevent us from clinging too strongly to it, he employs the fittest reason for calling us back, and shaking off our lethargy.

Adam Smith and David Hume were influenced by Calvin:

If we see a funeral, or walk among graves, as the image of death is then present to the eye, I admit we philosophise admirably on the vanity of life. We do not indeed always do so, for those things often have no effect upon us at all. But, at the best, our philosophy is momentary. It vanishes as soon as we turn our back, and leaves not the vestige of remembrance behind; in short, it passes away, just like the applause of a theatre at some pleasant spectacle. Forgetful not only of death, but also of mortality itself, as if no rumour of it had ever reached us, we indulge in supine security as expecting a terrestrial immortality.

It is odd to call someone so famous an "underrated thinker" but indeed Calvin is. You'll find the whole text of the Institutes of Christian Religion here; it makes for good browsing.

This chapter is John Calvin imitating Robin Hanson.

Buy the book here on Kindle for 99 cents.

Why Signals Are Shallow

Robin Hanson:

A boss who has known you for years may not promote you unless you get a better degree, even if that teaches you nothing useful for your job. He might not hire you without that degree, even if knows and trusts folks who have known you for years. Why do people who know us well care so much about such shallow signals?

Your boss doesn't just want high quality subordinates; he wants his boss to think he has high quality subordinates. Actually he wants his boss to be happy about it, which requires his boss be happy about it, etc. We all want to affiliate with high status people, but since status is about common distant perceptions of quality, we often care more about what distant observers would think about our associates than about how we privately evaluate them.

To which Arnold Kling adds:

The idea is that in a large, complex society, shallow signals may become more important than accurate information. It is a really profound insight, deserving of more development. For example, in banking, it may explain why "AAA-rated" became more important than truly having a low risk of default.

Liberty vs. Efficiency

Two GMU profs, Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson, in the debate of the year:

Come see the event of the year: Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson will debate on Liberty vs. Efficiency, Tuesday April 14th. The debate will take place in Enterprise Hall Room 80 at 530pm. The event is open to the public so please come and bring as many guests as you'd like!

If this is anything like Caplan's debate against Larry Iannaccone on whether or not religion was rational, I expect this to be a similarly lively debate.

The Daily Dozen

1. Proetests in Moldova explode, with the help of Twitter. A lot of people are not too happy with the Communist Party. Judging by what I saw when I was there, I don't blame them. More on this here.
   
2. The most polarizing president? I dunno.
3. The only way to prevent genocide.
4. After netbooks, will a $5 iPod follow? Here's hoping so.
5. Some people worry too much. And when there's more to worry about they worry even more. Who knew?
6. How much Americans actually pay in taxes.
7. Is the Chicago School of Economics really dead? How do you know?
8. Do business schools have any responsibility for the current economic crisis?
   
9. Robin Hanson has a good summary of an article by Marko Tervio about why CEOs, actors, directors, musicians, authors, and atheletes make the big bucks: "1) Desired abilities are rare and lasting; 2) It is very expensive to try someone new; 3) Everyone can see which trials worked or not; and 4) Winners are free to demand more money or walk."
   
10. How is entrepreneurial judgment different from luck? More on this here.
    
11. Career Alternatives: Poker is a better bet than Yale Law School? I personally know at least one professor who makes more playing poker than he does as an academic. Don't think I'd recommend that to most, however.
    
12. Question of the Day: "Two hundred years from now, will Somali filmmakers be making stirring, presumably holographic, action flicks about adventures on the high seas?"

The Daily Dozen

1. Economy pinches the billable hour at law firms. This sounds like good news for consumers of legal services and probably many associates too. Right now, the billable hour encourages gross overwork and grueling hours of mind-numbing work. Who wins in this? The partners, of course. Now maybe that will finally start to change? Not only that, but the chill of salary freezes reaches top law firms.
2. A 111-year-old is not only a brand-new dad, he's a tuatara too!
3. Building safer, superior stents.
4. Voodoo correlations in neuroscience?
5. Is it time for the U.S. to re-think its educational model?
6. The evils of partial boredom.
7. A fast, keyboard friendly calculator.
8. Robin Hanson and Russ Roberts discuss Truth and Economics.
9. William Easterly just started his own blog.
10. The 10,000 Year Explosion: Did civilization accelerate human evolution?
11. Academia doesn't live up to its noble image?
12. Cryptography -- it's not just for spies any more.
    

The Daily Dozen

1. Why blogging for money will not make you rich. Darn!
2. Ants incapable of acquiring... human capital?
3. Robin Hanson becomes the Chief Scientist for Consensus Point.
4. The $1 million Netflix prize.
   
5. THE NEW YORK TIMES: "Happy people spend a lot of time socializing, going to church and reading newspapers — but they don’t spend a lot of time watching television, a new study finds. That's what unhappy people do."
6. U.S. News top 200 colleges and universities in the world.
7. Spending less is more efficient than earning more?
8. Back to 20% down on a house? Probably not a bad idea. Might have helped avoid much of the financial mess we're currently in.
9. Share Google Docs with a quick drag and drop in GMail.
10. What happens to your body if you stop smoking right now?
11. A few tools to help you invest.
12. eHarmony forced to create a dating service for gay singles. Radly Balko finds this "petulant and silly." I agree.
    

Partisan Academics?

Robin Hanson:

Today, many academics say the current US presidential election is of enormous importance, and wonder how they can help. And yet most everything I see academics doing on this election is overtly partisan - folks act as if it were obvious who is the best candidate, and just wonder how best to help that candidate.

But If this election is really more important that the typical topic covered by an academic review article, why not write election review articles to advise academics like me who are honestly uncertain how to vote? An election review article would apply typical academic standards to review what we know about the actual consequences of choosing each candidate.

For example, in this election the two candidates come from two established political parties. So a review article could summarize published analyses attempting to discern how national outcomes relate to the party holding office. Better yet, it could summarize the implications of published multivariate analyses, relating national outcomes to many candidate features. Of special interest might be candidate policy positions; one could summarize how candidate policy positions have related historically to actual chosen policies. For particular policy positions of these particular candidates, one could point to and summarize other academic review articles on the consequences of those particular policies.

Sure some will accuse election review articles of being covertly partisan. But given all the other academic review articles out there, why does no one even try this? I was hoping disinterest in presidential decision markets came from inertia and novelty-aversion, but are even academics just aren't interested in neutral evaluations?

Some good questions. Unfortunately, academics aren't the only ones who behave in such a biased way. People who aren't explicity and stronly partisan seem to be more the exception than the rule. I guess that's why there's not much of a market for this kind of research? Everyone's already made up their mind and have made themselves immune to any contrary evidence.

Touching vs. Understanding

Robin Hanson:

On the plane home last week I talked to a sharp Yale historian, and realized we devote far more resources to preserving historical sites, and to making history available via museums, than we do to funding professional historians to make sense of it all. That reminded me of complaints that NASA spends far more on sending instruments into space to collect data than it does on funding scientists to analyze that data. In both cases we collect far more data than ever gets carefully analyzed.

Now part of the explanation must be that the public can more easily see historical sites, museums, and space instruments than historians and data analysts. But that doesn't seem to me a sufficient explanation - I suspect we are also just more interested in touching the past, and in touching space, than in understanding either. We talk about understanding because that is a modern applause light, but really we just like to touch exotic things. The more we can touch, the further is our reach, and the more important and powerful we must be. I wonder how much more this explains.

I don't know. I have two hypotheses that I think may explain what's going on:

1) It costs more to collect the data than it does to analyze. On the margin, hiring more analysts may not enhance our understanding much.

2) Preserving historical sites and launching space probes are both high-visibility examples of public expenditures that politicians use to show evidence of their hard work and help secure votes. Data analysis is much less showy and harder to appreciate than a large builiding or rocket blasting into space.

The "Deep Blue" of Poker?

Robin Hanson:

A computer has beaten top human poker players:

Humanity was dealt a decisive blow by a poker-playing artificial intelligence program called Polaris during the Man-Machine Poker Competition in Las Vegas. Poker champs fought the AI system to a draw, then won in the first two of four rounds (each round had Polaris playing 500 hands against two humans, whose points were averaged.) But in the final two rounds of the match, Polaris beat both human teams, two wins out of four, with one loss and one draw. IBM's Deep Blue beat chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997.

This has gained very little news coverage, in stark contrast to the Chess case, even though far more people play poker than chess. To explain both facts, note that most people can more easily see that they lack chess than poker expertise. They can watch a poker expert fold or raise and imagine that they would have done the same, but know they have no idea why a chess expert makes his moves.

This fools people into thinking they could be a poker champion, which is why so many more people try at poker. And being less impressed by existing poker champions, people are less impressed by a computer who beats those champions. The moral: beware of underestimating computers by underestimating the difficulty of the tasks at which they excel.

I am a bit surprised this hasn't gotten more coverage, but think Hanson is correct in his explanation. Poker is similar in golf in that every now and then even a novice by chance can play a perfect hand or hit a perfect ball that convinces him that he can do it again. Chess doesn't have this stochastic dimension to it, making people more in awe of those who excel at it. What separates the poker and golf champions from normal mortals is not their ability to sometimes play a good hand or hit the golf ball with great skill, but their consistency in doing so. The ability for a computer to consistently outplay the best poker players in the world is tremendous accomplishment in the world of artificial intelligence, similar to that of Deep Blue.

The other explanation I would offer is that chess is held in higher esteem by many people in society, being thought of as relatively pure and having a certain beauty in the pure intellectual challenge of the game. In contrast, many people view poker as a bit more base -- often associated with shady activities that many people find distasteful such as gambling, smoking, drinking, etc. I think fewer people appreciate the skills and intellectual prowess required to be a star poker player than those who appreciate the skills of a chess master.

One question remains about this recent advance: Will this destroy online poker?

Male and Female Privilege

Tyler Cowen:

Here is the male privilege checklist. Here is the female privilege checklist. Robin Hanson, scientist, continues: "The next obvious step is to assign point values to such privileges, so we can add them up and compare totals." You can imagine how much fun we had at lunch on this topic and yes a woman was there too.

Wish I could have been a fly on the wall during that conversation!

Don't Throw Hanson Out the Airlock!

Robin Hanson, a huge lover of science fiction and technological progress (who also happens to be an economist) writes:

On Monday I was interviewed on BBC Radio about what if any economic value we get out of NASA. I said the benefits were mostly like the pyramids - national prestige and being part of history. I was not told I would be debating a NASA fan, who said gave the tang/teflon argument that all research is good, and also said we don't want to be like the Chinese who pulled their advanced ships back just before the Europeans took over the world. There was not time to respond.

Sigh. The US government spends more on space research than on NIH and NSF combined, which most scientists consider far out of proportion to its science value. Most any ambitious tech project, like floating cities, 3DTV, or robot mules, gives similar indirect tech spinoffs per dollar spent, and surely we can find other projects with larger direct payoffs. Sure the Chinese might have colonized the Americas, but we can see now there are no similarly lush gardens accessible in space - we'll colonize Antarctica and the Earth oceans long before, as these are far less harsh environments with plenty of the sunlight and materials which are mainly what space has to offer. Yes someday we'll run out of stuff here on Earth, but that day is far off. We'll probably use kite power before solar satellites, world population is not proportional to oil production, and hopes for more than a tiny space tourism market anytime soon are pure fantasy.

To which Bryan Caplan responds:

I've often heard Robin Hanson called a "space cadet" or even a "replicant." So it's pretty dramatic to see him throw cold water on his fellow cadets. Technophiles, I beg of you - don't throw Robin out the airlock! :-)

Hanson started his career as a scientist and computer guy and later turned to economics. As an engineer turned economist, I completely agree with Hanson's assessment. Incidentally, most people I hear arguing the opposite perspective most vociferously have little training in either science/technology or economics.

Having said all that, I do have to admit seeing displays of space technology in action can be quite amazing (just like those pyramids). But that still doesn't make it a good economic investment.

Innocence

Paul Graham on innocence:

Innocence is also open-mindedness. We want kids to be innocent so they can continue to learn. Paradoxical as it sounds, there are some kinds of knowledge that get in the way of other kinds of knowledge. If you're going to learn that the world is a brutal place full of people trying to take advantage of one another, you're better off learning it last. Otherwise you won't bother learning much more.

Very smart adults often seem unusually innocent, and I don't think this is a coincidence. I think they've deliberately avoided learning about certain things. Certainly I do. I used to think I wanted to know everything. Now I know I don't.

(HT Robin Hanson via Tyler Cowen, photo via ang)

Intro to Innovation

Robin Hanson with an excellent summary of the basics of innovation:

Systems are parts in a structure; innovations are better part or structure designs. An innovation embodies insights whose value depends on a context, and so changes with that context.

Most growth in the number or size of large systems has been due to collecting innovations.

Wars, quakes, and diseases may be distributed so most impact comes from the few largest instances. In contrast, in large systems most innovation value comes from many small innovations. Even big innovations require many matching small innovations to be viable.

Innovation rates increase when early innovations make it easier to pursue later innovations, and decrease when the most valuable easiest innovations tend to be pursued first. Steady (exponential) growth suggests that these factors roughly cancel. Since growth rates commonly increase then decrease, usually the second factor eventually wins.


Innovation in large systems comes mostly from part innovation, so system innovation is steadier than part innovation, and the largest systems grow steadiest.

System structures vary in how well they encourage and test innovations locally and then distribute the best ones widely. Better structures for this are meta-innovations.


• Good modularity reduces the need to match innovations in differing parts.
• Good abstraction puts similar innovation problems within the same part.

If a barrier isolates two systems, the faster growing one eventually dominates. A system that better promotes innovation can lose to a system with a larger source of innovation.

In large innovation pools, similar innovations commonly arise from several semi-independent sources at nearly the same time. No single source was essential.


Current human society can give incentives to innovate too much, when innovation is used to signal, and to innovate too little, when innovators are not paid the full value gained by others.

Remembering Memorial Day

Robin Hanson asks:

[W]warriors, dead and otherwise, deserve some honor, but to me this seems all out of proportion. Not only do we overemphasize warriors of dramatic battles we won (e.g., not WWI trench doughboys), but surely many others deserve honor. How about warriors who died on other sides, or in other wars? How about civilians who died or sacrificed in wars? How about those who prevented wars?

And surely war should not be the main source of honor in our world! How about holidays to honor those who died for or sacrificed for or at least benefited the rest of us in other ways? For example, why not a day to honor volunteers? Or a day to honor all explorers, including intellectual, artistic, and business explorers? Why focus so much on our winning dead warriors?

Some good questions. Here would be my answers:

1) Cost. The first thing I would point out is that the soldiers remembered on Memorial Day are those who paid for the wars they fought in with their lives. As worthwhile as the sacrifices are of many volunteers and explorers are, a relative few paid for their endeavors with their lives. Those who did tend to be revered more than those who did not. I think soldiers are remembered more than civilians because there is the perception that they chose to put themselves in harms way. While this is not always true (such as for enlistees), it is more likely to be true for a soldier than for a civilian. (This also explains why the fire department during 9/11 is held in particular honor -- they chose to run into the building.) It is particularly likely to be true of soldiers who received military honors.

2) Victory. People certainly view themselves not only as individuals, but also as part of larger groups ranging from families to tribes to schools to nations. When our nation does something good (or bad) most citizens tend to feel some association with it. (I'm not arguing if people should or shouldn't feel this way -- just observing that they do.) When our college team wins a game we feel a certain pride in our school. The same is true for wars our countries fight. (Most Japanese I know feel shame about Japan's history during World War II despite that fact than none of them were alive at the time. Many Germans still seem to feel guilt and many Americans feel deep pride about the same war.)

3) Connection. I think wars closer in history tend to get more attention than those farther away. Vietnam is still in the minds of many people as is World War II. World War I is less so. The Civil War gets more more attention than the American Revolution. People have greater connection to the more recent past. I know for a fact I have a great-great grandfather who fought in the Civil War. (He used to tell my grandma stories about being in the war that she later told to me.) I am pretty sure I had a forefather who also fought in the Revolution, but haven't been able to verify it 100%. People who lost loved ones (either family or friends) still grieve their loss. People are much less prone to remember the soldiers of other countries because they do not have as close of a connection to them. With the exception of the Civil War, enemies are not usually honored because they tend to be remembered as part of the reason why American soldiers had to die. Having said this, I would also say one of the things that makes America special is how well we tend to get along with former enemies. (Think Japan, Germany, (increasingly) Vietnam, etc.) Contrast that with other regions of the world with centuries-old conflict.

4) Impact. The wars that led to the most dramatic outcomes tend to get much more attention than wars that do not. World War II changed the balance of power in the world dramatically into America's favor.

5) Clarity. Wars that have a clear purpose and/or a clear "good guy" and "bad guy" tend to get remembered with more intensity than those that did not. The American Revolution and World War II both had a clear purpose (the founding of a new nation and the total defeat of Germany, Japan, and Italy). World War II was probably unique in terms of how clearly people felt their enemy was truly bad. The Civil War also had clear goals (preservation of the Union vs. Southern succession), but less clarity about who was good and who was bad and is remembered as a truly tragic time for the nation. World War I, Vietnam, and other wars had much less defined goals.

6) Collective. A broad-based national war (such as World War II) is the one of the few times when the objectives of a large majority of a nation's population become strongly aligned. Hayek pointed this out in The Road to Serfdom, warning that the same conditions would not hold during peacetime. This alignment also serves to imprint the war on people's minds and give them identification of both real and perceived contribution to the war's efforts. If victory occurs, people feel connected to it and remember it more strongly.

7) Isolation. America has also been blessed with relative geographic isolation from the rest of the world, protecting her civilians from any wars being fought on her soil for nearly 150 years. American servicemen and women killed in conflict far outnumber American civilian casualties by a very wide margin, putting more focus on military deaths.

All of these effects carry over into the stories we tell ourselves about our nation and the world. They become part of the culture, recorded in our history books, and shape how we view our nation, our identities, and our place in the world. While these stories may be imperfect, they are by no means fully flawed. As human beings we use stories to help shape meaning and understanding about our world. Soldiers throughout history have played a large role in the events that shape these stories and are honored accordingly. Remembering them connects us to our past which connects us to our stories.

To paraphrase a quote from Noel Piper I had in an earlier post, despite many imperfections in America's history, government, and military, we have much to be thankful for.

Read my thoughts from last year's Memorial Day here.

Bounty Hunters A Bust In Hunt for Al-Qaeda?

Chris Whitlock writes in the Washington Post:

Jaber Elbaneh is one of the world's most-wanted terrorism suspects. In 2003, the U.S. government indicted him, posted a $5 million reward for his capture and distributed posters bearing photos of him around the globe. None of it worked. Elbaneh remains at large, as wanted as ever. ...

Since 1984, the program has handed out $77 million to more than 50 tipsters, according to the State Department. ... In 2004, Rep. Mark Steven Kirk (R-Ill.) visited Pakistan to assess why Rewards for Justice had generated so little information regarding al-Qaeda's leadership. He discovered that the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad had effectively shut down the program. There was no radio or television advertising. ...

In 2004, Congress passed a law authorizing the State Department to post rewards as high as $50 million apiece -- a provision with bin Laden in mind. Last fall, Rep. Dan Boren (D-Okla.) went further, introducing a bill that would raise the cap to $500 million. The State Department has declined to boost the reward for bin Laden, arguing that more money was unlikely to do any good and would only add to his notoriety.

To which Robin Hanson replies:

Let's see, billions spent via ordinary means, and millions offered in bounties, and it is the bounties they blame for Al-Qaeda's notoriety and failing to catch leaders? The billions are spent and gone, while the millions in bounties we only lose when they actually work. How then is this data suggesting we should prefer ordinary means to bounties?

(HT Alex Tabarrok)

Making Sure You're Sufficiently Biased

Tyler Cowen:

To think more objectively, become less allied.

That is Robin Hanson, the rest of the post is interesting as well. Don't forget that: "people ignore info more when they feel powerful."

I also like this (older) sentence from Megan Non-McArdle:

Once you believe your opponents are disproportionately powerful liars, you have completed the Devil Shift.

Here is more.

"Interesting" Economists?

(Four of GMU's profs clockwise from lower left: Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan, Alex Tabarrok, Tyler Cowen. See more photos of GMU faculty here.)

A friend of mine just gave me a copy of a good article on GMU's Economics Department:

George Mason University’s economics department is populated by many libertarians, but libertarianism is not its most salient feature. In speaking with several members of the department, I searched for le mot juste: “Freakonomics”? “Weird economics”? “Interesting economics” turned out to be the least inaccurate term for a sub-discipline that encompasses such questions as whether bounty hunters are (and pirates were) as violent as is commonly supposed, how best to survive torture, and whether one ought to pay to have one’s head frozen after snuffing it.

Northern Virginia’s GMU was once known mainly as a commuter school, but its economics department has risen to national prominence in part because of the two Nobels awarded to faculty members in the past 20 years, and also because of its brand of “interesting economics,” which has helped make it one of the most-quoted economics departments in the world.

Adjunct professor Arnold Kling offered a terser précis of the GMU way. “My simple way of describing it is that at Chicago they say, ‘Markets work; let’s use markets.’ At Harvard and MIT they say, ‘Markets fail; let’s use government.’ And at George Mason, we say, ‘Markets fail; let’s use markets.’” This seeming paradox means, that GMU sees plenty of deviations from the “perfect neoclassical paradigm,” which requires “perfect information, perfect competition,” but that unlike Harvard or MIT, they do not automatically “ring a bell and say, ‘We need more government.’ Markets come up with solutions to problems of information.”

“Poetry is far too trivial to lie about,” wrote the critic William Logan, so perhaps unheeded economists should take grim satisfaction in the sight of civilians stuffing their ears with their index fingers. Not to be counterintuitive, but it stands to reason that the notion that most prefer to live under a canopy of economic falsehood testifies to the field’s importance.

Read the whole thing.

I recently wrote:

I have been somewhat disappointed by how few applicable ideas I've learned since starting my PhD. It seems like much research in economics today is trivial and of interest only to academics who try to outdo each other with esoteric mathematical cleverness. Many of these ideas hold very little relevance to understanding or impacting the "real world".

Had I gone anywhere but GMU, I think I would be feeling this far more intensely. They really do like ideas here, even if they sometimes cut against the grain.

To get more familiar with the department, here is a list of faculty and students in GMU's econ department who have blogs and some of the reasons I like GMU so much. Incidentally, my blog is still the #1 Google hit for "I love GMU".

Robin Hanson and Reversion to the Mean

Tyler Cowen:

Yesterday my friend Robin Hanson walked into my office and said "Heh, how about that football game!"  My world was momentarily jarred.  This may be the most normal thing Robin has ever said to me. 

Fortunately, things are back to normal today.  Robin is speaking at a conference on the Search for Extra Terrestrial Life.  Gotta love GMU.

Presidential Decision Markets

Robin Hanson:

We have had many prediction markets on who will be elected, but almost none on who should be elected. So far, the only exceptions I know are decision markets on which nominees would most help their party gain the U.S. presidency.

Today, I'm pleased to announce that Peter McCluskey has funded the creation of six now-live InTrade markets that should tell us how a Democratic versus Republican U.S. President will differently effect oil prices, long term interest rates, US government debt, and US troops in Iraq! If enough people trade these assets, then for voters who know which direction they want these parameters to move, InTrade market prices could advise them on how to vote!

Read the whole thing!