Lunch at the Labs

Various web links I found to be of interest recently.

• I Mentored Mark Zuckerberg. I Loved Facebook. But I Can't Stay Silent About What's Happening.

  by Roger McNamee, January 17, 2019

  It took me a very long time to accept that success had blinded Zuck and Sheryl to the consequences of their actions. I have never had a reason to bite Facebook''s hand. Even at this writing, I still own shares in Facebook. My criticism of the company is a matter of principle, and owning shares is a good way to make that point. I became an activist because I was among the first to see a catastrophe unfolding, and my history with the company made me a credible voice.
  ...
  The massive success of Facebook eventually led to catastrophe. The business model depends on advertising, which in turn depends on manipulating the attention of users so they see more ads. One of the best ways to manipulate attention is to appeal to outrage and fear, emotions that increase engagement. Facebook's algorithms give users what they want, so each person's News Feed becomes a unique reality, a filter bubble that creates the illusion that most people the user knows believe the same things. Showing users only posts they agree with was good for Facebook's bottom line, but some research showed it also increased polarization and, as we learned, harmed democracy.

• I Love You, But I Hate Your Politics

  Psychotherapist Jeanne Safer discusses how political differences are hurting personal relationships and offers remedies to the problem. She is a liberal and has been married to the conservative writer Richard Brookhiser for 38 years. C-SPAN BookTV video.

  Also see, The Liberal vs. the Pro-Lifer
• "Predictive Learning" is the New Buzzword in Deep Learning

  If intelligence was a cake, unsupervised learning would be the cake, supervised learning would be the icing on the cake, and reinforcement learning would be the cherry on the cake. We know how to make the icing and the cherry, but we don't know how to make the cake.
  ...
  A key element we are missing is predictive (or unsupervised) learning: the ability of a machine to model the environment, predict possible futures and understand how the world works by observing it and acting in it.

• The Ugly Truth Behind Stock Buybacks

  In my opinion, this should be a first step in fixing income inequality. Instead of making shareholders wealthier they should give their excess cash to employees as bonuses.

  For most of the 20th century, stock buybacks were deemed illegal because they were thought to be a form of stock market manipulation. But since 1982, when they were essentially legalized by the SEC, buybacks have become perhaps the most popular financial engineering tool in the C-Suite tool shed. And it's obvious why Wall Street loves them: Buying back company stock can inflate a company's share price and boost its earnings per share--metrics that often guide lucrative executive bonuses.

• Border crisis scrambling the politics of immigration policy

  This old article from 2014 is about Obama's immigration policy, which seems to have been forgotten now that Trump is in office.

  Obama's goal now is to make clear to adults in Central America that there is no payoff for sending their children on the dangerous journey northward, said Cecilia Muñoz, the White House domestic policy director. "He feels intensely a responsibility to prevent an even greater humanitarian crisis," she said.

  That, however, means speeding the deportation of most of those who have already arrived, which many in Obama's own party are resisting.

• Why one editor won't run any more op-eds by the Heritage Foundation's top economist

  I've long thought the right wing pundit Stephen Moore has little regard for the truth, so it's nice to see some concrete evidence.

  So says Miriam Pepper, editorial page editor of the Kansas City Star-and not just because she's retiring this week. Pepper's no-Moore stance comes after her paper discovered substantial factual errors in a recent guest op-ed by Moore, the chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
  ...
  In fact, Moore later acknowledged, he was using BLS numbers not from "the last five years" but from an earlier five-year period: December 2007 to December 2012. Focusing on that period is arguably dubious, because the span captures the depths of the Great Recession and the housing crash, which hit some states harder than others-and whose impact likely would have swamped any tax-rate effect. There are other issues with the quality of Moore's argument, too, like its glancing-at-best treatment of how factors like housing costs shape population and job growth.

• A non-technical guide to the dueling Seattle minimum wage studies

  This post presents a non-technical guide to the problems associated with attempting to estimate the effects of the minimum wage, the statistical methods used in both papers, and how to interpret the results (spoiler: the results are actually not in conflict).
  ...
  Two teams of researchers have presented estimates of the effects of Seattle's recent minimum wage increases on restaurant workers in Seattle, using similar methods and similar data. Both teams find that there were small but detectable increases in average wages paid in the restaurant sector. One team found there were no statistically significant effects on employment, but that result should not be misunderstood as a claim that the study "proves" the effect was actually zero, and the estimates in the two studies are not statistically in conflict in the sense that they are both consistent with small to moderate negative employment effects in the restaurant sector. We can't compare results in other sectors because the Berkeley study limits attention to restaurant workers.

• No Tuition, but You Pay a Percentage of Your Income (if You Find a Job)

  The concept is deceptively simple: Instead of charging students tuition - which often requires them to take out thousands of dollars in loans - students go to school for free and are required to pay back a percentage of their income after graduation, but only if they get a job with a good salary.

• Brave: The Ad-Blocking Browser That Pays the Sites You Visit

  So what if you could just set a budget-say, $5 a month-and divvy that up amongst all the sites you visit? It might not amount to much, but if enough people sent pennies-or even fractions of a penny-then maybe, just maybe, those micropayments could add up to a real business model for the media.
  ...
  Earlier this year, Eich launched Brave, a new web browser that blocks third party trackers, like cookies. As a side effect, the browser also blocks most ads. But Eich and company have always wanted to find a way to help publishers make money. Starting today, the desktop version of Brave will tally up how often you visit different sites and then set aside a small amount of the bitcoin digital currency for your favorite publishers. Then, once a month, it will send off your donation to a central bitcoin wallet so that publishers can get their share.

• Revisiting the Marshmallow Test:

  A Conceptual Replication Investigating Links Between Early Delay of Gratification and Later Outcomes

  We replicated and extended Shoda, Mischel, and Peake's (1990) famous marshmallow study, which showed strong bivariate correlations between a child's ability to delay gratification just before entering school and both adolescent achievement and socioemotional behaviors. Concentrating on children whose mothers had not completed college, we found that an additional minute waited at age 4 predicted a gain of approximately one tenth of a standard deviation in achievement at age 15. But this bivariate correlation was only half the size of those reported in the original studies and was reduced by two thirds in the presence of controls for family background, early cognitive ability, and the home environment. Most of the variation in adolescent achievement came from being able to wait at least 20 s. Associations between delay time and measures of behavioral outcomes at age 15 were much smaller and rarely statistically significant.

• Judith Rich Harris, 80, Dies; Author Played Down the Role of Parents

  I knew her from my early days at Bell Labs and we stayed in touch over the years.

  She had her own theory: that children are influenced more by their genes and peers than by their parents. It was a revolutionary thought and ran counter to what most psychologists - and most parents - believed. She wrote it up for an academic journal and won a prestigious prize from the American Psychological Association.