jmh

• jmh 15 Mar 2019 12:35 UTC

  12 points

  on: Black­mailers are pri­va­teers in the war on hypocrisy

  I don’t re­ally fol­low the logic that cer­tain cases of asym­met­ric in­for­ma­tion are bad from some gen­eral per­spec­tive and so the world/​so­ciety bet­ter off if that asym­me­try is re­duced, there­fore black­mail is good.

  Black­mail is about pri­vately benefit­ing from main­tain­ing the con­di­tion of asym­met­ric in­for­ma­tion within what­ever pop­u­la­tion is rele­vant.

  I did like jim­ran­domh’s com­ment about norm differ­ences, which then gets to the whole ques­tion about pri­vacy rights, in­di­vi­d­ual free­doms and other as­pects of so­cial life that need to be un­rav­eled be­fore one can say and given case of re­veal­ing the se­cret is a pos­i­tive or nega­tive.

• jmh 12 Mar 2019 16:03 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ryan_b's comment on: Me­gapro­ject management

  As the pro­ject grows large enough, we should ex­pect to be per­pet­u­ally chok­ing on one bot­tle­neck or other.

  I did un­der­stand that but was sug­gest­ing that the crite­ria as a mega pro­ject was re­ally not about the costs—though fully ex­pect a high costs to be as­so­ci­ated with such effort. As you say, they can­not be eas­ily be sep­a­rated into more man­age­able sub-pro­jects. Per­haps I can rephrase my though. Is the po­si­tion that any and ev­ery pro­ject that costs $X or more nec­es­sar­ily has the type of com­plex­ity and non-sep­a­ra­bil­ity?

  If not then the abil­ity to clas­sify high cost pro­jects should be use­ful—and point to al­ter­na­tive man­age­ment re­quire­ments if all pro­jects greater than $x still suffer from many of the same in­effi­cien­cies.

  Each new stake­holder is a stu­pen­dous in­crease in the poli­ti­cal com­plex­ity of the pro­ject, so much so that even at the smaller level of pro­jects where we know the right an­swers about how to do them ap­ply­ing the right an­swers is of­ten im­pos­si­ble be­cause of the differ­ent in­ter­ests at play.

  Sure, and you run into whole prob­lem of what ex­actly is the right an­swer as the differ­ent stake­holder are max­i­miz­ing slightly differ­ent (and likely equally le­gi­t­i­mate) crite­ria. That alone is not a bad or wrong thing. But the ap­proach of limit­ing par­ti­ci­pa­tion, in a way, seems ex­actly the same thing as chunk­ing the pro­ject into man­age­able bites. But it’s not clear that can be done much bet­ter than dis­assem­bling the pro­ject into smaller, sim­pler and more man­age­able sub pro­jects.

  If so, limit­ing the stake­hold­ers then the as­sess­ment of the pro­ject will always be one of par­tial failure. That would also drive var­i­ous type of cost over run and time de­lays when such ex­cluded stake­hold­ers seek to in­fluence the pro­ject from out­side the man­age­ment pro­cess.

  It’s not clear to me that would be the op­ti­mal solu­tion to all mega pro­jects.

• jmh 11 Mar 2019 17:39 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: elityre's comment on: S-Curves for Trend Forecasting

  Plus one on that point.

  In once sense though it seems a re­jec­tion of, what I will call, the S-Curve men­tal­ity. That would be the think­ing all growth always plateaus (and it seems that is a dom­i­nant view in terms of eco­nomic growth there—de­vel­op­ing economies can grow faster then de­vel­oped economies so all these fast grow­ers are doomed to the fate of Ja­pan, Europe or the USA). That think­ing can lead to ac­cep­tance rather than effort to over­come some cur­rent limi­ta­tion/​con­straint.

• jmh 11 Mar 2019 17:16 UTC

  1 point

  on: Me­gapro­ject management

  In­ter­est­ing. One think I would like to see more of men­tioned here—but per­haps will have to dig for my­self—would be about the struc­ture of the pro­ject man­age­ment. It seems one clear char­ac­ter­is­tic is com­plex­ity of the whole. While cost, and over­all “size”, would clearly be well cor­re­lated. How­ever I don’t think that is the crit­i­cal fea­ture. I would per­haps pose it as a sep­a­ra­bil­ity is­sue. Can the over­all whole be chun­ked out into bite-sized bits with­out too much co­or­di­na­tion type work or not?

  As more of a side thought, I won­der if any­one has done much in the way of spill-over type effects on these mega pro­jects and if any cat­e­go­riza­tion or char­ac­ter­is­tics are iden­ti­fi­able. We know there have been spillover from both the space pro­gram and mil­i­tary pro­grams. Not sure about more com­mer­cial or gov­ern­ment mega pro­jects. But you would think all in­fras­truc­ture type pro­jects should benefit from some pos­i­tive net­work ex­ter­nal­ity effects.

  I don’t try to make any “if you built it they will come” ar­gu­ment here. If any it would be a “peo­ple are pretty good at figur­ing out how to make lemon­aide from a lemon” type “ar­gu­ment”. This kind of goes along with the too com­plex to man­age well cases as well. We of­ten will not know what the end benefits will be for many things—if the USA didn’t do the elec­trifi­ca­tion pro­ject to get power to ru­ral com­mu­ni­ties would we have the same type of com­mu­ni­ca­tions net­works we cur­rently have? Worse? Bet­ter???

  Of course this is not re­ally about how to bet­ter man­age such pro­jects and it’s likely bet­ter man­age­ments would al­low such as­pects greater po­ten­tials and lessen any such af­fects.

• jmh 26 Feb 2019 14:56 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: jmh's comment on: Less Com­pe­ti­tion, More Mer­i­toc­racy?

  Small edit to my own com­ment. I ne­glected to point out my com­ments and as­sess­ment were re­ally about the what I un­der­stood to be the po­si­tion of the pa­per un­der re­view and not about the anal­y­sis per se.

• jmh 25 Feb 2019 17:54 UTC

  3 points

  on: Less Com­pe­ti­tion, More Mer­i­toc­racy?

  First, I did not get though the en­tire post. That said, some thoughts that oc­curred to me.

  • Un­der what con­di­tions is does this gen­er­al­ize? I was try­ing to ap­ply it to my world. If I am hiring part of the prob­lem is not about hard skills but soft skill—and those will differ a bit based on what team the new per­son will be part of.

  • Good game the­ory always wins seems to have di­rected at the can­di­dates but what hap­pens when the game mas­ter (lack of a bet­ter term) has poor game the­ory or doesn’t think such be­hav­ior good? Again, from a cor­po­rate hiring stand­point that might be a real situ­a­tion. In terms of con­sumers shop­ping around that might also ap­ply (the av­er­age ad­ver­tiser is a bet­ter game the­o­rists than the av­er­age con­sumer). Do the con­clu­sions still hold here?

  • Closely re­lated to the first bul­let, just what mar­ket set­tings were con­sid­ered for the anal­y­sis.

  • I re­call an old pa­per that asked if duopoly was more com­pet­i­tive than the stan­dard atom­istic com­pe­ti­tion in the Econ 101 pure com­pe­ti­tion model. That was largely driven by search costs and asym­met­ric in­for­ma­tion prob­lems. Would the­ory here be com­ple­men­tary?

  My gut re­ac­tion is there is some value and truth here but that it should not be taken too se­ri­ously. Con­sider it an area of con­sid­er­a­tion and el­e­ment of a solu­tion rather than a solu­tion to any prob­lem of get­ting the best out of the messy so­cial in­sti­tu­tions that me­di­ate our ac­tivi­ties and greatly in­fluence the col­lec­tive/​ag­gre­gate re­sults.

• jmh 12 Feb 2019 16:18 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Bucky's comment on: Spaghetti Towers

  Ex­tend­ing that the leg­is­la­tion and law in gen­eral seems ap­pro­pri­ate as well. I won­der if one con­trasts and com­pares slice of time views of both com­mon law regimes and statu­tory law regimes if there would be any differ­ences.

• jmh 7 Feb 2019 16:16 UTC

  3 points

  on: Spaghetti Towers

  I seem to work (and pos­si­ble live) in such a set­ting ;-)

  On one level I won­der how much we need to worry. The idea be­hind that com­ment is the prob­lem we all face with the asym­met­ric na­ture of our knowl­edge when fac­ing the fu­ture. The dis­tinc­tion here is not to say that sloppy plan­ning and main­te­nance should be con­sider ac­cept­able but that we can only avoid the spaghetti to some ex­tent. This is not to sug­gest the au­thor was sug­gest­ing that. Only say­ing we might want to think about where the mar­gins of effi­ciency are.

  I was also won­der­ing if some of the in­no­va­tions in graph the­ory might help man­age de­ci­sion-mak­ing in a spaghetti world. The idea of a pro­gram­ming lan­guage that can help re­fac­tor the spaghetti might use such tools.

  The last (ac­tu­ally first but...) thought I had was “Hello Gor­dian Knot.”

• jmh 25 Jan 2019 13:27 UTC

  2 points

  on: The 3 Books Tech­nique for Learn­ing a New Skilll

  I will sec­ond Hazard’s com­ments on the way to ap­proach the re­views. Seems so ob­vi­ous af­ter you said it.

  I am won­der­ing what you were con­sid­ered in terms of skills.

  I think the gen­eral ap­proach should work re­ally well in some set­tings. I do won­der what the limits might be. For in­stance, I could prob­a­bly use this ap­proach well to learn how to write in a pro­gram­ming lan­guage, or how to weld or how to ma­chine parts. I’m not sure it’s as helpful for, say, learn­ing a new lan­guage.

  Per­haps the dis­tinc­tion is be­tween skill and knowl­edge?

• jmh 14 Jan 2019 14:22 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: JacobKopczynski's comment on: What are the open prob­lems in Hu­man Ra­tion­al­ity?

  My com­ment must nec­es­sary be some­thing of an aside since I don’t know the Ham­ming prob­lem. How­ever, your state­ment “We are not de­signed to be ra­tio­nal” jumped out for me.

  Is that to say some­thing along the lines of ra­tio­nal­ity is not one of the char­ac­ter­is­tics that pro­vided an evolu­tion­ary ad­van­tage for us ? Or would it mean ra­tio­nal­ity was a mu­ta­tion of some “de­sign” (and pos­si­bly one that was a good sur­vival trait)?

  Or is the cor­rect un­der­stand­ing there some­thing en­tirely differ­ent?

• jmh 14 Jan 2019 14:14 UTC

  1 point

  on: What are the open prob­lems in Hu­man Ra­tion­al­ity?

  I had a could of thought, to fol­low, but in think­ing on them the is­sue of sep­a­ra­bil­ity seemed to come up. If we think of ra­tio­nal­ity as ei­ther a men­tal skill to de­velop or some type of trait that can be de­vel­oped re­lated to our de­ci­sion mak­ing, and there­fore ac­tions can that truly be sep­a­rated from all the other things that make up be­ing hu­man.

  Are emo­tions and any part of our emo­tional re­sponses part or ra­tio­nal­ity? The en­emy of ra­tio­nal­ity (I think many peo­ple would con­sider emo­tional and ra­tio­nal as op­po­sites—not sure about a more so­phis­ti­cated view that is found here. Are there cer­tain com­ple­men­tary as­pects/​el­e­ments?

  In­tu­itive ra­tio­nal­ity (maybe some­thing like Hayek’s idea of inar­tic­u­late knowl­edge)? Where does that fit?

  Last is the is­sue of sub­jec­tive val­ues and rec­og­niz­ing other’s ra­tio­nal­ity. What limits would that place on ob­serv­ing ra­tio­nal­ity in oth­ers as well as as­sess­ing our own ra­tio­nal­ity.

• jmh 4 Jan 2019 14:02 UTC

  1 point

  on: Learn­ing-In­ten­tions vs Do­ing-In­ten­tions

  I liked the dis­tinc­tion you make. Res­tat­ing, very similar ac­tivi­ties will of­ten have differ­ent tar­gets and so need to view the same ac­tions from very differ­ent view points. That said, I don’t think it’s a bi­nary, but more a con­tinuum. For a suc­cess­ful, on­go­ing and grow­ing en­ter­prise more than just un­der­stand­ing the dis­tinc­tion is needed.

  I think that was clearly im­plied but I didn’t re­ally see that de­vel­oped in the dis­cus­sion but think it should be. The or­ga­ni­za­tion will not just be in “learn­ing” phase of ex­is­tence or “do­ing” phase but both through­out its life. There needs to be a third leg that then me­di­ates be­tween the two philo­soph­i­cally differ­ent view points to cre­ate the real syn­er­gies be­tween the two a suc­cess­ful en­ter­prise will need.

• jmh 20 Dec 2018 18:50 UTC

  1 point

  on: You can be wrong about what you like, and you of­ten are

  Per­haps I’m just be­ing dense here but why is lik­ing and happy be­ing linked to­gether the way they are? I don’t think “I like pizza.” (pre­sum­ably to eat) is a com­pletely differ­ent state­ment from “I am happy when I eat pizza.”

  I do agree that we of­ten do things that ul­ti­mately are not in our own in­ter­ests but I don’t re­ally see that as a huge prob­lem. We’re rather com­plex in our ex­is­tence. I don’t think we have some in­ter­nal util­ity func­tion with a sin­gle met­ric to max­i­mize. What we end up deal­ing with is more a con­strained max­i­miza­tion case. More­over, the var­i­ous mar­gins we max­i­mize on are of­ten not only mu­tu­ally ex­clu­sive but mu­tu­ally in­com­pat­i­ble.

• jmh 26 Oct 2018 13:34 UTC

  −1 points

  on: In fa­vor of taboo­ing the word “val­ues” and us­ing only “pri­ori­ties” instead

  There’s an old song that says “lan­guage is a virus”—the mean­ing of which has changed for me over time and the phrase it­self offers mul­ti­ple in­ter­pre­ta­tions.

  Might I sug­gest that your val­ues are what help define how you pri­ori­tize your al­ter­na­tives and efforts within that ends-means frame­work.

• jmh 26 Oct 2018 13:24 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Said Achmiz's comment on: In praise of heuristics

  My bad. I thought you were say­ing the term it­self was not some­thing you were fa­mil­iar with.

  I agree that it is difficult to un­der­stand in what set­tings sta­tus would fit the “X-sum” struc­ture. My gen­eral think­ing is per­haps it is more of the mind­set for the per­son in the situ­a­tion (in this case, the au­thor) than some ex­ter­nal ob­jec­tive met­ric out­side ob­servers would all be able to con­firm.

  That said, I took the zero-sum as an as­sump­tion “for the sake of ar­gu­ment” type rhetoric. I was in­ter­ested in the bits about heuris­tics though it seems the main fo­cus is re­ally about how to deal with work­place re­la­tion­ship, in the con­text of sta­tus, which doesn’t greatly in­ter­est me or shed much light on the value of heuris­tics as rule and why they may be more valuable than at­tempts as some ra­tio­nal calcu­lus in mak­ing one’s de­ci­sions in cer­tain as­pects of life.

• jmh 25 Oct 2018 17:43 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Said Achmiz's comment on: In praise of heuristics

  My un­der­stand­ing of zero-sum is: as­sume a pie of a fixed size that will be eaten, en­tirely, by sev­eral peo­ple. The size of any given per­son’s slice and only be made larger but mak­ing at least one of the other slices smaller.

  Pos­i­tive-sum would be set­tings where the in­ter­ac­tions of the eaters could in­crease the size of the pie—or per­haps num­ber of pies to eat. Nega­tive sum is just bad all around—stay away ;-)

• jmh 25 Oct 2018 17:26 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: lifelonglearner's comment on: What will the long-term fu­ture of em­ploy­ment look like?

  While this re­sponse may well de­serve to be a bit more tongue-in-cheek I won­der if there isn’t some pos­si­bil­ity. What if the fol­low­ers are ac­tu­ally all the AIs that have been re­plac­ing the peo­ple? If all the IoT pre­dic­tions on num­ber of con­nected de­vices are cor­rect the po­ten­tial “pop­u­la­tion” is go­ing to be huge.

  Shimiux is also on to some­thing very im­por­tant I think. We keep cast­ing the pic­ture are AI re­plac­ing ex­ist­ing man but for­get that what will quickly take place is the merger of tech­nol­ogy and man—in­clud­ing per­haps any num­ber of sub­or­di­nate AI el­e­ments in the en­hanced hu­man.

• jmh 11 Oct 2018 14:40 UTC

  2 points

  on: Two Kinds of Tech­nol­ogy Change

  This seems to be a similar ar­gu­ment Lach­mann makes in _The Struc­ture of Pro­duc­tion_. That ar­gu­ment is very similar, prob­a­bly well thought of as an ex­ten­sion of Smith’s di­vi­sion of la­bor limited by the ex­tent of the mar­ket ap­plied to cap­i­tal. Tech­nol­ogy sim­ply be­ing some­thing of a more gen­eral clas­sifi­ca­tion that ap­plies to both la­bor and cap­i­tal.

  For me it’s about con­sid­er­ing in­no­va­tion through the lens of com­ple­men­tar­ity with the rest of the econ­omy and par­tic­u­larly at the “edges”. If we con­sider the econ­omy a tapestry the edges will be frayed, not well bound. That will be where in­no­va­tion can take root and in­te­grate into the broader pic­ture by find­ing new re­la­tion­ships with the ex­ist­ing threads on the frayed edges. In some cases that re­sults in brand new eco­nomic ar­eas. Most of the time I sus­pect it re­sults in ad­vance­ments in how ex­ist­ing eco­nomic ac­tivity is con­ducted or needs are met lead­ing to the Schum­pete­rian pro­cess of cre­ative de­struc­tion.

  I won­der if the Eu­clidean graph type ap­proach re­ally cap­tures the full tex­ture of the pro­cesses at work or not. Per­haps it hides as much in the shad­ows as it sheds light on.

• jmh 2 Oct 2018 10:43 UTC

  2 points

  on: The tails com­ing apart as a strat­egy for success

  Over at MR Cowan was just talk­ing about how the great Ven­ture Cap­i­tal­ists were all gen­er­al­ist, not spe­cial­ist. This post seems to be in the same vein. I tend to be very sym­pa­thetic to the idea that hu­mans will do best if they are not overly spe­cial­ized. Might be some­thing from my dad—he always told me I should get a trade and a pro­fes­sion and that way I will always be able for find a good pay­ing job. That is a type of gen­er­al­ist.

  I also agree that it’s not merely be­ing some­thing of a jack of many trades but to have those skills that are com­ple­men­tary with the oth­ers, not sub­sti­tutes ( the anti-cor­re­lated re­la­tion­ship romeosteven­sit men­tions).

  Clearly it’s an ex­am­ple of the whole be­ing greater than the sum of the part idea.

• jmh 28 Sep 2018 12:02 UTC

  1 point

  on: Anti-so­cial Punishment

  (Con­fes­sion—I’m tired and my eyes hurt so to say I’ve done more than skim a few pas­sages would be a gross over­state­ment)

  Very tan­gen­tial ques­tions here. In these types of games does any­one use the con­cept of net­work effects in terms of un­der­stand­ing any of the be­hav­iors and re­sults?