jamesz

The talents of Steve Jobs

/in /by

Steve Wozniak may be a brilliant technician, but this quote shows why Jobs was so important to Apple’s success. Wozniak is talking about how much he preferred Siri before Apple bought it.

“I start telling everyone I knew and speaking around the world about how this was the future of computing, speaking things in normal ways, feeling like you’re talking to a human,” Wozniak said of the original Siri program. When asked for an example of how Siri used to be better when it was just a third-party iOS app, Wozniak said that he used to be able to get Siri to list prime numbers greater than 87, but when he asks Siri to do that now it thinks he’s talking about prime ribs.

Yep, he thinks that it’s more useful to interpret ‘prime’ as referring to numbers than ribs. Technicians should really recognise the importance of designers!

jamesz

Who’s scared of paternalism?

/6 Comments/in , /by

Eric has pointed me to the discussion that happened at Cato Unbound over libertarian/new paternalism. It went a bit like this:

Glen Whitman alleges:

New paternalist policies, and indeed the intellectual framework of new paternalism itself, create a serious risk of slippery slopes toward ever more intrusive paternalism.

Richard Thaler (a founding father of LP) replies:

[The] risk of the slippery slope appears to be a figment of Professor Whitman’s imagination… Slope-mongering is a well-worn political tool used by all sides in the political debate to debunk any idea they oppose. For example, when the proposal was made to replace the draft with an all-volunteer army, the opponents said this would inevitably lead to all kinds of disastrous consequences because we were turning our military into a band of mercenaries… Instead of slope-mongering we should evaluate proposals on their merits.

My favourite commentary on the debate was Robin Hanson’s:

As far as I’m concerned, all of these authors avoid the core hard problem. Yes paternalism can be a matter of degree, but even so we need principles by which to choose what degree of paternalism is appropriate in what context. Just repeating ‘More’ and ‘Less’ quickly gets tiresome. Such principles need to explicitly take into account the fact that organizations can give folks advice instead of limiting their choices.

It highlights how the argument often ignores the key normative question: how paternalistic should governments be? I’m constantly surrounded by people arguing from a fairly libertarian, utilitarian perspective so I’m curious about how the other half thinks. For instance, what’s the justification for trying to stamp out smoking? Which modern philosophers have supported positions that economists would refer to as hard paternalism, and why?

jamesz

The importance of economists

/3 Comments/in , /by

In the comments of a recent post I claimed that philosophers and economists have little sway over important social policy decisions. Discussing the subject with colleagues I was pointed to this stunning quote by Keynes:

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.

I’d like to believe it but is there any empirical support? Not that I’d really want to kill such a beautiful idea with brutal facts.

jamesz

No free lunches in economic reform

/in , /by

A recently released report from the Grattan Institute in Australia surveys ‘game-changing’ ways to increase GDP. Its conclusions on the priorities for economic reform are summarised in a diagram:

Notably, two of the three most urgent changes that they identify relate to lifting workforce participation. That’s a tricky topic because, while more labour might increase GDP, it also decreases leisure time. Read more

jamesz

More on slippery slopes and nudges

/3 Comments/in , , /by

In a follow up post about nudges and shoves Eric recommends a piece by David Friedman on slippery slopes that argues:

An optional charge where the default choice is to pay it is the sort of thing Sunstein and Thaler propose, a nudge in the direction of doing what those responsible believe, possibly correctly, that most of those nudged would want to do if they took the time to think about it. But the people constructing the choice architecture know what result they want to get, they believe they are doing good and so not constrained by what they themselves would consider proper principles of morality and honesty in a commercial context, so it is very easy to make the “wrong” choice more and more difficult and obscure until what is optional in theory becomes mandatory in practice.

Essentially, the argument is that once you start meddling with people’s choices it’s very hard to avoid imposing your own views of the world. The idea behind nudges is that you help people to make the best choice from their own perspective, not yours, but that’s very hard to do in practice.

As far as it goes, that sounds very sensible and Friedman is probably right that people trying to nudge others are likely to stray in paternalistic territory. However, what the argument is missing is a plausible counterfactual. The choice architects will still need to frame people’s choices in some way. If they use nudges as their guiding principle then they will attempt to frame the choice to maximise the expected benefit to the person making the choice. As Friedman cautions, the architect may not be very good at divining the preferences of others and may end up being more paternalistic than they intended. But the alternative is not that the choice disappears, or that it is not framed in some way. The alternative must be some other guiding principle for framing the choice.

One possibility is randomisation, but there are many instances in which that will result in terrible choices for most people becoming the default. It seems hard to justify that position. A more likely alternative is that the framer will use their own preferences to guide the framing of the choice. The outcome is likely to be rather paternalistic and not at all to Friedman’s liking! It’s all very well to suggest imperfections in the mechanism for framing choices but imperfection doesn’t mean it’s not the best of the bunch.

jamesz

Markets for speeding and networking

/in /by

In Texas you’ll soon be able to pay less than the price of a speeding ticket to go faster.

If you’re a young entrepreneur then you might want to pay to contact influential people and be guaranteed they’ll actually read what you write. A former NZ diplomat has co-founded an internet startup to allow you to do just that. Interestingly, much of the fee you pay to contact them goes to the charity of their choice.