Slippery Slope/Tit for Tat

 One of the arguments of "Hive" is that research shows that in a prisoner's dilemna game which extends over multiple sessions, the best strategy is "tit for tat" but not always.  Straight "tit for tat" can lock the players into a vicious cycle of retaliation, often familiar from Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, etc., while the occasional deviation can transform the game into one of cooperation, which is win-win for both parties.  The book arguments that people with higher IQ's take a longer perspective, so are thus more likely to initiate cooperation, leading to group evolution.

It strikes me that "slippery slope" arguments are related to "tit for tat".  Consider SCOTUS nominations--the Republicans start with Bork, the Democrats with Thomas but either way we've evolved away from the Senate confirmations of the Eisenhower/JFK/LBJ era (though from an old Democrat's viewpoint the real starting point was Gerald Ford's crusade against Abe Fortas.  😉

Myrh America II

 Akhil Reed Amar writes in Myth America about the founding fathers.  He emphasizes Washington's importance to the Constitutional Convention and downplays Madison's contribution, sees little difference between "republican" and "democratic", emphasizes the "union" side of the founding, doesn't accept Charles Beard's interpretation, and accepts the Constitution as helping slavery. 

All in all it seems well-argued.  I was surprised by his singling out Beard; by 1960 he seemed no longer prominent.

Myth America

 Started reading this collection of essays, subtitled: "Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past" David Bell leads off with "exceptionalism".  He mentions the Winthrop sermon, but not the Biblical verse to which he referred. (Mathew 5:14 "You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden.") 

I didn't know of the connection to Marxism, though Seymour Martin Lipsetl's use of the concept to explain why the US didn't have socialism was big in the early 60's when I was studying history.

Bell notes Reagan's use of "shining city on a hill" and Gingrich's pushing of the concept as a political weapon against the left, and Obama's formulation that all nations are exceptional. And he notes Daniel Bell's 1975 essay "End of Exceptionalism".

Personally I'm not ready to concede the term to the right.  America is exceptionally  important; on that all sides can agree. Whether we point to a glorious ascension or a past stained by misdeeds, America can't be ignored. The vehemence of the arguments over our past and future testify to exceptional importance.

Ukraine

 Lots of media coverage of the 1-year anniversary of the Russia invasion into Ukraine.

In general I've been in favor of the Biden policy, supporting Ukraine against Russia but avoiding committing US troops. I still am.  But I remember in the early days after 9/11, I had some doubts,never expressed, about the Bush policy. He seemed to have called it right for some time, but now the conventional wisdom says it was a mistake.

In the case of the Ukraine, we forget Russia invaded in 2014, took Crimea and a good portion of eastern Ukraine. Why the new invasion--was it because EU/NATO/US didn't support Ukraine that much in 2014?

My bottom line--it's complicated and I don't see an easy ending.  Biden's making his calls; they seem reasonable today, they may or may not be the right ones when looking back at it from 20 years on.

A Shepherd Is Angry

 

This ELMs scheme is SO POOR… where are the options for regenerative grazing, for long recovery periods, for trampling carbon, for hyper diverse permanent pasture, for agro-ecological transition, and for actually earning the real cost of public benefits? https://t.co/G0rawZT5xA

— James Rebanks (@herdyshepherd1) January 31, 2023

Good Old Days of Democratic Dominance

 James Fallows had a tribute to Jimmy Carter today, mentioning in passing that the Democratic margin in the House was 150!! I checked, it actually was 149 in 1977 and 122 in 1979.

As Fallows noted, the big fights were intra-party.

Fear the Future--Bot and Sock Puppets

 A comment the other day about communications from fake social media sites--sock puppets.  The writer observed it was sometimes hard to identify messages from bots.

My fear--you ain't seen nothing yet.  Someone is already linking Chatgpt to their fake media sites, so they can push out messages which seem very real with little effort. 

HIve Mind and the Mathew Effect

 Reading Hive Mind by Garret Jones. Finding it good through the first chapters, until he got to the "Ingredients for Good Politics" and the Coase Theorem.  A fast summary: if a state has people focused on the long term, and willing to accept the results of elections, there can be effective bipartisan deals to handle externalities (like pollution) using Coase.  Coase says that if you have good negotiators they can find a win-win solution without the need for regulation. 

Then I started thinking about the Matthew Effect.

An assumption in the discussion is that high IQ people are more future-oriented and more able to do tit for tat bargaining, without holding grudges which lead to mutual destruction. The problem when you apply the idea to politics is that those with the gold/assets are able to hire those with IQ (lobbyists and lawyers) to rig the bargain.

How To Avoid Taxes

 Reading a book by Scott Galloway: Adrift, America in 100 Charts.

He has a chart showing the increase in the amount of corporate earning which are booked in tax havens.  It's gone from 0% in the 1960's to 50% in 2016.  

I wonder what it means.  If we see a figure that corporations pay x% of their income as taxes, is their real tax rate considering total income x/2 %

And the audit rate has declined from the good old days of 1960 of 3 percent to less than .5%.

On Vice and the Prohibition Thereof

 I seldom agree with Prof. Blackman, but I envy him his office setup. (Seven monitors, it's incredible.  I tweeted a snarky comment about the relationship to high tuition rates, but his output is so voluminous that he might be producing seven times that of the average law professor.)

I might agree with his negative assessment of the SCOTUS decision on sports betting.

It seems to me humans are prone to being addicted, sometimes to good things, sometimes bad.  I'm not libertarian enough to say  everyone can choose her own addiction.  I'd rather see the government intervene, possibly with "nudges" rather than flat prohibitions.  Taxing vices like cigarettes and alcohol is good, taxing gambling 

Programming? Chat Bots

 ". It's just programmed to seem human." That's a sentence from Ann Althouse, in a post reacting to the frontpage article in the NYTimes recounting an exchange with Microsoft's trial version of a chat bot. 

I'm jumping in where I have no knowledge, but that's not the way I understand chat bots like ChatGPT, etc.  Aren't they "learning models"?  To me that means the programmer is responsible for the IQ of the model, of the bot, but not the content of the responses. So it seems that ChatGPT et.al. will be showing us an average person, "average" based on the context the bot is learning from, which seems to be the usual suspects--white, european, educated etc. 

I suppose by controlling the content from which the bot learns the developers can create different personas--say develop a basic personality, then give it a collection of the 500 greatest books in some category with instructions to give the words in them triple the weight. 

Brain Tests

 I've participated in some research on the aging brain, partly because my mother started showing signs of what we assumed was Alzheimers at about my current age, partly out of do-gooder syndrome. 

Two of the projects had me run various computer-based exercises.  The most recent one is being run by a Phd with Georgetown University, possibly with the hospital; I'm not clear.   His exercises spanned a wider variety of challenges than I'd run into before: for example seeing a long sequece pairing seldom seen names (because rare in English or originating in a foreign language) with pictures of the objects  or a sequence of pairs of objects with no obvious connection (i.e., a brick and a coffin). 

Before I got old, I'd almost always do well on tests, tests requiring language knowledge and identifying shapes.  As I've reached my 80's I'm doing less well on the familiar tests, and absolutely lousy on some of the Georgetown tests.  While some of my problems likely are changes in my brain, I think I never would have done well on some of them. 

The ways I and my spouse process ideas and experience are often very different, which was observed years ago when we both took the same tests.  She hasn't taken the Georgetown tests, but I expect she would do much better  than I did on some of the tests.  

In a perfect world, knowing what I do now, I'd wish I had taken these tests back in my teens.  It would have expanded my view of how brains work, and made me better.

Suoer Bowl Ads

Watched the first half of the Super Bowl last night.  Turned it off when Mahomes was injured, knowing the Chiefs were done for.  Besides, I tuned out of all the ads because mostly they included people I didn't recognize.  I realize I'm almost totally disconnected from popular entertainment and celebrity culture. 

Proper Representation II

 When I was young "representation" wasn't an issue. Instead you had "mobility", the idea that immigrants climbed the ladder from poverty to middle class with some striking it rich.  Actually there were different ladders--Jews were noted boxers and basketball players before they became doctors and lawyers. Mobility was often about "firsts". We noted the "firsts"--the first Jewish SCOTUS justice, the first Polish cabinet secretary, even the first black cabinet secretary.

Emphasizing the firsts obscured our view of the many, or perhaps was just a way to avoid looking at the many.   But "firsts" are still important; they show what is possible, what isn't prohibited.  Similarly the extreme cases, like Muggsy Bogues, may be outliers but they too show what's possible.

Somehow this discussion ties into "intersectionality" to me.  But that's for another day.

AFIDA and Congress

 CRS has a paper on the issue of foreign ownership of agricultural land in preparation for the upcoming farm bill.  Two items of note--about half the acreage included in FSA's AFIDA data is forest land (apparently a lot of which is in Maine) and China doesn't show up in the discussion of the owners of the most land.

They mention possible problems in FSA's data, including a request to GAO to look at it.  I am sure there are problems. 

What Is Proper Representation?

The conventional wisdom now seems to be that groups, whether ethnic, racial, gender, ideological, deserve to have representation in every walk of life that matches their presence in society.  

For example, I've noted articles on the dwindling presence of American blacks in major league baseball; the absence of blacks in management positions in the NFL, the lack of conservative professors in higher education, etc

My first reaction is to go slowly--the first consideration is whether there are legal barriers to such representation. Those I presume are almost always wrong. 

A second consideration is that under-representation of one group necessarily means over-representation of other group(s).  For example, the over-representation of Asian students in top educational institutions (i.e., Harvard, Thomas Jefferson High School) is the other side of the under-representation of other minorities. 

A third consideration is the under-representation  of a group in one area means the over-representation in other area(s).  For example, the over-representation of blacks in pro football and basketball seems to be the counterpart to their under-representation in pro baseball.

A fourth consideration is trajectory through history.  For example, blacks seem to have created and still dominate areas of music (about which I know nothing), like hip hop and rap.  Jews seem to be prominent in Hollywood and the entertainment industry.

A final consideration (some would put it first) is whether the differential representation indicates a barrier to advancement of some kind. One rule of advancement is usually--it depends on who you know--meaning the greater the representation the easier it is to advance.

The Hole In FSA Management?

 FSA has something called Box Onespan, which appears to be an on-line signature manager. I'm guessing from messages on the FSA Employee group on Facebook that FSA continues to have a hole in its management. 

What hole?  Someone who worries about the day-to-day operation of the county office; someone who is the authority on the common tools used in the office, who worries about training and answering questions.  Instead there's an ad hoc network of county personnel sharing information and tips.

The hole existed, I think, when I worked there and likely still exists. The problem is management in DC is specialized so no one has a unified picture of how things come together in the county office.  

IIRC there were occasional efforts in ASCS/FSA to come up with such a picture: training classes for counter clerks, manuals for district directors, and sometime the area/regional directors in DC would have a take. 

[Updated to eliminate double negative in title]

ChatGPT and Congress

 Yesterday there was a report, which I may be garbling, that Google had given ChatGPT the same test questions they give to engineering job applicants, and the AI qualified as a level 3, apparently an entry level.  The starting salary for level 3 was given as about $180K, more than the starting salary for a new member of Congress, not to mention a member of considerable seniority. 

Not sure what that says about AI, Google, Congress, or the US. 

New EWG Report on Distribution of Farm Payments

 Various newspapers picked up the EWG report.

The lede for one: "The top 10% of recipients of federal farm payments raked in more than 79% of total subsidies over the last 25 years ",  

Here's the EWG report.

Elsewhere they note that the Trump administration changed the reporting of payments--I think FSA must be reporting payments to assignees, so likely using the payee data, not the payable. 

[Update: they note the change in reporting reveals which financial institutions get the most payments: " Surprisingly, the financial institution that received the most farm subsidies was the USDA. The USDA’s Farm Service Agency, or FSA, alone got almost $350 million in farm subsidies between 2019 and 2021, more than any other financial organization." Not a surprise to anyone who understands how the payments word.]]

The Importance of Making/Fixing Things

 A recent hole in the roof meant I had to move away from my keyboard and actually do some work, physical work repairing the damage to drywall.  

Since gardening has been inactive this winter, I've not been doing such work. I found it good to be active, to try to do something, and actually succeed, not perfectly but good enough for government work.  (Note the source says it used to mean quality work. In some ways government specifications still are more particular, and certainly more expensive, than "off the shelf" civilian products. (Note the origin of this expression, not at all related to its current use, meaning standard items, not bespoke.

That's a digression--my point is doing the work was rewarding.

Police Killed in Line of Duty

 Turns out there's a wikipedia page for US police killed in line of duty. Quite a contrast with a page for UK police killed.

For anyone too lazy to click, US killings of police run about 50 or above, the UK runs about 1 a year.

The context is the culture: US view police as maintaining order against crime in the midst of an armed populace, meaning a focus on conflict and violence, while the UK has a different history. In short, there's not an arms race in the UK, there is in US.