Are we more than our ideology?

After predicting he could guess most of an economist's positions after hearing just one of them, Russ Roberts takes a crack at guessing Noah Smith's positions on a variety of policies, and Smith grades him.

Smith is always interesting, and often unpredictable, and those are of course correlated.

Stricter Gun Control: Probably not. I grew up in small(ish)-town Texas, where tons of people had guns and there weren't any shootings that I ever heard of (though probably some accidents). Canada has relatively high gun ownership and very little crime, including few mass shootings. Brazil has a small fraction of the gun ownership we have, and much higher crime. Meanwhile, we've had a huge drop in crime in the last two decades with no real increase in gun control. Let's try to replicate that success before we start disarming the populace. I will admit that my stance on this has wavered recently, in light of the rash of mass shootings, but I still don't think gun control is likely to have a huge effect.
 

Noah's post-mortem is worth a read. I especially like this:

I think this exercise shows a number of different "failure modes" of attempting to model people's policy positions based on an assessment of their ideology. For example:

...

4. People disagree on the facts, not just on values. In general, people with heterogeneous priors about the state of the world will fail to reach agreement even after seeing all of the same evidence. And when people form their policy positions, they consider efficacy of policies, not just whether the intended effect would be a good thing. Russ probably didn't bet that I would be pessimistic about the efficacy of taxing the rich, the usefulness of the ACA's tax credits, or the effectiveness of gun control. He also probably underestimated my uncertainty about the effect of Obamacare on health costs, the usefulness of education spending, and the employment effects of minimum wage hikes.

George Saunders: an education

Every Monday night, Doug’s workshop meets at his house. Doug’s wife, Amy, makes us dinner, which we eat on the break. We first-years are a bit tight-assed and over-literary. We are trying too hard. One night, Doug has us do an exercise: after the break, we are going to tell a story from our lives, off the cuff. We are terrified. We don’t know any good, real stories, which is why we have been writing all of these stories about kids having sex with crocodiles and so forth. And an audience of our peers is going to be sitting there, wincing or declining to laugh or nodding off? Yikes. We drink more on the break than usual. And then we all do a pretty good job, actually. None of us wants to be a flop and so each of us rises to the occasion by telling a story we actually find interesting, in something like our real voice, using the same assets (humor, understatement, overstatement, funny accents, whatever) that we actually use in our everyday lives to, for example, get out of trouble, or seduce someone. For me, a light goes on: we are supposed to be—are required to be—interesting. We’re not only allowed to think about audience, we’d better. What we’re doing in writing is not all that different from what we’ve been doing all our lives, i.e., using our personalities as a way of coping with life. Writing is about charm, about finding and accessing and honing ones’ particular charms. To say that “a light goes on” is not quite right—it’s more like: a fixture gets installed. Only many years later (see below) will the light go on.
 

Even Later That Semester
 

Doug gets an unkind review. We are worried. Will one of us dopily bring it up in workshop? We don’t. Doug does. Right off the bat. He wants to talk about it, because he feels there might be something in it for us. The talk he gives us is beautiful, honest, courageous, totally generous. He shows us where the reviewer was wrong—but also where the reviewer might have gotten it right. Doug talks about the importance of being able to extract the useful bits from even a hurtful review: this is important, because it will make the next book better. He talks about the fact that it was hard for him to get up this morning after that review and write, but that he did it anyway. He’s in it for the long haul, we can see. He’s a fighter, and that’s what we must become too: we have to learn to honor our craft by refusing to be beaten, by remaining open, by treating every single thing that happens to us, good or bad, as one more lesson on the longer path.
 

We liked Doug before this. Now we love him.
 

George Saunders offers up a timeline of his education as a writer. It is, as much of his work, wonderful. I'll never forget reading his first short story collection CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. Every story more astounding than the next, so brilliant and dazzling that you become angry, wondering how something like that is possible from the same corpus of words the rest of us work with.

I loved hearing Saunders' recollections of Tobias Wolff, who taught creative writing at Stanford for many years, too. One of the other life-changing moments for me as a reader was picking up a collection of Wolff's short stories from Green Library when I was an undergraduate and inhaling them over two sleepless days.

Twice in my life I sat in the crowd as Wolff read one of his short stories, and each was memorable, his stentorian voice the perfect instrument for his muscular prose. Some people just look and sound exactly as you'd imagine them from reading their work. Wolff is one of them. I was left with the image of great short story writers as totemic figures.

This Saunders' passage on Wolff is spot on, especially for those who are fortunate enough to have met him:

Toby is a generous reader and a Zen-like teacher. The virtues I feel being modeled—in his in-class comments and demeanor, in his notes, and during our after-workshop meetings—are subtle and profound. A story’s positive virtues are not different from the positive virtues of its writer. A story should be honest, direct, loving, restrained. It can, by being worked and reworked, come to have more power than its length should allow. A story can be a compressed bundle of energy, and, in fact, the more it is thoughtfully compressed, the more power it will have.
 

His brilliant story “The Other Miller” appears in The Atlantic. I read it, love it. I can’t believe I know the person who wrote it, and that he knows me. I walk over to the Hall of Languages and there he is, the guy who wrote that story. What’s he doing? Talking to a student? Photocopying a story for next day’s class? I don’t remember. But there he is: both writer and citizen. I don’t know why this makes such an impression on me–maybe because I somehow have the idea that a writer walks around in a trance, being rude, moved to misbehavior by the power of his own words. But here is the author of this great story, walking around, being nice. It makes me think of the Flaubert quote, “live like a bourgeoisie and think like a demigod.” At the time, I am not sure what a bourgeoisie is, exactly, or a demigod, but I understand this to mean: “live like a normal person, write like a maniac.” Toby manifests as an example of suppressed power, or, rather: directed power. No silliness necessary, no dramatics, all of his considerable personal power directed, at the appropriate time, to a worthy goal.
 

Saunders is a prophet, and he most embodies my ideal of writers as sages who can extract the pulp of wisdom from all the Brownian motion of human life.

What Doug does for me in this meeting is respect me, by declining to hyperbolize my crap thesis. I don’t remember what he said about it, but what he did not say was, you know: “Amazing, you did a great job, this is publishable, you rocked our world with this! Loved the elephant.” There’s this theory that self-esteem has to do with getting confirmation from the outside world that our perceptions are fundamentally accurate. What Doug does at this meeting is increase my self-esteem by confirming that my perception of the work I’d been doing is fundamentally accurate. The work I’ve been doing is bad. Or, worse: it’s blah. This is uplifting–liberating, even—to have my unspoken opinion of my work confirmed. I don’t have to pretend bad is good. This frees me to leave it behind and move on and try to do something better. The main thing I feel: respected. Doug conveys a sense that I am a good-enough writer and person to take this not-great news in stride and move on. One bad set of pages isn’t the end of the world.
 

But beyond just those deep powers of perception, a great writer has the ability to spin a sentence like this with abnormal regularity:

It is as if that is the point of power: to allow one to access the higher registers of gentleness.

Crime and punishment

Longer sentences didn’t reduce crime as much as expected because criminals aren’t good at thinking about the future; criminal types have problems forecasting and they have difficulty regulating their emotions and controlling their impulses. In the heat of the moment, the threat of future punishment vanishes from the calculus of decision. Thus, rather than deterring (much) crime, longer sentences simply filled the prisons. As if that weren’t bad enough, by exposing more people to criminal peers and by making it increasingly difficult for felons to reintegrate into civil society, longer sentences increased recidivism.
 

Instead of thinking about criminals as rational actors, we should think about criminals as children. In this light, consider the “Becker approach” to parenting. Punishing children is costly so to reduce that cost, ignore a child’s bad behavior most of the time but when it’s most convenient give the kid a really good spanking or put them in time out for a very long time. Of course, this approach leads to disaster–indeed, it’s precisely this approach that leads to criminality in later life.
 

So what is the recommended parenting approach? I don’t want to get into a debate over spanking, timeouts, and reasoning but one thing all recommendations have in common is that the consequences for inappropriate behavior should be be quick, clear, and consistent. Quick responses help not just because children have “high discount rates” (better thought of as difficulty integrating their future selves into a consistent whole but “high discount rates” will do as short hand) but even more importantly because a quick response helps children to understand the relationship between behavior and consequence. Prior to Becker there was Becaaria and in Beccarian theory, people must learn to associate crime with punishment. When responses aren’t quick, children, just like scientists, have difficulty learning cause and effect. Quick is thus one way of lowering cognitive demands and making consequences clear.
 

Alex Tabarrok on what Gary Becker got wrong about crime and punishment. A great post with lots of broadly applicable wisdom.

I try to apply the same principle of quick, clear, and consistent to the feedback I provide to my teams at work. Much of white collar work, including product management, tends to have slow feedback loops. Often the time between when you come up with an idea and when it ships and elicits feedback from consumers is months. That means very little of that work falls into the category of deliberate practice. Post-mortems, if they even occur, take place long after the key decisions were made.

Some of that is unavoidable, but much of it just requires a change in habit as managers. If you have feedback to share with a team member, share it as soon as possible. Someone didn't lead a meeting as efficiently as possible? Grab them right after the meeting for a quick chat. Have a presentation ready? Practice on someone as soon as possible and gather their immediate feedback.

The higher the cadence of these practice and feedback loops, the more rapid the improvement. Not all such work can be transformed into deliberate practice, but the amount that can be is non-trivial.

For most people, delivering feedback at such a cadence does not feel comfortable or normal in a white collar work environment; it feels paternalistic, even arrogant, and it still does not come naturally to introverts like myself. Certainly many aren't ready to receive notes at such a cadence, either. Much of this may stem from underestimating the amount of rapid feedback and deliberate practice one spends time on in other crafts, like music, sports, cooking, and so on. Going to an arts school helps. I've never received as much feedback as frequently as I did in my undergraduate creative writing classes or in film school.

Dear Airbnb

"Dear SF Tax Collector,
You know the $12 million in hotel taxes?
Don't spend it all in one place.
Love, Airbnb"
 

"Dear Public Works,
Please use the $12 million in hotel taxes to build more bike lanes, like this one.
Love, Airbnb"
 

"Dear Board of Education,
Please use some of the $12 million in hotel taxes to keep art in schools.
Love, Airbnb"
 

"Dear Public Library System,
We hope you use some of the $12 million in hotel taxes to keep the library open later.
Love, Airbnb"
 

Those are some of the by now legendary and misguided ads by Airbnb that went up last week and came down just as quickly after the understandable public backlash. AdWeek reports the ads were from Airbnb's agency of record TBWA\Chiat\Day L.A. which is surprising as they've done some legendary campaigns in the past, especially for Apple, their one time prized client.

Still, Airbnb is the client, and the client has to sign off on all this. It's on them for approving this incredibly smug and tone deaf campaign. One of the serious challenges companies like Airbnb and Uber have to battle is regulatory capture, but they have so many consumers who love their services that they really only need to make it clear that government officials might take away their offerings to rally a formidable wave of public support.

And yet almost all the Airbnb ads I've seen come across as really odd and cult-like. It's already strange enough sleeping on someone's sofa, the last thing the public needs is to be reminded of it. If I were Airbnb I'd be doing everything possible to make the service seem normal and more smart relative to the alternatives. My suspicion: some creative director is trying to be too clever by half.

An engineering theory of the Volkswagen scandal

Paul Kedrosky in The New Yorker:

In a powerful book about the disintegration, immediately after launch, of the Challenger space shuttle, which killed seven astronauts in January of 1986, the sociologist Diane Vaughan described a phenomenon inside engineering organizations that she called the “normalization of deviance.” In such cultures, she argued, there can be a tendency to slowly and progressively create rationales that justify ever-riskier behaviors. Starting in 1983, the Challenger shuttle had been through nine successful launches, in progressively lower ambient temperatures, across the years. Each time the launch team got away with a lower-temperature launch, Vaughan argued, engineers noted the deviance, then decided it wasn’t sufficiently different from what they had done before to constitute a problem. They effectively declared the mildly abnormal normal, making deviant behavior acceptable, right up until the moment when, after the shuttle launched on a particularly cold Florida morning in 1986, its O-rings failed catastrophically and the ship broke apart.
 

If the same pattern proves to have played out at Volkswagen, then the scandal may well have begun with a few lines of engine-tuning software. Perhaps it started with tweaks that optimized some aspect of diesel performance and then evolved over time: detect this, change that, optimize something else. At every step, the software changes might have seemed to be a slight “improvement” on what came before, but at no one step would it necessarily have felt like a vast, emissions-fixing conspiracy by Volkswagen engineers, or been identified by Volkswagen executives. Instead, it would have slowly and insidiously led to the development of the defeat device and its inclusion in cars that were sold to consumers.
 

If this was, in fact, the case, then Horn was basically right that engineers were responsible. The scandal wouldn’t have been caused by a few rogue engineers, though, so much as by the nature of engineering organizations themselves. Faced with an expensively engineered diesel engine that couldn’t meet strict emissions standards, Volkswagen engineers “tuned” their engine software. And they kept on tuning it, normalizing deviance along the way, until they were far from where they started, to the point of gaming the emissions tests by detecting test conditions and re-calibrating the engine accordingly on the fly.
 

My uncle who works in aerospace/aeronautics has long told me that most of the public has no idea how far the Space Shuttle program were pushing the boundaries of what was possible.

Encouraging to see Kedrosky get a byline in The New Yorker. Om Malik has a piece in The New Yorker on Jack Dorsey's return to Twitter. I love The New Yorker, but their coverage of the tech industry has occasionally struck me as a bit biased (part of the larger East Coast/West Coast culture war, with Silicon Valley in the role of the nouveau riche). I'm encouraged to see their stable of tech voices broadening.