Author: Tom Slee

The Long Tail 0 – Cards on the Table

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My next several postings are going to be a critical reader’s companion for The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. And if you’re going to read these postings, there are some things you should know – and that’s what this introductory post is for, to make sure all my cards are on the table.

The posts talk about The Long Tail, but they are really about two books. Both were published in summer 2006 and both were about the changing face of individual choice in today’s economy and culture. If it wasn’t for The Long Tail‘s index being two pages shorter, both would be exactly 240 pages long. Both authors have a training in science, but neither are professional economists or cultural studies professionals. In fact, both work in the computer industry, one as an editor of Wired Magazine, and one for a computer software company. At the time of writing, The Long Tail is at number 310 in the Amazon best seller list. The other book currently stands at 806,127.

Obviously that second author is me. My book is "No One Makes You Shop At Wal-Mart: the surprising deceptions of individual choice" and it was published by Between The Lines of Toronto, a small publisher whose staff love books and love to publish provocative, left-wing titles with an academic slant. The Long Tail is published by Hyperion, of New York. As for the subject and the authors’ take on it, mine is encapsulated in that phrase "the surprising deceptions of individual choice" and Anderson’s in a chapter title "The Paradise of Choice". Couldn’t be more opposite.

So there’s a danger here, because I have a chip on my shoulder. The Long Tail and No One Makes You… cover overlapping territory, and have almost diametrically opposite views. I think that Anderson is basically wrong. Not completely wrong, but basically wrong. What’s more, and what’s more important, I think his book is fundamentally sloppy and misleading despite the fact that there are a few good insights – and he does have a great title. But you, dear reader, knowing that I have the aforementioned chip on my shoulder, might naturally and understandably think this is sour grapes – the envious grumblings of a bit player when a more talented writer has seized the agenda and won the argument.

And maybe it is. I’d like to say not, but who am I to say? Any honest person knows that we are not the best judge of our own motivations. I’m sure as hell not the best judge of mine, and that’s why I wanted to get this off my chest before starting. If you see bias in what I say, you know where it comes from.

But even with that danger of misdirected envy, there are still things I want to say, so all I can do is put down what I think and you can judge it on its merits. One option would be to take a five paragraph run at the book, but its success and its influence have been so significant that it needs more. I’m going to take a chapter-by-chapter run at the thing (with a couple of extra posts as well).

Just a few more preparatory statements before we can start.

First, this is a reading of the book, which is a bit different from the idea behind the book. There are only a few cases where I have gone beyond what is in the book to cite discussion and research that has happened since its publication (or before). A book should stand reasonably well on its own, or point to places for more reading if it leaves discussions open-ended.

Second, there are some things that are important to me in non-fiction books. Consistency is important. So is clarity. And so is logic. If they don’t matter to you – if rhetoric or eloquent phrasing or memorable stories matter more, then you and I are going to have different opinions.

Third, I reference page numbers in the book in square brackets, like [23] this.

I think that’s all. The next post takes a look at the cover (this project may take a while to complete).

 

A School District With Low Taxes and No Schools – New York Times

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Here is a case of free riding in spades, from Jeff Topping in the New York Times.

Just to be clear, Patrick Flynn says he loves public education. He just does not like the idea of paying for it.

So when it came time last
November for the expanding, unincorporated desert community of Troon to
choose between joining a nearby school district, and paying higher
property taxes to help finance it, or starting its own, Mr. Flynn led
the movement that created the Christopher Verde School District.

Not that the Christopher Verde district will  have any schools, teachers or, apparently, students.

The children of Troon will continue to attend nearby schools. And thanks to a loophole in  Arizona law, the grown-ups of Troon will continue to avoid paying property
taxes in those districts, which makes officials in the districts less
than mirthful.

“The whole purpose of this was to avoid taxes on their million-dollar homes,” said State Senator Linda Gray, a Republican who has sponsored a bill to prevent the formation of a school district
without schools. (Ms. Gray conceded that there was at least one Flynn
supporter who had “a half-million-dollar home.”)

<story continues at the link below>

Link: A School District With Low Taxes and No Schools – New York Times.

How should we link to books?

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Most people, when they mention a book and want to link to something about that book, link to Amazon. It’s easy and it’s become the norm.

But I don’t like it. Neither, unsurprisingly, does Dave from How to Furnish a Room.  I’ve noticed he links to Powells web site, which is cunning. People can read about the book, but Powells (US based) does not compete with the Words Worth behemoth. Linking to Amazon has made the Amazon page the canonical page for many books and encourages us all to think "buy book, go to Amazon" and if we all do that then where do we browse in the real world? What’s an independent bookstore aficionado to do?

But what’s the alternative? Linking to Powells solves the competition problem, but it’s clearly a bit of a slapdash fix. Usually I try to link to the publisher’s site for a book, but that can take a bit of work to locate in some cases or in the case of older, out of print books. I’ve heard there are networks of independent bookstores that provide something similar, but I’ve not found it yet.

Good ideas – hell, any ideas – welcome.

Tit fot Tat

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First, my thanks to Mark Thoma, John Quiggin, and Brad DeLong for responding to my request to mark the passing of Anatol Rapoport. It’s odd whose death gets noticed and whose doesn’t: Jane Jacobs’ passing was remarked far and wide (and rightly so) but Rapoport, who I think was as important a thinker in a different way, seemed to get less attention. Their posts helped to right that a little in the social science blogosphere.

Comments on Brad DeLong’s posting pulled him into a sequence of posts about Tit for Tat and other repeated prisoner’s dilemma strategies, in A Note on a GRIM Game of Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma…., and More on Tit for Tat. For what it’s worth, I’m just going to put my two cents in here.

First, I do agree with one commenter (David Cameron) that the submission of Tit for Tat, although  widely known because of Axelrod’s writing about the tournaments, was certainly not the most substantial of Rapoport’s contributions. Still, it has a certain je ne sais quoi that obviously catches the attention, as all the discussion at BDL’s site makes clear.

The fact that Rapoport submitted (twice) and won with Tit for Tat was a reflection of what he had learned pragmatically in his experiments in playing repeated prisoner’s dilemma (on a petty side note, I can’t bring myself to use Axelrod’s term "iterated prisoner’s dilemma" which seems slightly pretentious and also inaccurate). The observation that T4T is not a subgame-perfect equilibrium for the game is beside the point in some ways – the tournament was just that, and the strategy won.

But of course there is more to it than the tournaments, because of the pedagogical use Axelrod made of them and of Tit for Tat as a way of looking at many disparate problems. There seem to be two arguments against Axelrod’s book.

The first is that strategies similar to T4T but slightly different can be discovered that do better under a wider class of situations. This does not seem too important. The repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma is, after all, never an exact match to any real world situation (and the real world is surely what we are interested in), so a theoretically more rigorous (or, in this case, computationally better) solution for the game is not guaranteed to perform better in the real world – where what constitutes a "move" is never precisely clear, and the game is never as self-contained as the idealized game that game theory studies. Axelrod accepts this, and so goes happily into all kinds of areas which are sometimes little more than reminiscent of his tournament. Even in the modelling work he discusses there are many variants – spatial games where neighbours are fixed, for example. So the key insights here are that (a) reciprocity as an approach can be successful in a wide variety of situations, (b) T4T catches the essence of reciprocity in a compact form, and (c) the success of reciprocity is surprising. So I’m with Axelrod on this.

The second critique is that strategies completely unlike T4T may do better, and in particular a strategy such as "GRIM", which defects for ever on first losing. One of the comments points out that Grim is a subgame perfect equilibrium for the infinitely repeated PD. The idea of a "successful strategy" in an infinitely repeated game is fickle (it depends, for example, on the other strategies allowed, of which there are infinitely many) and it is not clear to me that subgame perfect equilibrium is the best criterion, but this is nevertheless a valuable reminder that reciprocity is not always the outcome of repeated interactions – sometimes the outcome is much less happy. And that’s OK. It is probably true that Axelrod overstates the case in his enthusiasm for T4T, but  T4T does show that a grim outcome is far from inevitable, which in the real world is plenty to be going on with. 

How rigorous we need to be in treatments of formal, idealized problems to learn practical lessons for messy real world situations is itself a messy real-world problem, and those mathematically inclined who argue that a fully rigorous treatment of a problem is the only basis for such lessons are wrong. So I give Axelrod a lot of credit here. His book, after all, prompted many many fruitful questions – and that is, perhaps more than precise answers, the mark of important ideas.

In memoriam: Anatol Rapoport

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I saw in the Globe and Mail that Anatol Rapoport died in Toronto on January 20, at the age of, I think, 95. He was an important person in many ways. I never met him, but I’ve been influenced both directly and indirectly by his mix of strong intelligence and conviction.

For anyone reading this who doesn’t know who Rapoport was, here are a few scattered items I know of about the man. There is more in the Globe and Mail obituary.

  • His book "Strategy and Conscience" was a unique contribution to the struggle against militaristic thinking in the cold war. It responded to the technicians of the Rand Corporation and others whose supposedly rational thinking was helping to guide strategy. Rapoport’s response to them was unique. He took them on at their own game, so to speak, and showed how the game theory approach missed key aspects of the conflict. He was not "anti game theory" by any means — quite the opposite — but also knew the limits of theory and the dangers of elegant but ultimately simplistic thinking.
  • As game theory developed in the ’50s and ’60s Rapoport was one of those who investigated the interface between the formal side of game theory and a recognition that people behave in a rich psychological manner. This form of experimentation has continued and expanded right through to the present day.
  • I read some of his 1984 book "Mathematical Methods in the Social and Behavioral Sciences" and it’s a great book. There are not many people who have a strong and original mathematical mind and yet know how to apply it with wisdom, but Rapoport’s reach and depth in the book is hugely impressive.
  • In addition to this intellectual strength, Rapoport was one of the leading figures in Peace Studies in this country. It’s taken a long effort from many people to make the obvious point that war is a complex and important problem, and if we are to understand how to achieve peaceful outcomes then no one discipline is enough. We need to bring the insights of as many disciplines as possible to bear on one of the most important problems of our times. There is a need for a strong intellectual effort to accompany other efforts in the search for peace, and Peace Studies is where that comes from.

I know two people who have known Rapoport at different times. Both were very impressed by him personally. He was obviously a cultured, somewhat intimidating, productive and original thinker and person. I wish I’d met him.

In the acknowledgement at the beginning of "No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart" I listed several people whose intellectual debt is obvious throughout the book. In the 10 months since it was published two of those have died (Jane Jacobs and Anatol Rapoport). The world is worse off without them.

One final note. In looking for more information about Rapoport I came across a quotation from Daniel Dennett (another of my favourite writers) who wrote this:

The social psychologist and game theorist Anatol Rapoport (creator of the winning Tit-for-Tat strategy in Robert Axelrod’s legendary prisoner’s dilemma tournament) once promulgated a list of rules for how to write a successful critical commentary on an opponent’s work. First, he said, you must attempt to re-express your opponent’s position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your opponent says “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.” Then, you should list any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement), and third, you should mention anything you have learned from your opponent. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.

Challenging words.

Freak – Freakonomics � unsettling economics

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Michael Perelman points is to "a delightful slam" at Steven Levitt’s hit book Freakonomics. by Ariel Rubinstein, who is himself an economist who has done prominent research about bargaining. I enjoyed Freakonomics, but Rubinstein gives it a very sharp poke with a stick, and he puts his finger on a number of things that I had vaguely disliked about the book, as well as much else. It’s a short entertaining read.