Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• Why even removing Trump from office won't save American democracy

  The reality is that Trump's removal or resignation from office, while desirable, would not do much to change the trajectory of America's political institutions. And the mounting desire for something cataclysmic that could change their trajectory strikes me as dangerous. The best we can do, I fear, is to muddle along and try our best to keep things from getting worse. And the less we accept that, and the more we escape into fantasias of collapse and redemption, the harder making those modest incremental improvements will be.

• People Voted for Trump Because They Were Anxious, Not Poor

  A new study finds that Trump voters weren't losing income or jobs. Instead, they were concerned about their place in the world.

• Lesson in Amazon Scams and Money Laundering

  Whereas Facebook is plagued by fake news, Amazon is littered with fake products. And these fake products encourage fraud and play a role in global money laundering.

• The Internet Apologizes

  Even those who designed our digital world are aghast at what they created. A breakdown of what went wrong - from the architects who built it:

  Jaron Lanier, Antonio García Martínez, Ellen Pao, Can Duruk, Kate Losse, Tristan Harris, Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka, Ethan Zuckerman, Dan McComas, Sandy Parakilas, Guillaume Chaslot, Roger McNamee, Richard Stallman

• Property Is Another Name for Monopoly

  Facilitating Efficient Bargaining with Partial Common Ownership of Spectrum, Corporations, and Land.
  Authors: Eric A. Posner & E. Glen Weyl August 9, 2016.
  

  The existing system of private property interferes with allocative efficiency by giving owners the power to hold out for excessive prices. We propose a remedy in the form of a tax on property, based on the value self-assessed by its owner at intervals, along with a requirement that the owner sell the property t o any third party willing to pay a price equal to the self-assessed value. The tax rate would reflect a tradeoff between gains from allocative efficiency and losses to investment efficiency, and would increase in line with expected developments in information technology. The legal and economic implications of this system are explored.

• Why Bitcoin is bullshit, explained by an expert

  It turns out cryptocurrencies and blockchains have a few problems.

• The Libertarian Who Accidentally Helped Make the Case for Regulation

  George Mason economist Alex Tabarrok set out to prove that federal regulations are strangling the economy. That's not what he found.

  When Tabarrok and his former grad student Nathan Goldschlag set out to measure how federal regulations impact business growth, they were sure they'd find proof that regulations were dragging down the economy. But they didn't. No matter how they sliced the data, they could find no evidence that federal regulation was bad for business.
  ...
  The trend of declining dynamism since 1980-along with wage stagnation, rising inequality, and a host of other ills-has tracked a parallel rise in monopolization, as the economy becomes increasingly consolidated in the hands of a few giant businesses. As New York Times columnist Eduardo Porter put it recently, "By allowing an ecosystem of gargantuan companies to develop, all but dominating the markets they served, the American economy shut out disruption. And thus it shut out change."

• Aggregation Theory

  First from July 21, 2015: Ben Thompson's Aggregation Theory

  The value chain for any given consumer market is divided into three parts: suppliers, distributors, and consumers/users. The best way to make outsize profits in any of these markets is to either gain a horizontal monopoly in one of the three parts or to integrate two of the parts such that you have a competitive advantage in delivering a vertical solution. In the pre-Internet era the latter depended on controlling distribution.
  ...
  The fundamental disruption of the Internet has been to turn this dynamic on its head. First, the Internet has made distribution (of digital goods) free, neutralizing the advantage that pre-Internet distributors leveraged to integrate with suppliers. Secondly, the Internet has made transaction costs zero, making it viable for a distributor to integrate forward with end users/consumers at scale.

  Second from June 6, 2017: Macro Blockchain #1: The End of Aggregation Theory

  Why do blockchains allow new startups to compete with FANG and break Aggregation Theory --> ML? Because blockchains diminish the two aspects of defensibility held by FANG:

  • UX/Network Effects- Blockchains allow for a new monetary incentive structure which gives early adopters greater upside the earlier they join the bootstrap (which can overcome aggregators' existing network effect).
  • ML Data Advantage- Blockchains allow for a DLT (distributed ledger technology) architecture where data is shared and open, rather than a client-server architecture where data is closed and siloed.

  So how do you get people to join a brand new network? You give people partial ownership of the network. Just like equity in a startup, it is more valuable to join the network early because you get more ownership. Decentralized applications do this by paying their contributors in their token. And there is potential for that token (partial ownership of the network) to be worth more in the future. This is equivalent to being a miner in the early days of Bitcoin. ...When the network is less populated and useful you now have a stronger incentive to join it.

• The world's hottest shopping city is becoming a ghost town

  Retail space in Manhattan sits unused as rental prices soar.

  Yes, there are bank branches, restaurants, fast-food outlets, theaters, Duane Reades, a vitamin shop and a few tourist-targeted "discount" stores. But mainly there are oodles of empty spaces covered with signs touting SUPERB CORNER RETAIL OPPORTUNITY.

• The Long and Curious History of Meetup.com.

  Old article from 2011 about the origins of meetup.com For some more recent (2016) information see, What Meetups Tell Us About America.

  And the most recent (2017) meetup.com news:

  WeWork Buys Meetup to Bring People Together Outside of Work

• More and more companies have monopoly power over workers' wages.

  The trend can explain slow growth, "missing" workers, and stagnant salaries.

  In sum, growing labor market power may well be a significant explanation of the host of maladies that have beset wealthy countries, notably the United States, in the past few decades: declining growth rates, falling labor share of corporate earnings, rising inequality, falling employment of prime-age men, and persistent and growing government fiscal deficits. It's remarkable how well labor market power alone can simultaneously explain all these trends.

• How to download a copy of everything Facebook knows about you

  Here's how to see everything Facebook knows about you and how to download your own archive of that information.

  To see how Facebook allows an advertiser to track you see: About Facebook Pixel.
• How brain cancer can affect the mind

  When neuroscientist Barbara Lipska was diagnosed with brain cancer, she thought she knew about the physical toll. But she was unprepared for its effect on her behaviour

  Yet for two distressing months, after surgery and radiation and just as she began an immunotherapy clinical trial, Lipska slid into what she terms "insanity", the tumours and swelling in the different areas of her brain triggering bewildering behaviour changes, lack of judgment, empathy and tolerance, and difficulty in relating to the world around her.
  ...
  Most important, she states, is to build the understanding that mental illness is a disease of the brain and must be studied and treated as such, "just as coronary illness is a disease of the heart". Notions of mental illness as different - "somehow involving blame" - still linger, she believes. "We are so far away from understanding how the brain functions. Understanding how it malfunctions is even further away. There is so much work to do."

• Researchers have ditched the autism-vaccine hypothesis.

  Genes and the microbiome are some of the most promising leads.

  Today, about one in 68 US children has autism - a rate that's remained unchanged since at least 1990, though there's been a steady increase in awareness and diagnosis.
  ...
  But "of all the causes of autism, the thing we know with the greatest certainty is that it's a very genetic disorder," said UCSF geneticist and autism researcher Stephan Sanders. "If you look at a child with autism, then look at their siblings, you'll find the rate of autism is 10 times higher in those siblings than in the general population. This has been looked at in populations of millions."
  ... "The bottom line is that when you add up all of the genetic risks, it looks like genetics can account for 50 percent of the risk for autism, which is very high," said David Amaral, an autism specialist at the UC Davis MIND Institute.
  
  ... Exposure to infections and certain medicines during pregnancy may be linked to autism .
  
  ... Overall, the evidence for these prenatal exposures is stronger than the evidence for the range of postnatal causes that may trigger autism, said Amaral.
  

  And for the sordid history of the vaccine-autism controversy and how Andrew Wakefield's shoddy science fueled autism-vaccine fear: 20 years ago, research fraud catalyzed the anti-vaccination movement.

  
  The study, led by the now discredited physician-researcher Andrew Wakefield, involved 12 children and suggested there's a link between the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine - which is administered to millions of children around the world each year - and autism.
  
  The study was subsequently thoroughly debunked. The Lancet retracted the paper and Wakefield was stripped of his medical license. Autism researchers have shown decisively again and again that the developmental disorder is not caused by vaccines.
  
  Still, public health experts say the false data and erroneous conclusions in that paper, while rejected in the scientific world, helped fuel a dangerous movement of vaccine skepticism and refusal around the world.
  

Some links and lot of quotes about Jordan Peterson who seems to be everywhere.

My interest is in how cults develop and what causes one brain to believe one thing is true while another brain thinks it's false.

• What's So Dangerous About Jordan Peterson?

  Not long ago, he was an obscure psychology professor. Now he leads a flock of die-hard disciples.
  (A good starting point if you don't know anything about him.)
  

  It can be tough to parse the Peterson phenomenon. For one thing, it seems as if there are multiple Petersons, each appealing to, or in some cases alienating, separate audiences. There is the pugnacious Peterson, a clench-jawed crusader against what he sees as an authoritarian movement masquerading as social-justice activism. That Peterson appears on TV, including on Fox & Friends, President Trump's preferred morning show, arguing that the left is primarily responsible for increased polarization. That Peterson contends that ideologically corrupt humanities and social-science programs should be starved of students and replaced by something like a Great Books curriculum.

  There's also the avuncular Peterson, the one who dispenses self-help lessons aimed at aimless young people, and to that end has written a new book of encouragement and admonition, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Random House Canada). The book isn't political, at least not overtly, and it grew out of his hobby of answering personal questions posted by strangers on the internet. That Peterson runs a website on "self-authoring" that promises to help those with a few spare hours and $14.95 discover their true selves.

  Then there's the actual Peterson, a guy who Ping-Pongs between exuberance and exhaustion, a grandfather who is loathed and loved by a public that, until very recently, had almost entirely ignored him. Now he has more than a half-million YouTube subscribers, nearly 300,000 Twitter followers, and several thousand die-hard disciples who send him money, to the tune of $60,000 per month.

  ... In the video that made Jordan Peterson famous, he can be seen sparring with a handful of transgender students about the use of pronouns. He is nattily attired in a white dress shirt with rolled-up sleeves and dark red suspenders. Several supporters, all of them male, stand behind Peterson, amplifying his points. A transgender student accuses Peterson of being their enemy for refusing to use gender-neutral pronouns. "I don't believe using your pronouns will do you any good in the long run," he says. "I believe it's quite the contrary." When another student asks what gives him the authority to determine which pronouns he uses when referring to someone else, Peterson spins to face that person.

  "Why do I have the authority to determine what I say?" Peterson replies, his voice brimming with outrage, his fingers pressed to his own chest. "What kind of question is that?"

  ... To understand Peterson's worldview, you have to see the connection between his opposition to gender-neutral pronouns and his obsession with the Soviet Union. He believes that the insistence on the use of gender-neutral pronouns is rooted in postmodernism, which he sees as thinly disguised Marxism. The imposition of Marxism led to the state-sponsored slaughter of millions. For Peterson, then, the mandated use of gender-neutral pronouns isn't just a case of political correctness run amok. It's much more serious than that. When he refers to the "murderous ideology" of postmodernism, he means it literally.

• Why Jordan Peterson Is A Charlatan In His Own Words.

  An introductory video (by someone calling himself Cult of Dusty) that explains why Jordan Peterson is just a modern day televangelist.

  In case your have doubts about other people's analysis of Peterson, check out this 21 minute video of snippets from his his own videos. Very good, although the clips are obviously selected to show his worse moments. If you encounter a true Jordan Peterson convert, this is the first link you should point them to.

• There has been a lot of chatter concerning Jordan Peterson's appearances on the Sam Harris podcast Waking Up
  • The audio for the original 01/21/2017 interview What is True? is over two hours long and goes nowhere. Around the 1:42:00 minute mark there is this Peterson quote:

    "scientific truth is nested inside moral truth and moral truth is the final adjudicator"
    (and by "moral truth" he means survival in the Darwinian sense)
    

    Also there is some interesting back and forth starting at the 1:54:39 minute mark. Harris postulates a scenario where his wife is cheating on him and he kills himself and says:

    "you have to grant one thing; you cannot remove the one piece:"
    "because you killed yourself it's not true that she was having an affair"
    (and that is followed by a long silence from Peterson)

    For Sam Harris' analysis of the interview see his notes at, Speaking of "Truth" with Jordan B. Peterson

    But the place at which Peterson and I got stuck was a strange one. He seemed to be claiming that any belief system compatible with our survival must be true, and any that gets us killed must be false.
    ...
    Peterson's peculiar form of pragmatism, anchored to the lone value of survival, can't capture what we mean by "truth" (or even what most pragmatists mean by it).

    You can listen to the second conversation (because the first wasn't fruitful) between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson at Meaning and Chaos. They discuss science, religion, archetypes, mythology, and the perennial problem of finding meaning in life. Peterson's first book is Maps Of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief.
  • What is your reaction to the debate between Sam Harris and Jordan B Peterson?

    An open discussion on Quora.com with some nice analysis.

    Some good comments trying to explain Peterson's position but I still cannot understand it. Here's one summary:

    Peterson proposes that scientific truth is "nested within a [Darwinian] moral framework", which implies that there may exist facts which are true, but are "not true enough" since they've proven adversarial to survival.

    Sam Harris opposes this dependency and insists that scientific truth is not concerned with morality in any way. Of course, the practice of scientific exploration should be bound by ethical considerations, but the discoveries of science exist outside of any moral context.

    Also on quora.com a discussion What are Dr. Jordan Peterson's religious beliefs?

    In the end, it is much more accurate to simply label him an agnostic. Granted, an agnostic that sees value in the utility of religion, due to a deep understanding of the mystical/quasi-gnostic/psychological ideas that religion has hidden in it. But still, roughly speaking, an agnostic at the end of the day.

    Peterson believes in an objective morality rooted in Jungian archetypes. He believes in modes of being played out through the course of human evolution. Modes of being that have contributed to successful societies win, those that don’t fail. We see these archetypes played out in movies today. He is also big on the dominance hierarchy.

  • What Sam Harris was missing re: Jordan Peterson and "What is true?"

    A defense of Jordan Peterson by Paul McKeever, leader of the Freedom Party of Ontario and advocate of laissez-faire capitalism. There are transcriptions of some relevant parts of the conversation.

    The essence of the explicit disagreement between Harris and Peterson concerned the issue of whether the truth or falsity of an idea depends upon the moral value (e.g., good or evil) of the idea. On Harris' view, an idea is true if it corresponds to the facts of reality, and the moral goodness or evil of the idea has no bearing on its truth or falsity: the good is a species of the true. On Peterson's view, an idea is true only if it is morally good: the true is a species of the good.
    ...
    On Peterson's stated theory of truth, an idea can be thought to be true (or false) at a "micro" or "proximal" level - e.g., at the level of a scientific experiment, or at some other level that does not take the morality of the idea into account - yet actually be false (or true) at a "macro" or "distal" level that includes a consideration of whether the idea is pro-survival or anti-survival (i.e., good or evil).

    McKeever finds fault with Sam Harris but I think it is Jordan Peterson who was unreasonable and couldn't defend his own viewpoint.

  • Sam Harris vs. Jordan Peterson: Key Philosophical & Personality Differences

    An examination by A.J. Drenth of some of the philosophical and psychological propensities of Harris and Peterson in trying to understand why they disagree. (May be paywalled.)

    If we think of Harris as a philosopher-scientist, Peterson is more like a philosopher-storyteller. A self-described existentialist and pragmatist, Peterson rarely uses formal logic and is far less structured and systematic in his approach than is Harris. Taken as a whole, I think we can safely locate Peterson on the opposite side of the philosophical aisle, namely, within what is commonly known as the continental school of philosophy
    ...
    Continentalists often criticize analytic philosophers for their relative inattention to epistemology (i.e., how we go about knowing things), their disregard for the historical-cultural context in which their work is nested, and their avoidance of topics that matter most to human beings (e.g., existential issues). Analytic philosophers, in turn, are inclined to see continentalists as vague, speculative, and lacking methodological rigor, as well as contributing little of real substance to the advancement of knowledge.
    ...
    On the whole, NTJ personality types, such as Harris, are more structured and systematic in their thought, often drawn to objective methods and more formal types of logic. They can thus be associated with science and analytic philosophy, even if only for the way they approach and think about philosophical problems.
    NTP types, like Peterson, are typically drawn to metaphysical thinking, meaning-centered philosophies (including religion), history, existentialism, and other forms of continental philosophy. Rather than seeing things through a mechanistic lens, many prefer philosophies that engender a sense of mystery toward life and humanity. While NTJs are well-described as knowledge-oriented, NTPs are generally more concerned with existential issues, things such as meaning and wisdom. They are also more comfortable allowing certain truths to remain implicit, as doing so preserves the sense of mystery and potentiality they value.
    

• Jordan Peterson, the obscure Canadian psychologist turned right-wing celebrity, explained

  Who Peterson is, and the important truths he reveals about our current political moment.

  Long article but good summary by Zack Beauchamp in vox.com. Here are some selected quotes that I think highlight the important points.

  His reactionary politics and talents as a public speaker combine to be a perfect fit for YouTube and the right-wing media, where videos of conservatives "destroying" weak-minded liberals routinely go viral. Peterson's denunciations of identity politics and political correctness are standard-issue conservative, but his academic credentials make his pronouncements feel much more authoritative than your replacement-level Fox News commentator.
  ...
  Peterson is also particularly appealing to disaffected young men. He's become a lifestyle guru for men and boys who feel displaced by a world where white male privilege is under attack; his new best-selling book, 12 Rules for Life, is explicitly pitched as a self-help manual, and he speaks emotionally of the impact his work has had on anxious, lost young men.
  ...
  At base, he argues that that Soviet-style communism, and all the mass murder and suffering it created, is still a serious threat to Western civilization. But rather than working openly, it seeps into our politics under the guise of "postmodernism."
  ...
  But this work, respected as it may be, has little to do with Peterson's fame. His most influential research was published in the late '90s and early to mid-2000s; of his 20 most cited papers, only one came out after 2010. By contrast, his international celebrity - as measured by worldwide Google searches for "Jordan Peterson" - didn't start to rise until October 2016:
  What happened in the fall of 2016 is that Peterson inserted himself into a national Canadian debate over transgender rights - specifically by refusing to refer to a student by their chosen gender pronouns.
  
  ...
  "I shouldn't say this, but I'm going to, because it's just so goddamn funny I can't help but say it: I've figured out how to monetize social justice warriors," Peterson told the podcast host Joe Rogan. "If they let me speak, then I get to speak, and then I make more money on Patreon ... if they protest me, then that goes up on YouTube, and my Patreon account goes WAY up."
  ...
  Peterson's stellar academic credentials act as a sort of legitimizing device, a way of setting up his authority on politics and making his denunciations of "leftist ideologues" more credible and attractive to his fans. Combine his undeniable talents as a public speaker and debater with his ability to use YouTube to reach audiences around the world and you get a right-wing celebrity who has transcended Canada and become a global reactionary star.
  ...
  He argues that these philosophers, famous for their skepticism about objective reality and emphasis on the social construction of human society, were actually crypto-Marxists. The difference is that they change the language - instead of arguing that society is defined by class oppression, Peterson says, they argue that it's defined by identity oppression: racism, sexism, gender identity, and the like.
  ... Actual experts on postmodernism note that the thinkers Peterson likes to cite were often quite critical of Marxism.
  
  ...
  Perhaps more fundamentally, there is no evidence that 20th-century French thinkers have a dominant influence on any sector of the left in contemporary Western politics, let alone society as a whole.
  ...
  But Peterson has inextricably intertwined his self-help approach with a kind of reactionary politics that validates white, straight, and cisgender men at the expense of everyone else. He gives them a sense of purpose by, in part, tearing other people down - by insisting that the world can and should revolve around them and their problems.

• Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism

  Epic takedown of Peterson in the guise of a book review by Pankaj Mishra in The New York Review of Books.

  It upset Peterson a lot (perhaps with some good reason?)

• My question for Jordan Peterson.

  I don't want to pay $5 per month to ask Dr. Peterson a question, so here it is:

  You got very angry at what Pankaj Mishra said in The New York Review of Books and many transsexuals are very angry at you for some of your comments. Why do people get angry over words? The late great cognitive psychologist Albert Ellis use to say, why should other people behave the way you want them to rather than the way they want. Isn't it irrational to expect otherwise?