The word “the” is the most commonly used word in the English language. The second most used word is “of” and it occurs half as many times as “the.” The third most used word, “and,” occurs a third as many times, the fourth most used word, “a,” occurs a fourth as many times, and so on down through the whole English language.
This pattern is called Zipf’s Law, named for George Kingsley Zipf, an American linguist who popularized the pattern and sought to explain it. Zipf claimed that Zipfian distribution applies to a lot of things.
For example, he claimed the largest city in a country is roughly twice as populous as the second largest city, three times as large as the third largest, four times as large as the fourth largest, and so on. This isn’t always true, but the pattern appears surprisingly often. It is a rule of thumb, like the Pareto Principle.
Is this really a law? If so, why? What are the implications? One of them, it seems to me, is that all other things being equal, there will be a drift towards extreme income inequality – which doesn’t mean that extreme income inequality is inevitable or justified. What do you think?
On his 70th birthday, tech writer Kevin Kelly posted 103 rules for life. That’s way too many to absorb. But Jason Kottke picked out a good sample of them.
Cultivate 12 people who love you, because they are worth more than 12 million people who like you.
Anything you say before the word “but” does not count.
When you forgive others, they may not notice, but you will heal. Forgiveness is not something we do for others; it is a gift to ourselves.
Efficiency is highly overrated. Goofing off is highly underrated. Regularly scheduled sabbaths, sabbaticals, vacations, breaks, aimless walks and time off are essential for top performance of any kind. The best work ethic requires a good rest ethic.
If winning becomes too important in a game, change the rules to make it more fun. Changing rules can become the new game.
The best way to get a correct answer on the internet is to post an obviously wrong answer and wait for someone to correct you.
Don’t wait for the storm to pass; dance in the rain.
We tend to overestimate what we can do in a day, and underestimate what we can achieve in a decade. Miraculous things can be accomplished if you give it ten years. A long game will compound small gains to overcome even big mistakes.
A wise man said, “Before you speak, let your words pass through three gates. At the first gate, ask yourself, ‘Is it true?’ At the second gate ask, ‘Is it necessary?’ At the third gate ask, ‘Is it kind?’ ”
To rapidly reveal the true character of a person you just met, move them onto an abysmally slow internet connection. Observe.
Take note if you find yourself wondering “Where is my good knife? Or, where is my good pen?” That means you have bad ones. Get rid of those.
If you loan someone $20 and you never see them again because they are avoiding paying you back, that makes it worth $20.
Copying others is a good way to start. Copying yourself is a disappointing way to end.
The chief prevention against getting old is to remain astonished.
Today is my 85th birthday. Here is what I’ve learned, such as it is, in 85 years.
Happiness is being able to look back on your life with justified satisfaction.
Never let your self-respect depend on anything (money, rank, reputation) that somebody else has the power to take away from you.
Success is a product of effort, talent and luck. The first factor is the only one you control, and the only one you deserve praise or blame for.
Success isn’t everything.
What you are is the product of your habits. Your habits are the product of thousands of small decisions you probably don’t remember making.
Nobody ever got in trouble by checking.
There is no such thing as a stupid question. Stupidity consists of not knowing and not asking.
When you admit a mistake, you are telling the world you understand things better today than you did yesterday.
Guilt is like everything else. Some people have much, much more than they should, and those who need it most have none at all.
Don’t compare yourself with others. There will always be somebody who is better, or better off, than you, and somebody else who is worse, or worse off, than you.
Don’t get upset about anything you don’t expect to remember 10 years from now.
A survivalist tip: Make yourself useful and treat people well, so that, during the coming bad years, they will have a reason to keep you alive.
Small kindnesses add up.
Count your blessings.
Some sayings of sages:
“A man, sir, must keep his friendships in constant repair.” (Samuel Johnson)
“The virtue of the middle class is thrift. The virtue of the working class is solidarity.” (David Graeber)
“It is possible to ignore reality, but it is not possible to ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.” (Atributed to Ayn Rand)
When “automation” first became a word back in the 1950s and 1960s, some of us had a hopeful vision of machines during all the dirty, backbreaking work, while human beings monitor and command the machines.
Nobody that I know of imagined places like customer service call centers or the Amazon warehouses or , where human beings are still doing high-stress and backbreaking work, and the supervision is done by machine intelligences.
Technology is not an autonomous force. It is created to serve human purposes. The question is which humans and which purposes.
I read an interesting interview with a writer named Frank Pasquale, author of a book called New Laws of Robotics. He says the robots and artificial intelligences in our lives serve the interests of people with wealth and power. It is time to take back control and make sure they serve us and not them.
He proposed new laws of robotics as follows.
Robotics should complement professionals, not replace them. As a general rule, management should not use technology to eliminate jobs or to reduce the need for skilled labor. The purpose of technology should to add value to labor.
Robots and AI should not counterfeit humanity. If robots send automated messages on social media, or evaluate your credit score or medical record, we have a right to know what they are and who owns them.
Robots and AI should not contribute to zero-sum arms races. It isn’t just robotic warfare. It is the construction of an $800 million fiber optics able between Chicago and New York so that speculators in Chicago can get in orders to the New York Stock Exchange a few fractions of a second earlier and thereby gain a competitive advantage. There is a lack of money for crucial infrastructure, but seemingly unlimited funds to gain small marketing or financial advantages.
Any person or control group that puts a machine or AI into operation should be legally liable for the consequences of what it does. AI algorithms can eliminate the human factor. It is just pushed into the background.
Asking whether technology is good or bad is meaningless, because every society, including those we regard as primitive, has some technology. The important question is always how a particular technology works, how controls it and whose interests it serves.
Computer algorithms may be good or bad, just as laws can be good or bad, but both are products of human judgment. Those judgments should be open to discussion and accountability.
LINKS
New Laws of Robotics with Frank Pasquale, an interview for Monthly Review Online. The interview is long, but rich and thought-provoking. I barely skimmed the surface of it in this post. I ordered Pasquale’s book and plan to review it.
Prescribing more drugs or scheduling more doctor’s appointments means more revenue. Hiring more nurses does not. Click on this link for a discussion of what this means.
Click on this for a full review of Jordon Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life
Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist and a professor at the University of Toronto whom I never heard of until last week, but who evidently has millions of followers on YouTube.
Below are his 12 Rules for Living, the title of a book that will be published later this year. Based on the video above and on a couple of articles I’ve read about him, he is a free spirit who says things that are important and true, things that are important if true and some other things that I can’t make head nor tail of.
Stand up straight with your shoulders back.
Treat yourself like you would treat someone you are responsible for helping.
Make friends with people who want the best for you.
Compare yourself with who you were yesterday, not with who somebody else is today.
Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.
Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.
Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)
Tell the truth—or at least don’t lie.
Assume the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.
Be precise in your speech.
Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.
Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.
The 12 rules are true and important. I remember, when I was a small boy, my mother telling me to stand with my shoulders back and my neck straight. I think of this when I’m feeling down, and adopting good posture does change my attitude. It makes me wiling to meet the challenges of the day.
He is right to object to silly rules about gendered pronouns, which regulate how you can refer to people who consider themselves neither men nor women. I do believe in good manners—referring to people (within reason) as they would wish to be called. But I wouldn’t try to enforce my idea of good manners through the criminal law.
Hoboes were itinerant workers who traveled illegally by freight car, and gathered in camps called “hobo jungles”. Most respectable people looked down on them. This formal ethical code was adopted at the Hobo National Convention of 1889.
1. Decide your own life; don’t let another person run or rule you.
2. When in town, always respect the local law and officials, and try to be a gentleman at all times.
3. Don’t take advantage of someone who is in a vulnerable situation, locals or other hobos.
4. Always try to find work, even if temporary, and always seek out jobs nobody wants. By doing so you not only help a business along, but ensure employment should you return to that town again.
5. When no employment is available, make your own work by using your added talents at crafts.
6. Do not allow yourself to become a stupid drunk and set a bad example for locals’ treatment of other hobos.
7. When jungling in town, respect handouts, do not wear them out, another hobo will be coming along who will need them as badly, if not worse than you.
8. Always respect nature, do not leave garbage where you are jungling.
9. If in a community jungle, always pitch in and help.
10. Try to stay clean, and boil up wherever possible.
11. When traveling, ride your train respectfully, take no personal chances, cause no problems with the operating crew or host railroad, act like an extra crew member.
12. Do not cause problems in a train yard, another hobo will be coming along who will need passage through that yard.
13. Do not allow other hobos to molest children; expose all molesters to authorities…they are the worst garbage to infest any society.
14. Help all runaway children, and try to induce them to return home.
15. Help your fellow hobos whenever and wherever needed, you may need their help someday.
Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the “facts.”
Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
Arguments from authority carry little weight — “authorities” have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
Spin more than one hypothesis. If there’s something to be explained, think of all the different ways in which it could be explained. Then think of tests by which you might systematically disprove each of the alternatives. What survives, the hypothesis that resists disproof in this Darwinian selection among “multiple working hypotheses,” has a much better chance of being the right answer than if you had simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.
Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours. It’s only a way station in the pursuit of knowledge. Ask yourself why you like the idea. Compare it fairly with the alternatives. See if you can find reasons for rejecting it. If you don’t, others will.
Quantify. If whatever it is you’re explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you’ll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations. Of course there are truths to be sought in the many qualitative issues we are obliged to confront, but finding them is more challenging.
If there’s a chain of argument, every link in the chain must work (including the premise) — not just most of them.
Occam’s Razor. This convenient rule-of-thumb urges us when faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well to choose the simpler.
Always ask whether the hypothesis can be, at least in principle, falsified. Propositions that are untestable, unfalsifiable are not worth much. Consider the grand idea that our Universe and everything in it is just an elementary particle — an electron, say — in a much bigger Cosmos. But if we can never acquire information from outside our Universe, is not the idea incapable of disproof? You must be able to check assertions out.
Inveterate skeptics must be given the chance to follow your reasoning, to duplicate your experiments and see if they get the same result.
In the spring of 2009, Elizabeth Warren, then chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel on the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), was taken to lunch by Larry Summers, then director of the National Economic Council and a top adviser to President Obama.
Summers, … … she recalls, told her that she had a choice to make. She could be an insider or an outsider, but if she was going to be an insider she needed to understand one unbreakable rule about insiders: “They don’t criticize other insiders.”
The quote is from a review of Senator Warren’s autobiography, A Fighting Chance, by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker. The whole review is well worth reading. Click on Reading Elizabeth Warren to read it.
RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for a while.
RULE TWO: General duties of a student: Pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.
John Cage
RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher: Pull everything out of your students.
RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment.
RULE FIVE: Be self-disciplined: this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
RULE SIX: Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.
RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.
RULE EIGHT: Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.
RULE NINE: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
RULE TEN: We’re breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.
HINTS: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully, often. Save everything. It might come in handy later.
I learned at age eleven, at the sunburned end of the first day the public pool was open, that pale skin is not superior.
Real food has one ingredient.
Never buy food from someone who gets an annual bonus.
There is nothing corporations won’t do for profit. Take toothpaste. What used to be one or two kinds per manufacturer now takes up ten feet of shelf space because they now make the same stuff in twelve different flavors.
The US is a great place, a huge country with astonishing and beautiful things to experience.
The US is a lousy place where only money matters, plagued by too many people who view themselves as chosen because they have a lot of it.
The US has been a bully from Day One. Every two years on average we invade a small country in order to seize its riches, destroy its government, and impoverish its people.
By 20 I was sure I was a mature adult. It turned out that wasn’t exactly true.
Hatred is an equal opportunity religion. Every religion has followers who somehow miss the central message about love, tolerance, and compassion, and spend their time murdering people they don’t know.
Revenge is equally stupid, with the same result.
Politicians should be amateurs who go home when their sentence is up.
Corporations, like religions, should be prohibited in politics entirely.
Money isn’t speech. Speech is speech. Corporations aren’t people. People are people.
Fundamentalist Christians are trying to impose their version of Sharia on us.
Gay is not a “lifestyle”. Your kids can’t be “recruited”, either.
You’re not going to look great when you get old. Don’t worry about it.
The older you get, the more weird things grow on your body.
Every abortion marks a failure. Regardless, anti-abortionists should get the hell out of your womb.
I’ll worry about abortion when all of the 13,000 daily unnecessary deaths of living, breathing children cease to happen because anti-abortionists did something about it.
People who are a lot smarter than you are not necessarily right, and the world is full of rich fools.
You can be happy at any age. Unfortunately, you can also be unhappy at any age, but happy is better so let yourself be happy if you can.
Spanish is not a foreign language. The US is not America. Puerto Ricans are not immigrants.
Immigrants should learn the prevailing language of their new country. In much of the US that language is Spanish, and the immigrants are Anglos.
There is no official language in the US. If there were to be, perhaps it should be Navajo.
Being dead is no big deal, and worrying about it is a waste of time. Now, dying is another matter. If you want to worry, worry about dying. But that won’t change anything either, so why bother.
The older you get, the more time you have.
Everything changes. Everything.
All of humanity is of no consequence. Neither is the Earth, or even our solar system. In fact, our Milky Way Galaxy, where the closest of uncountable stars is much too far for humans to reach in a single lifetime, is only one of billions. This shouldn’t make us feel insignificant. We should feel amazed at being part of this astonishing universe.
Blogger Duncan Black, aka Atrios, has a new unofficial rule.
Any pundit who advocates war for supposed humanitarian reasons must be able to point to 5 recent occasions when they advocated for achieving humanitarian goals using non-killing methods.
I am grateful for my liberal arts education for how it has helped me to understand the world I live in and the culture in which I live. The kind of liberal arts education I received is being undermined. The process is described in this post.
1. DEFUND PUBLIC HIGHER EDUCATION.
2. DEPROFESSIONALIZE AND IMPOVERISH THE PROFESSORS by replacing them by marginally-employed adjuncts and video lessons.
3. MOVE IN A MANAGERIAL / ADMINISTRATIVE CLASS WHO TAKE OVER GOVERNANCE OF THE UNIVERSITY.
4. MOVE IN CORPORATE CULTURE AND CORPORATE MONEY.
5. DESTROY THE STUDENTS by raising tuition and lowering the quality of education.
I never worked in academia, but I have friends who do, and everything in this post fits what they tell me.
A few years back, Paul E. Lingenfelter began his report on the defunding of public education by saying, “In 1920 H.G. Wells wrote, ‘History is becoming more and more a race between education and catastrophe.’ I think he got it right. Nothing is more important to the future of the United States and the world than the breadth and effectiveness of education, especially of higher education. I say especially higher education, but not because pre- school, elementary, and secondary education are less important. Success at every level of education obviously depends on what has gone before. But for better or worse, the quality of postsecondary education and research affects the quality and effectiveness of education at every level.”
In the last few years, conversations have been growing like gathering storm clouds about the ways in which our universities are failing. There is talk about the poor educational outcomes apparent in…
Malanowski’s First Law of Politics is that the rich and powerful will always act in their own self interest.
Malanowski’s Second Law is that the rich and powerful will then get the rest of us to act in their interest as well, usually by making us believe that we hold this interest in common.
Malanowski’s Third Law is that when the rest of us figure out ways to act in our own self-interests, the rich and powerful are likely to outlaw whatever we’ve come up with.
Rule 1. Think of the economy as more like a cat than a washing machine.
Rule 2. Favor businesses that benefit from their own mistakes, not those whose mistakes percolate into the system.
Rule 3. Small is beautiful, but it is also efficient.
Rule 4. Trial and error beats academic knowledge.
Rule 5. Decision-makers must have skin in the game.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a successful Wall Street options trader and author of a new book, ANTIFRAGILE: Things That Gain from Disorder.In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, he laid down those five wise rules for economic policy-makers.
The economy is organic, like a cat, and not mechanical, like a washing machine. Every kind of stress on a machine causes it to wear out faster. But a living animal thrives on stress, up to a point. Animals and other organic systems are best left alone, except in dire emergency.
One of Taleb’s examples of businesses that learn from their own mistakes is the airline industry. Every time there is an airplane crash, the airline companies study the causes of the crash and incorporate that information into their practices. In a sense, every airline crash makes the airlines safer. Another example is Silicon Valley, where failure is not regarded as a disgrace and the idea is to “fail quickly” so you can go on to try something. The opposite of this is the Wall Street banking industry, where every bank failure weakens the overall system.
An industry is strongest when it consists of many small units, where the failure of an individual business makes the survivors stronger. Taleb cited the restaurant business, in which the failure of an individual restaurant is common but the failure of the restaurant industry as a whole is unimaginable. Failures mean the best restaurants survive, and so the industry is ever-improving (assuming, I would add, that the big chain restaurants don’t drive the individually-owned restaurants out of business). Government is least harmful, he wrote, when it is vested in the lowest and possible unit, as in Switzerland.
We should honor failed entrepreneurs in the same spirit that we honor warriors who fall in battle. It is through their individual sacrifice contributes that society as a whole survives and prospers.
He is skeptical of top-down planning, whether done by government, corporations or some other form of corporation. The best economic and social system is one that allows trial and error in which the errors are small and are a source of knowledge and improvement. Experimentation and tinkering, not theory, is the source of technological and economic progress.
The trouble with most journalists, academics and government policy-makers is that they suffer no penalty for being wrong, not even a loss of reputation. Even worse are Wall Street bankers, who are able to pocket the gains from their successes and push their losses onto the taxpayers. He said the government in a humane society ought to provide for the weak and help the unlucky get back on their feet, but it should never bail out a failed business. If a business is too big to fail, he said, nobody in that business should receive greater compensation than the most highly-paid civil servant.
Taleb admires Ralph Nader because he is the opposite of a Wall Street banker. Nader accepts personal risks and sacrifices in order to confer benefits on society as a whole.
Beware of projects that risk permanent harm in return for short-term gains. This is the reverse of mainstream economic thinking, which privileges present value over future value.
Beware of risk assessments. An insurance actuary can accurately estimate the risk of common events, but there is no accurate way to estimate the risk of catastrophic events that rarely happen or haven’t yet happened. It is much safer to weigh what you have to gain against what you have to lose.
Beware of projects that require waivers of laws. If an environmental law, or a health and safety law, is harmful or unnecessary, it should be repealed, but if it is needful, then there shouldn’t be any exceptions.
Charles Goodhart was an adviser to the Bank of England in 1975. The advice he gave then has been summarized as Goodhart’s law, which has been summarized as follows:
All economic models break down when used for policy.
Charles Goodhart
His version
Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.’
Another short version
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara demanded a graph of numbers that would show whether or not the United States was winning in Vietnam. Sure enough, the military responded with “body count” figures that showed the Viet Cong were all being killed many times over, but the United States lost the war.
I thought of Goodhart’s Law in connection with President Bush’s No Child Left Behind and President Obama’s Race to the Top programs. Teachers and schools are judged on the basis of test results. So the incentive is for teachers to improve, not learning, but the numbers by which learning supposedly is measured. Dishonest teachers cheat. Honest teachers have to take time away from teaching the material to teaching how to pass the test.
The aim is evidence-based policy. The result is policy-based evidence.
Once you start measuring GDP as a way of gauging social welfare, people will start to figure out ways to make GDP go up without improving social welfare (say, by swapping dirty financial derivatives). Once Google starts measuring inbound links as a way of evaluating the importance of web-pages, people will figure out how to increase the inbound links to unimportant pages (splogging, blogspam). And once you measure fat or calorie content as a proxy for the healthfulness of food, manufacturers will figure out how to decrease fat and calories without making the food more healthful (reducing fat by adding sugar, reducing calories by adding poisonous artificial sweeteners).
The prime example of Goodhart’s Law in action is Soviet economic planning. Factories were evaluated on the basis of measured output, irrespective of the usefulness of what was produced. Machinery factories were actually judged on the total weight of the machinery they produced. That is why there is no substitute for free markets and the workings of supply and demand. But large corporations often operate like mini-Soviet Unions until reality catches up with them.
W. Edwards Deming, who was possibly the world’s greatest exponent of using statistics to improvement business performance, objected to judging either managers or workers based on numerical goals. Understand and improve the process, and the numbers will improve, he said, but trying to improve the numbers without understanding the process is an exercise in futility.
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