Uncommon Priors

Here’s an interesting general way in which a group of people can start burning all kinds of utility. Combine:

1. People who are incompetent in some socially useful skill, but whose incompetence is costly for others to determine;

2. A fairly high base rate of #1; and

3. Rational reactions from others.

Two examples.

First, consider (heteronormative, for simplicity) dating. Imagine a world in which there are many more single Gender-As than Gender-Bs, but many of the gAs have serious social skills problems that are costly for gBs to discover but drastically reduce their dating value.

If single gBs in general act like Bayesians, sooner or later after enough bad experiences with no-social-skills gAs, they’ll update their prior on any arbitrary gA’s social skills. Acting rationally, they’ll reject approaches from far more gAs than they would reject otherwise, to economize on the costs of being subjected to poor social skills. Only those gAs who can display a costly signal of good social skills right up-front will succeed. The consequence is that both the gBs and the medium-social-skills gAs (who are datable, but not awesome enough to be able to display costly signals) lose out on opportunities.

Now consider bad drivers. On the road, we take a lot of cues from one another’s behavior — ordinarily, for example, if people slow down or stop, there’s a reason for it, and we can make inferences about those reasons from the behavior. But this information mechanism breaks when there are a lot of incompetent drivers on the road.

So suppose Joey, a competent driver, is in a community with a lot of timid drivers. Ordinarily, if someone in front of Joey stops for no visible reason, s/he’ll infer that there’s some good reason to stop, like a hard-to-see pedestrian crossing the street. But eventually, after observing all kinds of drivers (many in priuses or volvos) stopping for no reason except misfiring synapses in their brains, Joey’s going to update his/her priors and expect that, ordinarily, stopping in this community just means the person in front is incompetent. So Joey, acting rationally and optimizing on his/her time, will swerve around the stopped car. The loss here falls on the pedestrian who is actually there .001% of the time.

How to deal with this general kind of problem? In the abstract, the best way I can see is to encourage the proliferation of reliable signals of competence and incompetence. Perhaps, for example, timid drivers ought to be identified and made to wear special tags on their cars… obviously not a serious suggestion (if only because sometimes even the timid drivers stop for an actual pedestrian, and the tags would mean all such pedestrians get run over), but something like that…

(Third example: job markets where applicants have private information about their own deficiencies…)

From Marginal Revolution:

A zoning board in Fairfax County, Va., is standing firm in its decision to order a war veteran to destroy a tree house he built for his two young sons.

Apparently it needs some kind of variance for purely technical reasons.

Here’s a question for the economists out there.

Why do zoning board personnel do their jobs here? Let’s assume that they don’t personally have a preference for chopping down treehouses. (Seems straightforward.) A zoning board employee has the choice to work or shirk on any given case — shouldn’t s/he work only on those cases where s/he’s likely to get punished for shirking, i.e., where anyone else in the would would give a damn?

Possibilities:
- they actually do have a preference for chopping down harmless treehouses
- they have preferences for enforcement of the rules in general (hmm… rule of law rears its head again?)
- they’re uncertain about others’ preferences, and are enforcing it due to risk-aversion?

My guess is the third, but, more?

Rule of law, eh? Check this out:

The Justice Department wrote a secret memorandum authorizing the lethal targeting of Anwar al-Aulaqi, the American-born radical cleric who was killed by a U.S. drone strike Friday, according to administration officials.

* * *

The administration officials refused to disclose the exact legal analysis used to authorize targeting Aulaqi, or how they considered any Fifth Amendment right to due process.

Yeah, that’s right, we have a president who authorizes extrajudicial killings based on secret legal analysis. Problem? Ask a rule of law scholar. (Or ask Conor Friedersdorf)

H/T my friend Altair, from a NYT story:

BANGKOK, Aug. 7 — It is the pink armband of shame for wayward police officers, as cute as can be with a Hello Kitty face and a pair of linked hearts.

No matter how many ribbons for valor a Thai officer may wear, if he parks in the wrong place, or shows up late for work, or is seen dropping a bit of litter on the sidewalk, he can be ordered to wear the insignia.

Certainly a novel way of making cops obey the rules. I like it. I do. But here’s the real money quote:

Pink armbands for misdemeanors are a start. Stronger measures could be next for corruption and extrajudicial killings.

I do hope so, I really do.

I’m on the academic job market in both law and political science this year. Comparing the brute bureaucratic process of applying in the two different fields is really quite fascinating.

Law is actually quite simple and centralized from the applicant end: everyone files a big form, and then committees call you. However, it externalizes a lot of work onto the committee end, i.e., going through a bunch of forms. (There’s a ludicrously high — $450 — fee for applicants, presumably to deter the unqualified [I'm being charitable here; no idea where all that money actually goes], and hence to trim the burden on committees, but that obviously raises its own problems re: wealth effects etc.) In law, there are no reference letters, just lists of references that committees call — much better for applicants, much worse for committees, again.

Political science is totally decentralized, and involves sending out dozens of packets, filling out numerous totally dysfunctional web forms, etc. (As far as I can tell, all the major web applications are, frankly, written by total incompetents.) And then faculty upload references, or, more likely, get some lovely and long-suffering department staff member to do it. Tons of work for applicants and recommenders, though presumably much less for committees. I’ve actually been on the edge of declining to apply for some searches just because the web app is so hopeless. (Naming and shaming: academic jobs online is bad. One school uses a peoplesoft system, which is much, much worse, just like everything else peoplesoft ever does.)

Both systems have advantages and disadvantages. On the whole, as noted, the law system is much gentler on applicants and (as far as I can tell from the outside) much more work for committees. Personally, though the $450 hurt, I’d much rather be able to pay that for polisci too and not have to go through all those wretched web apps. The polisci system is a crushing amount of work for applicants and, again AFAIK, less work for committees. But it should be possible, with a little creative centralization, to get both.

I think the only solution to this mess is going to be market-based, i.e., someone coming up with an actually usable centralized system at a good price and then marketing it like crazy to disciplinary associations to get schools to adopt. (Its utility and profit would both depend on adoption — a classic network product.) That system would have to do the following:

1. Allow applicants and references to upload full dossiers. And by full, I mean full. At most, there should be a customized cover letter for each school. Few applicants customize the rest anyway, and it’s unlikely that it makes any difference.

2. Allow schools to upload job descriptions and then allow applicants to apply to those jobs will one click.

3. Allow schools to, alternatively, search dossiers that applicants have chosen to make public, along clearly specified subfield lines per discipline as well as qualification terms. (e.g., law schools could search for people in contracts w/ at least one publication listed, political science departments could search for comparativists who study Europe).

4. Be affordable.

5. Be user-friendly. (That is, not be written by peoplesoft. Let me repeat. Not be written by peoplesoft. Did I mention not written by peoplesoft? Also, no peoplesoft. And peoplesoft is right out. Peoplesoft delenda est. One of my life’s dreams is to have the opportunity to dance on the steps of the bankruptcy court while peoplesoft is inside.)

I hear interfolio tries to do some of this, but I also hear (secondhand) that it is extremely overpriced and doesn’t work so well. Academic jobs online also tries some of this, but from personal experience it isn’t very user-friendly, and also doesn’t appear to be adopted widely (at least, I’ve seen it on only 2 of the polisci searches I’ve applied for so far).

This is possible. It’s more-or-less happened on the undergraduate level with the common application; I’m not sure of its precise details but I hear that it works fairly well. Also, that’s an initiative started by schools, not the private market. But, still.

Hey silicon valley friends, who wants to do this? There’s money in it! Really, there is! Right now, the market is absolutely not providing this service. I might even get involved myself.

… you realize that your job paper, which has been downloaded by upwards of 100 people, contains a repeated typo in the name of a leading scholar in the references list. Whoops!

A really interesting argument that Marx got a bunch of claims/predictions about capitalism right. (Though the author didn’t get Marx totally right… nothing unusual there, Marx is hard.) Sample:

Alienation. As workers were divorced from the output of their labor, Marx claimed, their sense of self-determination dwindled, alienating them from a sense of meaning, purpose, and fulfillment. How’s Marx doing on this score? I’d say quite well: even the most self-proclaimed humane modern workplaces, for all their creature comforts, are bastions of bone-crushing tedium and soul-sucking mediocrity, filled with dreary meetings, dismal tasks, and pointless objectives that are well, just a little bit alienating. If sweating over the font in a PowerPoint deck for the mega-leveraged buyout of a line of designer diapers is the portrait of modern “work,” then call me — and I’d bet most of you — alienated: disengaged, demoralized, unmotivated, uninspired, and about as fulfilled as a stoic Zen Master forced to watch an endless loop of Cowboys and Aliens.

Social-networking toilet rentals.

The next time you’re desperate to find a bathroom near you, you can use CLOO’ and the power of your social networks to find friends of friends who will let you use their bathroom for a buck or two.

Doom.

From academicjobsonline.org. Click for full-size.

Two awesome anti-demand letters in the news recently.

First Mike Godwin responds to an FBI demand to take down their official seal from Wikipedia. The win line in the letter has to be the one that proves that he took some philosophy courses at some point in his life:

In your letter, you assert that an image of an FBI seal included in a Wikipedia article is
“problematic” because “it facilitates both deliberate and unwitting violations” of 18 U.S.C.
701. I hope you will agree that the adjective “problematic,” even if it were truly applicable
here, is not semantically identical to “unlawful.”

Second, Marc Randazza, on behalf of one of the many TSA groping victims (but one who happens to have a widely-read blog), in response to a $500,000 defamation claim from the groper (ok, alleged groper, but given the pattern of TSA behavior it’s very easy to believe the blogger and very hard to believe the TSA agent) (h/t: Mike):

After the 9/11 attacks, America wallowed in fear, and ignoble politicians took advantage of that national temporary psychosis. In doing so, they foisted an intrusive security apparatus upon us, but one that was never effective at making us safer. It was, however, effective at rolling back our rights under the Fourth Amendment. We may have killed Osama Bin Laden this year, but he actually defeated the American way of life ten years ago. On September. 11, 2001, America went from “the land of the free and the home of the brave” to a nation of mewling cowards, eager to give up their liberties for perceived “safety.” One of the worst symptoms of this transformation is the TSA and its minions of blue-shirted “officers.” As numerous investigations of these checkpoints’ efficacy reveal, anyone with a marginal IQ and the desire to evade them can and will do so.

While the TSA fails miserably in providing security, it excels in undermining our protections under the Bill of Rights. This petty army has done its best not only to grind the Fourth Amendment into dust, but to strip us of our dignity as human beings. The Internet is replete with videos of travelers being groped by the TSA in a way that would result in sexual assault prosecutions for people other than TSA agents, all while the victims cry, protest, and express their horror. Your client may feel that she is in no way culpable for these wrongs, but her continued employment by the TSA and her actions against Ms. Alkon are an integral and inseparable part of the TSA’s abuse of all Americans. Fortunately for all of us, people like my client take the position that TSA agents cannot simply do whatever they want – not without dissent.

Ms. Alkon is acutely aware of the TSA’s erosion of our rights. When she entered the airport, Ms. Alkon did what any good American should do – she refused to quietly give up her rights and her dignity. This was an act of patriotism by Ms. Alkon. Like this law firm, Ms. Alkon believes that the TSA has gone too far, and it has turned America into a nation held hostage by its lowest common denominator. However, when Ms. Alkon refused to be subjected to the full body scan, your client, like so many other TSA agents before her, decided to teach Ms. Alkon a lesson. The message was clear: If you do not do as the TSA commands, you will pay with your dignity.

After Ms. Alkon refused to allow her Fourth Amendment rights to be yanked away without protest, she refused to remain silent when Ms. Magee sexually assaulted her, jamming the side of her hand between Ms. Alkon’s labia four times. And why should Ms. Alkon remain silent? Because your client felt that Ms. Alkon should learn a lesson about respecting authority? If so, she is wrong. And if your client thinks that she should now win the lottery to the tune of $500,000 because she wants to punish a patriotic American for exercising her First Amendment rights, she should think again.

Read the whole thing.