More Interviews from Occupy Wall Street (update below)

Posted on October 12, 2011 by Jonathan

Update: In the above video, there is a portion of of one of my interviews which I edited in such a way that the conversation flow was interrupted, so I’ve posted an uninterrupted portion of that conversation below:

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Interview with Jesse LaGreca, a Blogger for the DailyKos

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Jonathan

Here’s a 2-part interview I did with Jesse LaGreca, who I had seen on the internet and TV discussing the movement with more famous journalists than myself. Jesse has ended both of our interviews by walking away (without much of a goodbye), explaining that he had more pressing media engagements to attend to. Next time I track him down, I will try to make him agree upfront to a specified interview length, so I have more control over the interview conclusion.

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Freed Prisoners Occupy Wall Street

Posted on October 9, 2011 by Jonathan
This afternoon at Occupy Wall Street we ran into Sarah Shourd, Josh Fattal, and Shane Bauer, who were taken prisoner in Iran in July 2011 while hiking. Sarah was released last year, and Josh and Shane were released a couple of weeks ago. Today, they were passing through Zuccotti Park to get a sense of the Occupy Wall Street protest, and it seemed that they were largely unrecognized. We chatted about what life had been like since their release, and how the protest had evolved over the last few weeks. They were very friendly and accommodating (even letting us charge our video camera from their laptop and giving us cashews). Given their recent hardships, we decided to give them a friendly interview, unlike some of the more hard-hitting ones we gave to the other protesters (footage forthcoming). My one regret is asking them the last question, which seemed to put them off a bit — if I hadn’t asked that question I probably could have gotten more questions in about their hopes about the future of this movement. Below is the on-the-record portion of our discussion with the former prisoners:

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Occupy Wall Street Investigation

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Jonathan

I am headed to Occupy Wall Street tomorrow, where I’ll interview some of the protesters. Any suggestions for good questions to ask (either about their political ideology or about the structure of their movement, for example)?

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“The worst idea ever”

Posted on September 27, 2011 by Jonathan

That is how Tyler Cowen describes Obama’s idea to make it illegal for companies (with more than 15 employees) to refuse to hire job applicants on the basis of their being unemployed. I agree with Cowen (I’m assuming he’s being a bit hyperbolic — something like “Obama’s worst idea since becoming president” would have been more accurate).

From the article:

White House officials see discrimination against the unemployed as a serious problem. In a radio interview last month, Mr. Obama said such discrimination made “absolutely no sense,” especially at a time when many people, through no fault of their own, had been laid off.

It is hard to both be original and critique Obama at the same time in this case. But the bottom line is that, if Obama were right, and if “such discrimination made ‘absolutely no sense,'” then, surely, the fact of its making “absolutely no sense” would be a far more powerful disincentive to use discrimination than Obama’s law prohibiting it. Only irrational employers engage in practices that make “absolutely no sense,” and, thanks to our system of capitalism, these irrational employers would be easily outcompeted by their rational counterparts. So why bother with the law?

Additionally, this law is, in my opinion, quite likely to make it harder for the unemployed to find work. An employer can’t be sued for just throwing out an unemployed person’s resume, so that’s what a rational employer who is a bit disinclined towards the unemployed will do. Without the law, at least the unemployed person might have gotten an interview.

Maybe Obama believes that it does make sense for employers to discriminate against the unemployed, but that the sense it makes is outweighed by the long-term harm done to the unemployed by this practice (the article describes the fear that there could become “a class of people who could be left behind as the economy recovers”). If he thinks that, he should say that, rather than saying exactly the opposite (that it makes “absolutely no sense.”) But his proposal would still self-defeating for the reason described in my previous paragraph, and in any case ill-advised because it is such a ridiculous encroachment on employment freedoms that it, in my opinion, would not be the right move even if it were good for the economy.

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Answer to Running Puzzle

Posted on September 3, 2011 by Jonathan

Here is the answer to the running puzzle I posted last month:

In short, the simple version of the puzzle is that you are going to run around a track for 30 minutes, at the same time that you know your friend will be doing the same. Your friend goes in 1 direction the whole time, while you may switch directions. You don’t know the location or direction of your friend.  You both run at the same speed. How do you maximize the probability that you’ll meet?

The key to making the puzzle a lot easier is to use the trick that commenter Albert Fuchs suggested, which is to consider the motion from the reference frame of your friend. So, in other words, pretend that your friend is standing still, and that your two choices, rather than running in one direction or the other, are to stand still as well, or to go towards your friend (at 2x the speed that you can actually run): after all, these are the two possibilities in the original problem: that you, at any point in time, are maintaining a constant distance from your friend (if you’re going the same direction), or that you are moving towards your friend at 2x the speed that you can run — thus the setup is equivalent.

So we can think of it this way: your friend is standing still. You, over the course of 30 minutes, can press a button as many times as you want, and each time you press the button, you switch between 2 possible modes, in mode 1 you stand still, and in mode 2 you move at 2x speed towards your friend – obviously, if you could, you’d stay in mode 2, but the trick is that you never know which mode you’re actually in. Suppose you decide to spend X minutes in one mode and Y minutes in the other — i.e. the amount of time between even button pushes and odd ones is X minutes, and the amount of time between odd button pushes and even ones is Y minutes (so X+Y = 30). Then, if it turns out you spent X minutes in mode 1, you will cover X*2*s (where s is your speed) + Y*0 = 2sX miles after the 30 minutes expire. If it turns out you spent  minutes in mode 2, you will cover 2sY miles after the 30 minutes expire (assume speed s is expressed in miles/minute). So, given that you don’t know which mode is which, the expected distance you’ll cover is:

(1/2)*(2sX) + (1/2)*(2sY) = s(X+Y)

And, if you cover this distance, and if the total track distance is sZ (i.e. if it takes Z minutes to run the full track), then the probability of a meeting is s(X+Y)/(sZ) = (X+Y)/Z

So, for example, if the track takes a total of 90 minutes to run, the probability of a meeting is 1/3. It doesn’t matter how many minutes you spend going in one direction or the other. You can change directions a much as you want.

Wait one minute though! There is an assumption I glossed over: that is that you don’t cover more than the entire loop in 30 minutes during either the X minutes in one mode or the Y in the other mode. If you cover the entire loop, the probability of a meeting is 1, not greater than 1 (probabilities never exceed 1!). Thus, in the formula, I should have used min(2sX,sZ) and min(2sY,sZ) in place of 2sX and 2sY, respectively. Then it becomes:

probability of meeting = 1/2*(min(2sX,sZ) + min(2sY,sZ)) / sZ = (min(X,0.5Z)+min(Y,0.5Z))/Z

So, any amount by which either X or Y exceeds 0.5Z is wasted time, and you must change directions.

Thus: the final answer is that it doesn’t matter how many times you change directions over the course of the run, as long as you guarantee that the cumulative time spent in either direction does not exceed half the time it would take to run the full loop. If you follow these instructions, the probability of a meeting is equal to 30/Z, where Z is the amount of time it takes to run the full loop.

Solution to the more complicated version will come later (unless a commenter gets it first).

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Glenn Greenwald Confuses the Readers

Posted on September 2, 2011 by Jonathan

He explains that recent Wikileaks cables reveal that U.S. forces may have murdered several Iraqi civilians (including women and children) in their house, and later covered it up with an airstrike on that house. Then he complains that the U.S. media is far too harsh on Wikileaks for endangering diplomats by accidentally releasing unredacted cables, while being far too forgiving towards the U.S:

As usual, many of those running around righteously condemning WikiLeaks for the potential, prospective, unintentional harm to innocents caused by this leak will have nothing to say about these actual, deliberate acts of wanton slaughter by the U.S...

Despite the fault fairly assigned to WikiLeaks, one point should be absolutely clear: there was nothing intentional about WikiLeaks’ publication of the cables in unredacted form.

Greenwald is confusing the reader in 2 ways:

1) blaming “the U.S.” for a potential murder carried out by several U.S. soldiers. He’d be on no shakier ground blaming “the U.S.” for an act of theft carried out by a member of Obama’s Green Jobs commission

2) saying there was “nothing intentional” about what Wikileaks did. They have intentionally created a significant probability of great harm to diplomats. This is what is annoying about words like “intentional” and “malicious.” Would it be “malicious” of Tom to punch Scott 10 times in the face, not because he wanted to hurt his friend, but because he preferred that Scott’s nose be a bit shorter? No, not by the strict (but in my opinion flimsy) definition of “malicious” — the puncher in this case was merely punching his friend as a means to an end. But does the classification of this act as not malicous reveal anything useful about how much we should blame Tom? No — Tom is clearly doing a very bad thing by showing more concern for a silly aesthetic idea than for his friend’s well-being. And he is not, in my opinion, any less at fault than if he punched his friend out of malice. When you do something, you do it because the benefits outweigh the costs– “malice” describes a characterization of the benefits, and ignores the extent to which a person’s appraisal of the costs shows immorality. Similarly with Wikileaks, they should clearly be responsible for their apparent lack of concern for diplomats’ safety, even if Wikileaks’ primary concern was not a minimization of that safety.

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The Unaddressed Question

Posted on August 29, 2011 by Jonathan

Sam Harris, in a followup post defending his call to use taxes to reduce income inequality, complains that his rich readers foolishly give themselves credit for their own well-being, failing to see that, in large part, they have other factors to thank:

And lurking at the bottom of this morass one finds flagrantly irrational ideas about the human condition. Many of my critics pretend that they have been entirely self-made. They seem to feel responsible for their intellectual gifts, for their freedom from injury and disease, and for the fact that they were born at a specific moment in history. Many appear to have absolutely no awareness of how lucky one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, to not have cerebral palsy, or to not have been bankrupted in middle age by the mortal illness of a spouse.

Many of us have been extraordinarily lucky—and we did not earn it. Many good people have been extraordinarily unlucky—and they did not deserve it. And yet I get the distinct sense that if I asked some of my readers why they weren’t born with club feet, or orphaned before the age of five, they would not hesitate to take credit for these accomplishments. There is a stunning lack of insight into the unfolding of human events that passes for moral and economic wisdom in some circles. And it is pernicious.

The fundamental question Harris is dancing around is: Which are the factors that government should allow well-being to be a function of, and to what extent? A total libertarian would say that society should basically not get involved, at all, and it should allow well-being to be a function of all factors, e.g. genes, good parents, pure luck, hard work, etc. Liberals often suggest that well-being which is driven mostly by luck or circumstance should be “evened-out,” i.e. that, since Warren Buffett was “lucky” to have been born into circumstances favorable enough to allow him to get a good education and so on, he should not be allowed to reap the “full” benefits of his investing.

Harris indeed seems to suggest that the only factor that should be totally unfettered in the way that it drives well-being (since it is somehow more legitimate than the other factors) is how hard someone works, normalized for his ability to work hard. (He says “Many appear to have absolutely no awareness of how lucky one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work.) Intelligence, lack of club feet, etc. are driven by “luck,” and thus any accomplishments attributable to these factors do not accrue credit purely to the individual.

Given Harris’ suggestion that wealth attributable purely to luck is somehow not purely “earned,” I wonder how he feels about lottery winners. Joe and Tom both walk into the store and buy a lottery ticket. Joe draws a losing ticket, while Tom wins and becomes a millionaire. Could there possibly be a purer example of achieving wealth through luck? — should Tom’s winnings be confiscated (and divided up with Joe at the very least, if not with the rest of us)? If not, why are his winnings any more legitimate, in Harris’ eyes, than the person whose good luck allowed him to be born into a family of millionaires?

And of course one must wonder why Harris doesn’t go all-out and declare all factors that can contribute to well-being to be based on “luck?” Maybe Harris believes that only those factors attributable to a person’s expression of “free will” can legitimately drive well-being. (So, in Harris’ view, should a liberal who does not believe in free will be in favor of more income redistribution than a liberal who does believe in free will?)

It is frustrating that show basically no attempt to quantify their stances on these issues, although they are fundamental to discussions of taxes and inequality. One (admittedly crude) way to quantify it (which it would be nice of politicians adopted) would be to publish a table indicating, along the first column, the factors that can contribute to well-being, and in the second column, the % of that factor’s contribution (to wealth/well-being) that the government should allow to remain in place (redistributing the rest). E.g. a total libertarian would say:

Factor               Unfettered Variation

Intelligence         100%

Hard work           100%

Rich Parents       100%

Physical Health  100%

(and so on)

A common liberal in the U.S. would probably say something like

Factor               Unfettered Variation

Intelligence         60%

Hard work           90%

Rich Parents       30%

Physical Health  60%

(Note that the term “luck” is not useful in the above, since most factors can be attributed to “luck” if you trace back far enough in the causal chain).

I’ll send Sam Harris a tweet encouraging him to publish such a table, and I’ll post it here if he does.

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Moral Absolutes

Posted on August 26, 2011 by Jonathan

I just read an essay by a guy named Jeremy Waldron who discusses “moral absolutes,” and attempts to defend his own “absolute” position against torture, i.e. the view that torture is always morally wrong, no matter the circumstances.

He identifies his primary challenge as being able to defend that position in the context of hypothetical cases where torture is necessary in order to avoid great suffering, e.g. in order to prevent many innocent people from being harmed or killed.

He explains that, up against such hypotheticals, he cannot simply keep emphasizing how truly damaging and immoral the act of torture is:

This is because the opponent of absolutism, if he knows his
business, can duplicate anything we want to say about the badness of torture on his side of the argument.

He credits to Jeremy Bentham a hypothetical case where torture is necessary in order to prevent the torture of 100 other innocent people. E.g. we need to torture some terrorist because he knows the location where his fellow terrorists are torturing (even more brutally than we would torture the guy we want to torture) 100 captured civilians.

To me, all of this seems unnecessary: if we are willing to ponder such wild hypotheticals (which, as I’ve found when arguing against casual anti-torture absolutists, many people are not), why not just stipulate that you need to torture some terrorist in order to prevent his fellow terrorists from blowing up the entire world and killing all living things. Surely no sane person could argue that you should not torture someone when the alternative is that the entire world would get blown up. The only way the absolutist could reasonably take on that hypothetical is to refuse to accept it, an evasion technique that Waldron laudably refuses to employ (although he does discuss briefly the idea that the uncertainty around potential evil committed by the terrorists should discount it versus the certain evil committed by the torturer).

So the upshot, in my opinion, is that any sane person must turn into a consequentialist (and drop all other “moral absolutes,” including that against torture) when one of the consequences under consideration is total destruction. When faced with such a consequence, who could argue that some abstract and absolute moral command is of greater importance?

And of course once we’ve gotten “absolutists” to admit that their absolutism collapses when faced with such a consequence, then they’re really no longer absolutists at all, and we should continue to nag them with hypotheticals just short of blowing up the entire world, just to rub it in.

Lastly: Waldron concludes the essay by admitting that he’s not proven his case, although he thinks he’s discussed some potentially promising lines of argument, along which there is “much more work to be done.” His most promising line of argument to me is that it is a greater evil to perform or authorize torture yourself, than it is to prevent such a crime from being committed by someone else (i.e. it is worse for the torture to be done “in your name” than “in the terrorists name”) — thus the justification for refusing to employ torturing to prevent torture. So again, we encounter the act-omission distinction discussed previously. However, even Waldron admits that this is far from a slam-dunk case, and it seems not to hold up well when up against extreme hypotheticals such as Bentham’s above. Indeed it seems only a narcissist or psychopath would be so obsessed with the question of whether an evil act was done “in his name” that he’d endeavor to keep his own hands “clean” at the expense of allowing such extreme suffering (or total destruction) to take place.

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Sam Harris Weighs In on Income Inequality

Posted on August 24, 2011 by Jonathan

Sam Harris has a question about how conservatives would feel about extreme income inequality:

And there is no reason to think that we have reached the upper bound of wealth inequality, as not every breakthrough in technology creates new jobs. The ultimate labor saving device might be just that—the ultimate labor saving device. Imagine the future Google of robotics or nanotechnology: Its CEO could make Steve Jobs look like a sharecropper, and its products could put tens of millions of people out of work. What would it mean for one person to hold the most valuable patents compatible with the laws of physics and to amass more wealth than everyone else on the Forbes 400 list combined?

How many Republicans who have vowed not to raise taxes on billionaires would want to live in a country with a trillionaire and 30 percent unemployment? If the answer is “none”—and it really must be—then everyone is in favor of “wealth redistribution.” They just haven’t been forced to admit it.

If Peter Thiel has his way, we may, within a couple hundred years or so, find out the answer to an even more interesting version of this question. Thiel is funding the effort to achieve seasteading, which means creating sovereign nations (with libertarian governance) on top of platforms built in international waters. How would the U.S. (and the rest of the world) deal with a situation where a brilliant inventor creates a technology so amazing that he puts millions of people out of work, and make himself incredibly wealthy, and then threatens to become a citizen of a seastead if the U.S. insists on taxing away his money and giving it to the newly unemployed?

Right now, non-libertarians argue that taxes are not “theft” because they are the product of a democratic process which citizens have chosen to take part in (by being citizens). But suppose that it truly becomes feasible to “opt out” (become a seasteader) in a way that it is not currently (now it is not always easy to gain citizenship in other countries, and even if you do, you’ll generally be subject to high taxes there). Would the conventional countries stand for this? Or would they, perhaps through the U.N., declare that seasteads are illegal, i.e. declare that the 200-odd conventional countries have a right, which they’ll uphold by force if necessary, to control the entire world, including all oceans? If they do not, then we’ll have a kind of freedom far beyond that which we currently have – the freedom not just to take part in a democracy (which almost never gets you what you want), but the freedom to decide which country to live in, during a time when countries will actually be able to offer meaningfully different experiences from one another rather than just slight variants on the same theme (at least in the West).

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