Steve Reads

I think it’s now fair to say that I backed the wrong horse.

Just putting that out there.

I’ve had a cumbersome, carefully organized collection of mail folders for well over a decade now. At the moment, there are about 300 of them. Typically they’re organized by sender, though sometimes it’s by subject (e.g., if I send out a party invitation, I gather up all the responses in a folder for that party). There are probably other rules that I’m forgetting. Within those 300 folders are, if I’m counting correctly, about 153,000 mail messages. On the order of 14,000 of those are from Adam.

Clearly my organizational scheme is suboptimal. It has become noticeably so in the last year, ever since I’ve owned an iPhone. Partly this is the iPhone’s fault: I should be able to jump to a folder by its first letter, just as I can jump to the first letter of a contact’s name or the first letter of an album title. Without the ability to jump around from folder to folder, I have to flick through page upon page of folders. Really annoying.

This scheme has always caused me troubles, though. In particular, if I ever want to send someone the full contents of a thread between myself and someone else, I need to jump back and forth between my ‘sent’ folder and the recipient’s folder, copy those messages off somewhere else, thread-order them, and send the thread-ordered collection off.

Thunderbird and other modern mail clients help out with this: they build a client-side cache of all your IMAP messages, which are then rapidly searchable. In general, this is obviously where things are going — or, indeed, where things already are: put everything in a text index and be done with it.

A client-side text index won’t help with my iPhone, which doesn’t have enough disk space to store such an index. Really what I need to do is what Gmail already does: put everything in a single folder called ‘Archive’ when I’m done with it. Maybe GTD up my mail and create folders for Do/Defer/Delegate/Delete. (I already have a Trash folder, so that last one is already done.) But in any case, radically reduce the number of folders. Then my iPhone could just consult the server-side IMAP text cache when it needs to search for something. Done and done.

So that’s what I’m doing right now. I’m watching Mail.app spin its wheels moving those 14,000 messages from the ‘kessel’ folder into ‘Archives’. Because I’m curious how IMAP works, I’ve got a Wireshark window open, showing me all the packets heading to the secure-IMAP port on my mail server. Here’s where I’m curious: why are there so many packets flowing that way? I would have expected not very many packets at all: one COPY command per set of, say, ten messages, a STORE command to tag those messages “\Deleted”, and an EXPUNGE to delete them from the source mailbox. Instead there have been many thousands of packets sent back and forth thus far. I can’t look into the details of those packets, though, because they’re TLSv1-encrypted. Once this folder is done moving, I’ll switch Mail.app to unencrypted IMAP and watch the packets to see what they’re containing. Stay tuned, you fascinated audience, you.

There’s a reasonable chance, as Henry at Crooked Timber notes, and as On The Media reported recently [1], that bloggers may soon be required to tell the world if they receive free products. It’s not clear to me whether they want us to announce only if we’ve been paid to shill for their company, or whether even review copies of books count.

Well, I receive review copies every now and again. Of the books I’ve read so far this year — which non-RSS readers can see listed in the right column — I’ve received review copies of two, namely Codes of the Underworld and The Myth of the Rational Market. I’ve not reviewed CotU yet, but it’s going to get a favorable review when I do. As you can see from the review, I really adored The Myth of the Rational Market.

As those of you who read my reviews regularly know, I quite often do not like the books that I read. Whether or not I like them, I make it a point to send the authors a link to my review — especially if they were gracious enough to send me a review copy, and in that case especially if I disliked the review. It’s a point of pride with me: if I don’t send a negative review to an author, then I’m a coward.

Sending reviews to the books’ authors has, perhaps, softened my reviews somewhat, but I count this as a good thing. Quite often, communication on the web takes place behind a veil of anonymity: people say things that they would never, ever say to someone else’s face. Knowing that the author himself will eventually be reading my review, I tone it down to be, at the least, civil. Those of you who’ve been reading this blog for a while may have noted — I, at least, certainly have noted — that I’m less of a bloviating jerk than I used to be. I consider this an improvement.

But to return to the topic at hand, I need to be emphatic: I would never, ever convert a negative review to a positive one just because someone gave me a free copy of a book. Also, no one ever has paid or ever will pay me to write a favorable review.

Finally, let’s be clear on the scope of my importance. My subscriber count has hovered around 130 for at least a year. I am not exactly the New York Times Book Review. It’s easy to avoid corruption when no one cares what you think.

[1] – Thanks to Adam for pointing me to that OTM story.

This makes me want to scream, because I see it so much and it misses the point in so many ways:

["Centrist" Democrat Mary] Landrieu [of Louisiana] says it makes no sense to create a third government health care program when Medicare and Medicaid are already headed for insolvency.

Here’s why that’s wrong and misses the point:

1. The entire U.S. health-care system is growing unsustainably. Medicare’s costs are growing more slowly than the health-care system’s costs as a whole. So if Medicare is pushing toward insolvency, so is the whole U.S. health system.
2. The private health-insurance system has, to some extent, been able to avoid obviously falling apart by throwing people off its rolls. If private insurers were required to accept all comers, its problems would be even more manifest.
3. In any case, Medicare is “headed for insolvency” because it works off a fixed budget. Well, Part A (hospital insurance) does. Parts B (reimbursing doctors), C (Medicare Advantage), and D (the drug benefit) are funded out of general revenues, so they can only go insolvent when the U.S. government goes insolvent. Medicare Part A is forced to be responsible in a way that the rest of the U.S. government is not. Why does no one ever talk about the Department of Defense being “headed for insolvency”? If Landrieu is so concerned about the public fisc, why doesn’t she push for the DoD to be funded out of a dedicated payroll tax? Then every few years, we could go through a public rending-of-garments ritual over the DoD’s impending bankruptcy. I would enjoy this very much. At least then we’d have parity: conservative Republicans shedding crocodile tears over how Medicare will have to be cut to keep it afloat, and my party doing the same for the military.

I wonder if it’s fair to label Landrieu’s words here “lying.” I wonder if she’s aware of the ways in which she’s perverted the debate. In fact, I wonder if the journalist who interviewed her is aware of her errors of fact.

A “debate” over health care would be nice, but first everyone has to understand the way the world works.

I found D²‘s excellent gloss on the folk theorem of iterated game theory the other day:

The Folk Theorem in game theory states that any outcome of a repeated game can be sustained as an equilibrium if the minimax condition for both players is satisfied. In plain language, it can be summarised as stating that “if we take strategic considerations into account, there is a game-theoretic rationale for practically anything”. This formulation leads on to my contribution, the Davies-Folk Theorem, which states that “if we take strategic considerations into account,there is a game-theoretic rationale for practically fucking anything” (it’s a fairly simple [corollary]; proof available from author on request).

(The rest of that post is worth reading. So is Thomas Schelling, for that matter. I’ve only read his Micromotives and Macrobehavior, but I want to read The Strategy of Conflict und so weiter.)

Gary Miller refers over and over again to the folk theorem in Managerial Dilemmas, and I could never figure out why — for reasons that D² makes most clear. Even at the time, Managerial Dilemmas seemed like a strangely theorized take on corporate structure. But then the folk theorem bits were lacquered on top, as though they justified the point he was making. It was very strange to me.

So yeah. Were you thinking your day would start with iterated game theory? Well it has.

There’s a fairly standard solution to the above-named problem that involves performing a conversion on your own before you actually insert into the database, it seems. I am new to SQL, so I’m going to ask a naïve question here: why can’t the database handle the string-to-int conversion for me? I’m thinking about this like an object oriented language: if I want to create a new Host object that takes an IP address as an argument to its constructor, I can have a string-based constructor like so:

Host( string ipAddress );

where ipAddress is a dotted-quad string, and an int-based constructor like so:

Host( int, int, int, int );

where each int is one of the octets. Behind the scenes, the first constructor will convert that string into a sequence of octets. The point is that the language is taking care of the conversion for me. So why can’t MySQL do the same?

Likewise, I’ve seen a GUID column in MySQL defined as, say, varchar(36). My object-oriented brain asks: why can’t that column be defined as a GUID?

The answer seems to be that these types are defined at a higher level: in your application, you handle conversion from a dotted quad into four octets, say, or from a GUID type to a varchar. Then the database only knows how to handle its primitive types. I don’t get why it should be so. Don’t we want the extra assurance that comes from constraining our datatypes at a lower level?

By now, I’ve read quite enough about how 1) economics assumes rational actors, and that the latest and greatest economics acknowledges deviations from homo economicus, and 2) economics as a profession assembled these rational actors into perfect frictionless markets, thereby condemning us to a second Great Depression.

All of that is well and good. Those of us who enjoy reading economics, though, would like to know what the actual state of the art is. Read enough of Krugman’s blog, and you’d almost think that you just need to return to the “saltwater economics” of the 60s and 70s in order to reclaim truth.

Daniel Davies had an interesting (and, per usual for him, really funny) post the other day on the use of nonparametric models in econometrics, which gets us on the way to what I’m looking for. Don’t be scared by the use of “nonparametric”: all it means is that you assume less about the way the world works when you’re building your models, and let the data fill in those details for you. Models that assume more can give precise answers, but they’re often precisely wrong.

So that’s a good start: nonparametric techniques in econometrics. What else? Maybe prospect theory as an alternative model of individual actors? Then we need some way to model the individual actors when they’re all put together in an economy; this would be a macroeconomics whose foundation is fallible humans.

Then we’d have to add some Keynes back in. Here’s where we return to the 60s or before.

Finally, maybe we’d add in the imperfect-information ideas from Stiglitz et al. — one of whose consequences is that, because of information asymmetries, employees will be paid systematically more than their “marginal product”, with consequent effects on labor supply.

There are a lot of us, I hope and believe, who are chomping at the bit for a mathematically rigorous, theoretically rich approach to macro. Given what I’ve read of behavioral microeconomics, it looks likely that the microfoundations have probably not been formed very precisely. That’s okay. I’d just like to see them put together in a compelling way, so that I can stop reading about the failures of economics and start reading about some successes.

I agree with George Packer: Obama should turn down the prize and ask them to hold off until he’s actually accomplished something Peace Prize-worthy.

Then again, if Kissinger can win it while widening a war behind the scenes, why shouldn’t Obama?

From Fred Brooks’s The Mythical Man-Month, which labels it “Conway’s Law”:

“Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce systems which are copies of the communications structures of these organizations.”

(This turns out to be a quote from Mel Conway’s essay “How Do Committees Invent?” It appears slightly differently in that article. Brooks’s stylistic editing was a good idea.)

I could come up with at least a dozen examples from my own work experience that confirm Conway’s Law. Indeed, I’m glad to find that I’m not the only one who’s had this idea.

Maybe the best example of this failure is when one group within a software organization considers a certain kind of work distasteful, and thereby throws it over the wall to another group to handle. Imagine, for instance, if engineering finds deployment odious, and hands that task off to a deployment group. The deployment group must then behave as though it were independent of engineering; it gets limited input from the engineers. The classic pattern here, then, is for the deployment group to write code that protects against any of the bugs from engineering. Layer upon layer of protective wrapper scripts then form around the engineering nucleus. The code, then, mimics the structure of the organization — whereas if the groups had been working together from the start, the code would reflect deployment concerns at a much earlier point.

If we’re going to ascribe laws to people, I’d like to posit Laniel’s Law: there are few genuine technical problems within a software organization, in the sense of problems that can be solved by a faster algorithm or more hardware; there are only employee or structural problems manifesting as problems in code. Come to think of it, this is basically a restatement (in more-pessimistic form) of Conway’s Law.

The Letterman blackmail thing makes me wonder a bigger question: why is blackmail a crime to begin with? If someone is hiding some information that’s socially useful — such as that a man is cheating on his wife, or something with broader social import, such as that a politician is corrupt — why doesn’t society have an interest in making that public? Why should people be punished for revealing socially useful information?

The only reason that comes to mind is that it’s more about the abuse of power than about the revelation of information that people want to keep secret. We want to discourage people who have access to privileged information from revealing that information. But this only makes sense to me in certain public contexts. The FBI can get its hands on information that the rest of the world can’t, and we don’t want them letting it out. It’s not at all clear that we, as a society, care whether a television producer reveals that his coworker is a rake.

What am I missing about the reasons for outlawing blackmail?

(I believe Posner addressed this question in Frontiers of Legal Theory, by the way. When I get back to my bookshelf, I’ll look up what he says.)