Ear Rational Thoughts

Soccer and the law of large numbers

Great insight from Arnold Kling on soccer:

having more scoring [in soccer] would reduce the luck factor. It seems as though every game I read about ... is decided by a lucky goal or a wrongly-allowed goal or a wrongly-disallowed goal. It makes me think--why doesn't this happen in baseball or football?

There is a lot of luck in baseball or football. There certainly are a lot of bad calls by umpires and referees in baseball and football.

The difference is that with more scoring, the law of large numbers kicks in. The chance that any one lucky bounce or bad call will determine the outcome is low, because scoring one point is not such an overwhelming event.

I wholeheartedly concur.

Who is the real Jesus here

Via Robin Hanson comes a great story of just how difficult it is for some people to move their dogma:

In the late 1950s, psychologist Milton Rokeach … gathered three psychiatric patients, each with the delusion that they were Jesus Christ, to live together for two years in Ypsilanti State Hospital to see if their beliefs would change. The early meetings were stormy. “You oughta worship me, I’ll tell you that!” one of the Christs yelled. “I will not worship you! You’re a creature! You better live your own life and wake up to the facts!” another snapped back. “No two men are Jesus Christs. … I am the Good Lord!” the third interjected, barely concealing his anger. …

Very little seems to shift the identities of the self-appointed Messiahs. They debate, argue, at one point come to blows, but show few signs that their beliefs have become any less intense. Only Leon seems to waver, eventually asking to be addressed as “Dr Righteous Idealed Dung” instead of his previous moniker of “Dr Domino dominorum et Rex rexarum, Simplis Christianus Puer Mentalis Doctor, reincarnation of Jesus Christ of Nazareth.” Rokeach interprets this more as an attempt to avoid conflict than a reflection of any genuine identity change. The Christs explain one another’s claims to divinity in predictably idiosyncratic ways: Clyde, an elderly gentleman, declares that his companions are, in fact, dead, and that it is the “machines” inside them that produce their false claims, while the other two explain the contradiction by noting that their companions are “crazy” or “duped” or that they don’t really mean what they say. …

Yet another case of science confirming what everyone already knows - if you've read the news over the past, say 50 years, you'd already know that people don't give up cherished beliefs about anything (religion, politics, ...) very easily.

Starving the beast

David Henderson quotes Bruce Bartlett on "starving the beast":

Bill Niskanen, chairman of the libertarian Cato Institute and a member of the CEA under Reagan, now argues that the starve-the-beast theory has actually been perverse. It led libertarians and conservatives to think that tax cuts are the only thing necessary to restrain the growth of government. Passage of large tax cuts during the George W. Bush administration led them to become "casual about the sustained political discipline necessary to control federal spending." Niskanen says it is a "fantasy" to think that tax cuts have any restraining influence on spending. [italics in original]

Which is of course obvious by now.

The multiplicativity of invention

Arnold Kling, in discussing William Bumol's new book, asks an interesting question:

When you buy a car, should the price include a licensing fee to the ancestor who invented the wheel?

... If you think of innovation as a factor of production in this sense, then Baumol argues that innovators are under-compensated. Most of the benefit of innovation accrues to people other than innovators--ultimately, it accrues to consumers. Baumol sees this as inefficient in theory but good in practice. He thinks that we would have a wildly unequal distribution of income if innovators were paid for the full value of their innovations. His resolution of the puzzle is that society has contrived institutions that pay innovators less than the value of their innovations in order to reduce poverty.

I lean toward a different resolution of the puzzle. I would emphasize that:

1. With innovation, the relationship between effort and value is unknown ex ante. You do not know whether that idea you are working on is going to turn out to be the Lisa (Apple's first graphical-interface computer, which bombed) or the Mac. You do not know whether the problem you are trying to solve is going to require years of effort or yield to a moment of inspiration.

2. Useful innovations tend to be combinations of innovations, multiplied together. ... The car requires the wheel, gearing, and the internal combustion engine (among other things). There is no way to compute the value of those innovations separately.

His second point is something I would like to think about. I think this is the source of exponential growth in many areas of technology, such as the industrial revolution and in computers. That is, two inventions that are individually so-so, but combined are not merely additive, but multiplicative. What causes that multiplicativity is a really interesting question to answer.