Almost Juneteenth

As I wrote yesterday, by nature I’m more fox than hedgehog. And, as a result, this blog has similarly been all over the place. Twenty-some years in, I still can’t seem to figure out if it’s just personal journalling and story-telling, or if I should be trying to share more focused and useful content around a single topic, like fitness or entrepreneurship or productivity, where I hope I’ve accumulated some wisdom.

But what this blog mostly hasn’t been about is taking bold political stands, or advocating for causes in which I believe. I’ve told myself that’s because I don’t want to alienate readers who see the world differently than I do in those specific areas. Though, less charitably, it’s probably because I’ve been afraid of being judged for, or truly held to, my beliefs. And, indeed, looking back now at some of my few posts that did stake out strong political positions, many of which now strike me as exceedingly cringey, perhaps that’s not unwise; it may be I just suck at that kind of writing.

Still, even if silence has felt safe, it now also seems increasingly complicit. Indeed, I noted as much myself when, six or seven years into blogging, I wrote a Judaically-themed post for the first time:

Posting about [Judaism] still makes me vaguely uncomfortable, as if it’s something I shouldn’t share, or at least shouldn’t advertise, about myself. We Jews are a culturally paranoid people – it’s easy to think everyone’s out to get you when, for centuries, they were. These days, bludgeoned as children by hundreds of Holocaust documentaries, we grow up with the message that, sometimes, being publicly Jewish can be rather bad for your health.

With a bit of thought, however, I conclude my tacit ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy simply supports anti-semitism. Instead, I decide to push for understanding through openness; if Chanukah is something I’m thinking about, a part of who I am, certainly, I should be willing to share that.

Fifteen years later, with anti-semitism clearly on the rise, there are as many risks as ever to being publicly Jewish. But it also remains fairly unique as a minority experience, in that I have some choice as to how much I identify (and am identified) as a Jew. Which is why it’s felt increasingly morally bankrupt to not stand in solidarity with the many other minorities who don’t have that privilege.

A few weeks back, when I joined the protests in Harlem, several of my family members called to express their worries about the risks – whether COVID, police violence, or arrest – inherent in that decision. In response, I told them that, if this were the 60’s, I’d like to think I would have marched with MLK on Washington, if not headed down with other Jewish Freedom Riders to register voters in the South. So, much as I was also concerned about my safety, I felt I needed to balance that with my obligation to the greater societal good.

And, in short, I think that applies to this site, too. I won’t be making a hard left turn into nonstop social justice warrior-ing here. But I will, at least, try to be less of a wuss about staking publicly the stances that I think are genuinely important. As I said before, I sort of suck at it, and I’m sure I’ll make a ton more (in retrospect equally cringey) missteps along the way. But, morally speaking, I don’t think I have any other choice.

 

June 18, 2020

Does not Compute

I spend a lot of time these days (arguably more than is useful) following the world of politics, in large part through Twitter and podcasts like Vox’s The Weeds, FiveThirtyEight’s Politics Podcast, and Crooked Media’s Pod Save America.

Recently, I’ve been trying to expand that circle, to include cogent thinkers and writers with whom I wildly disagree. As John Stuart Mill put it, “he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” Indeed, based on conversation with family and friends across a wide array of issues, it’s rare enough to find people who can articulately justify their own positions, much less make the strongest possible case for the opposing perspective.

Most political arguments – online and off – tend to be adversarial. Which, research, shows, is a terrible way to actually change opinions. Once people engage emotionally, opinion becomes tied to identity, and people quickly discard facts that don’t align with their already-held beliefs.

Instead, the science backs a more nuanced approach: start from a place of agreement (to avoid thet emotional roadblock), then reframe the problem and introduce a new solution. Given a different point of view, and then reasonable evidence that supports it, the other person doesn’t have to be ‘wrong,’ just simply accept that, given the problem’s new definition, a different decision might be right.

To make that style of argument work, however, you need Mill’s deep understanding of both sides. And, to that end, I’m especially impressed with economist Bryan Caplan’s proposed gold-standard objective: being able to pass an ideological Turing test.

A traditional Turing test is meant to demonstrate a computer’s human-level intelligent behavior: a judge engages in a typed conversation with both a human and a machine; if the judge can’t reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test.

In turn, that leads to (libertarian) Caplan’s ideological Turing: put him and some liberal Ph.D.s in a chat room, let liberal readers ask them questions for an hour, then vote on who isn’t really a liberal.

That level of ‘passing’ is a high standard indeed, and one for which, on the issues I care about most, I still doubtless fall short. But it remains a useful goal, especially if you’re following politics not just as entertainment (cf., Eitan Hersh’s great recent paper on ‘political hobbyism’) but rather to change minds, and thereby make change in the world.

May 23, 2017

Don’t Make ’em Like They Used To

In the last week, the politically-minded fitness world has been abuzz with the theory of exercise that Donald Trump shared in a recent New Yorker feature:

There has been considerable speculation about Trump’s physical and mental health, in part because few facts are known. During the campaign, his staff reported that he was six feet three inches tall and weighed two hundred and thirty-six pounds, which is considered overweight but not obese. Trump himself says that he is “not a big sleeper” (“I like three hours, four hours”) and professes a fondness for steak and McDonald’s. Other than golf, he considers exercise misguided, arguing that a person, like a battery, is born with a finite amount of energy.

Like many of Trump’s science-minded proclamations, this one is mind-bogglingly stupid. And it reinforces my long-held belief that massive heart-attack is the likeliest way for 45 to serve out less than a full first term.

But what really caught my eye was a piece about the quote in GQ, which ran through the exercise habits of recent presidents past: Obamas pick-up basketball games, W’s “100 Degree Club” (waiting until the temperature hit 100° before heading for stacks of 7:00 miles), Clinton’s pokier lopes in 90’s jogging suits.

The real kicker, however, is a reference to an episode I think I knew about obliquely, but had largely forgotten:

On the campaign trail in 1912, Teddy Roosevelt stopped in Wisconsin for a campaign rally. There, a crazed assassin (who later claimed to have been egged on by the ghost of William McKinley) sprung from the crowd, and shot Roosevelt in the chest at point-blank range.

The bullet, however, simply got stuck in Roosevelt’s pec muscle. Though doctors wanted to bring him immediately to the hospital, Roosevelt explained that he was not mortally wounded, and would go ahead with the speech. Blood still dripping from the wound, Roosevelt told the gaping crowd, “I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose!”

So, in short, Donald is definitely being a wuss. And Teddy Roosevelt, who I also think of whenever I visit New York’s American Natural History Museum, full of taxidermied fauna he gunned down on hunting trips during his spare time, is undoubtedly the original Most Interesting Man in the World.

May 18, 2017

Neutrality vs. the Robots

On Monday, I posted about the importance of net neutrality, and of making your voice heard as the Trump FCC considers rolling back the existing strong enforcement policy.

Fortunately, that’s hardly a minority view, as more than a half million people have weighed in on the FCC’s public comment system to that end. (To reiterate, you should, too: go to gofccyourself.com, click “Express”, then leave a comment supporting “strong oversight of net neutrality based on Title II enforcement.”)

However, about ten percent of the comments have weighed in against net neutrality. And while that might elsewhere be a sign of healthy debate, it’s a bit suspicious that 58,000 of those comments use the exact same clip from a 2010 anti-neutrality press release, with posts cycling in perfect alphabetical order by posters’ names.

According to some crack reporting by ZDnet today, the supposed posters of those comments confirmed that they hadn’t left the comments themselves. Some didn’t even know what net neutrality was.

In other words, this looks like a textbook ‘astroturfing’ bot attack. Given the outsize role of bots during the 2016 election, I hope more media outlets will follow ZDnet’s lead, and give this issue the coverage it deserves. It’s bad enough that powerful internet service provider lobbies egged the FCC into considering scaling back enforcement in the first place; it’s even worse if those same players are resorting to underhanded tactics to try and make it seem like it’s what we, the people, want.

May 10, 2017

Neutral

The internet is, by design, a very robust system. Instead of a hierarchy that can be controlled from a central point, it’s a distributed network. So, in the words of legendary computer scientist (and Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder) John Gilmore, “the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

But there’s one real point of weakness in the internet’s design: the single pipe that connects from the distributed cloud directly to you, the end user. You depend on your mobile provider to connect your phone to the internet, or your cable provider to connect your desktop computer. Which, in turn, gives those providers unique power.

Imagine that the internet is like the island of Manhattan, and you live directly across the Hudson River in Fort Lee, New Jersey. For anything to make it to you from Manhattan, it would have to cross the George Washington Bridge.

Because the bridge is publicly owned, we take for granted that anyone who wants to can drive across. But what if that bridge was privately owned? All of a sudden, the owner of the bridge could start making rules about who could use it. For example, the bridge company could cut an exclusive deal with Domino’s Pizza, and prevent any other pizzeria from delivering to you over the bridge. Goodbye real New York slices, hello doughy circle of crap.

And that’s basically what net neutrality is about. Much like preventing the bridge company from making an exclusive deal with Domino’s, under net neutrality rules, Verizon isn’t allowed to make a deal with Amazon Prime that would then block you from accessing Netflix.

Back in 2000, the FCC put net neutrality rules in place using their Title I enforcement standard. Verizon, in turn, sued the FCC. And the courts ruled that, for the FCC to be able to actually enforce net neutrality, they would need to instead use the stricter Title II standard.

Three years ago, in a giant push that united the internet, consumers commented en masse and convinced the FCC to adopt that stricter Title II net neutrality standard. Victory!

But last month, Trump appointed a former Verizon attorney, Ajit Pai, as the new head of the FCC. And, as Pai said, “net neutrality’s days are numbered.”

Pai has now proposed moving net neutrality back to the looser Title I standard. Which, as the courts have already ruled, the FCC can’t actually enforce.

So, if you care about a free and open internet, about a level playing field in which new companies can compete against rich, entrenched players, now’s the time to act. Americans’ voices convinced the FCC to adopt a strong standard three years ago, and we can keep those protections in place by making our voices heard again today.

To help out, head to gofccyourself.com, and click the ‘express’ link. (Because of the huge wave of support thus far, the FCC’s website appears to be regularly crashing, so you may have to try again later if the site is currently down.)

Then leave a comment saying you want strong oversight of net neutrality based on Title II enforcement.

It takes two minutes, but it could have an immeasurable impact on the future of the Internet. That’s pretty solid ROI.

Again, gofccyourself.com, click express, then “strong oversight of net neutrality based on Title II enforcement.” Get to it.

May 8, 2017

100

I remember a few years ago hearing Barack Obama explain the challenge of being President: because anything that had an easy solution would get solved by his departments and staff, by definition, every one of the problems and decisions that made it to his desk were all very difficult.

I thought of that again, a few days ago, when Trump observed, “this is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier." Nobody knew President-ing could be so complicated!

It’s been particularly interesting to see the swirling of healthcare policy over the past week, as I think it highlights the two major kinds of problems Trump has faced in his first hundred days, and I think is likely to face over the balance of this four years.

First, he’s enormously focused on solving the problem in front of him, with little regard for how that sets up the next steps. He’s all tactics and no strategy.

When the AHCA / Obamacare repeal faltered a month back, it was because the far-right Freedom Caucus took the bill down. Now, state waiver provisions appear to have pulled the Freedom Caucus back in, though with changes that likely alienated even more Republican moderates. But even if it does get through the House, it’s immediately dead in the water in the Senate. And if, by some miracle, it makes it all the way to Trump’s desk, the bill’s hugely unpopular with voters (garnering just 17% approval by recent polls), and likely to become even more so as tens of millions of Trump voters lose healthcare he promised to protect.

So, at a big picture level, the AHCA looks pretty bad. But the first step – getting the Freedom Caucus on board – still looks enough like a win in the short term to Trump that he was willing to put his weight behind it, longer-term consequences be damned.

Second, Trump also appears to falter when understanding the systems nature of government (and the world). When he’s pulled back on campaign promises (like labeling China a currency manipulator), it’s largely been because carrying them out would have second-order consequences (like losing China’s support in dealing with North Korea) that he previously didn’t grasp.

We’ve seen that this week in healthcare, too, with the White House’s unwillingness to commit to a policy on Obamacare cost-sharing reduction (“CSR”) subsidies.

Admittedly, the topic is slightly wonky, but bear with me: while Obamacare requires the government to subsidize health insurance premiums, those in the lowest income brackets still wouldn’t be able to afford the other costs of those plans: co-pays and deductibles when you actually use the insurance. So Obamacare also authorized CSR subsidies, which help cover those co-pays and deductibles. While the government is required to keep paying the health insurance premiums by law, a judge ruled a few years back that they could drop those CSR payments.

If you’re trying to cut government cost, and reduce the amount spent on Obamacare in particular, the $7B yearly cost of CSRs seem like a good place to start.

But, in fact, the downstream effects work completely to the contrary.

Because of the way Obamacare is drafted, if the government doesn’t pay the CSR subsidies, it’s not the low-income insured who get stuck with the bill. Instead, insurance companies are required to pick up the slack. Doing that is expensive. So to stay profitable, insurers would need to jack up premiums substantially overall – nearly 20% on average by estimate of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

With higher premiums, a bunch of middle class buyers (who don’t get subsidies) would conclude they couldn’t afford insurance, and would just drop out of the market.

But because the government is required to keep low-income premiums at a fixed cost, even if it doesn’t pay CSR subsidies, low-income buyers could stay in the market, still pay what they do now as mandated by Obamacare, and the bill for the increase in their premiums would go right back to the government. By Kaiser’s estimates, those increased premiums would cost the government $10B annually – $3B more than they saved by killing the CSRs.

In other words, while killing CSRs looks like a win in isolation (a $7B savings and a blow to Obamacare), it actually increases what the government will have to spend on Obamacare in the end, while also leaving a slew of middle-class people newly uninsured for no reason.

It’s a really dumb idea. But one that’s only clearly a dumb idea if you can understand that, in a complex system, the results of simple actions can be similarly complex.

With three and three-quarters years to go in this term, there’s still plenty of time for Trump to get better, or worse. We don’t know what Democrats will do (actually, we probably do: devolve into infighting and Bernie vs. moderates / economics-first vs. identity-politics-first civil war), what’s going to happen in the rest of the world, whether we’ll face terrorism or economic disaster at home, etc. But, politics aside, these two big troubles with Trump – his inability to think strategically and to understand complex systems – are enough to make me worry it’s not going to be pretty.

April 29, 2017

Taxing

Politically speaking, I don’t fit neatly into a box. I’m a far-left liberal on social issues, yet I have no patience for the political correctness that seems to be convulsing college campuses at the moment. I’m a strong believer in the unrivaled power of the free market, but I support strong governmental safety nets, and regulations that prevent ugly externalities and solve for thorny coordination problems.

As a friend once quipped, I’m either a free-market socialist or a tax-and-spend libertarian.

From that vantage point, I’m not a fan of any of the tax reform proposals currently percolating through Congress or the White House. But I will say: boy do we need some kind of tax simplification.

Not to toot my own horn, but I’m pretty sure I’m at the higher end of math savvy, in terms of percentile within the US population. Even so, every year, as I do my taxes, I can barely make heads or tails of the forms and pages after pages of inscrutable instructions that back them up.

And, every year, I think to myself: if I can’t figure this stuff out, how in the world do the two-thirds of Americans with no college degree puzzle their way through?

And I suspect there are problems for more than just those two-thirds; I’ve watched plenty of groups of my over-educated friends trying to split the check at dinner, and it isn’t pretty.

I’m certainly not a supporter of a flat tax. And I do believe that tax policy – through targeted deductions and well-placed credits – can be an important tool in driving collective economic decision-making. But good god do we need to clean things up in the tax code, because this stuff is a total mess.

April 7, 2017

In the Weeds

[Is gluten intolerance really about pesticides?]

As I’ve said before, I’m not a nutrition dogmatist. While I think an ancestral-based approach is a good starting point for most people, I also strongly believe that differences in genetics, epigenetics, and microbiome cause different people to react very differently to the same foods. So it seems a prudent approach to start by paring down to a healthful dietary core, then test the re-addition of new foods to gauge their individualized effects.

Though wheat isn’t a central part of my own diet, I find that I can easily enjoy a bowl of pasta, say, without issue. But for a number of friends and Composite clients, removing grains has had hugely beneficial health impact.

More than a few of those ‘grain-reactive’ folks, however, have shared with me similar stories: though they feel terrible after eating even organic breads here in the US, while traveling in Italy or France, they decided that the chance to enjoy the local cuisine trumped their usual dietary concerns. But even after eating relatively large amounts of a food that they couldn’t tolerate at home, often for days at a time, they had no problems while abroad.

I’m dubious of claims (at least, health-based ones) against GMO’s, so I’d previously written off those international bread stories as the vagaries of travel – the excitement of being somewhere new, or the masking effects of a circadian rhythm tossed out of whack.

But today, I ended up diving down a rabbit-hole of research papers about glyphosate, an herbicide used as a primary ingredient in Monsanto’s hugely popular pesticide Roundup. Roundup is nearly ubiquitous in the US, where it’s used on 98% of non-organic wheat. And it travels well enough when airborne that it’s found on more than 50% of US organic wheat, too.

Though Roundup was approved as safe for humans back in the 1970’s, deeper research over the last decade has increasingly indicated that glyphosate – especially when combined with other ‘inert’ ingredients in Roundup – may be an extremely potent mitochondrial disruptor, which in turn can cause a broad array of health issues.

In other words, while people are complex, foods are, too. And, indeed, over the next few years, I suspect we’re going to discover that the rise of ‘gluten intolerance’ has less to do with an increase in people reacting negatively to wheat, and more to do with people reacting to the specific ways in which wheat is increasingly raised here in the US.

Our approach to large-scale agribusiness has certainly changed the fundamental economics of how we feed the world. But boy does it seem to come with a lot of second-order costs.

March 27, 2017