Humor

"humor functions in part to help us coordinate with close associates on what norm violations to excuse" - That's from Overcoming bias, the post is here.

I'd like to offer my own anecdotal evidence. I was at a bit of a dinner party last night. The group tended to grow as the evening progressed, and I didn't think of it at the time, but there was an interesting trend in the humor.

The group started small, and everyone knew, more-or-less, everyone's background. It was a very well educated group, and the humor was a sophisticated social-political-historical commentary. As the evening progressed, and more members joined the group, it became impossible to ascertain everyone's background, and there was clearly some political and religious variation. The humor progressively devolved as the night went on, though the members that were added to the group we no less educated or intelligent than the original participants.

The evening concluded with a bunch of lawyers and economists smiling at bathroom humor; the jokes that light up the room two hours earlier would probably have been met with blank stares or awkward seat shifting by the same people who had uproariously partaken.

Traffic heuristics

I walk ten minutes to work everyday. I've found that having a short commute is highly under-rated in popular discourse, though I guess it isn't in the happiness research.

I moved to a new city three months ago (my current city), and my first walk to work took at least 15 minutes. It has progressively gotten shorter - over 30% shorter. It is interesting to note how this happens. I've been able to shorten my route by:

-finding parking lots on the corners of city blocks and crossing them

-crossing on side streets to avoid waiting for lights

-following the flow of people instead of watching the traffic lights

So this last point gets to the heart of this post. I'm trying to figure out if not watching traffic lights increases my risk of an accident. I wonder if our risk of an accident over our lifetime is normally distributed given our behaviors/appetite for risk. If so, each of these people that I allow to be my "traffic heuristic" lies somewhere on that distribution - and if the way I pick these people is random, then their behaviors should cancel out, and I should be sitting right in the middle of the risk distribution. So I guess the question becomes - where did I sit in the distribution before my heuristic approach? My guess is that I was a higher risk than the mean, simply because I am not used to cities, and I am less adept to reading the flow of people and cars than the average person in the city.

So maybe not watching traffic lights does more than save time.

Logical Consistency on the Census

The changes to the long form questionnaire, a part of the Canadian Census mailed out to 1 in 5 households, are openly ideological. The interesting bit is how the ideology is misunderstood. The Globe and Mail has been calling the move a "socially conservative" one, and this media interpretation has, no doubt, influenced those who support it, and those who denounce it.

This move is ultimately about individual liberties, and as such, it is a socially liberal move. A note to the social conservatives towing the line - if you endorse this position, you must also endorse gay marriage, and legalization - to be logically consistent. I have a feeling this notion might leave supporters of the change shifting in their cowboy boots.

As for the libertarians - the only group whose ideology directly aligns with this change, I have one thing to say: if you are willing to tolerate the myriad of interventions that follow from a government that appropriates >40% of the wealth of our country, should they not be informed interventions? Good Government (if that is possible) is an effective business cycle stabilizer, far more effective than ramp-up stimulus spending. It seems to me that the data collection should be the last thing to go. Get rid of the rest: the superfluous jet fighter purchases, the entrenched labor regulations, the anachronistic immigration policies, and then get rid of the data collection. I guess I'm more concerned with efficiency than dejure liberties, as long as defacto, we still have them.

More on the Census

Probably the most interesting thing I learned from watching the Parliamentary proceedings was how the Census is used to benchmark all of the voluntary surveys done by Stats Canada to try and identify and correct for bias. This just seems unbelievably cool. I'd really like to be involved in trying to do that at some point. I'm just imagining some of the biases you might find in relation to the specific questions you had asked. There are probably some very quirky discoveries.

On the census

I've been watching the committee proceedings on the changes to the long-form questionnaire for most of the morning, and I've learned a few things.

-MPs do not understand statistics.

-Maxime Bernier is a lawyer, and I didn't have to google that to find out.

-Our Chief Statistician was well spoken, smart, and very much an economist.

-Our Census is extraordinarily well thought out, and it is sad (as a social scientist) to see it go.

-From an "individual liberty" perspective, the Government is right.

-From an efficiency perspective, we don't know if they are right, we don't know if they are wrong.

-The Census is used as a benchmark to try and identify bias in voluntary surveys. This is very interesting.

-Statistics Canada is probably a very effective organization, if their operations are at all a reflection of their leaders.

Also,

Don Drummond is very smart.

Chuck

I read almost all of Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs and Coco Puffs on my two flights home yesterday. Reading this book in a single sitting is not an indication that it was good, or even above average. I guess Klosterman is known for writing frustrating books, and this is a frustrating book, frustrating because Klosterman is so delusional about his intellect that it is simply frustrating that you cannot smack him on the head. At least he acknowledges his sophistry - but even that isn't satisfying because he snaps back into his delusions immediately. This man is an idiot, and he shouldn't write the word mathematics, never-mind make philosophical commentary on the state of probability theory; he understand that outcomes can be binary, but he doesn't understand probability. Waste of money, or maybe I am ten years too young to get it.

Airport etiquette

Right now I'm imagining a world in which I would turn around rip the voice box out of the sun-stained-lobster-red woman with the trashy Gatineau accent sitting behind me in Pearson; this would give me ample opportunity to smash the MB pro currently blaring fittingly atonal-pseudo-Jamaican club remixes, and simultaneously end her over-the-top frankenglish of a conversation with her equally trashy sounding sister.

It is kind of comforting knowing that if Schrodinger is right, that happened - somewhere.

I would also like to beat up Chuck Klosterman for being Chuck Klosterman and wasting my $20.