I have a piece in the current issue of Wired on political prediction markets – basically, Internet-based betting on elections and other outcomes such as nomination fights, the makeup of the next Congress, et al. Economists celebrate them as the next big thing – a way to focus expert knowledge and the “wisdom of crowds” to improve forecasting in politics and other real-world events.
This is kind of cool, even though the hype exceeds the reality, at least right now. The upshot: political prediction markets closely track the (frequently wrong) conventional wisdom. We already have pundits for that. Some keys to overcoming this problem:
Cash is definitely the surest way to grease a market. In June 2007, 25 economists signed a letter urging legislators to grant these markets “safe harbor” from Internet gambling regulations, given the sites’ value as forecasting tools.
Beyond this, it’s important to improve the pool of traders. According to economists, this requires a certain alchemy of expertise and stupidity. With more experts and insiders, the markets can get out ahead of conventional wisdom. But forecasting also needs more so-called noise traders, who do business with almost no information. Noise traders boost accuracy by increasing volume and the potential profits of informed traders.
The potential of prediction markets goes far beyond politics or movie grosses. For instance, there’s futarchy, the notion advanced by GMU economist Robin Hanson. Short version: after politicians determine a broad course of action, policymaking decisions can be handed over to small markets composed of specialists, thus minimizing the impact of politics on problem-solving. This is certainly an appealing idea, based on the fact that markets filter out individual biases, and are thus more likely to arrive at a “right” answer than, say, Karl Rove.
For nostalgia reasons, I’m disappointed that “Speed Racer” has turned out to be the year’s first mega-flop. I watched the original anime as a kid, along with other early Japanese imports including Kimba the White Lion and Gigantor. The style – the saucer eyes, the kinetic, absurd effects (watch Speed Racer drive his car up a mountainside during an earthquake!), the rat-a-tat of dialogue spoken too fast – was, and still is, strangely entrancing. And though the Wachowski brothers flubbed 2 of 3 Matrix films, how hard can it be to write a short, punchy children’s-themed movie about a guy with a race car? Too hard, according to the universal judgment of critics and audiences. When I saw that the movie was more than 2 hours long, it was clear the game was up.
Maybe there’s good news in it, though. I doubt the Wachowskis will get to blow $150 million again with some close supervision (not that that will necessarily work). More important, a movie – especially a kids’ movie – needs a story:
In my review of “Speed Racer” I said that if the movie’s target audience turned out in vast numbers we’d be looking at child endangerment on a global scale. It was a joke line, but I meant it. Kids need inoculation against media-generated chaos. That’s not to suggest seeking out entertainment that preaches, peddles homilies, hustles uplift or shies away from the darker areas of human experience that inform some of our most cherished fairy tales (or, for that matter, one of my most cherished films, Carol Reed’s “Oliver!”). It’s more than enough when movies enhance a sense of wonder (and, as a byproduct, a capacity for concentration); when they delight and surprise (as Pixar productions do so dependably); when they open up the world through the window of thrilling fiction.
Thanks to Cartoon Brew, a great animation blog, for the links.
An entertaining, high-stakes fight is underway between the cable blowhards and their corporate overlords: Fox News and Bill O’Reilly vs. NBC and Keith Olbermann. Short take: Olbermann attacks O’Reilly, O’Reilly gets pissy; Roger Ailes demands NBC muzzle Olbermann, NBC declines; O’Reilly starts attacking execs at General Electric (NBC’s owner) as traitors for the company’s dealings in Iran.
The immediate takeaway is that O’Reilly and Ailes are thin-skinned; they can dish it out but they can’t take it. And so they will go to absurd lengths to shut up their critics. I have a hard time believing that pique is the primary motivation, though.
Here’s one theory: What’s going on is an attempted precision strike to take out Keith Olbermann’s unique space in the universe of cable yakkers.
Though he might balk at the term, Olbermann is a Fox-style liberal. There’s no one else on TV who fits that description. Most of the “liberals” on TV news fall into the crypto-liberal category, like Dan Rather. Even George Stephanopoulos would call himself a newsman first. That’s advantage Fox, which can tag them with the “liberal” label and force them to deny it. (Which they sometimes can’t – double advantage. Or which they respond to by taking their cues from Fox – triple advantage.)
As a liberal on a traditional, non-ideological news network, Olbermann breaks this pattern. It actually is dangerous to Fox, whose raison d’etre is the notion that liberalism is secretly shading the competition’s news programming. If liberalism is out in the open, and liberals and non-ideological reporters can coexist on cable news, Fox’s project to obliterate those distinctions in people’s minds – everything on NBC is liberal bias, so go with conservative bias instead – falters.
There are a lot of reasons why Olbermann is the only outspoken liberal in a primo slot on cable news. Fox’s success is perhaps the biggest. And there just aren’t that many TV personalities, liberal or conservative, with the combination of ego, persistence and ratings to go up against O’Reilly toe-to-toe. Phil Donahue, let’s face it, was a bore. (And bear in mind: there’s not much point to mixing it up with O’Reilly & Co. to begin with. We don’t need even more exploding-heads stupidity on TV. I’m also leaving out Stewart and Colbert here, in a class by themselves.)
But Olbermann has also tapped into something. His outraged rants against the likes of O’Reilly and Fox, and against George W. Bush and Dick Cheney channel a kind of populist anger at Republicans that is surging as the Bush years wind down. And though Olbermann goes over the top at times, often his rants are right on. People should be outraged, for reasons too numerous to mention here. It’s a wonder ratings-starved cable networks don’t do more to harness this – there’s gold there.
Once, Fox thought it had the market cornered on over-the-top populist outrage. No more. Hence the logic to the idea that Olbermann-must-be-destroyed. If Ailes succeeds, the networks will think twice before trying to replicate the Olbermann formula.
David Brooks hit upon something important in his “neural Buddhists” column last week: both the militant atheists and religious fundamentalists miss out on larger truths about the nature of spirituality that scientists are actively exploring:
First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.
In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.
As it is with Brooks at his best, the column boils down a large amount of difficult material into provocative and culturally savvy points – which, in this case, happen to be mostly correct. “The self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships” is straight out of Buddhism 101, and accords not just with scientific understanding of the body and mind but also with common sense. (Buddhism emerged in a milieu of ancient Indian religious philosophies that explored the nature of the body-mind in a systematic, experimental way. The Buddha himself put the era’s leading approach to spiritual insight, asceticism, to the test, nearly starving before ultimately rejecting it.) And the is-there-or-isn’t-there debate about God is, indeed, mostly beside the point, a sideshow that sells a lot of books but elides the important questions.
But the column still falls into a typical Brooksian trap: glibness. Are the religious experiences scientists are investigating really a kind of gooey (small-r) rapture, the perception of “the unknowable total of all there is”? I wish he’d chosen his words more carefully. And how are these very diverse concepts – no fixed self, morality, ecstatic experiences of oneness – related, except in the broadest terms, as a bunch of stuff scientists (and religious people through the ages) have observed? Brooks tosses around interesting ideas, which may or may not be connected, either conceptually/theologically or even scientifically, and suggests they’re all part of a single cultural revolution now underway. Not sure about that. The scientific study of morality, for instance, tries to tease out its evolutionary basis – typically, the advantages of altruism for perpetuating genes. But when altruism (or any kind of self-sacrifice) becomes merely a tool for keeping the species going – a means to an end – it loses any claim on the sacred, and on true morality. If you’re being nice to advance your own interests, in other words, you’re not really being nice. And God (if there is one) knows it. But most scientists wouldn’t make that distinction.
On the other hand, Ross Douthat’s critique of Brooks sounds equally muddled:
This notion’s major premise is summed up nicely by Brooks as follows: “Particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits.” No, the Christian would say: Particular religious systems are cultural artifacts, in a sense, yes, but they’re artifacts built around specific human experiences, not universal ones. Christian theology and Christian ritual are compatible with the universal human ability to experience the sacred through prayer and meditation, but they’re “built on top” of particular encounters and revelations that tend to have little in common with the “transcending boundaries/overflowing with love” experiences that neuroscientists are equipped to measure. Indeed, in both the Old and New Testaments, the foundational encounters with God – the religious experiences that created Judaism and Christianity – are nothing like a meditative, free-floating sense of one-ness with the universe. Instead, whether it’s Moses encountering the burning bush or Job being addressed out of the whirlwind or the disciples encountering the Risen Christ, the encounters with God that shape the Judeo-Christian tradition tend to be extremely personal on the one hand (God has a personality, a voice, even a body; He isn’t just some cosmic soup we can all go swimming in) and extremely terrifying and difficult to comprehend on the other.
Here, Brooks’s generalizations are turned into straw men. Of course religions are built on “specific” experiences. Every person’s experiences are, after all, specific. You cannot build a religion on some abstract, unrealized human capability – it must be realized, and every realization will by definition be unique, a product of its own place and time. “A free-floating sense of oneness” may crudely describe, clipboard-style, what some test subjects felt. But it’s a cliche, some words on a page – it doesn’t capture the actual experience they had. By the same token, I doubt Douthat, or the rest of us for that matter, can know what Moses, or Jesus, or the Apostles were thinking and feeling. We have some idea of it from what people wrote down, years after the fact, and yes, it was strange and surprising. Real insights always are.
I am still trying to figure out what Twitter is good for, both for myself and for life in general. At first, it seemed absurd to have a website ask me what I was doing, and expect either the web, or any individual, to care. Facebook at least puts your announcements in some kind of context, a digital environment you create around your online profile, your “friends,” your Super Wall and Scrabulous games and other widgets. Twitter strips all of that away.
That’s actually kind of cool. And useful in various contexts – sending out short work updates to interested parties, social swarming, political organizing, random venting. And now that I’ve done it a bit the appeal is growing. I have only 11 or 12 people and/or institutions whose updates I’m following. The result is an interesting, ever-changing braid of information and random personal observations. You see this braid – or tapestry, or raging river, I suppose, if you’re following hundreds of people – and it invariably draws you in; you want to say something, stick your toe in. To the river, not the tapestry.
The two truly great discoveries so far, previously mentioned – John Hodgman’s Twitter updates are a highlight. Especially the ones concerning the meaning of “tharn.” And Stephen Colbert’s are funny as well. (While it is clear Hodgman is writing his, is Colbert actually putting these Colbertian gems up on the web himself? More likely, some writing staff intern is assigned to do it.)
The mayor said the city has an estimated 5,000 to 12,000 homeless people, many of whom came here looking for jobs after Katrina struck in August 2005.
“I’m not suggesting that they were dumped here, but we have a lot of people from a lot of different places around the country, and you may be helping one of your citizens. Maybe we can even find some bus tickets. We’ll see. One way,” Nagin said, drawing laughs from audience members.
After the panel discussion, Nagin said he was “just kidding around.”
It’s hard to see how John McCain’s speech yesterday – saying that we may be able to pull out of Iraq at the end of his first term because peace and prosperity will reign there and in the U.S. thanks to his (currently quite threadbare) policies – does much for him.
It comes off as a strange mixture of silliness and arrogance to predict so specifically what your accomplishments will be four years down the road. But it also muddies the waters on Iraq in ways disadvantageous to McCain’s candidacy. He presumably is trying to back away from his “100 years” statement and reassure the majority of Americans fed up with the Iraq war that yes, he’d like to get (mostly) out after all. But his previous position at least had the advantage of simplicity, and could be defended on those grounds – don’t pull out until we achieve “victory.” However ill-defined victory may be, it’s clear we aren’t winning now and that there are dangers to leaving.
But “maybe out by 2013″ sounds either like an out-and-out pander or a fantasy. The non-deadline deadline is a transparent attempt to have it both ways. So it’s unlikely to win over Iraq skeptics, and may alienate war supporters.
Aside from the entertainment value, this video shows just how unhinged the political debate about terrorism, diplomacy and foreign policy in general has come from reality, from history, in the past eight years.
Effective political rhetoric employs facts and context from what actually happened in the past as tools of persuasion. Skilled demagogues twist past events to their own purposes. Bad demagogues skim the past for slogans and buzzwords without knowing, or much caring, what happened back when.
It seems that apart from any fallout to polar bear populations, sea levels, climate or ecology, melting polar ice is also a security threat:
For ships headed from the Pacific to Europe, traveling through the northwest passage saves time and valuable energy costs.
That traffic increase has coincided with greater international interest in potential energy resources in the Arctic, prompting more exploration.
“All of this has implications that there could be security concerns,” Renuart said.
It sounds vaguely absurd – will terrorists be coming our way now via the North Pole? – but this reflects a very big change in human settlement patterns: as the ice melts, and the world gets warmer, previously inaccessible and inhospitable northern climes will become a new frontier for development. Mining operations, tourism, and even housing will migrate northward, bringing with them added government surveillance and other security measures, as well as all the other trappings of the modern state. This in turn will damage local ecologies and cultures that are already in upheaval due to melting ice and rising temperatures.
