This is my first (inter)national press, I’m a little embarrassed to feel excited about it. Its also a pleasant surprise, I wouldn’t have expected it to have general appeal.
Links:
I spent the summer of 2012 with fascinating people. Seeing only their talent as scientists, I thought I knew how fascinating they were. But this short-notice series of short talks revealed their depth. There is no record of the proceedings, only the program:
SFI CSSS Enfascination, for we must stop at nothing to start at everything:
Priya on Symmetries
Kyle on the adversarial paradigm
Drew on the history of espionage in Santa FE
Tom’s song, the Power Law Blues
Seth on keiteki rio
“Yeats on robots sailing to Byzantium” by Chloe
Christa and her Feet
Xin on Disasters
“Kasparo, A robotics opera” by Katrien
Jasmeen on post-war polish poetry
Keith on voting
Madeleine’s “Paradoxes of modern agriculture”
Sandro singing “El Piscatore”
Robert on audio illusions, specifically Shephard tones and the McGurk effect
Isaac on biblical Isaac
Miguel on the diversity of an unpronounceably beautiful variety of sea creature
Nick on mechanical turk
Georg’s poetry
Some things take time, but it only takes an instant to realize that you have no idea what’s going on. This epiphany-every time it happens-is punctuated by the sound of 500 stars around the universe literally exploding, dissolving their planets and neighbors in flaming atoms, in silence. It happens every instant, forever. As right as you were, its impossible for you to know how right.
The 2012 program from May 5, 2012, featuring:
“Libary”, “supposably”, and other wonderful nuggets welcomed me to southern Indiana five years ago. I no longer have inSUREance, I have IN-surance. I eventually also learned that the grass needs mowed, the fence needs painted, the dishes need washed, and the car needs fixed and sold.
But the best ones are those that it takes you five years to realize you’ve been hearing the whole time. Natives will ask for a Reesee cup. Tonight I saw a father and daughter walk in. The dad said Reese’s pieces, the daughter said Reesee pieces, both referring to the same thing. I asked about it, and not even they had realized that they were saying it different. Its been getting as far as my ears the whole time I’ve been in the state, but it took me this long to actually let it as far up as my conscious awareness.
I’m distributing jobs and had a bit of trouble with my scripts. I don’t want to go to every computer on the cluster one-by-one to get the right scripts on them, and we’ve turned ssh off, and it’ll take going to each one to turn it on. Plus what if a later script needs different libraries? This pretty simple (*nix-/OSX-only) snippet installs the package if you don’t already have it, and it works even if xgrid is chugging without special privileges:
if (!("urpackagehere" %in% installed.packages())) {install.packages("urpackagehere", repos = "http://cran.r-project.org", lib="/tmp/")}
In high school I would bring very large sandwiches constructed with many pounds of meat and bread. They were famous enough that I would sell them. I bought some in exchange for people’s souls. Jonathan Lazarus wouldn’t sell his, but he offered to make me a song instead, and I couldn’t have hoped for more.
link
This is 1998 or 1999. He died two weeks ago, hit by a train. His brother Ben made this video to remember Jon. RIP Jonathan Lazarus. RIP also Sean Emdy who was in the same high school class, and was killed the same way in 2003 or 2004. Thanks also to Ben.
They don’t currently do social science, but they’ve gotten a taste of what it can do and where it can go. They’ve hired me to help launch an interdisciplinary behavioral research agenda — economics, sociology, psychology — lab experiments, web experiments, simulations, and big data. I don’t know what to expect, but I believe its in line with my goals for myself and I’m excited and grateful.
Uncountably many photons have come from the sun, bounced off of me, and shot back into space. One day one of them is going to come back. Photons turn as they pass heavy things. A photon retreating from me is being turned, slowly, over billions of empty years, all the way around. A black hole can turn them around in one shot. Ancient photons are returning simultaneously, from all over, right now.
What it means is that we can see ourselves in the sky. At least one of those dots is the Earth in the past. If we manage to see it at all, we won’t start out seeing much more than a fuzzy dot, “Yep, there it is.” But there could be thousands or millions of earths in the sky. Each fragile broken circuit of light is a channel, or rather a mirror, showing the earth as it was or wasn’t 1, 2, 5, 8 billion years ago. Between them, you have the entire history of the earth being projected back to it at each moment.
The most interesting action is in the past millions and thousands of years. To open up the Earth’s human past we would need a black hole very close, within a few thousand light years, like V4641 Sgr, 1600 light years away. I want to watch the decline of Rome. Going further back, I want to see the earthquake that split the temple curtain. And I want to look in the sky and see an ancestor’s eyes as they look up to God. Not to be God, but to make eye contact full of love, and excitement, and no answers.
From unsympathetic eyes, no science is more arrogant than astronomy. Astronomers think that we can know the universe and replace the dreams and the meaning in the skies with a cold place that is constantly dying.
But I think that there is no more humble science than astronomy. No science has had so much romance imposed on it by the things that we want to be true, no other science has found a starker reality, and no other science has submitted so thoroughly. They’ve been so pummelled by what they’ve seen that they will believe absolutely anything that makes the equations balance out. As the wild story currently goes, the universe is growing at an accelerating rate because invisible matter woven into the universe is pulling the stars from each other. Its hard to swallow, and we don’t appreciate how astronomers struggled to face that story. They’ve accepted that the universe has no regard for our sense of sensibility, and they are finally along for the ride. I wish it was me, I want to see how much I’m missing by thinking I understand.
Awe Talks are a 5-minute fun lecture series started by my pal Kyle. He asked me to record one, here: http://vimeo.com/59541529
This paper, published with my advisor Rob Goldstone, reports a major result of my dissertation, that people can flock not only physically, but also in their depth of iterated reasoning through each other’s motives. It is interesting because of the many economists who hoped that type of reasoning would prevent flocking. Ha!
* Here is the paper: http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0056416
which follows the preprint
* One-minute video of this emergent cyclical behavior: http://vimeo.com/50459678
* Three-minute video explaining it in terms of the movie The Princess Bride: http://posterhall.org/igert2012/posters/218
* And here is a press release draft to give you a sense of it:
Rock-Paper-Scissors reveals herd behavior in logical reasoning
“Poor Bart, always picks Rock.” In these telling words from Lisa Simpson, we see Rock-Paper-Scissors as a game of mind reading. Scientists have already used Rock-Paper-Scissors to study how we cooperate, to show that we are bad randomizers, and to build AIs that can beat us at our own game. But this simple game has many more tricks up its sleeve. Rock-Paper-Scissors gives us the ideal case study for herd behavior in higher-level reasoning: specifically, thoughts about the thoughts of others. You would like to think that your thoughts are your own, but recent work from the Indiana University Cognitive Science program shows that people playing Rock-Paper-Scissors subtly influence each other, converging on similar ways of reasoning over time. The natural analogy is to a flock of birds veering in concert.
In work appearing in PLoS ONE (XXX), Seth Frey and Robert L. Goldstone introduce a version of Rock-Paper-Scissors called the Mod Game. In each round, they gave IU psychology undergraduates a choice between the numbers 1 through 24. Participants earned money for picking a number exactly one greater than someone else, but the choices wrapped around in a circle so that 1 beat 24 (just as Ace beats King in card games). Participants just had to anticipate what others were going to pick, and pick the next number up — keeping in mind that everyone else was thinking the same thing. In this game of one-upmanship, the best performers aren’t the ones who think the most steps ahead, but the ones who think just the right number of steps ahead — about two, as it turned out in the experiment.
Many economists predict that with enough experience, people should be able to think infinite steps ahead, or at least that their number of steps should increase dramatically over time. But this isn’t what happened in the Mod Game. Instead, when participants were shown each previous round’s results, they tended to cluster in one part of the circle of choices and start bounding around it in synch. Groups produced a compelling periodic orbit around the choices, reminiscent of the cultural pendulum swinging back and forth, bringing, say, moustaches in and out of fashion. Interestingly, the cycling behavior consistently got faster with time. This means that people did learn to think further ahead with time — the economic prediction was partly correct — but the increase was much less dramatic than it ought to have been: after 200 rounds of the Mod Game, the average number of thinking steps increased by only half a step, from 2 to 2.5. Moreover, herding in this game benefited everyone; a tighter grouping of choices means a higher density of money to be earned in each round.
What does all this mean for society? Typical treatments of higher-level reasoning look to it as preventing herd behavior, but we can now see it as a source. Anticipation may be the motor that keeps fads running in circles. It could be a source of the violent swings that we see in financial markets. And if you’ve ever been in a bidding war on Ebay, you may have been caught in this dynamic yourself. If every bidder is tweaking their increasing bids based on the tweaks of others, then the whole group may converge in price and in how those prices rise. The process isn’t governed by the intrinsic value of that mint Star Wars lunch box you’re fighting for, but on the collective dynamics of people trying to reason through each other’s thoughts. Whether looking at benign social habits or mass panics, social theorists have always treated human herd behavior as though it resulted from mindlessness. But this simple lesson from Rock-Paper-Scissors suggests that even the most sophisticated reasoning processes may be drawn about by the subtle influence of social interaction.
In institutional economics, there are four main kinds of resource, classified by whether they are limited (yes or no) and whether you can keep others from using them (yes or no). Now everyone who uses these categories knows that they are fuzzy, and full of exceptions. They can vary in degree, by context, and in time. WiFi gives us a beautiful example of how technology (and defaults) can change the nature of a resource. These days, early 2013, wireless routers come password-protected out of the box, and they come initialized with unique hard-to-crack passwords. That wasn’t the case in the early 2000s, when routers either came unlocked by default or locked with an easy-to-find default password. In those days, wifi was a common-pool resource in that it was limited (only so much bandwidth) and you couldn’t keep others out of it by default. You needed special knowledge to create a proper password and turn your wireless into the private good (still limited, but excludable) that you get out of the box today.
The point about technology has been made. Governing the Commons contains a history of roundups in the Western US, showing how the invention of barbed wire turned the large cattle herds from a managed common-pool resource into a private (excludable) good. The WiFi example adds the influence of defaults, which makes it a bit more interesting, since we see a case in which the flip of a switch can change the nature of a good, and we see how, given the choice, society has chosen private property over common property over the past ten years.
But there is another facet to the WiFi resource. Another feature that comes default is the broadcast SSID, or the name of your wifi. These are often informative, but they can also be impressively inappropriate. Trying to steal wireless on the road, you can be driving around a beautiful peaceful thoroughly-family-looking neighborhood and stumble upon all kinds of sinister things in the air.
What kind of resource is the NSFW SSID? Well, lets be square and say that its a bad rather than a good. Its non-subtractable because unlike bandwidth my reading it doesn’t interfere with your reading it. Its common. By all that, NSFW SSID’s are a public bad, pollution. And what is interesting about all this is that a resource can be anything, even the name of an interesting resource can be an interesting resource, one that gets managed by norms and rules, and one that channels all the complexity of human society.
People imagine that experts know lots of things. I mean, it’s true, but that’s like saying the ocean is full of sand. The ocean, as full of sand as it is, is more full of questions.
I think we all miss the point of expertise a little, but experts are the farthest off. I’m on the path to becoming an expert myself. When it happens, I’ll do my part to disappoint the people who expect answers. I’d sooner disappoint them than not. I think the cleanest pursuit of science is the pursuit of feeling small. Maybe it sounds depressing to have only this defiantly inadequate expertise, but it beats the alternative.
My server was down for two weeks at the beginning of 2013 — Jan 9 to Jan 25 — before I fixed it. All is well now. Sorry.
So I was at a lumber yard looking at the fancy woods they’ve got. A guy on the yard was walking me through showing me what they’ve got, and at the end he added with a gesture “… and this here is just the run of the mill.” I realized at that moment that I was for the very first time hearing that expression in context. For a big geek that kind of thing can be pretty exciting and I, personally, am pretty easily amazed. People say things, they get meaning, those meanings change, but not as a unit. Phrases diffuse over the hills, or hop on to different islands, and evolve in their own directions to suit their own environments.
Ever wonder why the standard hotel breakfast is called the continental breakfast? I did — not as a thing I’ve always actively wondered about, it has just been an ambient missing piece. Well I figured it out this morning. I’m in the UK, and they were serving two options, the British breakfast and the Continental breakfast. Get it? The Continent is a meaningful idea, but only from the UK. This morning I had my first authentic continental breakfast, which is a hilarious idea, because continental means “other,” and its a mash and interpretation of the very different breakfasts served in every region of every nation of the continent. So its inherently inauthentic, but this was still the authentic inauthentic non-British breakfast. Its based most probably on the French breakfast. Croissant, with marmite, fruit, coffee or chocolate. The British breakfast is eggs, tomato, two kinds of vulgar sausage, and “bacon,” known to me as fried ham.
So there it is. Continental breakfast is the British interpretation of breakfast on the continent, and its great! Your Motel 8 roadside continental breakfast is only a cheap imitation of the true cheap imitation that I’m tucking in every morning this week.
Another funny thing about Britain: One of the many junkfood companies calls itself the real McCoy. Also, all the elevator voices have British accents.
I spent way too long trying to find percentile ranks for FIDE ELO scores (international professional chess players). Percentiles exists for USCF (USA-ranked Chess players; http://archive.uschess.org/ratings/ratedist.php) but not FIDE, which is different, and worth knowing, and worth being able to map. So I just did it myself. In the process I got percentile equivalences for many other systems and game Federations. I used this data: http://ratings.fide.com/download.phtml
and got the percentiles in the far right hand column.
Disclaimer: I pulled some tricks, this is all approximate, there are translations of translations of equivalences, but this is what we’ve got. Everyone who has pulled any of these numbers knows that they don’t really mean what they say as precisely as they aspire to mean what they say. Also, don’t interpret these as equivalences, for example, FIDE is more professional than USCF, so the worst players in it are way way better than the worst in USCF.
|
Percentile |
AGA | KGS | USCF | EGF | UCSF2 | EGF kyu/dan | Korean kyu/dan | Japan kyu/dan | A(ussie)CF | FIDE | |||||||
| 1% | -34.61 | -24.26 | 444 | 100 | 20 k | 22k | 17+ k | 100 | 1319 | ||||||||
| 2% | -32.58 | -22.3 | 531 | 100 | 20 k | 22 k | 17+ k | 200 | 1385 | ||||||||
| 5% | -27.69 | -19.2 | 663 | 153 | 100 | 20 k | 22 k | 17 k | 300 | 1494 | |||||||
| 10% | -23.47 | -15.36 | 793 | 456 | 16 k | 18 k | 13 k | 600 | 1596 | ||||||||
| 20% | -18.54 | -11.26 | 964 | 953 | 500 | 12 k | 13 k | 9 k | 900 | 1723 | |||||||
| 30% | -13.91 | -8.94 | 1122 | 1200 | 9 k | 10 k | 6 k | 1100 | 1815 | ||||||||
| 40% | -9.9 | -7.18 | 1269 | 1387 | 7 k | 8 k | 4 k | 1300 | 1890 | ||||||||
| 50% | -7.1 | -5.65 | 1411 | 1557 | 1000 | 6 k | 7 k | 3 k | 1400 | 1958 | |||||||
| 60% | -4.59 | -4.19 | 1538 | 1709 | 4 k | 5 k | 1 k | 1500 | 2021 | ||||||||
| 70% | -1.85 | -2.73 | 1667 | 1884 | 3 k | 4 k | 1 d | 1600 | 2081 | ||||||||
| 80% | 2.1 | -1.28 | 1807 | 2039 | 1500 | 1 k | 2 k | 3 d | 1800 | 2147 | |||||||
| 90% | 4.71 | 2.52 | 1990 | 2217 | 1800 | 2 d | 1 d | 4 d | 1900 | 2236 | |||||||
| 95% | 6.12 | 3.88 | 2124 | 2339 | 1900 | 3 d | 2 d | 5 d | 2100 | 2308 | |||||||
| 98% | 7.41 | 5.29 | 2265 | 2460 | 2100 | 4 d | 3 d | 5 d | 2200 | 2398 | |||||||
| 99% | 8.15 | 6.09 | 2357 | 2536 | 2200 | 5 d | 4 d | 6 d | 2300 | 2454 | |||||||
| 99.50% | 8.7 | 7.2 | 2470 | 2604 | 2300 | 6 d | 5 d | 6 d | 2400 | 2516 | |||||||
| 99.90% | 9.64 | pro | 2643 | 2747 | 2500 | 3p | 2500 | 2625 | |||||||||
| top | 10.12 | 9p | 2789 | 2809 | 2700 | 5p | |||||||||||
| source | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 4 | 5 | me, with 6 | |||||||
All useful links while I was doing this:
Another note: ELO is a “rating,” while dan/kyu is a “ranking.”
Some things take time, but it only takes an instant to realize that you have no idea what’s going on. This epiphany—every time it happens—is punctuated by the sound of 500 stars around the universe literally exploding, dissolving their planets and neighbors in flaming atoms, in silence. It happens every instant, forever. As right as you were, it’s impossible for you to know how right.
Enfascination is a very tiny event that celebrates the act of being caught. You have five minutes to share something that you think is fascinating—that’s the only rule. You will find that the people you are sharing with are fascinated too, and you will be caught by things you’ve never thought to catch.
The 2012 Enfascination Lectures
Why: I would love for you to share.
When: Saturday, May 5th, or “Thinko de Mayo,” starting at, say, 5PM.
Where: Probably in the basement of Woodburn Hall, on the IU campus
Really?: Probably, maybe not. I just made this all up now so times and places can change. Check this webpage for updates.
This year’s occasion is my 30th birthday, but this is the ninth year that I’ve been hosting this birthday lecture series. Past topics have included Counting the Permutations of Digit Strings, Conceptions of Time in History, Chili Peppers, How to cross a glacier, The Singularity, Indiana Jones, Rural desert water distribution systems, Hexaflexagons, Small precious things, Wilderness Camps as Commodity, DIY Cooking, Roman Emperor Deaths , Joy of Science, Salt , Three Great Banquets in Italian History, How to Sharpen a Chisel, Some Properties of Numbers in Base Ten, The Physiological Limits to Human Perception of Time, Geophagy, Pond Ecology, Superstition: For Fun and Profit, Counterintuitive Results in Hydrodynamics, The Wolof Conception of Time, Arctic String Figures, The Seven Axioms of Mathematics, Dr Seuss and his Impact on Contemporary Children’s Literature, Motorcycle Life and Culture, Cultural Differences Between Japan and the US, Brief history of the Jim Henson Company, Female Orgasm, Insider Trading: For Fun and Profit, Film of Peter Greenaway, A Typographical Incident with Implications for the Structure of Thought, Cooperative Birth Control, Tones in Mandarin, Unschooling and Deschooling, Q&A: Fine Beer, DIY Backpacking, Chinese Nationalism in Tibet, Biofuels, The Yeti, The Health Benefits of Squatting, The Big Bang, How to Pick Stocks Like a Pro, Food Preservation Technique, or Managing Rot, Demonstrations in Number Theory, Rangolis, Kolum, The Hollow Earth, Edible Mushrooms: For Fun and Profit, Human Asexuality, A History of the California Central Valley Watershed, An Account of the Maidu Creation, Rural India, German Compound Words, Manipulating Children, Physics of Time, Animal Training on Humans, Constructed Languages, This Week’s Weather, The XYZs of Body Language, Light Filtration Through Orchards, Our Limits in Visualizing High Dimensional Spaces,Twin Studies. There is video for some of it, notes for others, collected here.
see you there,
seth.
I love the paper, its about the evolution of neural structure. Do brains have parts? Do bodies have parts? If you think so, you’re very forward thinking, because science has no idea how that could possibly have evolved. Kashtan and Alon published a mechanism for the evolution of structure. They proposed that if environments have modular structure then things that evolve in them will as well. Or something like that.
I had trouble replicating their result. By the time I did, I had lost all faith in it. There are some tricks to make the effect seem bigger than it is, and there might be some confounds, though I stopped short of proving it. I’ve got a proposal all written up, but I changed disciplines before I could implement. I’m not the only one who couldn’t replicate — I’ve met others who had the same problem.
I still love that paper, but I personally believe that the mystery of evolved structure is more unsolved than we think.
Neat: incubation ranges for many food-borne llnesses. No, I didn’t get sick, I just got curious because of Kate’s research on Tweet What You Eat.
I really didn’t think I would come out of graduate school as a smarter person. I knew that I would know more about stuff, but I assumed, if anything, I would come out constrained by some understanding of how epiphany “should” happen. But I had a funny experience playing Minesweeper yesterday. It was a lapse: in high school I played 4–6 hours a day. It was the first thing I was ever good at. Even though my behavior back then was addictive, I credit Minesweeper with giving me experiences of life that have been indelible. That probably sounds crazy, but I found my first glimpse of self-worth in being good at Minesweeper. And since it is a talent that no normal person would value, I recognized immediately that self-worth was not a thing that has to be connected to what others think. It sounds obvious, but it was big and it changed me completely. I quit playing the game some time in there (around the time that my friend Sudano became way better than me–another valuable experience) and in the decade since I’ve picked it up for maybe a few days every year or so.
Every return to the game has made me feel good and familiar. I’ve recognized every time that if I invested the time I could get as good as I once was (the game is not very physical), and each time I’ve recognized as quickly that I don’t want that. The annual moment of weakness returned two days ago when I started playing a Minesweeper clone instead of reading papers. I only put in an hour, and I was as slow a player as ever, but the experience of playing had changed. I was seeing the game in a way that I never had before. I could recognize, with the consistency of habit, the irrelevance of my old approach to the game. The number-patterns are all the same, but patterns are just the beginning of Minesweeper. Two humps that I never even recognized before were a habitual hesitation before taking necessary risks and an attachment to the visual patterns made available by certainty. On Wednesday I saw the humps clearly, over my shoulder.
It can be really depressing with people, but there are some ways that it is great to interact with a thing that is exactly the same ten years later. Playing Minesweeper gave me an opportunity to measure myself in a very clean way, and it gave me a surprise. Honestly, I don’t really believe that the training I’m receiving in graduate school made me better at Minesweeper. Between challenges at school, at home, and in a relationship, I’m a very different person than I was a year ago. I still can’t describe-in-words any of the changes I feel, but I know I have some expectation of what the changes must have been because of how surprised I was to find “Better at Minesweeper” among them.
There was another time in my life when I was entirely devoted to learning how to draw. I was drawing at least four hours a day for a month. Every week or so I would run my work by an artist in town. On day 1, I was OK. Between day 1 and day 14 I got better. Between day 14 and day 30, I got worse. I had an urgent sense of time, so it was depressing to realize that I had learned to become worse; I didn’t draw at all for the next 30 days. But during that time I discovered the amazing complement to getting-worse-by-doing. I could tell by the way I was physically looking at objects that I was, in those moments, getting better at drawing (drawing is about seeing). Here is a great example of giving too much power to a person that isn’t ready for it: Take someone with an unhealthy commitment to productivity and show them that it is possible to get better at something by not doing it. Instead of accepting that rest and relaxation are a part of growth, I indulged the mystical realization that by doing nothing I could become good at Everything. It was a good time, only in part because it was grounded in the absurd.
Through all of it there is a me in a world putting meaning on things and feeling. I like the idea that I’m currently doing and learning everything. It isn’t just an appreciation that everything-affects-everything; I know the initial conditions are sensitive to me, that I can flap in hurricanes, but there is more. I cherish the invisible decrement to my ambition when a close friend does something that I have always wanted to do. I suddenly don’t need it as much anymore–vicarious experience is experience enough if you use a capital V. And suddenly, again, I’m presently doing nearly everything in the world, merely by caring about people.
What does it mean when the things you believe make you feel gigantic, but the corresponding growth they imply for the world makes you net invisible? The unfolding powers of ten leave enough room for meaning and meaninglessness to coexist, and they make it natural to feel good, busy, tiny, and lost all at the same time. The only real danger in being a busybody is forgetting that its silly. I’m totally content to be a silly creature imagining itself to be doing and learning everything. In fact, I’m thrilled.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_island
I’ve been reading a lot about the history of early Christianity, and a lot of the theories and ideas that define it. A lot of the scholarship is totally wild, and a lot is pretty sound; some is both, but its all confusing, because these things get mixed together indiscriminately. It motivated me to create a taxonomy of “knowability” for theories about Christ and early Christianity. The taxonomy allowed me to craft a test by which I judge if a theory is worth taking seriously. For me to take a Bible theory seriously, it has to have more evidence than the suspicious theory that Jesus was a hypocrite and demagogue.
First, the taxonomy. It isn’t exactly a scale, and there is room for overlap and grey. It is still loose enough that two people could put the same theory into the pragmatic or reach categories, so this is currently only a personal taxonomy for establishing one’s own sense or the sense of a community that shares one’s assumptions.
I’ll only warily assert anything into the faith type of knowing, and “beyond a reasonable doubt” is a luxury reserved for very few aspects of Biblical history. In general, I’m wary to assume that I know anything with more certainty than I know that I’ve got two feet on the ground, and even that is fair to call suspect. Going down the ladder, none of the theories I’m willing to work with can really be proven false, so I’m lowering the bar; falsifiability is too strict a standard for ancient history. Even without it, historians can establish things that are worth trying to establish. So how far down should I go?
Now that we’ve got a scale of knowing things about the history of early Christianity, I’m going to be the devil’s advocate and pose a reach/fringe theory that Jesus was a demagogue and a hypocrite. Its purpose is to serve as a criterion for judging other theories, and for establishing the legitimacy (in my eyes) of theories of ancient history. I’ll consider your theory if it is more plausible than the theory that Jesus was merely a human demagogue.
Here is the theory: Demagogues are people who preach a populist message, often to the poor, while themselves living within the means that they criticize.* Demamgogues happen. People want supernatural, and a demagogue can convey that without doing anything impossible. Here is the case that Jesus was living large, using only evidence from the Gospels, the most legitimate accounts of the Life of Christ: getting his hair perfumed, breaking Sabbath by not fasting, the thousands of loaves, the parable for rich people. From this theory it makes sense that he would say he isn’t having wine tomorrow night, and it explains the doting entourages that retrieved him donkey and presented lepers and blind people to him.
This theory is reach/fringe, but it errs on the side of pragmatic. It obviously has lots of problems as a theory, but that’s the point. I think that a more sympathetic read is at least as plausible, but also that a reasonable person could believe all of this.
Whether it is right or wrong is irrelevant. It is at least as true as the New Testament case against (for example) homosexuality *. Things I’m willing to work with: I think Q passes the test, also the existences of Herod and Pilate *, even the existence of Godfearers.
These theories that I’m willing to work with are above the border between reach/fringe and pragmatic. That’s the line I’ve drawn in helping myself know what I think.
I’m excited about the field called “complex systems” because it reflects of best of science’s inherent humility: everything affects everything, and we oughtn’t pretend that we know what we’re doing. I think of that as a responsible perspective, and I think it protects science from being abused (or being an abuser) in the sociopolitical sphere. So imagine my surprise to discover that the “everything affects everything” rhetoric of complex systems, ecology, and cybernetics was leveraged by tobacco companies in the 1990s to take attention away from second-hand smoke in office health investigations. Second-hand smoke wasn’t causing sickness, the hard-to-pin-down “sick building syndrome” was. For your reading pleasure, I’ve pulled a lot of text from “Sick building syndrome and the problem of uncertainty,” by Michelle Murphy. I’ve focused on Chapter 6, “Building ecologies, tobacco, and the politics of multiplicity.” Thanks to Isaac.
The meat of the chapter is pp. 146-148, and on a bit:
In the 1980s, the largest building investigation company was healthy Buildings Internations (HBI), located in Fairax, Virginia. HBI had been a modest ventilation cleaning service called ACVA Atlantic until the Tobacco Institute, an industry lobby group, contacted its president, Gray Robertson 46. Tobacco companies hoped to thwart the regulation of secondhand smoke in workspaces, restaurants, bars, and public spaces. Sick building syndrome appealed to the Tobacco Institute because it drew attention to the multiple causes of indoor pollution. Only a few cases of SBS had been attributed to tobacco smoke, a fact that Robertson, HBI, and the literature sponsored by the Tobacco Institute emphasized over and over 47. Soon the Tobacco Institute and Philip Morris were building a database together on sick building syndrome cases, collecting a literature review, and contacting sympathetic indoor air quality experts who could spread news of sick building syndrome. In 1988, five big tobacco companies found the nonprofit Center for Indoor Air Research (CIAR), which quickly became the largest nongovernmental source of funding for indoor air pollution studies.
Robertson, with a monthly retainer from the Tobacco Institute, began to underbid other companies for lucrative building investigation contracts in the Washington area–the US Capitol, the CIA headquarters, the Supreme Court, as well as corporate buildings on the East Coast such as the offices of IBM, MCI WorldCom, and Union Carbide. 49. Underwritten by Philip Morris, HBI expanded its scope by publishing a free glossy magazine that distributed over three-hundred thousand copies in multiple languages 50.
…
While Robertson was promoting sick building syndrome on the road, his company continued collecting data that later became tobacco industry evidence demonstrating that secondhand smoke —— unlike other culprits such as fungi, dust, humidity, bacteria, and formaldehyde —— was rarely a problem in buildings 54. His testimony before city councils, in court cases, and at federal hearings was pivotal to the tobacco industry’s case that secondhand smoke was not a substantive indoor pollutant and thus not in need of regulation 55.
…
the effort was so successful that the Tobacco Institute launched similar promotions of SBS in Canada, Hong Kong, and Venezuela.Healthy Buildings International was not the only building investigation company wooed by the tobacco industry, nor was the Tobacco Institute the only industry association invested in derailing possible regulation of indoor pollution 60. The Business Council on Indoor Air, founded in 1988, represented industry sponsors such as Dow Chemical and Owens-Corning at fifteen thousand dollars for board membership. It too promoted a “building systems approach” 61. In addition, the Tobacco Industry Labor/Management Committee developed a presentation on indoor pollution for unions, creating a coast-to-coast roadshow that ran from 1988 to 1990 62. Conferences, professional associations, and particularly newsletters proliferated in which industry sponsored experts rubbed elbows with independent building investigators.
The appeal of sick building syndrome was that pollution and its effects could be materialized in a way impossible to regulate —— as an unpredictable multiplicity. “Virtually every indoor decoration, building material or piece of furniture sheds some type of gaseous or particulate pollutant,” testified Robertson 63. In its manual for building managers, the EPA warned that indoor pollution was “the product of multiple influences, and attempts to bring problems under control do not always produce the expected results” 64. Managing complex relationships among many “factors” and “symptoms” replaced a “naive,” “single-minded,” and even “dangerous” attention to specific pollutants.
and last,
The implication is that multiplicity was not a quality that could be simply celebrated for its eschewing of reductionism and embracing of diversity. Materializing an object as a multiplicity allowed historical actors to do concrete things about chemical exposure; at the same time, it disallowed and excluded other actions. It was precisely this capacity to exclude specific causal narratives and affirm ambiguity that made ecology and multiplicity such powerful ways to manage the physical corridors of capitalism. p.150
All this comes with interpretation. Murphy takes ecology and cybernetics to be fundamentally “establishment.” She documents the affection of management rhetoric for ecological and cybernetic concepts, but she goes further, citing Eugene Odum’s declaration of ecosystems ecology as “a new managerial ethos for society” (p.134). Then she moves into buildings, the business of buildings, the rhetoric of buildings as living things, wrapping up with research on the idea of questionnaires.
Throughout the book the author rocks a latent hostility to these concepts and also to criticisms of them. The author pulls the same trick with sick building syndrome itself: criticizing the establishment for not recognizing it as a disease, but also criticizing the people who suffer from it because they are too privileged to have actual problems. I guess that’s why they call it critical theory, but I can’t help but feel like critical theorists do it as a hyperdefensive maneuver to avoid being vulnerable in front of their own peers. So I did find myself reading past her writing for the content, but there is a lot of that. She collected a ton of evidence, and its an impressive case in showing that everything has got politics.
Here are all of the citations, copied straight out of the footnotes.
46 Myron Levin, “Who’s Behind the Building Doctor?”; Mintz, “Smoke Screen.”
47. Using its own building investigations as the data, HBI often cited its estimate that tobacco smoke played a role in 3% of SBS cases. However, this obscures incidents when tobacco smoke might have been named as an irritant unassociated with any larger SBS episode.
48. The CIAR was disbanded in 1998 as part of the Master Settlement Agreement.
49. On the sponsorship of Robertson, see Mintz, “Smoke Screen.” For a list of buildings the firm investigated, see References, Healthy Buildings Internationsl, Web site, http://www.hbiamerica.com/references/index.htm (accessed Nov. 19, 2003).
50 Myron Levin, “Who’s Behind the Building Doctor?”; Mintz, “Smoke Screen.”
51. Healthy Buildings International, “Sick Building Syndrome Causes and Cures,” 1991. Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, Philip Morris Collection, Bates No. 2022889303-9324, http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/hpc78e00 (accessed Nov. 27, 2003).
52. “Business Council on Indoor Air: A Multi-industry Response,” 6.
53. Gra Roberston, Healthy Buidings International, Sick Building Syndrome—Facts and Fallacies, Obt. 23, 1991, Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, R. J. Reynolds, Bates No. 509915547-5568, http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/qbr63d00. Recent Advances in Tobacco Science, v. 17. Topics of Current Scientific Interest in Tobacco Research, Proceedings of a Symposium Presented at the Forty-Fifth Meeting of the Tobacco Chemists’ Research Conference (accessed Nov. 27, 2003): 151-52.
54. Healthy Buildings International, “HBI Experience.”
55. HBI’s relationship with the tobacco industry was revealed in 1992 when a fired employee turn whistle-blower. By 1998 the Master Settlement Agreement, a settlement between the U.S. state attorneys general and major tobacco companies, along with the Tobacco Institute, mandated that the industry release digital snapshots of millions of pages of internal documents, which have since demonstrated the industry’s support of indoor air s quality research and investigators, establishing ties not only with Rboertson but a host of other indoor air quality specialists.
56. U.s> Environemtnal Prote tionAgentcy, “Indoor Air Facts.” Much of the credit for the successful publication of this pamphlet is due to James Repace, a senior EPA scientist, whistle-cloer, and active NFEE union member, who widely published his rebuttals to the tobacco industry. On the EPA’s building assessment approach, see U.S. Envionmental Protection Agency and National Instutute of Occupational Safety and Health, “Building Air Quality.”
57. Healthy Buildings International, “About Us,” http://www.hbiamerica.com/aboutus/index.htm (accessed Nov. 11, 2003).
58. Ibid.
59. Gray Robertson, “Sick Building Syndrome,” Nov. 18, 1987. Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, Philip Morris Collection, Bates No. 2061692010-2012, http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/pjf49e00 (accessed Nov. 27, 2003).
60. See, e.g., the role of tobacco industry representatives within ASHRAE; Glantz and Bialous, “ASHRAE Standard 62.”
61. Business Council on Indoor Air, “Indoor Air Quality: A Public Healthy Issue in the 1990s; How Will It Affect Your Company?,” undated brochure, received on April 11, 1996, and “Building Systems Approach.”
62. “Labor Indoor Air Quality Presentations and Events,” Jan 1990, Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, Tobacco Institute, Bates No. TI02120328-0338, http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/wht30c00 (accessed Nov. 23, 2003).
63. “Investigating the ‘Sick Building Syndrome’:ETS in Context,” statement of Gray Robertson, president, ACVA Atlantic, Inc., before the National Academy of Sciences Concerning the Contribution of Environmental Tobacco Smoke to Indoor Air Pollution, Jan. 14, 1986, Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, Philip Morris Collection, Bates No. 2021005103-5125, http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/epj34e00 (accessed Nov. 27, 2003) 7.
64. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, “Building Air Quality,” x.
65. Robertson, “Investigating the ‘Sick Building Syndrome’,” 21.
And, as an extra snippet, Here is an excerpt bringing ecology in:
… moreover, the healthfulness of buildings was of deep interest to a selection of industries and their associations, most particularly the chemical, carpet, and tobacco industries. Ecology proved a very useful frame to this set of financially driven actors, each of which brought distinct motivation to the materialization of sick building syndrome. Ecology gave a framework for affirming the nonspecific and multiplous quality of sick building syndrome that was especially appealing to the tobacco industry, which actively resisted regulation. This chapter concludes that the concept of sick building syndrome achieved the prominence it did in the last two decades of the twentieth century largely because of the tobacco industry’s efforts to promote an ecological and systems approach to indoor pollution
Sick building syndrome would have looked very different without the cybernetically inflected ecology of the 1970s. ‘Ecology’ was a word used to describe both a field of study (the scientific discipline of ecology) and an object of study (ecologies that existed in the world). Systems ecology took as its primary focus the study of the abstract patterns of relations between the organic and inorganic elements of a system. An emphasis on the management of the system, on the regulation of its flows, relationships, and second-order consequences, made systems ecology enormously attractive as a management ideology for business. This chapter traces how ecology was used to grant a complex, fluid, and multi causal form to business practices, building systems, and finally to sick building syndrome itself. The foregrounding of relationships defined by contingencies made ecological explanations extremely useful for assembling accounts that did not lay blame for indoor pollution on any one thing. p. 132
This is a list of some of the things that pretty much all cultures have in common. It is drawn from Steven Pinker’s Language Instinct (pp. 413-415), citing anthropologist Donald Brown:
Value placed on articulateness. Gossip. Lying. Misleading. Verbal humor. Humorous insults. Poetic and rhetorical speech forms. Narrative and storytelling. Metaphor. Poetry with repetition of linguistic elements and three-second lines separated by pauses. Words for days, months, seasons, years, past, present, future, body parts, inner states (emotions, sensations, thoughts), behavioral propensities, flora, fauna, weather, tools, space, motion, speed, location, spatial dimensions, physical properties, giving, lending, affecting things and people, numbers (at the very least “one,” “two,” and “more than two”), proper names, possession. Distinctions between mother and father. Kinship categories, defined in terms of mother, father, son, daughter, and age sequence. Binary distinctions, including male and female, black and white, natural and cultural, good and bad. Measures. Logical relations including “not,” “and,” “same,” “equivalent,” “opposite,” general versus particular, part versus whole. Conjectural reasoning (inferring the presence of absent and invisible entities from their perceptible traces).
Nonlinguistic vocal communication such as cries and squeals. Interpreting intention from behavior. Recognized facial expressions of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust, and contempt. Use of smiles as a friendly greeting. Crying. Coy flirtation with the eyes. Masking, modifying, and mimicking facial expressions. Displays of affection.
Sense of self versus other, responsibility, voluntary versus involuntary behavior, intention, private inner life, normal versus abnormal mental states. Empathy. Sexual attraction. Powerful sexual jealousy. Childhood fears, especially of loud noises, and, at the end of the first year, strangers. Fear of snakes. “Oedipal” feelings (possessiveness of mother, coolness toward her consort). Face recognition. Adornment of bodies and arrangement of hair. Sexual attractiveness, based in part on signs of health and, in women, youth. Hygiene. Dance. Music. Play, including play fighting.
Manufacture of, and dependence upon, many kinds of tools, many of them permanent, made according to culturally transmitted motifs, including cutters, pounders, containers, string, levers, spears. Use of fire to cook food and for other purposes. Drugs, both medicinal and recreational. Shelter. Decoration of artifacts.
A standard pattern and time for weaning. Living in groups, which claim a territory and have a sense of being a distinct people. Families built a round a mother and children, usually the biological mother, and one or more men. Institutionalized marriage, in the sense of publicly recognized right of sexual access to a woman eligible for childbearing. Socialization of children (including toilet training) by senior kin. Children copying their elders. Distinguishing of close kin from distant kin, and favoring of close kin. Avoidance of incest between mothers and sons. Great interest in the topic of sex.
Status and prestige, both assigned (by kinship, age, sex) and achieved. Some degree of economic inequality. Division of labor by sex and age. More childcare by women. More aggression and violence by men. Acknowledgment of differences between male and female natures. Domination by men in the public political sphere. Exchange of labor, goods, and services. Reciprocity, including retaliation. Gifts.
Social reasoning. Coalitions. Government, in the sense of binding collective decisions about public affairs. Leaders, almost always nondictatorial, perhaps ephemeral. Laws, rights, and obligations, including laws against violence, rape, and murder. Punishment. Conflict, which is deplored. Rape. Seeking of redress for wrongs. Mediation. In-group/out-group conflicts. Property. Inheritance of property. Sense of right and wrong. Envy.
Etiquette. Hospitality. Feasting. Diurnality. Standards of sexual modesty. Sex generally in private. Fondness for sweets. Food taboos. Discreetness in elimination of body wastes. Supernatural beliefs. Magic to sustain and increase life, and to attract the opposite sex. Theories of fortune and misfortune. Explanations of disease and death. Medicine. Rituals, including rites
If that isn’t enough for you, try:
J. Henrich, S. J. Heine, A. Norenzayan, The weirdest people in the world?, Behavioral and brain sciences 33, 61–83 (2010). * It pitches itself as rejecting universality, but in the process presents the best review of robust similarities that I’ve found.
You can find the old site behind any link in the Archives, up and to the left.
So many of my peers are going epicurean. Its beautiful because I think cooking is empowering: it encourages people to try new things and experiencing new ways of thinking. It worrisome because it provides another thoroughly commodified identity, with all kinds of vocabulary for justifying not liking something. I spent a year convinced that I knew how I liked my coffee (and that I didn’t like it any other way). I finally admitted to myself that it was a delusion, and that the variance between cups of coffee was greater than my ability to tell the difference.
So we’ll focus on the first: empowerment. I never knew how to use the spices. I figured that the best way was to just cook lots of recipes by the book until I got the hang of it. But so much of the joy of cooking, for me, is making stuff up. For a while I just cooked without spices at all. I still prefer it that way, but I wanted to learn the spices, so I shifted to throwing in tons of random everything. Occasionally I would make things that worked. While the random approach will eventually start to pay off fine, it requires a certain affection for failure.
Though my stance towards failure is particularly affectionate, I did eventually refine my technique, and now it is fancy enough for anyone to learn to use any spice. Did you know that taste and smell are thoroughly integrated senses? Did you know that the tastiness of coffee and chocolate is entirely illusory? Coffee and chocolate have no taste. They are entirely smell. Try eating chocolate while holding your nose: all you’ll taste is the added sugar. And you can use this confound of the senses to simulate the experience of a new spice without committing to it. Soup is the easiest for this technique, so I’ll focus on it, but it works for everything:
Make your soup without any spices at all, throwing in all kind of stuff and putting off any spicing towards the end. When you are ready, ladle a little thimbleful of soup into a cup and walk over to you spice cabinet. Now open a random spice, take a sip of the soup, and smell the spice, and the next spice, and on down the line. By mixing smell and taste, you can simulate the experience of the soup with the spice. If you like what you are tasting, add the spice to the soup, erring on the side of too little. You can try all kinds of exotic spices and figure out what you like with impunity. Its simple and intuitive, and it will eventually get you a familiarity with the spice cabinet that you didn’t imagine yourself capable of. Feel the power of spice through your main course!
Myopia in decentralized systems: The Ant Well
explained here
And here is the opposite: unexpected success.
The funny thing is I expected these lists to be longer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_claimed_to_be_Jesus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_messiah_claimants
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Messiah_claimants
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mahdi_claimants
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Buddha_claimants
You’ll find more among some of these:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_have_been_considered_deities
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_founders_of_religious_traditions
It is hard to find things that every strain of Christianity holds in common. One is that Christianity started with Jesus, and there were no glimmers of his visit outside of prophecy. The big prophecy at the time was apocalyptic: the End was near and a Christ would appear to take everyone there. But the New Testament is also full of more concrete social and cultural signs that a Greco-Roman Judiasm was already in the works.
The cleanest example is in The Godfearers. The Gospels and Acts are littered with God-fearers: non-Jews, many of them Romans, who believe in the Jewish God. What? How? What is their history? What was their role in the eventual growth of Christianity? What was their proportion? Were they growing? How? Why did it appeal to them? What did they think of the Jews? Of themselves? What were their struggles; what were the appealing perspectives from Greco-Roman culture that were hardest to reconcile with the compelling idea of a single fearsome creator? I have no idea, and there isn’t much on them (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godfearers), but there is no question within the New testament that they were there before the beginning, and they were characters in both the birth and growth of Christianity.
I’m curious about the ways in which the Hellenistic worldview was behind Christianity’s innovations beyond Judiasm (Christianity: +, Judiasm: – , Greco-Romans: ? )
I’m curious about the interaction of this worldview with the aspects of Judaism that it shared, and that Christianity retained (Christianity: +, Judiasm: +, Greco-Romans: + )
And some of which were foreign to Hellenism (Christianity: +, Judiasm: +, Greco-Romans: – )
I want to learn more, but not much is known about the Levant around that time. I think its impressive that we recently proved the historicity of Pilate. I’ll read what I can, though I don’t really know where to go next.
Excellent:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soramimi
Hi, I’m Seth and I just screwed over lots of people on Mechanical Turk. My writing this is an attempt to fix that. I was negligent because I didn’t check the code that was reviewing the jobs (which rejected 70% of maybe 1000 people), and I didn’t check the Turk account’s email address ever, not once over the four months that the job has been running. The email in that account, from hundreds of people who were rejected for honest work, was full of hints that something was wrong, but I only discovered the extent of it last week.
I feel horrible about it. I do a lot of work for participatory workplaces and democracy as a route to responsible business practices. I’m a founder of a worker cooperative (http://bloomingtoncoop.org) and I’m involved in a bunch of organization and projects to raise the profile of workplace democracy (http://nasco.coop http://geo.coop/issue/9). I like to think I’m doing good things for people who work, so imagine my surprise to find that I’m a truly horrible, exploitative boss. Literally hundreds of people put in 5-20 minutes, on the promise of payment, and they got rejected with no explanation, sometimes incorrectly. Here are some testimonials:
I’m not sure how to fix all this. I want to apologize, but any apology is empty until after I’ve actually fixed things. The code is fixed, and I’m working with a friend to figure out who should have gotten paid, and then pay them. Next step after that is to ask Amazon to unreject everyone. And beyond that, what? Damages? (UPDATE: we’ve sent out payments with an apology and a bonus. We still have to ask Amazon about unrejections. I can now offer a good apology: I’m sorry for rejecting your honest work)
Out of 850 jobs, 300 were accepted, 122 were falsely rejected. Most of the remaining 50% didn’t fill the survey out completely. But even though they were possibly fairly rejected, I could still have done more to prevent that: like warning people that they are submitting an incomplete HIT with a few simple lines of PHP. I’ve thought about it a bunch, but your comments will help me figure out what is the right thing to do moving forward. The best ideas have come from other Turkers who got rejected on this badly designed HIT, like attention checks, brief qualifying HITs, and captchas that help eliminate bots and people who are inattentive. More ideas?
If you are interested, I can offer the original questionnaire, and the results from everyone who took it (anonymized).
I’m happy to answer any questions about it.
I’m going to do my best to make up for it, but I don’t blame anyone for mistaking my negligence for maliciousness. If you aren’t feeling right yet, let me know what I can do.
Burning Man is a big classic successful event sort of thing out in a Nevada desert. It has been getting more and more popular, but there is only room for 40,000 people. So what’s the best way to distribute 40,000 tickets among 80,000 people fairly and efficiently? They’ve always done it one way, but as demand grows, they’ve been feeling pressure for a new system.
This year they changed to an entirely new market-based system. They created a brand new social system designed from the top-down from scratch. That last clause should give you a hint that I’m not going to like it, and that I’m going to criticize it for not taking into account important things like reality. If you know me well enough, you might even suspect that this will get into libertarians.
The new system introduced a small variety of bidding and market mechanisms, all at once. The central mechanism made it so people could enter one of three lotteries at three prices: $245, $325, and $four-something (uhh $390)). It was probably designed to make a certain target amount of money.
Wait a second: wild finger-painted feather-boa’d dusty creative hippie types using the inspirations of the free market? What’s going on? Here’s my theory: Burning Man creates Burning Man enthusiasts, some of whom may be drug enthusiasts, most of whom are enthusiastic for legalization, some of whom lean towards deregulation generally which at this point makes one vulnerable to crazy things like the Libertarian myopia for market distribution. That’s my theory: the whole thing smacks of drug-addled libertarians. Their devotion to markets is very idealistic, where “idealistic” is a nice way of saying ignorant of complexity. Just to spell it out.
What could go wrong? They’re actually still not sure what went wrong. (Scalpers! Hackers! Scalpers! The Masses!).
Following phone conversations with major theme camp and art group organizers, we determined that only 20%-25% of the key people needed to bring those projects to the playa had received notifications for tickets. A number of people also told us they’d used multiple credit cards and asked friends to register for them as a way to increase their chances of getting tickets. Those who received more tickets than they need said they are considering how to redistribute them.
As a result they are probably going to over-correct and hand-pick the people to offer their remaining tickets to, a move akin to wealth redistribution, very “non-free.”
Generally, our fine notions about society are wrong. Unintended consequences are a fact of any change to an existing institution. Sometimes they matter, and they are more likely to matter the bigger the change. So what to do? Evolution gives you one nice model: cope with the incomprehensible complexity of existence with diversity and incremental changes. My favorite thing about markets isn’t their ability to crush collusion and find equilibrium, but their ability to mimic the mutation, selection, and reproduction characteristic of effective search through complex spaces, but even that isn’t everything.
