The usual "suspects"

I'm sure this is a pet peeve for a lot of other people but I'm too lazy to google it right now.  Just chalk me up as one more.  I can't stand it when I read a newspaper article that refers to the lead character in a crime story as "the suspect," especially when it's clear that the "suspect's" name is not known.

This was triggered by an NYT story that quoted the Sparks, Nevada Police as follows:

"After the shooting, the Sparks Police Department posted a message on its Web site that read: 'Stay away from Sparks Middle School 2275 18th St. We believe the suspect has been neutralized.'"

Why can't they simply say "the shooter" has been neutralized?  In this case it is particularly egregious, because you really shouldn't go around "neutralizing" people on mere suspicion.

I heard/read the same mistake during the Navy Yard shootings.  There, the person killing all the people was "the suspect" and for a while there were even two or three "suspects," but nobody knew who they were.

Yes, people are innocent until proven guilty, but if you don't have a name, there is NOTHING to suspect.  You might as well call the person who is doing the shooting the shooter, the killer, the murderer.  That's what he is.

It gets more confusing if there actually is an identified suspect -- i.e. someone who the police think might have committed the crime.  In that case, it's even worse to talk about the "suspect" doing this or that crime, since then you're essentially assuming what you're supposed to be proving.

UPDATE June 13, 2015

Here we go again, from CNN today:

CNN)[Breaking news update, posted at 5:05 a.m. ET]

Authorities found explosives in one of four suspicious bags found near Dallas' police headquarters, Police Chief David Brown said. Police believe there were multiple shooters who may have fired from different locations. "There might be up to four suspects," Brown said.

[Previous story, posted at 4:53 a.m. ET]

(CNN) -- Shots were fired at Dallas police headquarters early Saturday, the Dallas Police Department said.

A witness told police that the suspects, who opened fire about 12:30 a.m., were in an armored vehicle. Police responded to the incident, the Dallas Police Department tweeted.

"There is currently a standoff with what appears to be an armored vehicle in the Dallas suburb of Hutchins, Texas, around I-20 and I-45," Major Max Geron said. No one has been injured so far.

Security has been beefed up at Dallas police stations and at Dallas City Hall, he said.

Creativity and the Billionaire

I don't usually discuss article that I like, but here's one:   http://www.salon.com/2013/10/13/ted_talks_are_lying_to_you/ by Thomas Frank, previously published in Harpers.  It picks up on a theme that I had just hit upon myself while listening to William Poundstone's "Are You Smart Enough To Work at Google?"

I think it's the same basic theme, anyway.

Frank's point is that all of the books we see on creativity nowadays are not the least bit creative.  They simply repeat the same old stories about post-its, jazz, Bob Dylan, Picasso, Einstein, and the Swiffer.  They don't really teach us anything, but they insist -- and have done so for a long time -- that the creative class will eventually rule the world.  Another book I happen to be listening to -- Daniel Pink's 2005 "A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future" is in the same vein.

The thought I had recently (in reaction to Poundstone) was that a lot of the people who are deemed "creative" nowadays don't really seem to have been all that creative.  He points to gmail as a great success of Google's "spend twenty percent of your time working on your own projects" policy.  Successful, yes, but creative??   It's just email, which had been around for a long time.  I think he also points to Facebook as some kind of triumph of creativity.  Really?  Just another example of a person being at the right place at the right time, and doing something that a lot of other people were already doing.

And Frank's final point is just that these books help reaffirm the sense of "creativity" among the people who have made it big in this economy.   Which I think is where I was going, but I hadn't gotten around to articulating that yet.  Here's how Frank says it in the end: "Creativity is what they bring to the national economic effort, these books reassure them — and it’s also the benevolent doctrine under which they rightly rule the world."

Frank's latest book is "Pity the Poor Billionaire:  The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right" which sounds like a painful read.  But he's a pretty good writer, so I might give it a try.

Malala tells Obama that drone attacks fuel terrorism

That was reported in the Washington Post this morning, and there's a lively debate in the comments on whether she's right or not.  Some say that the only way to stop terrorism is by killing its leaders, and it's easier to do that by drone than by a full scale invasion, and if there's some collateral damage, well, that's the price we (and the victims, and the victims' loved ones) pay for the result.  And of course, Obama knows there's a tradeoff, and he's used his judgment to continue -- well, exponentiate [if that's a word] -- the drone attacks.

Others support Malala, and wonder why Obama has to learn this from a 16-year-old.

True, I don't have the all the information that Obama does.  But I do have some experience with organizations generally.  And in my experience, for every person that is currently a "leader" in an organization, there are at least five or more equally-qualified people who would love to be the "leader" too.  And also, in my experience, the people who get the "leadership" positions are not always the greatest leaders; often the ones just below would be much better.   I'd be surprised if the Taliban or Al Qaeda or any of the other other terrorist organizations that we are targeting were any different.

So the whole idea of "cutting off the head" by killing the leaders of these movements seems cockeyed to me.  That might work if you've got a single charismatic leader on whom the whole organization depends.  But that's clearly not the case here -- we're going after dozens if not hundreds of "leaders" that nobody's ever heard of.  You kill a leader, and then there's a brief power vacuum, but then the next guy steps up and takes that leader's place.  The organization doesn't just go home -- it continues to exist based on its principles and ideas, and the very drone attack that killed the leader is just one more affirmation of the "correctness" of those principles and ideas.  The people in the organization continue to believe in them, and will simply follow the next leader, and many of them are doubtless hoping to advance to leadership positions within the organization themselves.  The very possibility of drone-created vacancies might seem like not such a bad thing for their ambitions.

In the case of terrorist organizations, we've got the additional fact that they are often very well funded, e.g. with Saudi oil money.  The death of one leader isn't going to affect the benefits that they can offer to new recruits, and the killing of innocents by drones will simply increase recruiting.  If I'm a young man and my little sister or brother is killed by a drone, and I don't have much else going on in my life, I'm signing up.  What am I missing?

Maybe this is what I'm missing:  Maybe, just maybe, there is only a limited supply of educated Muslim clerics with access to Saudi (or other) money who are willing to step up and into these "leadership" positions.  I suppose if there really is only a finite supply of those people, if we can kill them off by drone, that might have a real effect.  That doesn't answer the moral question of whether these executions -- and the inevitable collateral damage -- is something a supposedly-civilized country should be doing, but perhaps if it's all a "cost-benefit" game, and the goal is to stop terrorism at all costs, perhaps the drone killing is "justifiable" on some level, if not morally so.  I still think the whole campaign most likely does more harm than good -- it really hurts our standing in the world, and undermines any effort to try to lead by example, which for me, has always been the only way out of this downward spiral.  But as always, I try to present both sides of an issue.

The No Pain Government

For a while I was feeling a little bit sorry for Federal workers who were unexpectedly furloughed last week.  But now I see that the House has passed a bill guaranteeing that they will be paid.

So let me see if I can get this straight.  We ran out of money, so we need to shut down the government.  But the one savings we might realize from that -- the cost of paying a bunch of Federal employees -- well, to actually impose that savings would just cause too much pain, and make too many voters mad at us.  So as soon as the government is back up and running, we'll just print some more money and pay them.  That sounds like soft-hearted liberal nonsense.  Lousy Democrats.  Oh wait -- it's the Republicans, trying to salvage something out of this disaster, by using taxpayer money to buy back the votes that they would have lost from the rightfully enraged Federal workers.

Onlyl in America -- and the American government -- does "furlough" essentially equate to "paid vacation."

It's ironic, but this is almost exactly like what the Democrats did by ramming through Obamacare without any concern for cost savings, and what the Republicans are in some (but not all) ways calling irresponsible.  Yes, it feels wonderful that people with pre-exising conditions can now get insurance, and formerly-uninsured people will no longer be bankrupted by unexpected medical bills.  But to get the votes we need, we need to make that the businesses that are responsible for soaring health costs will continue to make healthy profits.

So who bears the costs in these two parallel situations?  

In Obamacare, it's basically the people who pay more for insurance than they get out of it who end up paying for it.  I.e. most of us.

With the Federal worker paid vacation program, it's all of us. 

Woot is Owned By Amazon

Yes, everyone should know this by now -- it happened in 2010 -- but not everybody does. Obviously, the Woot site isn't going to broadcast it, because that site needs to appear edgy and cool.

I've bought stuff from Woot both before and after the Amazon purchase, and to be honest, I didn't notice any difference.  The monkey jokes seemed to be about the same.  Not really funny, but oddly addictive.

But now it's all a marketing game; one more profit center for Amazon (and one less competitor also).  Pre-Amazon, when you saw something on Woot, you could go to Amazon and look at the reviews and the price there and decide if you are getting a good deal.  Sometimes, it seemed, Amazon would even lower its price to bring it into Woot's range.

But that's all over now.  Amazon owns Woot, and so they know you are going to go to Amazon to try to figure out what a "fair" price for the item is.  And knowing THAT, they make sure that the price on Amazon is a good deal higher than the one on Woot, which makes the Woot price look like all the better a deal.

I'm writing this today because both Woot and Yugster are offering a one-day sale on a handheld 3M M220 projector.  Woot is at $129 and Yugster is at $169.  It seems like a pretty good product, but apparently it's not easy to figure out how to actually make it work with your files (internal software limitations), and moreover, the VGA cables that you might use to connect it to your computer are apparently not available anywhere (at least according to the one star reviews). Also, apparently it's important to have a remote with it, but that's sold separately and might also not be available.

And what is Amazon selling this discontinued product for?  $200.  So looks like a pretty good deal on Woot, right?

I think I'm going to pass this up today, based on the cable and software issues.  Would be nice to have a little battery operated projector of course, and that price seems pretty good, but I don't want to spend a lot of time tracking down cables and dealing with other limitations.  The nice thing about Amazon's review system is that although many if not most five-star reviews for any given product are fake, the one-star through three-star reviews are generally heart-felt.

Where's My Nobel Prize??

I enjoyed Daniel Kahneman's TED Talk about the experiencing self and the remembering self.  Definitely food for thought -- i.e. when deciding what to do next, consider whether you are doing it for your "experiencing self" -- which only exists for a window of about 3 seconds at a time -- or your "remembering self" which will remember the whole event or vacation or whatever.

But I'd never been very impressed with Kahneman and Tversky's Nobel Prize winning work. Here's a summary of what I think is their most famous experiment, followed by a summary of a somewhat-related experiment by Richard Thaler.  I lifted them both from Thayer Watkins' San Jose State Economics Department web page, although I had to fix some typos.   So the quotes are there because this is Watkins' explanation.

"One very important result of Kahneman and Tversky's work is demonstrating that people's attitudes toward risks concerning gains may be quite different from their attitudes toward risks concerning losses. For example, when given a choice between getting $1000 with certainty or having a 50% chance of getting $2500 they may well choose the certain $1000 in preference to the uncertain chance of getting $2500 even though the mathematical expectation of the uncertain option is $1250. This is a perfectly reasonable attitude that is described as risk-aversion. But Kahneman and Tversky found that the same people when confronted with a certain loss of $1000 versus a 50% chance of no loss or a $2500 loss do often choose the risky alternative. This is called risk-seeking behavior. This is not necessarily irrational but it is important for analysts to recognize the asymmetry of human choices.

"Peter Bernstein cites an experiment by Richard Thaler in which students were told to assume they had just won $30 and were offered a coin-flip upon which they would win or lose $9. Seventy percent of the students opted for the coin-flip. When other students were offered $30 for certain versus a coin-flip in which they got either $21 or $39 a much smaller proportion, 43%, opted for the coin-flip."

I'll start by saying I'm glad Thaler didn't win a Nobel prize for his work.  Yes, people think he's in line for one, but we can hope if he wins it, it won't be for that study, since that study tells us nothing at all about human nature, just about how humans can be tricked with math.  In other words, the choice in both cases is exactly the same -- you get $30 to keep, with the opportunity to bet $9 on a coin flip.  The two results -- the two choices offered the subjects -- are truly identical.  The only thing the study shows is that Thaler was able to trick his subjects into thinking there was a difference, so that they preferred one option that sounded better.  That's probably useful information for marketing professionals, and other people who like to use numbers to influence the masses -- and it's useful for those of use trying to avoid being manipulated by presentation -- but it tells us nothing about human nature.  It's just another example of illogical thinking by test subjects.

The Kahneman-Tversky study is better than the Thaler study, because unlike in Thaler's study, the subjects are being presented with a real choice, not a false choice. But neither result is surprising, and contrary to what Watkins says -- and what I presume Kahneman and Tversky said -- they are NOT asymmetrical.  In fact, if you consider these examples just after listening to Kahneman's TED talk on happiness, you'll understand why.

Note:  I haven't gone back and looked at Kahneman's study.  Relying on Watkins for that.

Also, I should probably doublecheck to see if my conclusion below in fact matches Kahneman's.  But no time right now.

So the first test is:  you get $1000 in the bag or a fifty-fifty chance of winning $2500.  Here's why they chose the thousand.  When you think about it, an unexpected gift of $1000 gives you a whole lot of happy, as does an unexpected gift of $2500.  But it's not necessarily mathematically twice the happiness.  You're just unexpectedly happy.  Think back to a time when you unexpectedly got some money.  Were you twenty times happier the time you got $500 vs. the time you got $25?  No, either way, you were just happy.  But now think of the problem with the 50-50 chance.  There's a real chance -- 50% -- that you'll get nothing.  Worse, you'll get that nothing KNOWING that you could have had $1000.  That's almost like losing $1000 (which admittedly you didn't have).  But it really hurts.  So if you think about the happiness equation, the unhappiness that comes from essentially LOSING $1000 dominates your thinking and you pick the lesser value, especially since you know you'll be very happy if you get either $1000 or $2500.  Yes, if the person tells you he'll let you play 100 times, then the logical thing to do would be to pick the $2500 bet 100 times in a row.  But when it's a one shot deal, the happiness equation is very different.  So they are right to call this risk-averse behavior, and it's extremely rational behavior, if the pursuit of happiness is the subject's guiding principle, which it almost certainly is.  So no surprise here.

Then the second test:  you get the choice between a thousand-dollar certain loss, and a 50% chance of losing $2500.  In this case, the subjects - who are not actually at risk for losing any real money - say they choose the 50% chance, which means they lose an expected value of $1250.  Watkins -- and presumably Kahneman and Tversky -- call this "risk seeking behavior" and consider it an asymmetrical result.

But in fact, it's perfectly symmetrical.  Looking  at it again from a happiness-maximizing perspective, the subjects here are behaving very rationally (at least for test subjects, see below), just like they did the first time around.  A loss of $1000 and a loss of $2500 both inflict a whole lot of hurt.  The difference in the amount is not quantifiable.  It's really just figures on an account statement somewhere.  Or if you're poor, it's one more debt you won't be able to pay.  Either way, it hurts.  But there's one way to avoid the hurt.  And that's to take the 50-50 chance that you won't lose anything at all.  In fact, if you pick that chance, and win nothing, it will FEEL like you won a thousand dollars, since otherwise you would have suffered that thousand dollar loss.  So from a sheer happiness-maximizing perspective, the same thinking governs both kinds of behavior.

But this does call into to question the value of studies like this -- where people are basically making decisions with play money.  In real life, I think someone would think a lot more carefully about the second choice.  A purely logical person (like me) would choose to take the thousand dollar loss, really because of the odds -- logically speaking I save $250, and I'll always be able to tell myself I did the logical thing.  For some people, the $1000 choice will be even more obvious -- a person living close to the edge might be able to handle a $1000 loss, but if it were $2500, then they'd be bankrupt -- e.g. they;d miss their car payments, the car would be repossessed, and they wouldn't have transportation to work.  For them, the $1000 choice would be all the more logical.

Put another way, taking the $1000 hit on the second choice is the responsible and logical thing to do, and if it turns out that e.g. only 40% of people would do that in real life, that just means that 60% of the people are not acting logically.  It doesn't say anything about human nature as a whole.  And when the money is considered only in the abstract, then logic takes a holiday and, apparently, people will take the bigger risk, thinking they are maximizing their (abstract) happiness, as above.

So where's my Nobel Prize?

Neil Pasricha -- Making New Money Off an Old Fad

Just watched a TED talk by Neil Pasricha, author of "The Book of Awesome," and now apparently a franchise of other related books (the book of business/holiday/etc awesome).  WTF?  how can that have worked?  To hear him tell it, he started with feeling sorry for himself -- his wife left him and a friend committed suicide -- and then he cheered himself up by writing a blog that noted little things that were awesome -- like a new line opening up at the supermarket.  At first nobody read it, then 10s, then 1000s, then millions.  Suddenly, he got an award for "Best Blog Ever" or something like that, and then he started getting offers for book contracts, and before you knew it, he had a NYT best-seller (which, incidentally, I had never heard of until now, and I see it's about 12,000 on Amazon's list).

But all the things he was talking about sounded like the same kind of things that were in "14,000 Things to Be Happy About," which (I just checked) was first published in 1990.  It is all so old, and of course the idea of appreciating the little things in life goes back much further than that.  The author of 14,000 doesn't seem to mind -- in fact, Amazon indicates that she (Barbara Ann Kipfer) reviewed the "Awesome" book and said "The Book of Awesome gives me 14,001 things to be happy about. Bravo for taking note of the sunny side of life!"

I have a feeling that's the way book marketing and reviewing works nowadays -- be sure to give a positive review, and make sure you're identified as "author" of a related book.  That is probably the best way to sell YOUR book, especially if it's been forgotten for many years.  Check it out: so many reviews -- especially quick one-line reviews -- are written by other authors with intriguing book titles.  It's all just more advertising.  None of it is real.  Except for the fact that the advertising works, and the result is that books on tired old themes get sold.

The usual disclaimer:  I haven't read the book.  It gets a lot of positive reviews on Amazon, and surprisingly few negatives.  So even accounting for the fact that many if not most Amazon reviews are fake, there may well be people out there who like the book.  Maybe the difference between it and 14,000 things is that he goes into cutesy/annoying detail about some of the awesome things -- that seems to be the way to blog works.

I have absolutely nothing against the theme of the book -- I am a great practitioner of appreciating life's little pleasures myself.  It's really the only way to live, and if you don't realize that, maybe you should buy the book.  But it's such an old concept -- I'm just expressing my astonishment that somebody can still make money off of it these days, and go on to the internet -- and onto TED -- and be treated as some kind of pioneer in the art of positive thinking.

I suggest you go to the website (http://1000awesomethings.com/) first, and if you like it, then you can think about buying the book.

This reminds me of my "review" of Tony Robbins's TED Talk.  If it works for you, great, buy all his stuff.  But permit me to still be a little bit annoyed.