Why TV will be around for a while

Suppose you were predicting the future of media, politics, and culture in 1963.  You would note that television was clearly the medium of the future, of the young.  Radio was dying – unable to compete against the new and superior technology.  Ad dollars were moving en masse to TV, and TVs were becoming more affordable and higher quality all the time.  You would point to JFK’s TV-assisted debate victory and declare that radio would have almost no role to play in the new world – everything would be based on images.

Well, here we are, fifty years later.  Who is the leading political figure on the right?  Rush Limbaugh – a physically unappealing radio demagogue.  And who’s the leading cultural figure on the center-left?  Ira Glass – host of the radio show “This American Life”.  And what would our prophet of 1963 have made of podcasts – people listening to radio shows of lower production quality than available in the ’60s, even when huge Hi-Def TVs were available?  Somehow the medium that was supposed to die, didn’t.

In 2013, advertising experts claim that TV is doomed, and the future is mobile.  But they are making the disruptor’s error – they see an exponential change, but overestimate how far it will go.

So what can save conventional TV from obsolescence?  A few things:

1) Big screens are big.

People like big TVs, and they’re prepared to pay really big money for them.  Until Apple comes up with a way to make iPads that you can unfold and put on your wall, you can’t do big on mobile.

2) The mass market is massive.

We hear so much about microtargeting and the long tail these days that we forget that there are plenty of advertisers that just want to reach a lot of people.  TV does that, and in a finely-tuned brand-safe way.  And, even better, people want to watch what everyone else is watching, at more or less the same time, so they can talk about it, like a book club or a movie opening.  And best of all, everyone likes the same things anyway.  You would only need ten different well-chosen TV shows to make sure that 95% of people in the U.S. loved at least one of them.  With fifteen, you could get 95% of the world.

3) TV just works.

Press the on button, and something will appear on your TV.  If you’re in the right demographic and do this at the right time, it’s pretty likely to be something you like.  And that’s all you have to do.  No passwords, no search terms, no network connection, no playlist, no seeing what your Facebook friends recommend – just press one button and there it is, and many highly-paid people work long hours to make sure that you will like it.  What could be simpler?  What could be better?

Now, you might object that these obstacles could be overcome – companies could produce videos for iPads with high production values and mass-market appeal that could be quickly and easily seen on a big screen with minimal selection required.  This will be a revolution, but of the Animal Farm variety, where at the end we will look from TV network to internet media company, and not be able to tell which is which.  Or, as I expect to hear at advertising conferences shortly – “Small Screens Good, Big Screens Better”.

Grandpa, what’s a Republican?

- Grandpa, what’s a Republican?
- Republican? I haven’t heard that word in a long time. Where did you hear it?
- It’s for a school project. We have to talk about something from old-people times, like record players or dial phones.
- I see. Well, the Republicans were a big political party once.
- Like the Democrats?
- Kind of, but more right-wing.
- What did they stand for?
- Well, they were pro-life, for one thing.
- You mean they were vegetarians like the Greens?
- No, people didn’t really think about food politically in those days.
- So they were for gun control and against the death penalty?
- No, not usually. They thought everyone should have a gun, to be safe.
- They thought we shouldn’t have an army, like the Libertarians?
- No, they wanted a very big army, and they used it to invade some other countries.
- Grandpa, I think you’re confused. Maybe you mean they were pro-death?
- Maybe. It was kind of confusing.
- What did they want to do about global warming?
- Well, they really didn’t think it was a problem.
- You mean because people didn’t know about it?
- No, I mean they didn’t believe in it. It was before the Great Fires, you see.
- Oh. OK. But everyone else believed in it?
- Kind of. But nobody really thought it was a big deal. Back then you could do all sorts of things. Everyone had a car, even poor people, and they could drive it whenever they liked. And there were machines which would give you as much water as you liked – even ice – even in the summer.
- It sounds pretty wasteful, Grandpa.
- Maybe it was. But things were very different then.
- So how come there aren’t any Republicans any more?
- I’m not sure. I think they just started winning fewer and fewer elections, and eventually they just gave up. We could ask your other grandpas, or we could Google it.
- That’s OK. I think I have enough to write about now. Oh, but Grandpa?
- Yes?
- What’s a Google?
- Let’s talk about that some other time.

Republican political correctness

The latest mini-flap? Biden’s saying to a partly black audience that Republicans want to put them in chains by reversing Wall St reform. Team Romney has vigorously objected, but it’s hard to see why. First, there’s plausible Bidenability – the VP has such a gaffe-prone reputation that nobody cares what he says. Second, the audience didn’t object. Third, Republicans should be spending all their time talking about the economy, and avoiding this sort of distraction. But most importantly, Republicans never look good when they play the “political correctness” card. Republican Meg Whitman’s campaign for California governor was generally uninspired, but her complaining about Jerry Brown’s associate calling her a (political) whore did her no favors – it just made her look whiny. Unfair? Probably. But Audre Lorde told us that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Republicans are learning that you can’t build the master’s house with the slave’s tools.

Civ game 236 years old

I have been playing a game of Civilization for 236 years now, and have got somewhat stuck.

My country is running out of money, and has a lot of citizens sitting around doing nothing. Production has fallen, I’ve abandoned the space race, and most of my tax revenue goes towards luxuries and maintaining a large military. I’ve tried to increase taxes, but the Senate keeps overruling. Pollution is not too bad at the moment, but there are a few ice cap squares that have melted.

Any suggestions? I’ve thought about a military victory, but all the major AIs have nukes, so I’m reluctant to do that. Should I be changing governmental type?

Thanks in advance.

(See playing same civ game for 10 years)

Lying and Economists

Heard behavioral economist Dan Ariely on the radio the other day. He was discussing economic research into when people cheat. In his study, they gave people 5 minutes to do some math problems and then gave them a dollar for each one they got right. The subjects would score themselves and then shred their worksheet, so they could claim more correct than they actually got without fear of being caught.

Except… the experimenters had rigged the shredder so that it would only shred the sides of the paper, so they would keep the true results, unbeknownst to the subjects. They found that on average people cheated about two dollars.

Ariely’s work is interesting, and he was able to get some intriguing results on what happened if you varied conditions slightly (e.g. introducing an intermediate step of being paid in a token makes people more likely to cheat), but he and the interviewer seemed blind to the irony – that they were lying to people in a study to find out why people lie. When presidents, CEOs and their apologists lie and cheat as a matter of course, is it any wonder if ordinary people do the same?

Command and Control in Computer Strategy Games

The computer game Civilization starts you off quick and simple, with just one unit.  But it gets more complex as you build more units, cities, and discover more of the world and other civilizations.  Using all of your forces optimally takes a lot of time, and towards the end of the game it becomes a long grind.

Civilization is an extreme example, but many other games follow the same pattern – Sim City, for example. How an we maintain a quick pace throughout a game?

One solution is to think more closely about who the player is representing (an idea outlined in Nicholas Palmer’s books on board wargaming).  In Civilization, you play the leader of a nation, so should be making high-level decisions such as what to research or where to attack, not minutiae such as how many air units should attack Kiev.  That decision is left to capable generals or ministers.

In the old days of boardgaming, this sort of separation was not desirable – why make the player go through a lot of automated gruntwork?  But a computer can easily perform these chores, with its AI making all the trivial decisions.

Computer games often do have an AI that will run some things on auto-pilot, but the part they generally do not think about is making the AI an integral and necessary part of the system, rather than a crutch for lazy players.  So perhaps you could only give direct orders to four units a turn, for example.  This would make things go quicker and might well be more challenging – choosing 4 out of N units to control is a more intellectually challenging (but often quicker) task than giving routine orders to each of N units.  Ironically, card-driven wargames such as Memoir ’44 or We The People have already adapted this mechanic (although without the ability to auto-pilot unordered units).  And, of course, the early wargame of chess only lets you make one move a turn.

Plausible Bidenability

When Joe Biden came out for gay marriage, was he making a cunning move in the administration’s game of eleven-dimensional chess, or just blundering around?  I don’t know, you don’t know, and even Biden might not be sure.  It’s another reason Biden was a great pick for VP – his reputation as an amiable doofus leads to plausible Bidenability.  Obama can use Biden to float a trial balloon, and if it doesn’t work out, he can say it was just Biden being Biden, something that would be impossible with a more disciplined politician like Gore or Hillary Clinton.  And this worked out spectacularly well – Obama got to test the waters, lower expectations, and then sucker-kiss progressives with a bold and historic declaration.  The President’s idealism and courage now stands in sharp contrast to the cynicism and cowardice of Team Romney.  Of course, some will say that this was just a move taken for political advantage.  I’m not sure what they’re looking for – should the President be making cautious decisions instead and not trying to win the election?  And would they have predicted this a couple of months ago?

So three cheers for Obama and Biden.  Whether by accident or design, they’ve come a long way since the inauguration, encouraged supporters, and confounded opponents.  If this is opportunism, let’s seize the opportunity!

The paradox of ranked-choice voting

Ranked-choice voting is a technical fix to voting problems. But it can often make matters worse.

In ranked-choice voting, aka instant runoff voting, you rank the candidates in order. Then the candidate with the lowest number of first preference votes is eliminated, and people who voted for him have their second preference counted instead.  Keep eliminating candidates until there’s only one left.  The aim is to make sure people don’t worry about “wasting” their vote on a comparatively unpopular candidate.

Proponents of ranked-choice voting generally fall into two camps. The first hopes to get more centrists elected, like the UK’s Liberal Democrats, or California’s Tom Campbell. Another popular reform of this type is open primaries, and centrists will keep coming up with these ideas as long as they can’t get anyone to vote for them.

The second hopes to get more left-wing parties running, like Greens or Socialists. The argument goes that people don’t vote for Greens like Nader because they’re worried about splitting the left-of-centre vote and letting the right in, as in 2000. But with ranked-choice voting, Nader could have run, disaffected Democrats could have indulged themselves with a protest vote for him, and it would have all worked out OK – Nader’s votes would have been redistributed to Gore, letting him win. It’s an attractive position, as it lets you be smugly superior in your purist vote without actually having to face the consequences of eight years of Bush-Cheney.

So how can it make things worse? One example is San Francisco, where it’s combined with public campaign financing to give 16 candidates for the mayor’s race. Mercifully, San Franciscans don’t have to rank order the whole set – they only need choose their top 3. But that gives 16*15*14 = 3360 possible choices, quite enough to induce analysis paralysis among anyone who took the task seriously. The “paradox of choice” says that all these options will give worse results.

And how is the election shaping up? With 16 candidates, all the messages blend into one vague mush of centre-left platitudes – protecting the environment, encouraging sustainable growth and so on. Nobody attacks anyone else, because they want their supporters to put them second or third. It’s San Francisco’s most boring election.

Who benefits from all of this? The same people who always benefit – incumbents and moneyed interests – the only ones who can cut through the chatter. What the reformers have forgotten is that, since Ancient Rome, any election worth anything has been, at base, a contest between rich and poor. Not that the patrician candidate is always worse – the rich didn’t get to be rich by being dummies. But the best way for the rich to win the class war is to deny and obscure its existence, and ranked choice voting is an excellent assistant.

Update: The left-wing SF Bay Guardian notes “Several consultants and election experts [the editor] talked to this week said that [incumbent mayor] Lee would be far more vulnerable in a traditional election. ‘He would lose a runoff against almost any of the top challengers,’ one person said.” and quotes Corey Cook, a political scientist at the University of San Francisco as saying “Ranked-choice voting clearly favors incumbents.”

xkcd and compound interest

Recently, xkcd had a strip saying compound interest is not that great – $1000 with 2% interest for 10 years only grows to $1219.

But if we take the same $1000, and use a more optimistic 4% compounded continuously for 30 years, then we get $3320. That’s an advantage of $1120 over simple interest. What’s going on?

Normally continuous compounding is introduced by thinking about compounding yearly, then monthly, then daily, then taking the limit.

Let’s look at it another way. It’s simple interest, plus the simple interest on the interest, plus the interest on the interest on the interest, … and so on.

Now if you invest $1 and compound it continuously at interest rate r for time t, the simple interest is $rt.

The interest on the interest is rt*rt / 2 (we divide by 2 because we don’t get all of the first $rt at once).

And the interest on the interest on the interest turns out to be rt*rt*rt / (2 *3). Put it all together, and we get

1 + rt + (rt)^2/2! + (rt)^3/3! + … = exp(rt)

Now, for our 30 years at 4%, rt = 1.2
The simple interest is $1000 * rt = $1200
The interest on the interest is $1000 * (rt)^2/2! = $720
The interest on the interest on the interest is $288
The interest on the interest on the interest on the interest is $86
The interest on the interest on the interest on the interest on the interest is $21
The interest on the interest on the interest on the interest on the interest on the interest is $4.

And we’re still not done!

We can go one more level and get another $0.71. What does interest on the interest on the interest on the interest on the interest on the interest on the interest even mean? It means 71 cents.

That seems pretty amazing to me. If you don’t think so, I guess you don’t like money.

And it also explains more intuitively why compounding is so unimpressive for 10 years at 2%. In that case, rt = 0.2, and the successive interest terms fall to 0 very quickly.

But forget about the large amounts of money. We’re talking about either taking infinitesimal limits, or taking an infinite sum of interest on interest on interest on interest. That’s hippy stoner talk, but that’s how the modern financial system works. What could be more esoteric than infinity, or more mundane than a banker? And yet, there they are, side by side.

Einstein might or might not have said that compound interest was the most powerful force in the universe. But even if it’s not magical, it’s certainly mysterious and astonishing.

2001-2011: Technology under Presidents Gore and Romney

Everyone remembers September 11th, 2001, when President Gore announced that America had been attacked. But few people knew at the time how drastically technology would change over the next ten years.

Gore had long been an environmentalist, but in the months following 9/11, he used his political capital to push through a range of new programs: a carbon tax combined with personal CO2 allowances, subsidies for energy efficiency and mass transit, and unprecedented investments in energy infrastructure, research, and development. This led to a seemingly endless demand for data analysts, physicists, computer scientists and engineers in companies funded by the Department of Energy, causing Jeff Hammerbacher, CEO of AdMath, to remark “Everyone is trying to make energy more cheaply and cleanly. That sucks if you want to do anything else.”  And it also led to many startups in that ecosystem, such as Zuckerberg’s FaceGrid, which lets people trade carbon credits with their friends and neighbors, and the rapidly growing Blipper, which generates a 140 character alert whenever there is a “blip” in power consumption. At first Blipper was parodied as just generating “using microwave for lunch” blips, but it now has a viable revenue stream with sponsored blips from major automakers such as Ford, Toyota, Tesla or GCars.

While Gore’s changes were dramatic, we should note that he was really just in the right place at the right time. The problems of global warming, dependence on foreign oil, and America’s crumbling infrastructure were so large that even if Bush had won, he would surely have implemented similar programs. Gore was also mocked for various gaffes, such as claiming that he invented FaceGrid, and that “his” levees and mangroves saved New Orleans.

After Romney defeated Hillary Clinton in 2008, he largely maintained the Gore agenda, but added a new project: healthcare reform, led by his popular Democratic Secretary of Health and Human Services Barack Obama. “Obamacare”, as it became known, built on Romney’s earlier work in Massachusetts, and cost reduction informed by data analysis and statistical modeling was a major part of it, from the NetDocs prize onwards.

What of the future? Vice President Bush is pushing forward his education initiative to find and reward the best teachers and fire the worst. In his words, “Those who can, can do. Those who can’t, can’t teach.”  Generous merit pay awards for math and science teachers have been unpopular with unions, but they are attracting talented graduates to the field. The administration claims that this and immigration reform will be the bases for continued American technological dominance into the next generation.