Confirmation bias

Abstract from paper: 'Using data from actual auditions in an individual fixed-effects framework, we find that the screen increases by 50% the probability a woman will be advanced out of certain preliminary rounds. The screen also enhances, by severalfold, the likelihood a female contestant will be the winner in the final round. Using data on orchestra personnel, the switch to blind' auditions can explain between 30% and 55% of the increase in the proportion female among new hires and between 25% and 46% of the increase in the percentage female in the orchestras since 1970.'

My impression of the results: it seems that female musicians were and are genuinely less likely to be top performers (otherwise blind auditions would result in proportionate representation), but also that the magnitude of the difference was exaggerated in the minds of those evaluating--as if confirmation bias were playing a role in the evaluation of individual candidates. It wouldn't surprise me if a similar confirmation bias effect were in play in the software industry.

--
Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.
Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.
Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.
Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.
Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honor more.

Mormon culture and RMs

In response to this article:

I don't know if I would tell someone to take "RM" off their checklist. After all, you only get one shot at marriage (in the general case), and I fully support your right to not marry anyone you don't want to marry for any reason at all, if you are willing to pay the price. But I would encourage boys and girls to be kind to those whom they do not intend to marry, and I would also encourage them to think hard about exactly which qualities they are willing to pay for in the currency of mate-selection, which is loneliness, self-doubt, and delayed fulfillment. Judge as you are willing to be judged.

-Max

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Communist Cuba

Interesting article: http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_2_havana.html

"Tourists tip waiters, taxi drivers, tour guides, and chambermaids in hard currency, and to stave off a revolt from these people, the government lets them keep the additional money, so they're "rich" compared with everyone else. In fact, they're an elite class enjoying privileges—enough income to afford a cell phone, go out to restaurants and bars, log on to the Internet once in a while—that ordinary Cubans can't even dream of. I asked a few people how much chambermaids earn in tips, partly so that I would know how much to leave on my dresser and also to get an idea of just how crazy Cuban economics are. Supposedly, the maids get about $1 per day for each room. If they clean an average of 30 rooms a day and work five days a week, they'll bring in $600 a month—30 times what everyone else gets. "All animals are equal," George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, his allegory of Stalinism, "but some animals are more equal than others." Only in the funhouse of a Communist country is the cleaning lady rich compared with the lawyer. Yet elite Cubans are impoverished compared with the middle class and even the poor outside Cuba."

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Subtlety and the Indirect Approach

Cool story.

By the early 1980s, Van Halen had become one of the biggest rock bands in history. Their touring contract carried a 53-page rider that laid out technical and security specs as well as food and beverage requirements. The "Munchies" section demanded potato chips, nuts, pretzels and "M&M's (WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES)."

When the M&M clause found its way into the press, it seemed like a typical case of rock-star excess, of the band "being abusive of others simply because we could," Mr. Roth said. But, he explained, "the reality is quite different."

Van Halen's live show boasted a colossal stage, booming audio and spectacular lighting. All this required a great deal of structural support, electrical power and the like. Thus the 53-page rider, which gave point-by-point instructions to ensure that no one got killed by a collapsing stage or a short-circuiting light tower. But how could Van Halen be sure that the local promoter in each city had read the whole thing and done everything properly?

Cue the brown M&M's. As Roth tells it, he would immediately go backstage to check out the bowl of M&M's. If he saw brown ones, he knew the promoter hadn't read the rider carefully—and that "we had to do a serious line check" to make sure that the more important details hadn't been botched either.

--
Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.
Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.
Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.
Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.
Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honor more.

Subtlety and the Indirect Approach

Cool story.

By the early 1980s, Van Halen had become one of the biggest rock bands in history. Their touring contract carried a 53-page rider that laid out technical and security specs as well as food and beverage requirements. The "Munchies" section demanded potato chips, nuts, pretzels and "M&M's (WARNING: ABSOLUTELY NO BROWN ONES)."

When the M&M clause found its way into the press, it seemed like a typical case of rock-star excess, of the band "being abusive of others simply because we could," Mr. Roth said. But, he explained, "the reality is quite different."

Van Halen's live show boasted a colossal stage, booming audio and spectacular lighting. All this required a great deal of structural support, electrical power and the like. Thus the 53-page rider, which gave point-by-point instructions to ensure that no one got killed by a collapsing stage or a short-circuiting light tower. But how could Van Halen be sure that the local promoter in each city had read the whole thing and done everything properly?

Cue the brown M&M's. As Roth tells it, he would immediately go backstage to check out the bowl of M&M's. If he saw brown ones, he knew the promoter hadn't read the rider carefully—and that "we had to do a serious line check" to make sure that the more important details hadn't been botched either.

--
Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.
Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.
Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.
Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.
Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honor more.

/Capital Accumulation In the Twenty-First Century/

So there's a book by an economist named Thomas Picketty which is very big right now, on capital and RoI trends over time. Now, I have not yet read this book so I'm going off of snippets and reviews (positive and negative), but since I've been reading Richard Heuer's /The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis/ (originally written for the CIA) one thing that is big on my mind now is that lots of data doesn't have to lead to good analysis. Heuer reports the interesting result that doctors who emphasize accumulating data over hypothesis testing tend to be worse at diagnosis; and experiments on experts in various domains (from horserace handicapping to social science) reveals that giving an expert more data does not improve the accuracy of his results, but does increase his CONFIDENCE in his own accuracy by a lot. That is, if you make a best-guess based on initial data, you're very aware that it's only a guess and your estimate of your own accuracy is pretty good; if someone gives you a whole bunch of information backing up the initial data, your accuracy doesn't improve but your impression of your own accuracy does--the extra data just makes you overconfident. It turns out that a multiple-hypotheses approach, concentrating on indicators that can differentiate between hypotheses (basically Bayesianism), is one of the best available approaches for avoiding overconfident estimates.

So, again emphasizing that I have only read reviews: Picketty's book, like Herrnstein and Murray's /The Bell Curve/ from two decades ago, appears to be heavily data-driven. Therefore, when and if I read Picketty's book I will be keeping a sharp and skeptical eye out for the following question: what hypotheses are you using your data to evaluate, and which pieces of evidence support some or all of those hypotheses?

--
Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.
Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.
Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.
Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.
Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honor more.

Private charity

The analysis in this article is flawed on multiple levels:

1.) Quote: 'Compared with government relief, private charity is supposed to be more responsive to individual need and less bureaucratic; more of a helping hand and less of an initiative-suppressing "hammock," the term Ryan uses to deride the effects of government programs.' 

Having acknowledge this point (and the related point that private charity builds cross-class social capital and alleviates social inequality), the article proceeds to ignore it, measuring private charity vs. government programs purely in terms of money spent. The goal isn't to spend the most money possible, it's to get the largest effect possible with the money you can afford to spend.

2.) Quote: 'As charitable giving is structured in the United States today, it too often plays out not as the rich helping out the poor, but as the rich increasing the gap between themselves and the poor. A 2007 study by Indiana University's Center on Philanthropy found that only 30% of individual giving in the benchmark year of 2005 was aimed at the needs of the poor — including contributions for basic needs, donations to healthcare institutions, for scholarships and allocations from religious groups. (The study was commissioned by Google.) The smallest allocation of philanthropic giving to basic needs of the poor was made by the wealthiest donors, those with income of $1 million of more, who directed 3.8% of their giving directly to the poor. For the $100,000-$200,000 income group, that allocation was 12.4%.' 

If you're trying to explore a counterfactual universe wherein private charity, not government aid, is responsible for the poor, why would you choose 2005 as your benchmark, a time when government aid is already supporting the poor? The only conclusion the 2005 data supports is that the wealthiest givers feel that the marginal value of giving to the poor is low--whether that's because they see the poor as overserved or because they don't care about the poor under any circumstances is impossible to tell. The article is perfectly willing to use Great Depression-era data when it supports the author's beliefs--why not examine the proportion of individual giving to the poor back in the Great Depression when the poor were certainly underserved and starving to death?

Probably because measuring individual charity is hard. See point #3.

3.) Quote: 'The largest single recipient of philanthropy is religion — 32% of the total, according to Giving USA. But only a small portion of that goes to outreach to the needy; more than three-quarters of donations to religious organizations is spent on "congregational operations," including facilities upkeep, the Indiana University study found.'

This confuses "private charity" with "charitable organizations"--probably because tax-deductible donations to charitable organizations are easily and conveniently measured when you want to write an article. But it's utterly missing the point. While I am more than willing to grant that "congregational operations" are not germane to relief for the poor and should be excluded from the discussion in the same way that support for the arts is--despite that, I also observe that many things that we do within the Church to help each other WOULD NOT SHOW UP in this money-oriented discussion. When Bishop Gordon introduces an out-of-work neighbor to his old colleagues at Microsoft, when he and Dave Koon fix up an old truck to loan to someone so he can restart his business, when you let a friend in need come over and ransack your cupboards for groceries that he needs, when you mentor a young person or an older gentleman who needs to update his skills so he can get a better job--all of that is private charity, and yet it will never show up on the analysis of tax-deductible contributions to charitable organizations because it doesn't fit the standard money-oriented mold. And yet it can change lives.

Conclusion: does this mean that private charity CAN replace government aid? Not necessarily, and IMHO probably not completely, given how socially-disconnected our society is. Eliminating federal aid would probably result in those who have no friends or family starving, or turning to crime--a bad result. But a society which relies on government programs instead of the civic virtue of real people will spend more and more money to achieve less and less. It is inferior in all ways to a society built on individuals who live the gospel of Jesus Christ in their dealings with each other--even if those dealings don't show up in neat statistical analyses of IRS deductions.

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Fictional vignette

I arrived. She was there on the cliff. I'm not sure whether she was doing pushups or painting, but she was doing something while relaxing and keeping an eye on the horizon.

She cocked an eyebrow at me. I... dropped down next to her and started doing pushups, which she accepted silently. Eventually I spoke.

"Mount Rushmore?"

"Good guess," she said. "No."

I frowned, then shrugged. She'd tell me when it was done, or she wouldn't need to. "It has," I said, "been months since I vacuumed." 

She grinned lazily at me. 

"Yes, that goes without saying," I added. "I will try."

"What else is on your mind?" she said.

"I'm trying to convert oData queries into FetchXml expressions for CRM. There's a built-in LINQ provider, but it doesn't really fit complex oData scenarios. For example, it doesn't play nicely with $expand, $orderby, $top, or some kinds of $select. Rather than massaging my queries until it does fit that built-in LINQ provider, I think it's going to be simpler to fall back to generating FetchXML queries. Supposedly they are a little slower than LINQ-generated QueryExpressions, although even that is a little controversial, but at this point I'm more concerned with feature completeness... and FetchXml can supply outer joins, which I absolutely need in order to make oData expands work correctly."

"Hmmm," she said. "Parsing the results might be a bit of a job. It's not coming back in a flat table, is it?"

I paused. "I'm not sure." A few minutes later I said, "Actually, it is. I don't have to parse the XML, but conceptually it is coming back in one big SQL table, which I would be responsible for grouping back into the appropriate objects during an $expand scenario using the server metadata."

"Hmmm. Sounds non-trivial."

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Code Re-use

Code re-use is a good thing, but sometimes it really is quicker to throw away OPA (Other People's Abstractions) and write directly against the lower-level code. Especially if OPA have a lot of features that you aren't going to use and your scenario is simple.

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

TDD

Q: Why is TDD a good idea when bug fixing?
A: Because sometimes the amount of work required to make a "red test" is so much that if you fix the bug first, you will never get around to writing the test infrastructure. (Plus, after you fix the bug, you don't have a good test case for writing that infrastructure.)

Case in point: I have an oData service which fails on certain queries, because the underlying CRM provider which services the queries can't handle certain LINQ expressions. There are likely to be other queries which fail in the future, and I need automated tests to prevent fixed queries from regressing as I tweak my oData service... but the bug repro I have is too heavyweight for a unit test. So instead of fixing the bug I just spent (three? five?) hours digging through dependencies with ILSpy and writing enough test infrastructure that I now have a failing "red test" to document the bug condition... only uses it uses mocks and reproes the bug without any network communication at all.

It's amazing how good I feel about the progress I've made even though the bug itself is still RIGHT THERE.

(Also, git's branch-per-feature paradigm is great for keeping my cognitive load modest while doing TDD.)

--
Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.
Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.
Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.
Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.
Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honor more.

Bayesian inference

[from another conference--a friend asked for a quick explanation of what Bayesian inference is]

The basic idea behind Bayesian reasoning is quite simple, it's simply quantifying with a formula what you do anyway instinctively. Here goes, without the math:

When you estimate probabilities, it's fair to say that you're guessing at the ratio of possible universes. Saying "Three out of four, Richard Nixon is a crook" means that of all the possible universes you can see from where you are today, Richard Nixon is a crook in three of them. "Fifty-fifty it comes up heads" means you think the possible universes are evenly balanced. That's the Bayesian view of probability, that it's a subjective estimate instead of something real.

Bayesian inference is about how your view of a given probability changes over time as you see new things. When you see something new, you delete all the universes in which that thing would not have happened, and then look at the ratio of remaining possibilities for the new probability. Example: say Nixon says "I am not a crook." If I estimate that Nixon would always say that in universes where he is a crook, and he wouldn't bother to say it in half the universes where he isn't a crook, then as soon as he says it, half of the universes where he was innocent vanish. Instead of 3/4 chance he's guilty, it's now a 6/7 chance. (Remember, the chance of being innocent drops from 1/4 to 1/8, and it's the ratio of 1/8 to 3/4 that matters because any universe not in that ratio has already been disproven.)

This doesn't just work for yes/no questions, it could be that I'm trying to decide between "Richard Nixon is a crook" vs. "Richard Nixon is incompetent." Either way I'm simply eliminating possible universes with each piece of evidence.

So far so good, but the great weakness of Bayesian inference is this: I'm simply narrowing down my hypotheses each time based on evidence. What if the truth isn't in any of my hypotheses? What if the real explanation is that "Richard Nixon is an alien"? Since Bayesian inference is all about ELIMINATING possibilities, I will never, ever tumble to the truth. Even if I see him beam himself up into his spaceship, Bayesianism has no way for me to deal with that. And yet in the real world, I would indeed change my mind if I saw his spaceship--I'd generate a new hypothesis on the fly. So my mind isn't Bayesian, it isn't deductive. What is my mind doing?

Bayesian inference is demonstrably the most reasonable way of deciding between two possibilities, but somewhere inside my head I must have a container that says "infinite number of other possibilities."

--
Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.
Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.
Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.
Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.
Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not Honor more.

Moroni

"Yea, verily, verily I say unto you, if all men had been, and were, and ever would be, like unto Moroni, behold, the very powers of hell would have been shaken forever; yea, the devil would never have power over the hearts of the children of men. Behold, he was a man like unto Ammon, the son of Mosiah, yea, and even the other sons of Mosiah, yea, and also Alma and his sons, for they were all men of God."

This is an interesting statement, considering Alma and Ammon's backstory as men over whom, at one point, the devil had quite a lot of power. So it's not something intrinsic to Moroni/Ammon/Alma, but rather a statement about the state which they had achieved by their faith in and obedience to Christ. And therefore you may wish to ponder whether you are, at this time, someone who would cause "the very powers of hell [to be] shaken forever." And if not, how can you become such?

That's what I get out of it, anyway.

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Personal ad

An awful ad at [http://www.ksl.com/index.php?nid=218&ad=27835668&cat&lpid&search=single] inspires me to write my own version.

WANTED

I never thought in a hundred years I'd do something like this but this idea has been floating around in my head for some time now! Time to let it out! :-)

ETERNAL GRATITUDE and/or MY FIRSTBORN CHILD to the person who introduces me to a kindred spirit.

Do you know of a socially-awkward single female with an old-but-cheerful soul who loves all kinds of skill and knowledge and isn't particularly anxious to get married that you would like to line up with a 33-year-old single guy who probably won't ever initiate anything romantic with her but would deeply appreciate having somebody to talk with?

I'm not really comfortable writing about my good qualities, but a few words about my bad qualities: I can be kind of insensitive, either because I genuinely don't notice the signs of distress or because I'm pigheadedly pursuing something I think is more important. I'm less interested in winning arguments than in determining out what is really true (couldn't be a lawyer), and I'm also less interested in appearances (and therefore social status) than being undisturbed in my own agenda. I can be ambitious and motivated at times but I am also subject to ennui and sloth when I get discouraged. Although I do accept criticism without complaint, especially from close friends, I probably have too much faith in my own judgment and I frequently jump to initial conclusions before the data are all in. I am about 200% more emotional than I wish I were. I'm also prone to making rash vows for sentimental reasons which then have to be kept forever, which is why I can now never eat kangaroo or squish a spider ever again, and probably can never marry. (This inflexibility drives people crazy, including my grandfather. Be warned.)

What I look for in a kindred spirit: I'd kind of like someone to balance me out, someone who is more analytical and less hasty, but who still shares my core values. If you know a girl who doesn't wear earrings or makeup, who has never had a boyfriend or kissed a boy nor particularly wants to do so, who occasionally reads books on chemistry or astrophysics for entertainment (even if she doesn't finish them), who doesn't really "get" people, who ignores social conventions when it suits her ("girls can't be blacksmiths!"), who reacts to setbacks with a wry smile and a philosophical shrug, who understands why vows MUST be kept once made, who makes you want to be better and kinder and more tolerant and more intelligent and more pure-hearted like she is--if you know such a girl, I would like to meet her.

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Gun suicides

Interesting result. From http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/firearms-and-suicides-in-us-states.html:

If suicides and gun ownership were being driven by a third factor we would expect gun ownership to be correlated with all suicides not just gun-suicide. What we find, however, is that an increase in gun ownership decrease non-gun suicide. From an economics perspective this makes perfect sense. As gun ownership increases, the cost of gun-suicide falls because guns are easier to access and as the cost of gun-suicide falls there is substitution away from non-gun suicide.

Put differently, when gun ownership decreases other methods of suicide increase. Substitution among methods is not perfect, however, so when gun ownership decreases we see a big decrease in gun-suicide and a substantial but less than fully compensating increase in non-gun suicide so a net decrease in the number of suicides.

- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/firearms-and-suicides-in-us-states.html#sthash.eq0Uf9z1.dpuf

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

On relativity

I'm not sure what to think of this datum. The result seems consistent with special relativity so I presume it's consistent with general relativity too, but then again I don't really understand the math for a rotating reference frame.

Note: On October, 1971, J. C. Hafele of Washington in St. Louis and Richard Keating of the US Naval Observatory in Washington, borrowed two cesium clocks from the Naval Observatory and bought each a first class found trip seat on commercial flights, one headed east, the other west.  The clocks were strapped into the seats and never moved again until they returned, nor were they observed in transit.  "The experiment may be the cheapest ever conducted" to test relativity, Scientific American explained. When the clocks were returned to Washington, the west bound clock had speeded up by 273 nanoseconds compared to an identical clock that remained at the Observatory, and the east bound clock had lost 59 nanoseconds. The previous position of Einstein was that "Moving clocks run slow", but there had been no prediction of a time difference depending on the direction of travel. The explanation by the relativity theorists involved a new frame of reference and a long defense as to what that reference frame was needed. Beckmann's theory predicted the time differences due to the travel of the clocks through Earth's gravitational field.

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Irony

This exchange with Richard Dawkins strikes me as incredibly ironic. (http://www.newstatesman.com/science/2013/10/richard-dawkins-interview-pope-francis-poetry-and-why-jews-win-so-many-nobel-prizes)

IC: One problem with these Darwinian explanations, however convincing they are, is that they aren't really falsifiable.

RD: That is a very common criticism, and it's probably a valid one. That doesn't mean they're wrong, of course. I think from my point of view—I won't say it doesn't matter whether they're right or wrong, it's just sufficient in some cases, for me, to be able to say, Well, at least it's not totally implausible from a Darwinian point of view.

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Jewish ancestry

[Cc K and B]

I haven't digested the scientific evidence in this post yet, but I want to hold on to it for future reference. The implication which leaped out to me is the same one Cochran mentions later on down: if the DNA evidence is accurate and most mitochondrial DNA is of local extraction, then most Jews are not Jewish through the female line of descent. Furthermore, this makes me wonder about studies which have purported to compare Jewish DNA with American Indian DNA in order to disprove the Lamanite hypothesis. If the Jews can't even keep track of their own lines of descent since classical times, what makes anyone think they are a reliable source of comparison DNA for disproving theories about a population which diverged 600 years before that? We don't even KNOW what Lamanite DNA "should" be like.

http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/10/08/jewish-moms/

-Max

--

Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Charity

This story made me laugh. I should cultivate just such a cheerful reaction to lies, instead of offended rage.

In June, I attended a dinner for Bill Clinton, which was educational. Clinton spoke passionately about his foundation, about African wildlife, inequality, childhood obesity, and much else with enormous factual command, emotion, and rhetorical power. But he and I also spoke privately. I asked him about the financial crisis. He paused and then became even more soulful, thoughtful, passionate, and articulate. And then he proceeded to tell me the most amazing lies I've heard in quite a while.

For example, Mr. Clinton sorrowfully lamented his inability to stop the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which banned all regulation of private (OTC) derivatives trading, and thereby greatly worsened the crisis. Mr. Clinton said that he and Larry Summers had argued with Alan Greenspan, but couldn't budge him, and then Congress passed the law by a veto-proof supermajority, tying his hands. Well, actually, the reason that the law passed by that overwhelming margin was because of the Clinton Administration's strong advocacy, including Congressional testimony by Larry Summers and harsh public and private attacks on advocates of regulation by Summers and Robert Rubin.

Wow, I thought, this guy is a really good actor.

From: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-ferguson/hillary-clinton-documentary_b_4014792.html?utm_hp_ref=media

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Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Charlie Munger on technological improvement

I had to dig up this story, sending it to you for future reference. Context was a Facebook conversation on the effect of technological advancement on labor.

Me: "Sometimes the benefit of a new technology doesn't flow to the workers or even the business owners, but only to the inventors of the new machinery (and perhaps to the consumers of the product). Charlie Munger tells an interesting story along those same lines."

[Charlie Munger, from http://ycombinator.com/munger.html]

The great lesson in microeconomics is to discriminate between when technology is going to help you and when it's going to kill you. And most people do not get this straight in their heads. But a fellow like Buffett does.

For example, when we were in the textile business, which is a terrible commodity business, we were making low-end textiles—which are a real commodity product. And one day, the people came to Warren and said, "They've invented a new loom that we think will do twice as much work as our old ones."

And Warren said, "Gee, I hope this doesn't work because if it does, I'm going to close the mill." And he meant it.

What was he thinking? He was thinking, "It's a lousy business. We're earning substandard returns and keeping it open just to be nice to the elderly workers. But we're not going to put huge amounts of new capital into a lousy business."

And he knew that the huge productivity increases that would come from a better machine introduced into the production of a commodity product would all go to the benefit of the buyers of the textiles. Nothing was going to stick to our ribs as owners.

That's such an obvious concept—that there are all kinds of wonderful new inventions that give you nothing as owners except the opportunity to spend a lot more money in a business that's still going to be lousy. The money still won't come to you. All of the advantages from great improvements are going to flow through to the customers.

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Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.

Asking In Prayer About the Book of Mormon

[from a conversation with B.J.]

When I was in the MTC, they kind of made a big deal about praying about the Book of Mormon to know if it's true.

I'd never done it before, and honestly I was kind of embarrassed to do so, but at the same time I knew that at some point someone (an investigator) was going to ask me if I had and it would be simpler to be able to just say, "Yes," instead of explaining why it was unnecessary.

So I did.

And the way the conversation went, metaphorically, was kind of like this:

[Heavenly Father is reading the newspaper]

Max: Um, Father? Is the Book of Mormon true?

[Heavenly Father raises his eyebrows as if to say, "I know that you know that I know that you know..."]

Max: Yeah, that's what I thought.

[end scenario]

It was kind of embarrassing, and sort of a formality, but we both knew why I did it, and it did make things simpler in the long run.

So that's my story.

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Deck thyself now with majesty and excellency; and array thyself with glory and beauty.

Cast abroad the rage of thy wrath: and behold every one that is proud, and abase him.

Look on every one that is proud, and bring him low; and tread down the wicked in their place.

Hide them in the dust together; and bind their faces in secret.

Then will I also confess unto thee that thine own right hand can save thee.

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not Honor more.