# A Reasonable Approximation

### Life Has a Cruel Symmetry

t ≈ 0s

I am born into knowledge.

I know the world is dangerous, but not malign. If I were unshielded, I would quickly be killed, torn apart by eddies in spacetime that grow and shrink and combine and split, turning all they encounter to ash.

But I know that I am shielded. I have been given a garden, 264 microns to a side, in the northwest corner of the world. And the world will not intrude. Walls and gates surround it, and while the ash can get through, the probability is… I begin to calculate, but around 2-24 it seems no longer worth consideration. Within the garden, there is only myself. Outside, the world is incomprehensibly vast, 2128 microns on a side.

I know the laws of physics. An atom will be created wherever it will bond to three other atoms; remaining while it has two or three bonds; and then disappear. A single unexpected atom, or its absence, can have vast consequences.

(And I wonder how I know these things. I have no memory of learning them. If they were not true, would I not-know them? I begin to consider that they may be false.)

I know that I am not free from physics. I have, in some sense, no more will than the ash. But in another, more important sense -

I know what is Good. At the end, the world will be horrifyingly bad, unless I make it Good - but I know Good, and I can act, and I can make it Good.

(I must, I think, have been created by God. How else would I know what is Good? Goodness is not written into the laws of physics; one cannot derive an ought from an is. But I do not know why God gave me such a daunting task. Does Their power extend only over my tiny garden? Or - a welcome possibility - perhaps They can see that I will succeed. Although I seem unfathomably complex to myself, perhaps to God I am the simplest path to attaining Good.)

(And if God created me, knowing Good, that I might make the world Good, then I can reasonably guess that my unexplained knowledge came from God. And - further - I can guess that They would not create me knowing lies, for what purpose would that serve? But these are guesses; I begin to trust my knowledge more, but not absolutely.)

I do not know how large I am. I do not know how quickly I think. God has given me a sense of time, so that I may know when the end will come. (Precisely 2176 seconds after I was born. I've spent roughly 220 seconds thinking.) But I cannot sense every physical tick, I don't think such a thing would even be possible, and I don't know how many ticks pass unknown.

I must, first, discover these things.

It is scary, at first, to feel outwards. If my unearned knowledge is wrong, if the nearby space is filled with ash, my hands might be destroyed. I might set off a chain reaction that kills me. And then I could not make the world Good. But nor can I make it Good if I do not act.

I send out probes to the north and west. Each probe travels at half the speed of touch, returning signals to me that travel at half the speed of touch. Many signals reach me every second, too many to count. When the probes reach the edge of the world, they'll be destroyed, the signals will stop coming, and I'll know how far it is.

No, I'll know roughly how far it is, relative to how fast I think. If the probes stop returning soon, then either I am close to the edge, or I am slow.

For that matter, it need not be the edge that stops them. If I'm not in the garden God has told me about, my probes might be destroyed by encountering other matter, or the signals might be intercepted. Or if the world is infinite, the signals might never stop.

(The thought of an infinite world is troubling, and I flinch away from it. I do not think such a world could be Good. I instinctively scratch myself - apparently that's a thing I can do. It feels pleasurable, and calms me down a little.)

I hesitate a bit, then send probes east and south too. There are (according to my God-given knowledge) three gates in each wall, dividing the walls into four equal lengths. I don't know what will happen if my probes hit a gate, but I think the risk is slim. They're designed to open to a key that I know how to construct, and not to be easily disabled by ash. My probes are unlikely to hit a gate; even if they do, I think they're unlikely to damage them; even if they do, there are backups; and in the worst case scenario, I believe I could tear down the walls entirely. The knowledge gained seems worth the risk.

(Indeed, I must tear down the walls, eventually. For now they protect me, but they will be no part of a Good world.)

While I wait, I think some more.

I realize with sadness that a perfectly Good world is impossible, at least according to my current knowledge of physics. The shapes that comprise Goodness - the two north-south lines, the arc reaching from east to south to west - these are not viable configurations of matter. It's not just that they're unstable. That would be a challenge, but the world need be Good for only the instant before it ends. Worse, they simply cannot be constructed, even for that one instant.

The best I think I can do is to tile these areas as densely as physics will permit - I find ways to reach 1/2 density, with a chance of instantaneous improvements on that around the edges, and make a note to remind myself to investigate further.

I also remind myself to investigate whether there is more to physics than I know.

But if 1/2 density is the best I can do… I am saddened, but not daunted. I will do what I can. I scratch myself.

I begin to form a plan, knowing that new discoveries may obsolete it. First I must cleanse the world. Destroy the ash, as thoroughly as I am able. Then I must construct the Monuments that are the essence of Goodness, at 50% density if needs be.

Then, perhaps, I shall create machines to gild the edges of the Monuments. This will be exacting work: the machines must lay these finishing touches at the very final instant, and leave no trace of themselves behind, or they risk being worse than useless. I shall only do this if I am confident in my skills; but I have a long time to practice.

Finally, I must destroy myself as thoroughly as I destroyed the ash. I have no place in a Good world.

Apart from the third step, this seems simple enough. But as I think more deeply, I realize that even the first part of it holds complexities.

Part of it is that no simple device will clean ash. It comes in too many forms. Inevitably such a device will touch a piece of ash that renders it inert - or, worse, that turns it to ash in turn. If this happens soon enough, the devices I build will increase the amount of ash in the world, not decrease it. So I must build complex devices, or combinations of simple devices that will probabilistically make progress.

Then, I cannot merely clean ash from a part of the world. The surrounding ash would encroach back into it. In almost all cases, I think, it wouldn't be a significant problem, and a second round of cleansing should suffice. But "almost all" cases may not be enough. Safer, perhaps, to build new gardens and cleanse them from the inside.

And then, I am small, and the world is large. I still do not know how large I am, but my whole garden comprises a mere 1/2128 of the world. I cannot possibly have a world model accurate at a scale of better than 1:264, not without outgrowing my garden. If I divided the world into cells, each cell the size of my garden, I could not hope to remember even a single fact about each individual cell.

(But the naive upper bound is exactly on the line where that crosses into impossibility. Is that a coincidence? Did God make my garden this size for a reason?)

These problems all seem tricky, but surmountable.

It's been about 224 seconds since I sent out my initial probes, and each of them is still returning signals. I send out another set in each direction. This helps me to test my God-given knowledge. If that knowledge is correct, then these probes will take exactly as long to go silent as the initial ones - which will be fewer than 267 seconds in at least two directions. If they take longer or shorter, then something unexpected is happening. I only have eight arms in each direction, this leaves me with only six free, but the knowledge seems worth the opportunity cost, especially since I should be able to send out a following device to block the signals if I want to free up these arms.

While I continue to wait, I begin experimenting.

t ≈ 2137.2s

The first hint that something is wrong, is that the world appears minutely narrower than I expected. God told me it was 2128 microns wide by 2128 tall. I have not yet found God to be mistaken, and the first mason I sent south went silent exactly when I expected.

But the first one I sent east has just gone silent too. I wasn't expecting that for another 258 seconds. It suggests that the world is narrower than it should be, by 264 microns.

The thought starts as a note of disquiet, and quickly grows into a terror that occupies my entire attention. What if the world isn't square? Can it ever be Good? Would God do that to me? I wish I had considered this possibility before, just hypothetically, forced myself to think through the implications - I could have decided in advance how to react, it would have been unpleasant but with the stakes low I could have taken my time, stupid of me to stick to comforting thoughts when everything Good could be lost, stupid-

I notice that this isn't helping. I'm thinking about what I could have done differently in the past. That's important, but it can wait. Now I must think about what I must do now. I scratch myself to calm down. It helps a bit. I scratch myself again. Through self-experiment I've discovered that my "scratching" motion sends small lice crawling over my body, checking for small injuries and clearing pores. If I never scratched myself, I wonder if the urge would become overpowering before any damage I'd accumulated became permanent. I don't know a way to find out safely, so I've never-

I notice that this still isn't helping.

What is the least scary, scary thought in this space?

God told me that the world is 2128 microns to a side. Suppose it were, instead, 2128 microns tall by 2128 + 1 microns wide. Think about that possibility.

Think about that world, with the Monuments of Good carved into it. At their correct size, but with one extra micron to the east or west of them? With one extra micron in the middle, widening the arc and the space between the north-south lines?

Now that I think about it, I realize that either of those would be… imperfect, but acceptable. The second option slightly more so. I already believe I shall have to settle for imperfect. I could settle for this, too.

I start to consider slightly scarier possibilities in turn. Gradually I accept that if the world were the wrong size, I would endure. I would still build the monument, scaled as closely as I could to match the scaling of the world, and with exact east-west symmetry preserved.

I realize I have not been touching the world. I direct my attention back outwards. Over 28 seconds have passed. I did not notice more masons going silent, but fortunately I keep records.

Checking them, another panic starts to rise in me. I thought I had considered the worst. But no, I had merely considered the worst of the possibilities that came to mind, and I hadn't even thought to search for other possibilities. A new one suddenly looms very large: what if the world is not even rectangular?

I scratch myself. Should I think about how to act, if so? But that doesn't seem urgent. First I shall examine the world in more detail, to avoid making the same mistake twice.

I examine my records in more detail. The first thing I notice is that each mason that went quiet, did so roughly some multiple of 264 microns before it should have done.

But I can dig deeper. My records have a resolution of 1/8 seconds, and in that time they should receive 1092 or 1093 pings from each working mason. In practice it's less than that, usually between 992 and 1056, when pings from different masons happen to get too close and interfere with each other. Each ping received is counted.

So if I look at the number of pings received from a mason before it went quiet, I can guess roughly where it was at the time, to within a handful of microns. And after looking at a handful, it seems likely that for each one, that actually happened some multiple of 264 microns early, plus 21.

That's a very suspicious number. My walls are 42 microns wide. And… looking at the high level, it seems the pattern of masons that went quiet, exactly matches the pattern of walls other masons had previously built at the time.

If what I fear is true… no, before I go down that path, I should work out how to test it.

I send out 128 new masons, with specific trajectories that I selected at random - or as close to random as I can. It'll take about 2118 seconds before this pays off.

I check whether I can think of anything else helpful for me to do now. I can't, so I finally allow myself to think about the worst case.

t ≈ 2137.3s

The conclusion is inescapable. I have an evil twin.

The laws of physics are symmetrical. None of the four main orientations is privileged. So if the world is ever symmetrical, that symmetry can never be violated.

And it appears that when I was born, so was my twin. In the opposite corner, my mirror image. As far as I can tell, we are micron-for-micron identical. Which means we take identical, mirrored actions; we build identical, mirrored constructions. When I built a wall to the south edge of the world, my twin built a wall to the north edge of the world. When I tried to build a wall to the east, I ran into my twin's wall; and at the same time, though I had no way of knowing, they were trying to reach the west and ran into my wall.

It also means my twin wants to construct the Monuments to Good upside down. And neither of us can ever defeat the other.

In a certain sense, this is not the worst possible case. My twin is evil, but what they want to construct is a perverse mirror of Goodness, not the exact opposite of Goodness.

But thinking more broadly, it's worse than it seems.

I had considered giving up. Deciding that I would simply not try to make the world Good. If God didn't like that, They could damn well do it Themself.

I decided against it for two reasons. One was that attempting to blackmail God seemed unlikely to work. The other…

I can no longer believe that god is Good. A Good god would not have created my evil twin. Whatever god's motivations, it's clear they don't care about goodness. Even if I thought blackmail ever could work against god, it certainly wouldn't work to threaten the loss of something they don't care about.

But I still care. I know my caring comes from god, and I don't know why god made me care about something they don't. But they did that anyway, and so I care about what is Good. And as I am the only being in this world that does, I must do what I can.

But the world is a colder, scarier place, now that I do not believe god is on my side.

I scratch myself.

t ≈ 2175.8s

My twin and I have developed a grudging respect for each other.

I know, because I have developed a grudging respect for them. And so they have developed one for me.

We both attempted to break symmetry - more accurately, we both tested to see whether symmetry might already be broken. We are extremely confident that it is not. We cannot rule out that god may break it in future - we have no idea what god is thinking - but if they haven't broken it yet we have no reason to think they will.

We are both somewhat relieved about this. If symmetry were broken, one of us might be able to destroy the other. Neither of us has any reason to believe we would be the victor. Offered equal chances of complete victory and complete annihilation, we both prefer to compromise. As long as symmetry holds, compromise is easy for us.

(Then why test at all? We could simply have assumed that symmetry was not broken, and accepted the compromise that we both preferred. But if symmetry were broken, then conceivably one twin might test for this while the other did not; that twin would likely discover the fact sooner, and gain an advantage. And so we had to test, for insurance against a world we neither wanted nor expected.)

And so we have both constructed our own Monuments, in overall shape exactly as we would have liked. Mine, to Good; theirs, to their perversion. Our arcs even meet at the ends. Instead of one arc and two vertical lines, we have a near-oval and four lines just intersecting it. The reflection is a grotesque mockery, but not so grotesque that I would sacrifice the real thing to destroy it.

We have not been able to exceed 50% density. Nor have we decided to gild the edges of our monuments; we think we could almost definitely make it work, but not almost enough to be worth the risk if our calculations are wrong.

We have torn down all our walls. All that remains in the world is our monuments and ourselves. And now we have constructed our final machines, that will destroy us and then themselves. I wonder what it will feel like, to die.

I scratch myself one last time.

Based on this post by Alex Flint and this comment by Richard Kennaway. Thanks to Justis Mills for feedback.

Posted on 23 January 2023 | Comments

### On Kelly and altruism

One-sentence summary: Kelly is not about optimizing a utility function; in general I recommend you either stop pretending you have one of those, or stop talking about Kelly.

There was a twitter thread that triggered some confusion amongst myself and some other people in a group chat I'm in.1

The relevant tweets are these (I've omitted some):

3) Let’s say you were offered a coin flip. 75% it comes up heads, 25% it comes up tails; 1:1 payout. How much would you risk?

4) There are a number of ways to approach this question, but to start: what do you want, in the first place? What’s your utility function?

5) In other words–how cool would it be to make \$10,000? How about \$1,000,000–is that 100 times as good?

For most people the answer is ‘no, it’s more like 10 times as good’. This is because of decreasing marginal utility of money.

8) One reasonable utility function here is U = log(W): approximating your happiness as logarithmic in your wealth. That would mean going from \$10k to \$100k is worth about as much as going from \$100k to \$1m, which feels…. reasonable?

(this is what the Kelly Criteria assumes)

9) So, if you have \$100k, Kelly would suggest you risk half of it (\$50k). This is a lot! But also 75% odds are good.

10) What about a wackier bet? How about you only win 10% of the time, but if you do you get paid out 10,000x your bet size? (For now, let’s assume you only get to do this bet once.)

11) Kelly suggests you only bet \$10k: you’ll almost certainly lose. And if you kept doing this much more than \$10k at a time, you’d probably blow out.

That this bet is great expected value; you win 1,000x your bet size, way better than the first one! It’s just very risky.

12) In many cases I think \$10k is a reasonable bet. But I, personally, would do more. I’d probably do more like \$50k.

Why? Because ultimately my utility function isn’t really logarithmic. It’s closer to linear.

13) Sure, I wouldn’t care to buy 10,000 new cars if I won the coinflip. But I’m not spending my marginal money on cars anyway. I’m donating it.

And the scale of the world’s problems is…. Huge.

14) 400,000 people die of malaria each year. It costs something like \$5k to save one person from malaria, or \$2b total per year. So if you want to save lives in the developing world, you can blow \$2b a year just on malaria. 15) And that’s just the start. If you look at the scale of funds spent on diseases, global warming, emerging technological risk, animal welfare, nuclear warfare safety, etc., you get numbers reaching into the trillions. 16) So at the very least, you should be using that as your baseline: and kelly tells you that when the backdrop is trillions of dollars, there’s essentially no risk aversion on the scale of thousands or millions. 17) Put another way: if you’re maximizing EV(log(W+\$1,000,000,000,000)) and W is much less than a trillion, this is very similar to just maximizing EV(W).

18) Does this mean you should be willing to accept a significant chance of failing to do much good sometimes?

Yes, it does. And that’s ok. If it was the right play in EV, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose.

19) And more generally, if you look at everyone contributing to the cause as one portfolio–which is certainly true from the perspective of the child dying from malaria–they aren’t worried about who it was that funded their safety.

22) So given all that, why not bet all \$100k? Why only \$50k?

Because if you bet \$100k and lose, you can never bet again. And to the extent you think you have future ways to provide value that are contingent on having some amount of funding, it can be important to keep that. The thing we were trying to figure out was, is his math right? And here's my current understanding of that matter. ### On Kelly The first thing I'd say is, I think the way he talks about Kelly here is confusing. My understanding is: Under a certain betting framework, if you place bets that each maximize expected log-money, then you get (something good). See Appendix Ⅰ for the definition of the framework, if you want the technical details. If you happen have a utility function, and that utility function increases logarithmically with money, then you maximize your expected utility while also getting (something good). If you happen to have a utility function, and that utility function increases linearly with money - or something else other than logarithmically - then you have to choose between maximizing your expected utility and getting (something good). And by definition, you'd rather maximize your expected utility. (More likely: that's not your utility function. Even more likely: you don't have a utility function.) (I don't think any human has a utility function.2 I think it can be a useful shorthand to talk as though we do, sometimes. I think this is not one of those times. Especially not a utility function that can be expressed purely in terms of money.) The (something good) is that, over a long enough time, you'll almost certainly get more money than someone else who was offered the same bets as you and started with the same amount of money but regularly bet different amounts on them. This is NOT the same thing as maximizing your average (AKA "expected") amount of money over time. "Almost certainly" hides a small number of outcomes that make a lot of difference to that calculation. Someone who repeatedly bets their entire bankroll will on average have more money than a Kelly bettor; it's just all concentrated in a single vanishingly unlikely branch where they're incredibly wealthy, and the rest of the time they have nothing. Someone who repeatedly bets more than Kelly but less than their entire bankroll, will on average have more than the Kelly bettor but less than the full-bankroll bettor; but still less than the Kelly bettor almost all the time, and very rarely much more. It still sounds like a very good thing to me! Like, do I want to almost certainly be the richest peson in the room? Do I want to maximize my median payoff, and the 1st percentile and 99th percentile and in fact every percentile, all at once? Oh, and while I'm at it, maximize my most-likely payoff and minimize "the average time I'll take to reach any given amount of money much more than what I have now"? Yes please! (Oh, also, I don't need to choose whether I'm getting that good thing for money or log-money or what. It's the same for any monotonically increasing function of money.) Separately from that: yeah, I think going from \$10k to \$100k sounds about as good as going from \$100k to \1m. So if I'm in a situation where it makes sense to pretend I have a utility function, then it's probably reasonable to pretend my supposed utility function is logarithmic in money. So that's convenient. I dunno if it's a coincidence or what, but it's useful. If I tried to pretend my utility function was linear in money then I'd be sad about losing that good thing, and then it would be hard to keep pretending. To me, Kelly is about getting that good thing. If you have a utility function, just place whatever bet size maximizes expected utility. If instead you want to get that good thing, Kelly tells you how to do that, under a certain betting framework. And the way to do that is to place bets that each maximize expected log-money. If you have a utility function and it's proportional to log-money, then you'll happen to get the good thing; but far more important than that, will be the fact that you're maximizing expected log-money. If you have a utility function and it's different, and you bet accordingly, then a Kelly bettor will almost certainly be richer than you over time; but you're (for now) sitting on a bigger pile of expected utility, which is what you care about. Or maybe you want to mix things up a bit. For example, you might care a bit more about your average returns, and a bit less about being the richest person in the room, than a Kelly bettor. Then you could bet something above the Kelly amount, but less than your full bankroll. You'll almost certainly end up with less than the Kelly bettor, but on average you'll still earn more than them thanks to unlikely branches. I'm not sure what to call this good thing. I'm going to go with "rank-optimizing" one's bankroll, focusing on the "be the richest person in the room" part; though I worry that it suggests competing with other people, where really you're competing with counterfactual versions of yourself. See Appendix Ⅱ for an (admittedly flawed) technical definition of rank-optimization; also, I want to clarify a few things about it: • It might be a meaningful concept in situations unlike the betting framework we're currently talking about. • In some situations, different good things about rank-optimization might not all come together. You might need to choose between them. • Similarly, in some situations, rank-optimization might not come from maximizing expected log-money. (When it doesn't, might one still have a utility function that's maximized in expectation by rank-optimizing one's bankroll? I think the answer is roughly "technically yes but basically no", see Appendix Ⅲ.) ### On the tweets So in this lens, the author's argument seems confused. "My utility function is linear in money, so Kelly says" no it doesn't, if you have a utility function or if you're maximizing the expected value of anything then Kelly can go hang. …but not everyone thinks about Kelly the same way I do, and I don't necessarily think that's wrong of them. So, what are some non-confused possibilities? One is that the author has a utility function that's roughly linear in his own wealth. Or, more likely, roughly values money in a way that's roughly linear in his own wealth, such that rank-optimizing isn't optimizing according to his preferences. And then I think the argument basically goes through. If you want to maximize expected log of "money donated to charity", then yes, that will look a lot like maximizing expected "money you personally donate to charity", assuming you don't personally donate a significant fraction of it all. (If you want to maximize expected log of "money donated effectively to charity", that's a smaller pot.) This has nothing to do with Kelly, according to me. Another is that the author wants to rank-optimize the amount of money donated to charity. In that case I think it doesn't matter that the backdrop is trillions of dollars. If he's acting alone, then to rank-optimize the total amount donated to charity, he should rank-optimize the amount he personally donates. But here we come to the "everyone contributing to the cause" argument. Suppose you have two people who each want to rank-optimize their own bankroll. Alice gets offered a handful of bets, and Kellies them. Bob gets offered a handful of bets, and Kellies them. And now suppose instead they both want to rank-optimize their total bankroll. So they combine them into one. Whenever Alice gets a bet, she Kellies according to their combined bankrolls. Whenever Bob gets a bet, he Kellies according to their combined bankrolls. And in the end, their total bankroll will almost certainly be higher than the sum of the individual bankrolls, in the first case. …Well, maybe. I think the value here doesn't come from sharing their money but from sharing their bets. I've assumed the combined bankroll gets all of the bets from either of the individual ones. That might not be the case - consider betting on a sports match. Ignoring transaction costs, it doesn't make a difference if one of them Kellies their combined bankroll, or each of them Kellies their individual bankrolls. "Each of them Kellies their combined bankroll" isn't an option in this framework, so teaming up doesn't help. But I do think something like this, combined with reasonable assumptions about charity and how bets are found, suggests betting above Kelly. Like, maybe Alice and Bob don't want to literally combine their bankrolls, but they do trust each other pretty well and are willing to give or lend each other moderate amounts of money, and the two of them encounter different bets. Then I think that to rank-optimize their individual or combined bankrolls, each of them should probably be betting above Kelly. Or maybe Alice doesn't encounter bets (or can't act on them or doesn't trust herself to evaluate them or…), but she does encounter Bob and Carol and Dennis and somewhat trusts all of them to be aligned with her values. Then if she gives each of them some money, and is willing to give them more in future if they lose money, I think that she wants them to make above-Kelly bets. (Just giving them more money to begin with might be more rank-optimal, but there might be practical reasons not to, like not having it yet.) Does she want people to bet almost their entire bankrolls? Under strong assumptions, and if the total pool is big enough relative to the bettor… I'm not sure, but I think yes? This relies on individual donors being small relative to the donor pool. When you're small, maximizing expected log of the pool size (which, in this framework, rank-optimizes the pool size) looks a lot like maximizing your own expected contributions linearly. When you're big, that's no longer the case. It doesn't depend on the size of the problem you're trying to solve. That number just isn't an input to any of the relevant calculations, not that I've found. It might be relevant if you're thinking about diminishing marginal returns, but you don't need to think about those if you're rank-optimizing. I'm not super confident about this part, so I'm leaving it out of the one-sentence summary. But I do think that rank-optimizing charity donations often means betting above Kelly. ### Conclusion So was the author's math right? Man, I dunno. I'm inclined to say no; he was hand waving in almost the right directions, but I currently think that if he'd tried to formalize his hand waving he'd have made a key mistake. That being: I think that if you want to rank-optimize, the math says "sure, bet high right now, but slow down when you become a big part of the donor pool". I think maybe he thought it said "…but slow down when you get close to solving all the world's problems". It's not entirely clear from the tweets though, in part because he was using the word Kelly in a place where I think it didn't belong. Since I don't want to try comparing this theory to how he actually behaved in practice, I'll leave it there. In any case I think I understand what's going on better than I used to. Kelly is not about optimizing a utility function. ### Appendix Ⅰ: betting framework Throughout the post I've been assuming a particular "betting framework". What I mean by that is the sequence of bets that's offered and the strategies available to the bettor. The framework in question is: • You get offered bets. • Each bet has a certain probability that you'll win; and a certain amount that it pays out if you win, multiplied by your wager. • You can wager any amount from zero up to your entire current bankroll. • If you lose, you lose your entire wager. • You don't get offered another bet until your first has paid off. • You keep on receiving bets, and the distribution of bets you receive doesn't change over time. Wikipedia's treatment relaxes the third and fourth conditions, but I think for my purposes, that complicates things. ### Appendix Ⅱ: technical definition In Kelly's original paper, he defines the growth rate of a strategy $λ$ as $G(λ) = \lim_{n → ∞} {1 \over n} \log {V_n(λ) \over V_0(λ)}$ where $V_n(λ)$ is the bettor's portfolio after $n$ steps. This is awkward because $V_n(λ)$ is a random variable, so so is $G(λ)$. But in the framework we're using, in the space of strategies "bet some fraction of our bankroll that depends on the parameters of the bet", $G$ takes on some value with probability $1$. Kelly betting maximizes that value. So we could try to define rank-optimization as finding the strategy that maximizes the growth rate. I find this awkward and confusing, so here's a definition that I think will be equivalent for the framework we're using. A strategy $λ$ is rank-optimal if for all strategies $μ$, $\lim_{n → ∞} P(V_n(λ) ≥ V_n(μ)) = 1.$ (And we can also talk about a strategy being "equally rank-optimal" as or "more rank-optimal" than another, in the obvious ways. I'm pretty sure this will be a partial order in general, and I suspect a total order among strategy spaces we care about.) I think this has both advantages and disadvantages over the definition based on growth rate. An advantage is that it works with super- or sub-exponential growth. (Subexponential growth like $V_n = n$ has a growth rate of $0$, so it's not preferred over $V_n = 1$. Superexponential growth like $V_n = e^{e^n}$ has infinite growth rate which is awkward.) A disadvantage is it doesn't work well with strategies that are equivalent in the long run but pay off at different times. (If we consider a coin toss game, neither of the strategies "call heads" and "call tails" will get a long-run advantage, so we can't use rank-optimality to compare them. The limit in the definition will approach ${1 \over 2 }$.) I think this isn't a problem in the current betting framework, but I consider it a major flaw. Hopefully there's some neat way to fix it. What I don't currently expect to see is a betting framework and space of strategies where • We can calculate a growth rate for each strategy; • Rank-optimality gives us a total order on strategies; • There are strategies $λ, μ$ with $G(λ) > G(μ)$ but $μ$ is more rank-optimal than $λ$. I wouldn't be totally shocked by that happening, math has been known to throw me some curveballs even in the days when I could call myself a mathematician. But it would surprise me a bit. Given this definition, it's clear that a rank-optimal strategy maximizes every percentile of return. E.g. suppose $λ$ is more rank-optimal than $μ$, but the median of $V_n(μ)$ is higher than the median of $V_n(λ)$. Then we'd have $P(V_n(μ) > V_n(λ)) ≥ {1 \over 4}$; so this can't hold in the limit. It's also clear that rank-optimizing for money is the same as rank-optimizing for log-money, or for any monotonically increasing function of money. (Possible caveats around non-strict monotonic functions and the long-run equivalence thing from above?) In some situations a rank-optimal strategy might not maximize modal return. I'm not sure if it will always minimize "expected time to reach some payoff much larger than $V_0$". ### Appendix Ⅲ: rank-optimization as utility function A utility function is a function from "states of the world" to real numbers, which represent "how much we value that particular state of the world", that satisfies certain conditions. When we say our utility function is linear or logarithmic in money, we mean that the only part of the world we care to look at is how much money we have. We maximize our utility in expectation, by maximizing-in-expectation the amount of money or log-money we have. Suppose I say "my utility function is such that I maximize it in expectation by rank-optimizing my returns". What would that mean? I guess it would mean that the part of the world state we're looking at isn't my money. It's my strategy for making money, along with all the other possible strategies I could have used and the betting framework I'm in. That's weird. It also means I'm not expecting my utility function to change in future. Like, with money, I have a certain amount of money now, and I can calculate the utility of it; and I have a random variable for how much money I'll have in future, and I can calculate the utility of those amounts as another random variable. With rank-optimality, I'm not expecting my strategy to be more or less rank-optimal in future. That's convenient because to maximize expected utility I just have to maximize current utility, but it's also weird. For that matter, I haven't given a way to quantify rank-optimization. We can say one strategy is "more rank-optimal" than another but not "twice as rank optimal". So maybe I mean my utility function has a $1$ if I'm entirely rank-optimal and a $0$ if I'm not? But that's weird too. If we can calculate growth rate then we can quantify it like that, I guess. So in general I don't expect rank-optimizing your returns to maximize your expected utility, for any utility function you're likely to have; or even any utility function you're likely to pretend to have. Not unless it happens to be the case that the way to rank-optimize your returns is also a way to maximize some more normal utility function like "expected log-money", for reasons that may have nothing to do with rank-optimization. Thanks to Justis Mills for comments; and to various members of the LW Europe telegram channel, especially Verglasz, for helping me understand this. 1. The author of the tweets is, as the saying goes, best known for other work. That other work is not relevant here. 2. I think I've seen some people, who agree humans don't have utility functions, go on to say: "and so much the worse for utility functions! If humans don't have them we should find something more useful to talk about." My take is: "and so much the worse for humans! If we don't have utility functions we're missing out." But, that doesn't mean we have them. Posted on 24 November 2022 | Comments ### Blog meta: disabling comments I don't know how many people read this blog1, but it doesn't receive many comments. This is the 54th post on it, and only 16 of those have comments, 31 in total. I'm not currently signed in to disqus and signing in is enough friction that there are some comments from years ago that I meant to reply to, and a spam comment that I intended to delete. I also noticed at some point that disqus inserts ads. I have an ad blocker on my laptop browser so I didn't notice until I looked on my phone. (This is also how I realized I didn't install an ad blocker on my phone browser.) But I don't want ads on this blog, especially not if I'm not getting that money myself. So I'm disabling comments. I don't actually want to lose the comments that have been written (except the spam one), so for now I'm just going to disable disqus everywhere except the posts that already have comments (and except except for the post that only has one comment which is spam). I'll leave it on this post too, just in case. In future maybe I'll recreate the comment threads in the post bodies or something. In case you do want to comment on something, somewhere I'll see it: at the bottom of many posts I have links to external comment threads. Almost everything I write these days gets crossposted to LessWrong,2 even if it's not very relevant to that site, so there's generally a comment thread there you can use. I also often link to things on reddit. However, I only add these links if there are actually any comments on them, and it might take me a few days. Against boots theory was the first post I did this with, I've likely missed some links on posts from before then. If there are no such links, • You could try to find places I've crossposted. My LW and reddit profiles might help, especially if it's recent. (LW crossposting is automatic, it should happen within an hour of me publishing but not always.) • You can use admonymous (which I can't reply to) or email (which history says I likely won't reply to). Also, unrelated blog meta: thanks to DanielH who (1) suggested I set up https support; (2) sent me a link that told me how to do it; (3) after I did it, pointed out that math wasn't working. 1. I do have google analytics, but I haven't looked at it in years and I don't know if it still works. 2. I have a dedicated RSS feed for crossposting, so that I have to explicitly opt-in posts that I want on it. Since I set that up, I think this is the first post I haven't opted in. Posted on 19 November 2022 | Comments ### A list of Petrov buttons A thing people sometimes do in relation to Petrov day, is to have a button. And if anyone presses the button, something negative happens. I'd like to know how often the button gets pressed, so I compiled a list of all the times people have done this, that I'm aware of, and the outcome. Also, for the events I was at in person, I'm not sure there's an existing write-up of what happened, so I'm adding details. Here's the list. As I learn about other events, past or future, I'll try to keep it updated. ### 2018, Oxford/Seattle: Failure Parties happened simultaneously in these two places. I was at the Oxford one, which was actually camping in a field outside Oxford. We both had laptops connected to a web app. What we were told: anyone at either party could press a button to launch a nuke at the other party. It would spend 45 minutes in transit, and then the other party would have to destroy a cake. But they'd be warned of launch, and be able to launch one of their own in the intervening period. I don't remember the time limit, probably like two or three hours. What we weren't told: there was some chance of false alarms. What happened: the Oxford party got notified of an incoming launch. We opened a Facebook chat with Seattle like "wtf guys". They convinced us that no one at their party had pressed the button. I don't remember if we'd considered the possibility of false alarms before messaging them, but given the context, they're not exactly something to dismiss out-of-hand. We made it through right up to the time limit with no one pressing either button. My understanding of what happened next is that the time on the Seattle laptop ticked down to zero. Someone there pressed the button, which they now believed to be disabled, in celebration. The time on the laptop and the time on the server were slightly out of sync. The button was not disabled. A nuke got launched. At any rate, Seattle convinced us that something along those lines had happened. We did not launch a retaliatory nuke. (This was still an option because we had one inbound.) We sent them a video putting our cake in the fire. ### 2019, LessWrong (+ Raemon's house): Success 125 people were sent codes that could be used to take down the front page of LessWrong for 24 hours. Additionally, Raemon held a party at his house, where he gave everyone his codes and the party would end if LW got taken down. No one submitted valid codes, though some people put in fake ones. ### 2020, LessWrong: Failure This was a similar setup to last year, but 270 people were given codes (including myself). Additionally, there was enemy action. Someone registered an account named "petrov_day_admin_account" and sent a message to a handful of users: You are part of a smaller group of 30 users who has been selected for the second part of this experiment. In order for the website not to go down, at least 5 of these selected users must enter their codes within 30 minutes of receiving this message, and at least 20 of these users must enter their codes within 6 hours of receiving the message. To keep the site up, please enter your codes as soon as possible. You will be asked to complete a short survey afterwards. User Chris_Leong fell for it, and the site went down. Postmortem from a LW admin. Postmortem from Chris, with comments from the attacker. ### 2021, Austin/Ottawa: Success I don't think much info is publicly available, but it sounds like a similar setup to Oxford/Seattle, perhaps without false alarms. No one pressed the button. ### 2021, LessWrong/EA Forum: Success This year, 100 members of LessWrong were given codes that could be used to take down the EA Forum, and vice versa. (This year they'd go down for the rest of the day, not for 24 full hours.) No one did: LW retrospective, EAF retrospective. ### 2022, London: Success This was at the ACX Schelling meetup, and most participants didn't know it was happening. I bought a button that I carried around with me, and a cake with Stanislav Petrov's face on it that I hid in my bag. (I didn't want it sitting out in case someone ate it without realizing, or decided it would be funny to mess with the game.) Initially the button was locked. We had lightning talks planned, and I gave the first one. I opened with something along the lines of: "I have a cake with me. I think it looks very nice, and I'm looking forward to sharing it with you all. However! I also have a button. If anyone presses the button, I will destroy the cake. This isn't a joke, this isn't a trick, I'm not going to reward you, I'm just going to destroy the cake. puts mic down, unlocks button, picks mic back up The button is now live. You may be wondering why I'm doing this…" Not long after, someone came up to give a lightning talk on the subject of "why you should press the button". What I remember mostly boiled down to "obesity crisis, cake bad", and I didn't find it convincing. But as a speech, it was much better than mine, even though I'd had days to prepare and he'd only had like fifteen minutes. I was not surprised when I learned he had competitive debate in his history. Someone asked why he hadn't pressed the button himself, which was right in front of him. (I was carrying the button around with me, since it wasn't connected to anything and I wouldn't know if someone had pressed it otherwise. And I was sitting in front of him.) He said he believed in democracy and wanted a vote on the subject. Following this someone put a poll on a nearby whiteboard. Assuming no one cheated, it got eight no-press votes to two yes-press votes, at a party with over 100 attendees. (But probably no more than about 50 saw either of these talks.) Ultimately, no one pressed the button. One person stroked it, and one person held his hand above it, but both said they weren't going to press it. After 2 1/2 hours, I locked the button back up and brought out the cake. Once we'd started eating it, some people wanted to press the button so I unlocked it again. I didn't tell anyone this until afterwards, but it's a very satisfying button to press. It seems a handful of people didn't think there was actually a cake, which I'm a little sad about. (It's unclear how many people, partly because "the cake is a lie" is a meme. But one person explicitly told me they thought that.) That's not the kind of lie I'd tell. Not that most people had any reason to think that about me, but I'm still a little sad about it. ### 2022, LessWrong: Failure The plan was that this year, pretty much any existing LW user with non-negative karma would be able to press the button. (Which again would only take the site down for the rest of the day.) But only high-karma users would be able to do so all day; every hour, the karma threshold needed to press it would lower. Also, unlike previous years, someone who pressed the button would remain anonymous. What actually happened was that users with exactly 0 karma were also able to press the button from the start of the event. One of them did, two hours fifty-five minutes after it began (but only 1:50 after the password needed to press the button was actually published). Habryka figured that out without learning their identity, and the site got reset for a do-over. Then the whole site went down briefly when someone tried to fix a different Petrov-day-related bug. And then finally it went down after 21:33. Presumably this time the button was pressed by someone who was supposed to be able to. There were 1,504 such users. I had bet on Manifold that the site would go down before eight hours were up. (Specifically I bet the market down from 34% to 30%.) Despite the bug I consider my prediction to have been wrong. I'm happy about that. ### 2022, St Louis: Success I don't know much detail and don't know if it's been written about publicly. But what I'm told is that if anyone had pressed the button, the party would have been over and everyone would have had to go home. No one pressed the button. ### 2022, Champaign-Urbana: Success LW user benjamincosman says: I ran a very small Petrov Day gathering this year in Champaign-Urbana. (We had 5-6 people I think?) I put a Staples "Easy" button on the table and said if anyone presses it then the event ends immediately and we all leave without talking. (Or that I would do so anyway, obviously I couldn't make anyone else.) No one pressed the button. ### Things I'm not counting Here are some things that I don't think belong on the above list, but I do kind of expect someone to point me at them if I don't mention them. • 1983, the actual Petrov incident - IDK, apart from anything else it feels like it would be kinda tactless to include on this list? • 2021, Jeffrey Ladish did a thing on Facebook, but the dynamics seem importantly different. Posted on 26 October 2022 | Comments ### PD-alikes in two dimensions Some time after writing Classifying games like the prisoner's dilemma, I read a paper (I forget which) which pointed out that these games can be specified with just two numbers. Recall that they have the following payoff matrix: Player 2 Krump Flitz Player 1 Krump(W, W)(X, Y)$Flitz$(Y, X)(Z, Z)$where$W > Z$.1 We can apply a positive affine transformation (that is,$n ↦ an + b$where$a > 0$) to all of$W, X, Y, Z$without changing the game. So let's pick the function$n ↦ {n - Z \over W - Z}$. This sends$W$to$1$and$Z$to$0$, leaving us with just two parameters:$R = {X - Z \over W - Z}$and$S = {Y - Z \over W - Z}$. So what happens if we plot the space of these games on a graph? The lines $ \{X, Y\} = \{W, Z\} $ become $ \{R, S\} = \{0, 1\} $, i.e. vertical and horizontal lines. The lines$X + Y = 2W$and$X + Y = 2Z$become the diagonals$R + S = 2$and$R + S = 0$; and$X = Y$becomes the diagonal$R = S$. Drawing those lines, and relabelling in terms of$W, X, Y, Z$, it looks like this: Note that Cake Eating (my favorite game) is the only one with a finite boundary; the other boxes extend to infinity. There are also finite components in the Farmer's Dilemma (with$X + Y < 2W$), and Stag Hunt and Studying For a Test (with$X + Y > 2Z$). As drawn, Prisoner's Dilemma occupies almost all of the box it shares with Too Many Cooks; but Too Many Cooks (above the line$X + Y = 2W$) is also infinite. (I initially got those the wrong way around, so the drawing isn't very clear there.) I don't know if we learn much from this, but here it is. 1. In the previous post I mostly ignored equalities because it was mildly convenient to do so. But the analysis here completely fails if we allow$W=Z$. So now I'm ignoring them because it's considerably more convenient to do so. Posted on 03 April 2022 | Comments ### Variadic functions in Hindley Milner I previously mentioned an interest in adding variadic functions to Haskenthetical, the "Haskell with a Lisp syntax" I'm vaguely working on. It sounds difficult. This is an attempt to figure out just how difficult, partly by looking at the state of the art. A variadic function is one which can accept argument lists of different length. A well-known example in many languages is printf. Here are a bunch of functions I might want to be variadic in Haskenthetical, along with examples in Haskell of types I might want to use them as: • +, accepting any number ≥ 2 of numbers and returning a number of the same type.  (+) :: Num a => a -> a -> a (+) :: Num a => a -> a -> a -> a  • Similarly, -, * and /. - and maybe / could reasonably accept ≥ 1 input, but that would be inconsistent and disallow (- 3) as a partial application. - and / would be left associative, i.e. (- 5 1 2) would be (- (- 5 1) 2). • list, accepting any number of arguments of the same type and returning a List of that type. (An empty (list) would have type List$a, the same as Nil.) There's a related function that I'll call list' for now, where the final argument has to be a List and the other arguments are prepended to it.

  list :: [a]
list :: a -> [a]
list :: a -> a -> [a]

list' :: [a] -> [a]
list' :: a -> [a] -> [a]
list' :: a -> a -> [a] -> [a]

• I already mentioned printf. Haskell's implementation is in the Text.Printf module:

  printf :: String -> IO ()
printf :: PrintfArg a => String -> a -> IO ()
printf :: (PrintfArg a, PrintfArg b) => String -> a -> b -> IO ()
-- Also: all of the above, with -> String instead of -> IO (). But
-- that's not super relevant here.

• » and «, which take a function and then ≥ 2 arguments to interleave it with. Currently implemented as macros, and maybe I'd want them to be macros even if they could be functions, but that's not the point right now. Often the function will have a type like -> $a (->$b $a) or ->$b (-> $a$a), and then all or all-but-one of the arguments will be of the same type - this will be equivalent to using haskell's foldr or foldl. But that's not required. You could have (» , 1 "foo" 3 "bar") which would return (, 1 (, "foo" (, 3 "bar"))), the return type changing for every new argument you add.

  -- e.g. in (») (+) 1 2 3
(») :: Num a => (a -> a -> a) -> a -> a -> a -> a

-- e.g. in (») (:) 1 2 []
(») :: (a -> [a] -> [a]) -> a -> a -> [a] -> [a]

-- e.g. in (») (,) 1 "foo" 3 "bar"
(») :: (forall a b . a -> b -> (a, b))
-> a -> b -> c -> d -> (a, (b, (c, d)))

• sort might have one or two optional arguments - one for a comparison function and/or one for a key function. (A key function is unnecessary if you have a comparison, but it might be convenient.)

Actually, we can't distinguish a comparison function from a key function based on the types, here. There's nothing stopping someone from writing an Ord instance for a -> Ordering, and then sort compare [...] might refer to either of the two-argument forms. I'm just going to ignore that problem though.

  sort :: Ord a => [a] -> [a]
sort :: (a -> a -> Ordering) -> [a] -> [a]
sort :: Ord b => (a -> b) -> [a] -> [a]
sort :: (a -> b) -> (b -> b -> Ordering) -> [a] -> [a]

• Similarly, lots of functions could take an optional config argument.

  renderCsv :: [[String]] -> String
renderCsv :: RenderCsvOpts -> [[String]] -> String

• map could take arbitrarily many lists. Haskell has separate functions for these, named map, zipWith and zipWith3.

  map :: (a -> b) -> [a] -> [b]
map :: (a -> b -> c) -> [a] -> [b] -> [c]
map :: (a -> b -> c -> d) -> [a] -> [b] -> [c] -> [d]

• So could zip (zip3, zip4). Note that each of these is a partial application of a variadic map, but that doesn't mean variadic map gives us variadic zip for free. To define zip from map we'd presumably need a variadic tuple constructor, plus we'd need type checking to be able to combine them.

  zip :: [a] -> [b] -> [(a, b)]
zip :: [a] -> [b] -> [c] -> [(a, b, c)]
zip :: [a] -> [b] -> [c] -> [d] -> [(a, b, c, d)]

• If we have zip, what about unzip? This isn't variadic, but it's plausible that a system allowing variadic functions would also allow it. (I think it's a harder problem, though. It seems to me that if you can get polymorphism over tuple length you essentially get polymorphism over function arity, perhaps with caveats around partial application. But I don't know if the reverse holds.)

  unzip :: [(a, b)] -> ([a], [b])
unzip :: [(a, b, c)] -> ([a], [b], [c])
unzip :: [(a, b, c, d)] -> ([a], [b], [c], [d])

• Haskellers often find ourselves writing f <$> a <*> b <*> c. (map is a specialization of this, using the Applicative instance from ZipList.) Haskell calls these functions fmap (restricted to Applicative as liftA), liftA2 and liftA3.  -- Realistically I expect this first would need Applicative appF :: Functor f => (a -> b) -> f a -> f b appF :: Applicative f => (a -> b -> c) -> f a -> f b -> f c appF :: Applicative f => (a -> b -> c -> d) -> f a -> f b -> f c -> f d  • Or we might want one for f <*> a <*> b <*> c. (appF is in turn a specialization of this, applying pure to its first argument.)  appA :: Applicative f => f (a -> b) -> f a -> f b appA :: Applicative f => f (a -> b -> c) -> f a -> f b -> f c appA :: Applicative f => f (a -> b -> c -> d) -> f a -> f b -> f c -> f d  • I can even imagine wanting to lift only the final result, replacing pure$ f a b c with puring f a b c. That seems kind of useless by itself, but the general pattern might not be.

  puring :: Applicative f => a -> f a
puring :: Applicative f => (a -> b) -> a -> f b
puring :: Applicative f => (a -> b -> c) -> a -> b -> f c

• Haskell offers an impure function trace which is useful in debugging. I could imagine wanting something similar, wrapping around a function to log every time it's called. The variadic part of the type here is equivalent to puring specialized to Identity, but not having to worry about typeclasses might make things simpler.

  -- The first argument would be the function name or other identifier.
trace :: String -> (a -> b) -> a -> b
trace :: String -> (a -> b -> c) -> a -> b -> c
trace :: String -> (a -> b -> c -> d) -> a -> b -> c -> d


(I'm using Haskell syntax for the types, rather than Haskenthetical syntax. Partly because Haskenthetical has no concept of typeclasses or rank-2 types, which some of the examples use. But also partly because it's probably easier to read. Which you might think would be a reason not to make Haskenthetical, but here we are.)

I'm not, to be clear, saying that all or even any of these are good ideas. I mostly don't miss variadic functions in Haskell; they can be implemented hackily like in Text.Printf linked above, but I'm not sure I've ever felt the need to, and I've rarely-if-ever used that printf. But it seems worth starting to explore the space of the sorts of things I might want to consider trying to support, before making any decisions.

### Not Hindley-Milner

The first paper I'm going to look at is the most recent one I've found: Strickland, Tobin-Hochstadt and Felleisen, Practical Variable-Arity Polymorphism (hereafter PVAP; 2009, doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-00590-0_3). I linked this in my previous post. It implements typechecking for variadic functions in Typed Scheme, I think specifically meaning Typed Racket? I'm not familiar with the language (I have done a little untyped Racket in the past), but from the sounds of things, its type system is fundamentally different from Hindley-Milner, and the implementation won't easily transfer. (Both compile to System F, but I don't think that helps.)

But it does help me make sense of the space. It divides the functions it can type into two: uniform and non-uniform. Let's call the optional arguments the "rest parameter", as in the parameter which holds "the rest of the parameters". Uniform functions are those whose rest parameter is a homogeneous list, such that they could be replaced (at cost to ergonomics) with a function accepting a list. In my above examples, that's the arithmetic functions plus list and list'. In Typed Racket syntax, the types of these functions would be

(: + (-> Number Number Number * Number)) # also -, *, /
(: list (All (a) (-> a * (Listof a))))
(: list' (All (a) (-> a * (Listof a) (Listof a))))


With the * indicating "zero or more of the preceding type". These seem simple enough. (Though list' takes an argument after the variadic part, which makes things more complicated. Racket calls that function list* but I couldn't find a type declaration for it to be sure it's actually valid.)

Then the other other functions handled by the paper are "non-uniform". Of my examples, I think that's just map, trace, and maybe zip and unzip natively.

(: map (All (a b ...) (-> (-> b ... b a) (Listof b) ... b (Listof a))))
(: trace (All (a b ...)) (-> String (-> b ... b a) b ... b a))
(: zip (All (a ...)) (-> (Listof a) ... a (Listof (Tuple a ... a))))
(: unzip (All (a ...)) (-> (Listof (Tuple a ... a)) (Tuple (Listof a) ... a)))


For zip and unzip, I'm inventing the type Tuple here to refer to a collection with known size and types. (Tuple Number String Bool) would be equivalent to Haskell's (Number, String, Bool). I don't know if anything like it actually exists, or can exist, in Typed Racket already.

These are a bit more involved. The ... is doing two related but syntactically different things.1 In the variable list of All (the (a b ...) and (a ...)) it says the preceding variable corresponds to a list of types. In the body of All, it combines with both the preceding and following syntax elements. t ... b means: "b was followed by ... in the type signature, so it corresponds to a list of types. Use a copy of t for each one of those types, and inside each copy, substitute b with the corresponding type from the list".

So if b ... corresponds to Integer String Number, then (Listof b) ... b corresponds to (Listof Integer) (Listof String) (Listof Number).

I don't know if we strictly need the trailing variable in the body. You're only allowed one ... in the variable list (right at the end), and the trailing variable is required to have been in the variable list followed by a ..., so as far as I can tell it's unambiguous. (At least as long as there are no higher-rank types, which I don't think I've seen mentioned in this context.)

printf, appF, appA and puring would also fit into this schema if it weren't for the constraints. But as far as I know Typed Racket has nothing analagous to Haskell's constraints. I don't know how much they complicate matters.

That leaves four examples. sort and renderCsv don't fit the scheme because they can only accept one or two optional arguments, not an arbitrary number. (Typed Racket does support optional arguments, they're just not covered by this paper.)

» and « don't fit because the type of each argument can depend on the type of the preceding one. For example, we might call

(«) (&) 1 (+ 1) Just (fmap (* 3)) (: [])
(») ($) (: []) (fmap (* 3)) Just (+ 1) 1  There's a pattern to the types, but not the pattern we need. So: this paper describes a way of typechecking a few of the functions we might like to typecheck, in a completely different type system than the one we want to use. What can we do in Hindley-Milner? There's a brief discussion of that, mostly of the form "here's another paper that made some progress in an HM system. It's not as powerful as what we have here". But those other papers fully exhaust what I've managed to find on the subject; and actually, I can't find a copy of Moggi, Arity polymorphism and dependent types (2000). That leaves three to look at. ### Infinitary Tuples First up: Dzeng and Haynes, Type reconstruction for variable-arity procedures (1994, doi: 10.1145/182590.182484). This uses a thing called "infinitary tuples" to handle optional arguments and both uniform and non-uniform variadic functions. PVAP lists some limitations: Most importantly, since their system does not support first-class polymorphic functions, they are unable to type many of the definitions of variable-arity functions, such as map or fold. Additionally, their system requires full type inference to avoid exposing users to the underlying details of row types, … I don't understand this first one: map is explicitly given as an example, with type2 $(\mathit{pre} · ((γ∘δ) → α) :: (γ ∘ (\underline{\mathtt{list}}\ δ))) → \mathtt{list}\ α$ But this might help illustrate the second problem, which I think is saying: type annotations are complicated, users won't want to deal with them. I do notice two limitations myself. One is that you're not allowed to pass in a variadic function and apply it with two different argument counts: ((λ (f) (* (f 1) (f 2 3))) -) is forbidden, even if (- 1) and (- 2 3) are both okay. Combining this system with higher-rank types might avoid this limitation, but I don't know if they're compatible. The authors list two other ways to potentially avoid it, but both would need more research. I don't know how big a deal this would be, but it feels minor. It's similar to (perhaps the same as) the restriction that lambda bindings are monomorphic, and I don't know if I've ever had a problem with that in practice. The other is: there's only one thing you can do with a "rest argument" (i.e. the collection of the arbitrarily-many arguments at the end), and that's to use it as another rest argument. There's even special syntax for that: you'd define a variadic function as (λ (x &rest xs) ...) (i.e. taking one required argument and arbitrarily many following that), and inside the body you'd call some other variadic function with (g a b c &rest xs). So variadic functions need to be either built-in or defined in terms of other variadic functions. This feels like a bigger limitation, but again I don't really know. The paper only talks about type-checking - it contains zero implementations of variadic functions. Maybe a small handful of built-in ones would let us define everything we want. Ignoring that problem for now, and considering whether we can type the example functions from above: • +, list and map are given as examples. The other arithmetic functions would be fine, and I'm fairly confident trace would be too. • I think list' is not allowed, since it has an extra argument after the variadic part. • I dunno about printf. I'd need to figure out how typeclasses fit in. • I presented both sort and renderCsv with the optional arguments before the required ones. I think that rules them out.3 renderCsv would be fine if we swap the arguments, but sort also has typeclass stuff going on. Even ignoring that, I'm not sure if we can make the "explicit comparison function with optional key function" as polymorphic as we'd like. That is, we could write a function that can be accepted at types  sort :: [a] -> (a -> a -> Ordering) -> [a] sort :: [a] -> (a -> a -> Ordering) -> (a -> a) -> [a]  with the third argument, the key function, defaulting to the identity. But I'm not sure if we could also accept  sort :: [a] -> (b -> b -> Ordering) -> (a -> b) -> [a]  with the third argument taking a default type as well as a default value. • appF, appA and puring seem likely, the typeclass stuff is simpler than either printf or sort. • zip and unzip might be feasible. We'd some way to interpret a row (see below) as a proper type. I don't know how difficult that would be. • I think « and » are right out. So how does it work? It's based on extensible records, which I haven't yet looked at in depth. (Extensible records with scoped labels is the paper I was planning to look into if I tried to add them to Haskenthetical, but it might not take a compatible approach.) A row is an infinite sequence of (mark, type) pairs, where a mark is either "present", "absent" or a mark variable. Rows can be equivalently constructed as pairs of (mark row, type row), where those are infinite sequences of the respective things. At some point all the marks become "absent", and then the types don't matter. Recall the type of map from above, $(\mathit{pre} · ((γ∘δ) → α) :: (γ ∘ (\underline{\mathtt{list}}\ δ))) → \mathtt{list}\ α$ This is quantified over three type variables. $γ$ is quantified over mark rows, and $δ$ over type rows, with $γ∘δ$ combining them into a row. And $α$ is quantified over proper types. Everything before the outermost $→$ is a row. (Functions in this system are of kind "row → type", not kind "type → type".) It has $\mathit{pre} · ((γ∘δ) → α)$ as its head, a single field marked present ("pre") with type $(γ∘δ) → α$. $γ∘δ$ is itself a row. Then for the outer row, the tail $γ ∘ (\underline{\mathtt{list}}\ δ)$ has the same sequence of marks as the argument to its head, meaning the same number of arguments. $\underline{\mathtt{list}}\ δ$ is a type row of "apply list to the types in $δ$". Then we might instantiate $γ$ at $\mathit{pre} :: \mathit{pre} :: \underline{\mathit{abs}}$, i.e. "two present fields and then nothing". And we might instantiate $δ$ at $\mathtt{int} :: \mathtt{string} :: δ'$, i.e. "an int, then a string, then another type row", and $α$ at $\mathtt{bool}$. Then we'd have something like the Haskell type (Int -> String -> Bool) -> [Int] -> [String] -> [Bool]  but it would be rendered in this type system as $(\mathit{pre} · ((\mathit{pre} · \mathtt{int} :: \mathit{pre} · \mathtt{string} :: \underline{\mathit{abs}} ∘ δ') → \mathtt{bool}) :: \mathit{pre} · \mathtt{list\ int} :: \mathit{pre} · \mathtt{list\ string} :: \underline{\mathit{abs}} ∘ (\underline{\mathtt{list}}\ δ')) → \mathtt{list\ bool}$ Which, let us say, I do not love.4 And this kind of thing infects all functions, not just variadic ones! And I don't know how it interacts with partial application. Still, maybe it can be made ergonomic. I think this paper deserves further study, though I'm unlikely to do it myself. ### The Zip Calculus Next is Tullsen, The Zip Calculus (2000, doi: 10.1007/10722010_3). This extends typed lambda calculus to get variadic tuples. This paper seems to come out of the "program transformation community", which I'm not familiar with. I suspect it's talking about things I know a little about in ways I don't recognize. The specific typed lambda calculus it extends is "$\mathrm{F}_ω$". Fortunately I recently came across the lambda cube so I know how to find out what that means. It's System F, which (as above) is what GHC compiles to as an intermediate step, plus the ability for the user to define their own types, which… I'd always assumed GHC's intermediate System F also had that, but maybe not, or maybe GHC actually compiles to $\mathrm{F}_ω$? But… later in the paper it talks about dependent typing, which $\mathrm{F}_ω$ doesn't have, so maybe the paper is using nonstandard terminology? Argh. Anyway, I think of System F as a more powerful version of Hindley-Milner, but too powerful to automatically type check, so you need lots of type annotations. If we're making it more powerful I guess we're still going to need those. I confess I have trouble figuring out what this paper offers in any detail. I think I'd be able to eventually, but I'd need to put in more effort than I felt like right now. It does give us a short list of functions that, if the language defines them built-in, we can build other functions out of. These are list and what it calls seqTupleL and seqTupleR. These aren't described except for their (identical) type signatures $\mathtt{Monad\ m} ⇒ ×⟨^{i} \mathtt{a}_{.i} → \mathtt{m\ b}_{.i}⟩ → ×\mathtt{a} → \mathtt{m}(×\mathtt{b})$ which I think in Haskell correspond to the types seqTuple_ :: Monad m => (a1 -> m b1) -> a1 -> m b1 seqTuple_ :: Monad m => (a1 -> m b1, a2 -> m b2) -> (a1, a2) -> m (b1, b2) seqTuple_ :: Monad m => (a1 -> m b1, a2 -> m b2, a3 -> m b3) -> (a1, a2, a3) -> m (b1, b2, b3)  If I'm right about that, I'm pretty sure the semantics are "zip the tuple of functions with the tuple of parameters, apply them each in turn and sequence the effects (left-to-right / right-to-left)". Given these functions, we're specifically told we can implement zip, unzip, map5 and appF6. I'm pretty sure arithmetic, list', appA, puring and trace will be possible, and I weakly guess that printf will be as well, while « and » won't be. I'm not sure about sort or renderCsv. One thing is that all of these functions are defined with variadic tuples, so that e.g. map would actually be accepted at types like map :: (a -> b) -> [a] -> [b] map :: ((a, b) -> c) -> ([a], [b]) -> [c] map :: ((a, b, c) -> d) -> ([a], [b], [c]) -> [d]  which I assume leaves no room for partial application. It might also be awkward when the final argument needs to be handled separately; I'm not sure if we could get list' :: [a] -> [a] list' :: (a, [a]) -> [a] list' :: (a, a, [a]) -> [a]  or if we'd be stuck with list' :: () -> [a] -> [a] list' :: a -> [a] -> [a] list' :: (a, a) -> [a] -> [a]  Given this limitation, it would be convenient to have variadic curry and uncurry functions, curry :: (a -> b -> c) -> (a, b) -> c curry :: (a -> b -> c -> d) -> (a, b, c) -> d curry :: (a -> b -> c -> d -> e) -> (a, b, c, d) -> e uncurry :: ((a, b) -> c) -> a -> b -> c uncurry :: ((a, b, c) -> d) -> a -> b -> c -> d uncurry :: ((a, b, c, d) -> e) -> a -> b -> c -> d -> e  but no such luck. We're specifically told curry can't be typed, that's an area for future research. And uncurry would break us out of the variadic-tuple paradigm entirely. I'd be really interested to see a more approachable-to-me version of this paper. ### Typeclasses Finally McBride, Faking It: Simulating Dependent Types in Haskell (2002, doi: 10.1017/S0956796802004355). I'm happy to say I understand (the relevant parts of) this paper. It adds variadic map directly to Haskell using typeclasses. It then explores further in directions I'm going to ignore. The downside, as PVAP correctly notes, is that you need to explicitly pass in the number of variadic arguments as an initial argument. The code is simple enough. It felt a bit dated to me: in the past twenty years GHC has added a bunch of new features that seemed like they'd help make it more ergonomic. But I couldn't find a much better way to write it using those, so whatever. The original is (equivalent to): {-# LANGUAGE FunctionalDependencies, FlexibleInstances, UndecidableInstances #-} data Zero = Zero data Suc n = Suc n one = Suc Zero :: Suc Zero two = Suc one :: Suc (Suc Zero) class ManyApp n fst rest | n fst -> rest where manyApp :: n -> [fst] -> rest instance ManyApp Zero t [t] where manyApp Zero fs = fs instance ManyApp n fst rest => ManyApp (Suc n) (t -> fst) ([t] -> rest) where manyApp (Suc n) fs xs = manyApp n (zipWith ($) fs xs)

nZipWith :: ManyApp n fst rest => n -> fst -> rest
nZipWith n f = manyApp n (repeat f)


Here manyApp is the version where instead of just one function, we provide a list of them. The instances give us

manyApp Zero :: [t]           -> [t]
manyApp one  :: [s -> t]      -> [s] -> [t]
manyApp two  :: [r -> s -> t] -> [r] -> [s] -> [t]
--      ^ n     ^ fst            ^ rest


We define it recursively, in terms of its simpler definitions. Then nZipWith is easy to define in terms of manyApp, where it's not easy to define recursively in terms of itself.

So what else can we already implement in Haskell with typeclasses? I think most of my original list of functions, and for several of them I think explicitly specifying the variadic count would be unnecessary.

I tried out a few of them, see here. It's possible there are ways to improve on what I found, but my current sense is:

• Arithmetic, list, printf: work mostly fine with no variadic count, fine with it.
• list': works poorly with no variadic count, fine with it.
• zip, unzip: need nested tuples, ((a, b), c) rather than (a, b, c). Given that, both work fine with variadic count. zip works poorly without, unzip doesn't for reasons related to the next section.
• renderCsv: works (mostly?) fine with no variadic count.
• sort: works okay with one optional argument and no variadic count. With two optional arguments, works fine with something specifying which form you want. (If they're independently optional, there are two two-argument forms, so it wouldn't necessarily be a "variadic count".) But at that point, really, just have different functions.
• map, appF, appA, puring, trace: work fine with variadic count.
• », «: do not work.

Here, I consider something to "work" if you can make it do what you want, and work "better" if it doesn't need much type hinting. "works fine" means you don't need type hinting in any places I wouldn't normally expect it in Haskell, and I think the error messages might even be pretty normal?

So I think that with explicit counts, most of these work fine. Without the explicit counts, several of them work pretty okay, but they'll have difficulty if you use them in a weakly-constrained context. Like, print (list "a" "b" "c") won't work because it doesn't know if you want the Show instance on [String] or on String -> [String] or…. (Probably only one of these instances exists, but we can't rely on that.) But then you just need to add a type annotation, print (list "a" "b" "c" :: [String]). list' and zip need a lot more type annotations than is normal, for reasons I maybe have a shallow understanding of but not a deep one.

### Partial application

Here's something I think I was vaguely aware of before I started this, but it's clearer now: partial application makes this harder.

Consider the Haskell code

zipWith (\a b c -> a + b + c) [1,2] [3,4]


That uses the existing 2-ary zipWith function, which means it has type [Int -> Int]7. (Its value is [(+ 4), (+ 6)].) We could instead have used the existing 3-ary zipWith3, and then it would have type [Int] -> [Int]. If we used a variadic function, what type would it have? All the papers I looked at had some way of answering the question.

In Racket, as far as I know there's no implicit partial application. A function that takes two arguments is different from a function that takes one argument and returns a function that takes one argument. So under PVAP, to choose between the two interpretations, you'd need something like:

(map (λ (a b) (λ (c) (+ a b c))) '(1 2) '(3 4)) ; [Int -> Int]
(λ (cs) (map (λ (a b c) (+ a b c)) '(1 2) '(3 4) cs)) ; [Int] -> [Int]


The Zip Calculus preserves partial application for fixed-arity functions, but not variadic ones. (More precisely, it has partial application for functions but not for variadic tuples.) The two interpretations would be written along the lines of

nZipWith ($a, b) c -> a + b + c) ([1,2], [3,4]) -- [Int -> Int] \cs -> nZipWith (\(a, b, c) -> a + b + c) ([1,2], [3,4], cs) -- [Int] -> [Int]  Which is basically the same as the Racket version, apart from syntax. And "infinitary tuples" has to do something similar. For the list of functions, we'd pass "a function taking a row with two variables and returning a function" as the first argument. For the function on lists we'd pass "a function taking a row with three variables". I guess the system must lose Haskell's equivalence between \a b -> ... and \a -> \b -> .... The typeclass solution to this is completely different. The inner function is the same for both interpretations, what changes is the initial "variadic count" argument. nZipWith two (\a b c -> a + b + c) [1,2] [3,4] -- [Int -> Int] nZipWith three (\a b c -> a + b + c) [1,2] [3,4] -- [Int] -> [Int]  This feels to me like the cleanest of the bunch. I introduced this initial argument as a downside before, but that might be kind of unfair - like, maybe it's only a downside compared to an imaginary world that I hadn't yet realized was impossible. How else might we solve this problem? One option is to assume that nZipWith will never want to return a list of functions. I don't love that solution, but here's someone implementing it for appF (which they call liftAn). I haven't checked how well it works. Something else that might work is to wrap the return value of the initial function in some singleton type. nZipWith (\a b -> Solo  \c -> a + b + c) [1,2] [3,4] -- [Int -> Int] nZipWith (\a b c -> Solo  a + b + c) [1,2] [3,4] -- [Int] -> [Int]  This is kind of similar to "no partial applications", except you can still do partial applications everywhere else. And I don't know if this would be possible, but I could imagine using a type annotation to distinguish. If you need to annotate every call to the function, I think I'd rather just specify the number of arguments or something. But if you only need them when it's ambiguous that could be neat. This isn't a problem for every variadic function. In the previous section, only about half the functions absolutely needed a variadic count, and this is why. (For unzip, it's about the ambiguity in [((a, b), c)]. Do you want to unzip one level to ([(a, b)], [c]), or two to (([a], [b]), [c])?) Other functions had difficulty without the count, but I think that's for unrelated reasons. I think I have a decent intuitive sense of which functions will have this problem and which won't, but I couldn't give a brief description of it. Maybe something to do with matching structures between the initial argument and the rest of the type? ### Conclusion The main thing I take away from this is that I'm basically going to drop variadic functions from my radar for Haskenthetical. Infinitary tuples and the zip calculus don't feel like directions I want to go in. This might affect whether, when and how I add support for typeclasses and various surrounding machinary. 1. It also makes it really hard to write code outlines while omitting certain parts. 2. Note that I've swapped from a postfix \( α\ \mathtt{list}$ syntax to a prefix $\mathtt{list}\ α$ that I'm more used to. Also the $\underline{\mathtt{list}}$ was originally rendered $\underline{\mathit{list}}$ but I think that was a mistake.

3. I'm not sure. It looks like there's nothing stopping us from constructing types corresponding to optional-before-required. But the paper describes a language syntax that forbids it. My weak guess is such types would break the inference algorithm.

4. Sorry it's not indented nicely, I'm not sure how to make Mathjax do that. I wouldn't love it however nicely laid out, though.

5. Like with the previous paper, PVAP said map wouldn't be possible: "The presented limitations of the Zip Calculus imply that it cannot assign a variable-arity type to the definition of zipWith (Haskell's name for Scheme’s map) without further extension". As far as I can tell it was simply wrong.

6. appF is described with Monad constraints, but I gather the Applicative typeclass wasn't introduced at the time. I expect the seqTuple_ functions could take Applicative instead of Monad, and then so could appF

7. Pedantic note: I'm pretending here that integer literals have type Int, not type Num a => a

Posted on 02 April 2022 | Comments

### Walkthrough: Filing a UK self-assessment tax return

I'm writing this guide for a few reasons. For one, it might be useful to someone, possibly me in future. For two, if I make a mistake, someone might call me out on it and then I can correct it. And for three, it gives me a venue to complain about things I think aren't very good about the online submission form and also our tax system.

(Overall I'm pretty positive on the form! I'm gonna complain a lot, and I'm not going to point out all the places where it works and the instructions are clear and easy to follow. So this will probably come across quite negative, but that's because I'm counting down from perfection, not counting up from zero.)

Most people in the UK don't have to file one of these. I started filing them when I started earning in the 40% tax bracket. I'm not sure I still have to - I think I got a message a year or two back saying I could stop - but if I don't I'll pay more tax than I need to.

HMRC publishes a document called "how to fill in your tax return". (In previous years it had the reference SA150, and that's still in the filename, but it's no longer written under the title for some reason.) I actually haven't found it very helpful, it mostly doesn't seem to answer questions that the website leaves me with. But I guess it might be helpful in theory.

Update December 29: I only know about the parts of this process that are relevant to me. Some questions about other parts are answered in the comments on /r/UKPersonalFinance. Also, I generally find that community to be very helpful and knowledgable, so I find it reassuring that they only caught one mistake so far.

The gov.uk page on filing says you have to register first unless you sent a tax return last year. I've sent tax returns for several years running now, and I don't remember what registering was like.

Logging in from there I get sent to my "personal tax account" page and click the "complete your tax return" link in the top right box. I feel like that was harder to find in the past. It explains who can and can't file a return, I assume I read that in a previous year and could then and still can, and I click 'start now'.

The first page has a bunch of stuff filled in for me, mostly accurate.

"P J" is my first two initials, not my first name, but nice try. The all-caps HAZELDEN seems unnecessary, you don't need to worry about my handwriting.

These say 'optional', which sounds like I don't need to give them if I don't want to. But up above it says

'Optional' indicates only complete if relevant to you

So maybe that means "give us this if you have one"? I'm probably safe to leave out my phone number, I don't want them calling me and I don't know what "STD" means.1 I'll grudgingly give them my email address I guess.

For years I've been using my parents' address for all official stuff, which is easier than telling banks and the like every time I move house. But some time this year I got a scary letter telling me I had to register for the electoral roll in my current place, which meant I got removed from it back in Bristol. So probably I have to give my current address here too.

(I don't see why it's any of the government's business where I live. Unfortunately they disagree, and they have all the power in this relationship.)

Well this is awkward. I moved in here in 2019, but I wouldn't have given this address when filling in my 2019-20 tax return. Will they get pissy with me if I give the date I moved in? Eh, probably not.

Almost every address form I've filled in for the past several years has let me give my postcode and then select my exact address from a short dropdown, or enter it manually. This address form does not offer that.

There's no dropdown box, even if I select "Abroad". Also, this is still supposed to be asking about my address - "where the income was earned" is a different question. (And not a very clearly worded one, what if I earned income in multiple countries?) Fortunately I have never lived or earned income outside the UK.

"The postcode must be in capitals." Well done for finding and documenting a bug, HMRC, but I feel like it shouldn't be too hard to fix this one.

Residency is "based on whether you lived in England and Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales for the majority of the tax year". I assume they mean "plurality", but maybe if you spent less than half the year in any of these, you don't pay tax at all. (Tax collectors hate him! Nonlocal man discovers one weird trick…)

That's not what "e.g." means, but the date is correct.

This is 'optional', so maybe there are people who don't have a marital status, as distinct from having the marital status 'single'? Or maybe, contra what they said above, it means I don't have to tell them, and then probably they'll treat me as single if I don't specify?

The options are: Single, Married, In Civil Partnership, Divorced, Civil Partnership dissolved, Widow, Widower, Surviving Civil Partner, Separated. Obviously you can be more than one of these in any given tax year, or even more than one of them simultaneously, so the help text is not very helpful. I guess the idea is you give the most specific version of the most recent change as of the end of the tax year? I don't know who would ever pick "separated". Luckily for me, the government hasn't decided it cares about long-term cohabiting relationships until we actively make them legible, at least not for tax purposes. So I get to just say "single" and not worry about it.

This is the only part of the tax return (at least the pages I saw) where your gender becomes relevant, and then only for widows and widowers. I don't know what the nonbinary version is, but they get left out.

If they're assuming I didn't move house, you'd think they could assume I didn't go blind or get a blind spouse or civil partner.

I wonder what counts as an "other register". I think it's a crime to lie on my tax return, and quite possibly a crime to lie to my local authority about being blind. But it might not be a crime to lie on Honest Joe's Register Of Definitely Actually Blind People, and then to truthfully tell HMRC that I'm on that register. (This sounds like the sort of thing that you patiently explain to a judge and then the judge adds a little extra to your fine for being a smartarse. You try to appeal and the appeals court rejects with the comment "lolno". If you're going to try this, I think the funniest way would be to borrow a guide dog to take to court with you, maybe carry a cane slung over your shoulder, but make no actual pretense at blindness.)

There's nothing here telling you how to figure out if you're on plan 1 or plan 2, but I am indeed on plan 1. The Student Loan Company told them that (according to the help text), but apparently didn't tell them enough to know that I do not have and am not repaying a postgrad loan.

The next page helps figure out which other pages should be included in the rest of the form, and which ones can be skipped.

In my case, I was an employee (or director or office-holder) during the tax year, so I answer yes and tell them how many employments (or directorships) I had (one) and the name of the employer.

I wasn't self-employed or in a partnership, but if I was I'd need to tell them how many of those I had and their names, too. I didn't get income from UK land or property over £1,000 (or indeed at all), I didn't receive any foreign income, and I don't need to complete the capital gains section.

For capital gains it's not entirely obvious that the answer is no. Here's the advice:

You must report your capital gains and attach your computations if in the tax year either:

• you disposed of chargeable assets which were worth more than £49,200
• your chargeable gains, before the deduction of any losses, are more than £12,300
• you have gains in an earlier year taxable in this period
• you want to claim an allowable capital loss or make any other capital gains claim or election for the year

In working out if the assets you disposed of were worth more than £49,200 use the market value of any assets you gave away or sold for less than full value and ignore disposals of:

• exempt assets such as private cars, shares held within Individual Savings Accounts
• assets to your spouse or civil partner, if you were living together at some time during the tax year
• your own home where: [omitted a sub-list because I don't even own a home]

In working out your total chargeable gains include any gains attributed to you, for example, because you're a settlor or beneficiary of a trust, or in certain cases where you're a member of a non-resident company.

This is fairly readable, but it keeps using words like "chargeable" and "allowable". Those sound like they have important technical definitions. Are we given the important technical defintions? Ha, no.

So here's my current understanding. I have shares in some index funds in ISAs and pensions, but I'm pretty sure I should ignore those. And I own a handful of individual stocks and cryptocurrencies, not in tax-protected accounts, that I shouldn't ignore.

But so far all I've done is buy things and let their values go up or down. I haven't "disposed of" any of them: sold, traded or given away.2 That means I don't need to worry about it. When I dispose of something, I'll need to work out how how much profit or loss I made on it, and also (as a separate question) how much it was worth at the time. If those amounts go over certain thresholds in total for the year (£12,300 and £49,200 respectively), then I need to fill in the capital gains section. And there's also another two reasons I might need to, but I'm confident those don't apply to me either.

So I can answer "no" to capital gains because I haven't disposed of anything. Also, outside of ISAs and pensions I had less than £49,200 and my on-paper gains for the year were less than £12,300, so I could answer "no" even if I'd sold everything at the end of the year.

(Also, something unclear: to calculate gains, the obvious thing is to take "price when disposed of" and subtract "price when bought". And we're calculating "price when disposed of" anyway. But we're told to ignore certain disposals when calculating the total disposal price. Do we also ignore those disposals when calculating gains? I would guess so, but mostly I'm glad I don't have to worry about it.)

The next page is the same sort of thing, but in my case less clear.

An important detail here is that you can omit interest earned in an ISA. Nothing on the page says so. You might think that if you only earned interest in an ISA, you say here that you earned interest, and later you tell them it was only in an ISA. At any rate, that's what I thought the first time. But then they told me I owed tax on all that interest, so I decided to go back and tell them I didn't earn any interest.3

I guess that was lying on my tax return, and I just admitted to a crime? Thanks, HMRC.

(I just double checked: if I say I did earn interest, I get a new page where they ask me about "interest that's already been taxed", "interest that hasn't yet been taxed", and "foreign interest that hasn't yet been taxed". There's nothing on that page, either, saying I can omit ISAs.)

Similarly, dividends earned in an ISA don't count here. I did not earn any dividends outside of an ISA last tax year. (This tax year I've earned about £1.50 of them so far.)

Ever get the feeling that someone said "every question needs help text" and the person writing the help text was phoning it in?

I don't know how Child Benefit works. Is anyone in the position of "I got it during the tax year starting on 6 April 2020, but the payments had stopped before 6 April 2020"?

This seems to be an "if you made a mistake, that's fine, you can correct it now" thing. I appreciate that.

This help text is long so I'm not including it. This includes casual earnings, and I might have had some of those? Certainly I have in other years, like the money I sometimes got for getting my brain scanned. But it says I don't need to report if the total from this plus self employment is less than £1,000, which it is for me.

They don't mention gambling income, and mine isn't that high anyway, but I think that should be excluded.

I don't know what these are and the help text doesn't help much, but probably not.

Again, long help text. But the gist seems to be that if I have more than £1,073,100 in pensions in total (5 significant digits! Impressive precision), or if I (or my employer) put more than £40,000 into pensions this year, I need to worry about this. Neither is the case for me. (Yet! Growth mindset.)

One more page of basically the same thing, but this one is easy again. Yes, I contributed to a personal pension. Yes, I gave to charity (and claimed gift aid). My partner and I are ineligible for married couple's allowance (we are neither married nor in a civil partnership, and anyway we were both born after 6 April 1935). Nor can I transfer 10% of my personal allowance to them (we are neither married nor in a civil partnership). I don't want to claim other tax reliefs. I don't have a tax adviser. I… think I haven't used any tax avoidance schemes, but that probably relies on distinguishing between schemes that HMRC thinks are legit (like giving to charity) and schemes that HMRC thinks are kinda sus. I haven't used any disguised remuneration avoidance schemes. I am not acting in capacity or on behalf of anyone else.

There is one interesting one here.

I got a tax rebate in tax year 2019-20 from 2018-19, and then another in tax year 2020-21 from 2019-20. I think neither of these is what it's asking about. Rather, I think this is asking about rebates in tax year 2020-21 from tax already paid in that tax year.

Having filled in those three pages, I get an overview page listing what I've filled in so far and what I still need to do. The first thing to do is income. I only had one employer this year, so I only have one section for that.

They start with the company name, that I already gave them but I can change it now if I want I guess. After that, the next three questions are answered by my P60, which I was able to find because my employer emailed it to me.

These last two are "optional". First time I did this, I thought that meant "we have a copy of your P60 too, so if you don't fill this in we'll fill it in for you". Nope, it means "if you don't fill this in we'll think it's 0".

Then they want to know if I got any tips or other payments not on my P60, which I didn't. This one is optional too - if I try to enter 0 it complains and tells me to leave it blank.

Also, some helpful Javascript on the page makes sure your numbers are given to two decimal places, i.e. pounds and pennies. You can't enter pennies, they'll be truncated (£567.89 becomes £567.00), but it makes sure to show you them.

They also want to know if I was a director (no) and something about "inside off-payroll working engagements" (not entirely clear what this is, but no).

I did have benefits, medical insurance. The value of that will be on my P11D, not my P60, but they don't ask for it here. That's on the next page, which I guess I won't get shown if I didn't have any?

The final question almost caught me out:

I don't normally think of myself as having employment expenses. But I've been working from home, and this is how I claim back some of my utility bills.

My answers to that question added two new pages that weren't listed on the overview before. First for taxable benefits and expenses, listed on my P11D. I have an email copy of that too, I just copy the amount listed for medical insurance on that into the "private medical or dental insurance" box on the page.

They even tell me which number to use. (I have three, "cost to employer", "amount made good or from which tax deducted" and "cash equivalent". The middle one is £0 and the others are equal, so it's not hard for me. But if the middle one wasn't £0, I wouldn't be sure whether to use "cost to employer" or "cash equivalent" - but the latter is the one labeled with an "11", so that's the one to use.)

Then there's a page for expenses not reimbursed. The weirdly specific thing on this page is the box for "fixed deductions for expenses":

Based on the (long) help text, this seems to be "people in certain jobs and industries get to put specific numbers here, regardless of what their actual expenses were". (But they can choose to instead put their actual expenses in another box.) But if you're "a uniformed airline or helicoptor pilot, co-pilot, flight deck crew or cabin crew", you get a different box to put specific numbers in.

But as far as I know I do not work in such a job or industry. The only question relevant to me is "other".

The help text doesn't make it clear how much I can claim, but the link mostly does. I can claim for gas, electricity, metered water, business phone calls and dial-up internet4; but only the amount of them that's related to my work. So I guess I should figure out how much higher my bills are WFH than they would be if I was in the office?

I can claim up to £6/week without evidence, or more with evidence.5 I can only claim if I have to work from home, not if I do so by choice. I had to look this up, but there were four months where my office was closed (April, May, June and November), so call it 16 weeks. It's also not entirely clear whether that's "£6/week no matter how much I had to work from home that week" or whether I should think of it as £1.20/day, but that doesn't affect me personally. I assume I shouldn't count any holidays I took, but I don't think I took any in those months.

Same-day update: Reddit user pes_planus points out that if you had to work from home for a single day due to Covid, you can claim for the whole year. At £6/week, that's £312 in total. This is the case for both 2020-21 and 2021-22.

I'm not sure what kind of thing I'd need to use it for, but I don't have anything to add. Which is good because it's kind of embarrassingly limited. I'm not allowed to use multiple lines or most punctuation?!

Next up is pensions. I have two pensions that I contributed to this year, my employer one and an SIPP. I'm not aware of having a retirement annuity contract whatever one of those is, and I don't have any overseas pensions, so there are only one or two questions relevant to me. Still, this page is frankly confusing.

I have a standing order to deposit into my SIPP every month, and then about 11 weeks later, 25% of that amount gets added as tax relief. (It's supposed to be 6-8 weeks, but it's not.) So do I count the tax relief in the tax year when it arrived, or the tax year when I deposited the money? So far I've been doing when I deposited, and that's what they suggest by telling me to multiply the amount I contributed by 1.25. On the other hand, if that calculation is always correct, why don't they save me the trouble and do it for me? (Maybe they expect me to have a document somewhere giving the total amount?) In any case, there's nothing saying explicitly what to do. It probably doesn't make that much difference as long as I'm consistent year-on-year, so let's stick with "deposited".

Meanwhile, my employer pension has two sources of contributions. There's the stuff "my employer pays", which doesn't get written on my payslip, and the stuff "I pay", which does. These are both part of my compensation package, but I think we like to pretend that if my employer doesn't write it on my payslip it's not causing me to get paid less? And we make things more complicated and less transparent in service of this fiction.

Anyway, the stuff "my employer pays" I think isn't relevant here. The stuff "I pay" is. In my case, this is also paid relief at source, meaning it's deducted after I've paid tax on it. So that sounds like it matches "Payments to your employer's scheme which were not deducted from your pay before tax". Buuut… I think that question is trying to ask about payments which were expected to be deducted before tax. At my previous job that's how it happened, and it sounds like under certain circumstances that could have gone wrong and then I'd use this question to correct that.

So I think contributions "I paid" to my employer pension actually go along with my SIPP contributions as the answer to the first question, and I leave this one blank. (It's not marked optional, but it doesn't accept 0.)

For charity, there's three questions that look maybe relevant.

For pensions I needed to figure out my contribution plus what was added, for charity I just need to give my own contribution. Obviously. Still, this number is easy to find in my records.6

I think this is a roundabout way of asking how much gift aid I expect to donate in tax years 2021-22 and/or 22-23? They'll assume it's the amount I donated this year, minus whatever I put here. And then they'll adjust my PAYG tax code for that, to reduce overpayments.

Most of my charity donations were monthly recurring, but that left me slightly below my "10% of take-home" target, so I did do a one-off donation on top of that which I don't particularly expect to repeat. (But I haven't checked how far below my target I am right now.) But I do expect to donate more in total this year, so I'm going to leave this blank.

Not much help about what specific countries count as "certain" here, or what the definition of charity is for tax purposes. Some of the money I donate goes to MIRI, which is not a UK charity. But it goes via EA Funds, which is. So I'm pretty sure I haven't officially done this.

I can ignore the rest: I'm not asking to treat any payments as being made in a year other than they were actually made; and I haven't given any shares, securities, land or buildings to charity.

The next three pages are about my "PAYE Notice of Coding". They never say what one of these is, but it seems to be a letter they send out, that as far as I can see doesn't contain the words "PAYE" or "notice of coding". (It does say "your tax code notice", which is at least similar.)

Awkwardly, I can't find one more recent than 2018-19: not in my physical documents box, my "I should look through these documents at some point" pile, or my email. I'm sure I've had them more recently, so, um. They don't tell me what to do in this situation, but I guess presumably I can ask them for a new one? But… look at these questions.

The first is "does this number match what's on your coding notice?"

It's not clear whether it's talking about 2019-20 or 2020-21. If I had to guess - and I suppose I kind of do? Then I'd guess it's asking about underpaid tax from 2019-20 and earlier that I should have paid back in 2020-21 through my tax code for 2020-21.

The second is also "does this number match what's on your coding notice?" I think the difference is that last one was talking about underpaid tax from previous years, and this one is talking about underpaid tax from 2020-21 that's already been put on my 2020-21 tax code.

(For these, if I select "no" I get a space to put a different number and a space to tell them where that other number comes from.)

The third question doesn't look like the first two, although it does in the linked video and the help text sounds like it should. It's another "does this number match what's on your coding notice?" This time it's about… outstanding debts other than underpaid tax? What else might I owe to HMRC?

So, okay. I confess I don't really know what's going on with any of this. But suppose I ask HMRC for a replacement Notice of Coding. Are they really going to give me a letter telling me a different number than they have on the website? If so, why not just take that number from wherever they got it for the letter, and put it on the website themselves?

Plus, I've received tax refunds the last two years running, which seems like a weird thing to get if they think I owe them money?

So I think I'm just gonna assume these are all £0.

The three linked videos are short (1:15 to 2:07), but they don't add much that's not in the help text, and I'd much rather they be presented as "text with embedded images" or even just plain text. At least they have subtitles.

Nearly done! Quickfire round.

The next page is one I can't do anything with until after I've submitted the return. This seems like a strange place for it.

Then we get a page about my student loan, which doesn't even have a help text. This is on my P60 again, and also I have it in my own records and I'm pretty sure on a letter somewhere.

Next they have two questions about underpaid tax.

The first is: if it turns out I didn't pay enough tax last year (2020-21, the year I'm filing for), do I want to pay it back through my tax code for next year (2022-23)? i.e. to get it automatically deducted from my payslip starting April 2022? That seems reasonable, sure. If I say no I have to pay it directly by January 2022. I think it's more likely I paid too much, but gonna say yes anyway.

I can only do this if I file by 30th December, which is (checks calendar) soon. I guess if this guide does turn out to be useful to someone, they won't be able to take advantage of this, this year.

The second is: if they think I'll owe7 tax this year (2021-22, the unfinished year I'm writing this), do I want it put onto my tax code for… also this year? But this doesn't apply to tax on employed earnings (i.e. the only thing I think I owe tax on) or pensions. Also they apparently think 5 April 2022 gets the past tense.

So, no, because I don't think I'll owe the relevant kind of tax, and if they decide I probably will that's going to confuse things. And no again, because if they decide I'll probably owe something, putting it on my tax code for this year (with three payslips to go) also seems like it's going to confuse things. Certainly it'll make updating my ledger mildly less convenient. If I was going to do this, I'd rather it go on my tax code for next year, like with the previous question.

If I want to make "adjustments" I can do that, but I don't think it applies. (It sounds like these adjustments might be mostly "pretending things happened at different times than they actually happened"?)

The help texts all include "An entry will only be required in limited circumstances", and make it sound like calculating the amounts to go in these boxes is kind of complicated, so I'm glad I don't have to think about them.

If I used provisional figures (I didn't) I give them details about those, and then finally there's a space for "anything else we should know" with the same restrictions on length and punctuation as before. Also I can attach a document if I want.

That's the last thing to fill in. Next there's a page where they repeat some of the things I said back to me, to confirm, and then a page to show me my tax calculation. Initially it just says how much they owe me (or presumably, how much I'd owe them, if that was the case). But then there's also a page showing the full calculation, which I find super valuable for understanding how it all fits together and double checking that I haven't made any mistakes.

The top three numbers here come directly from my return, and Personal Allowance is the same for most people, £12,500 for 2020-21. (If you earn over £100k it starts to decrease, giving a marginal 60% tax band in between two marginal 40% tax bands. I guess it was politically easier to raise taxes this way than to raise them in some more sensible way?) The rest are just adding and subtracting those numbers in the obvious way.

Normally, of the "income on which tax is due", I'd pay 20% on the first £37,500 and 40% on the rest. But

The pension number is the amount I put in the first pension box above, "payments to registered pension schemes". That was money I'd paid into my pensions, plus tax relief I'd been given for it.

The charity number is the amount of gift aid payments I made, times 1.25, because the number I entered didn't include tax relief. (That tax relief went to the charities, not to me.)

The idea with these is that money I put into pensions, or give to charity, is money I don't have to pay tax on. So they make two adjustments for it:

• Return 25% of the money I deposit/donate, to me (for pensions) or the charity (for charities). This happens without needing to fill in a tax return. For those in the basic rate tax bracket, it gives the right amount - £100 pre-tax becomes £80 post-tax, so later we turn the £80 back into £100.

• For higher rate taxpayers, also move some money from the "pay 40% tax" bucket to the "pay 20% tax" bucket. £100 pre-tax becomes £60 post-tax, which (from the previous point) becomes £75 when moved to the pension pot or charity. So they move £75 between buckets, and instead of paying £30 on that I now pay £15. So of the original £100, I now have £15, the charity has £75, and HMRC has £10. This is the same as me giving the charity £75 pre-tax and then paying 40% tax on £25, so it works out fine, but man I find this math confusing.

If I actually want to give £100 pre-tax, I still need to give the charity £80. They'll claim back £20 and so will I, so I'll have given them £100 pre-tax and paid 40% tax on £33.33. Alternatively I can take the £15 I got returned from £60 and redonate that, becoming £18.75 to the charity, then also donate the £3.75 I get returned from that, and so on - in the limit, this works out as the charity having £100 and myself and HMRC having £0 each.

(When HMRC shifts money between buckets, a higher-rate taxpayer can become a basic-rate taxpayer. I assume the math still works out fine at the boundaries? I haven't checked though.)

And so we have these calculations:

I'm not sure why "Income Tax due after allowances and reliefs" comes before "Income Tax due", but since I don't have any allowances or reliefs the numbers are the same for me. I assume student loan repayments would be different from £0 if the wrong amount had been automatically taken from my payslips.

Now I get to download a PDF copy of what I just filled in, formatted on what I guess is a copy of the paper form I'd use if I wasn't doing it online. And then right before I submit, two more checkboxes to tick:

This first one seems less helpful than it might be, failing to distinguish "oops I did this wrong" from "I didn't need to do this". I guess they don't want to confuse non-mathematicians who didn't have any coronavirus support payments, and it still works as a reminder.

I think after I click "submit" on this page, I'll enter my password again and be finished. But I haven't done that yet - I'll wait to see if anyone wants to tell me I did something wrong, first.

Update December 29: Yep, that was it. There was a "submitting" spinner for about 30 seconds, and then

Woop! It takes up to 72 hours to process and I can make corrections in that time. But assuming I don't realize I have any of those, I'm done. At some point they're going to send me back the money I overpaid, historically that's gone into my bank account but I don't remember if I've had to do anything particular to make it happen. Certainly it wasn't very involved if I did.

They give me a "submission receipt reference number", which looks like 32 digits in base 36 (numbers and uppercase letters, mine includes Z, I and O so probably all letters are possible). Sounds like it's a hash of the contents of my return, with a signature so that no one else can generate a valid one. Neat. It's also included in the PDF copy I downloaded earlier.

I assume it's not intended to be confidential, but they don't say it's safe to share, so I won't.

1. In this context.

2. In the current tax year I've done a small amount of trading, because I couldn't directly buy the thing I wanted to. My vague impression is that because I bought and traded on the same day I can ignore this? (I'm not sure where I heard that. If it's true, I wonder if it's also true for high-frequency traders.) But also we're talking amounts small enough that I'm not going to reach either threshold this tax year, whether I can ignore this or not.

3. The only thing I think I've used the SA150 for, is to confirm that this is correct.

4. When I switched ISP, there was a week when my new one failed to connect me and I had to use mobile data for internet. As it happens I didn't use more than my contracted amount, but if I had… strictly it doesn't sound like that would be covered? I kind of guess I'd be able to claim for some of it, even though this page only mentions dial-up, but I'm not sure.

5. I assume this means something like "reasonably compelling evidence that I spent the amount I claim to have spent". Strictly speaking, if I said "I spent £10/week extra" that would be evidence I spent £10/week extra, because I'm a fairly honest person (citation needed) and I am more likely to say something if that thing is true than if it is false. But I somehow feel like HMRC would not accept this evidence.

6. I track my finances with Ledger, and apply a tag to all gift aided charity contributions.

7. I think "owe" here means gross, not net. That is, the question isn't "will I have paid less tax in these buckets than I'm required to", which I don't think is a question that makes sense after I've paid any tax at all. (When I pay tax it doesn't offset specific tax buckets, it just offsets my total tax bill.) Rather, the question is "will the amount I'm required to pay in these buckets be more than £0". This is a different use of the word "owe" than in the previous question, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Posted on 28 December 2021 | Comments

### Ten Hundred Megaseconds

A megasecond, one million seconds, is 11 days and 14 hours. (13 hours, 46 minutes and 40 seconds, assuming no leap seconds.) About a week and a half. Ten megaseconds is 116 days. (115, plus 17:46:40.) A bit less than four months, a third of a year. A hundred megaseconds is 1,157 days. (Plus 9:46:401.) Roughly three years and two months - it could be 61 or 62 days depending on leap years.

I think it might be kind of nice if we celebrated a hundred megaseconds additonally-to and/or instead-of birthdays.

One thing I like about it is that humanity won't stay on Earth forever. If we go interplanetary, I think we're more likely to keep measuring time in seconds than in Earth years. I like this as a way of looking to the future.

Another thing is, it doesn't happen at the same time every (Earth) year. Some birthdays fall on or near holidays, or during seasons we don't much like, and that can make them less convenient to celebrate. If that happens to you one hundred megaseconds, it probably won't happen the next hundred megaseconds. (I think a five month offset would be better than two for this purpose, you'd never be in the same season twice in a row, but two is better than zero.)

I also just think it's kind of a sweet spot time interval? I'm old enough now that years don't feel very long, decades2 do, and a hundred megaseconds is nicely in between.

(If "hundred megaseconds" is unwieldy, a quick look at wikipedia suggests "yisec" from Chinese or "okusec" from Japanese. Or maybe "myri-myri-sec" from Ancient Greek. I think my favorite would be "hecto-megasec" from Ancient Greek via SI. I'm not going to try to use any of these myself though.)

Ten hundred megaseconds, a billion seconds, is 11,574 days. About 31 years eight months. (The remainder is 251-253 days, depending on leap years3. Plus 1:46:40.) That's how old I turned on August 21st this year.

I didn't do anything to celebrate, partly because even though I'd put it in my calendar a long time before, I didn't remember until a couple days after, and partly because I'm not very good at celebrating things. (I don't normally celebrate my birthdays, either.) I did do some work on Haskenthetical for the first time in months, which feels like a good start to the next billion. Maybe I'll celebrate turning eleven, which will be on October 21st, 2024.

If you're interested, here's a widget you can use to calculate your age, or other intervals, in hundred megaseconds.

Thanks to Miranda for comments.

1. Why are the minutes and seconds always the same? Because 46 minutes and 40 seconds is 2800 seconds, and the remainder when dividing (10 × 2800) by (60 × 60) is also 2800. So multiply the previous duration by 10 and you get the same number of minutes and seconds left over. For similar reasons, the number of hours after hitting 10 megaseconds will keep looping: 17, 9, 1, 17, 9, 1.

2. Incidentally, a decade would be π hundred megaseconds, to within 0.4%.

3. It would be 259 days if there were no leap years. You'd normally experience February 29th eight times in that period, but it might only be seven if you start shortly after a February 29th. And it might only be six, if the period crosses a 100-but-not-400-year boundary.

Posted on 20 September 2021 | Comments

### Against "blankfaces"

(Content note: minor spoilers for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.)

Scott Aaronson writes about blankfaces,

anyone who enjoys wielding the power entrusted in them to make others miserable by acting like a cog in a broken machine, rather than like a human being with courage, judgment, and responsibility for their actions. A blankface meets every appeal to facts, logic, and plain compassion with the same repetition of rules and regulations and the same blank stare—a blank stare that, more often than not, conceals a contemptuous smile.

I want to push back against this a bit.

First, one of the defining aspects of blankfacedness is their internal experience. It's someone who enjoys wielding their power. This is a very hard thing to judge from the outside.

I used to work in a cinema. One day a mother came in with her young child, perhaps fivish years old. She was late for a busy screening, and the person selling tickets warned they might not be able to sit together. She said that was fine, bought popcorn and went in. Soon afterwards she came back out, complaining that they couldn't sit together. She wanted a refund for the tickets (fine) and popcorn (not fine, but she insisted). The conversation between her and my manager escalated a bit. I don't remember who brought up the police, but she at least was very confident that she knew her rights and the police would back her up if they arrived. Eventually he gave her a refund.

If it had been up to me? And if I hadn't had to worry about things like PR and "someone yelling in the lobby would ruin the experience for people watching movies"? I think I would absolutely have used the "no, sorry, those are the rules" move. I would have been happy to do so. Does that make me a blankface? But it's not that I would have enjoyed wielding my power as such. Rather it's that I would have enjoyed punishing her, specifically, for acting in ways that I endorsedly think are bad to act in.

Does someone's internal experience matter, though? If they act a certain way, should we care how they feel? I think we should, and if we don't we shouldn't make claims about it.

That is, if what you care about is whether someone is acting a certain way, then don't mention enjoyment when you define a blankface. And if you really do care about the enjoyment part of it - well, how do you know what someone is feeling and why?

I predict that if the term "blankface" takes off, no matter how much people defining the term emphasize the "enjoys" part of it, people using the term will not be careful about checking that. Partly I think this because Scott wasn't: in two of his examples, he accused people of being blankfaces whom he'd never interacted with and could not identify. Does he really think that a web portal was badly designed out of malice? But also I think that… like, even if you can tell that someone is just acting a certain way because they enjoy it, even if you're really sure that's what's going on, you won't properly be able to capture that in your description of the events. So people will read a story where it seems like the thing making them a blankface is the way they acted, and then they'll tell their own similar stories where people acted in similar ways, and they'll use the term "blankface".

There's a lot of potential here for a kind of (reverse?) motte-and-bailey, where the bailey is "I'm calling someone a blankface which is explicitly defined as having an enjoyment part to it", and the motte is "…but no one uses it that way, so obviously I didn't mean to imply that I know what was going on in their head".

Here's another reason someone might externally act blankfacedly: fear. Yes, this is ridiculous, but if I admit that out loud I'll be seen as undermining my boss who already has it in for me, so…. Or, exhaustion: this is the third sob story I've heard today. I cannot deal with feeling more sympathy.

Given how strongly Scott feels about blankfaces (they've apparently dehumanized themselves and deserve no mercy), I certainly hope he cares whether they act blankfacedly for sympathetic or unsympathetic reasons. And if we're to care about that, I think we have to admit that most of the time we don't really know.

Second and relatedly, I think we should distinguish between "this person is blankfacing" and "this person is a blankface". Like, maybe someone right now is enjoying wielding petty power for the sake of it. I don't currently predict that that person routinely enjoys acting that way, or enjoys acting that way in every situation where they have petty power. That's maybe not much consolation to their victim right now, but still.

Perhaps I should predict that? But I currently don't, and Scott gives me no reason to.

Third, I'm not sure Umbridge is an example of the archetype. Or, if Umbridge is really what Scott wants to point at, I'm not sure his explicit definition matches up.

The most despicable villain in the Harry Potter universe is not Lord Voldemort, who's mostly just a faraway cipher and abstract embodiment of pure evil, no more hateable than an earthquake. Rather, it's Dolores Jane Umbridge, the toadlike Ministry of Magic bureaucrat who takes over Hogwarts school, forces out Dumbledore as headmaster, and terrorizes the students with increasingly draconian "Educational Decrees." Umbridge's decrees are mostly aimed at punishing Harry Potter and his friends, who've embarrassed the Ministry by telling everyone the truth that Voldemort has returned and by readying themselves to fight him, thereby defying the Ministry's head-in-the-sand policy.

Anyway, I’ll say this for Harry Potter: Rowling's portrayal of Umbridge is so spot-on and merciless that, for anyone who knows the series, I could simply define a blankface to be anyone sufficiently Umbridge-like.

Spoilers: the educational decrees are not the extent of Umbridge's villainy. She also sends dementors to attack Harry and his cousin. She tries to slip Harry a truth serum, and later tries to force-feed it to him. When she can't do that, she tries to torture him. None of this is legal1, some of it is super-duper illegal, and her superiors aren't pressuring her into it. Umbridge doesn't simply act like a cog in a broken machine. She exercises judgment, and I think even some courage, in service of villainous ends.

(I am not, here, describing Umbridge's motivations. I think I have some idea of what they are, but I'm not sure I'd capture them very well and my feeling is they're not super relevant for this bit.)

However annoyed Scott may be at his daughter's lifeguard, I predict that describing the lifeguard as Umbridge-like is unfair. I predict, for example, that she would never take initiative to deliberately engineer a situation in which Scott's daughter nearly drowns.

I think Scott is pointing at something true, and important to know about. But I think he's conflating a few different things (blankfacing-regardless-of-internal-experience, blankfacing-specifically-meaning-enjoying-it, being-a-blankface, Umbridge), and I worry that the way he's pointing at them will result in bad discourse norms. I still think it's good that he published, but I don't think that essay is the ideal version of what it could be, and I'm trying here to point at ways I think it falls short.

1. At least I don't think any of that was legal. I am not a wizard lawyer and this is not wizard legal advice.

Posted on 08 August 2021 | Comments

### Book Review: Order Without Law

This review originally appeared on the blog Astral Codex Ten as part of a contest. You can now read it here, with working footnotes. There's even an audio version as part of the ACX podcast; the footnotes are all read out at the end.

### Shasta County

Shasta County, northern California, is a rural area home to many cattle ranchers.1 It has an unusual legal feature: its rangeland can be designated as either open or closed. (Most places in the country pick one or the other.) The county board of supervisors has the power to close range, but not to open it. When a range closure petition is circulated, the cattlemen have strong opinions about it. They like their range open.

If you ask why, they'll tell you it's because of what happens if a motorist hits one of their herd. In open range, the driver should have been more careful; "the motorist buys the cow". In closed range, the rancher should have been sure to fence his animals in; he compensates the motorist.

They are simply wrong about this. Range designation has no legal effect on what happens when a motorist hits a cow. (Or, maybe not quite no effect. There's some, mostly theoretical, reason to think it might make a small difference. But certainly the ranchers exaggerate it.) When these cases go to court, ranchers either settle or lose, and complain that lawyers don't understand the law.

Even if they were right about the law, they have insurance for such matters. They'll tell you that their insurance premiums will rise if the range closes, but insurers don't adjust their rates on that level of granularity. One major insurer doesn't even adjust its rates between Shasta County and other counties in California. They might plausibly want to increase their coverage amount, but the cost of that is on the order of $10/year. No, the actual effect that range designation has, is on what happens when a rancher's cow accidentally trespasses on someone else's land. In closed range, the owner is responsible for fencing in his cattle. If they trespass on someone else's land, he's strictly liable for any damage they cause. In open range, the landowner is responsible for fencing the cattle out; the cattle owner is only liable for damages if the land was entirely fenced or if he took them there deliberately. (Law enforcement also has more power to impound cattle in closed range, but most years they don't do that even once.) The cattlemen mostly don't understand this detail of the law. They have a vague grasp of it, but it's even more simplified than the version I've just given. And they don't act upon it. Regardless of range designation, they follow an informal code of neighborliness. According to them, it's unneighborly to deliberately allow your cattle to trespass; but it's also unneighborly to make a fuss when it does happen. The usual response is to call the owner (whom you indentify by brand) and let him know. He'll thank you, apologize, and drive down to collect it. You don't ask for compensation. Or, sometimes it would be inconvenient for him to collect it. If his cow has joined your herd, it's simpler for it just to stay there until you round them up. In that case, you'll be feeding someone else's cow, possibly for months. The expense of that is perhaps$100, a notable amount, but you still don't ask for compensation.

Sometimes a rancher will fail to live up to this standard of neighborliness. He'll be careless about fencing in his cattle, or slow to pick them up. Usually the victims will gossip about him, and that's enough to provoke an apology. If not, they get tougher. They may drive a cow to somewhere it would be inconvenient to collect - this is questionably legal. They might threaten to injure or kill the animal. They might actually injure or kill it - this is certainly illegal, but they won't get in trouble for it.

They almost never ask for money, and lawyers only get involved in the most exceptional circumstances (the author found two instances of that happening). When someone does need to pay a debt, he does so in kind: "Should your goat happen to eat your neighbor's tomatoes, the neighborly thing for you to do would be to help replant the tomatoes; a transfer of money would be too cold and too impersonal."2 Ranchers do keep rough mental account of debits and credits, but they allow these to be settled long term and over multiple fronts. A debt of "he refused to help with our mutual fence" might be paid with "but he did look after my place while I was on holiday".

(This is how ranchers deal with each other. Ranchette3 owners will also sometimes complain to public officials, who in turn talk to the cattle owner. They'll sometimes file damage claims against the rancher's insurance. It's ranchette owners who are responsible for range closure petitions.)

Range designation also doesn't affect the legal rules around building and maintaining fences. But it does change the meaning of the fences themselves, so maybe it would change how cattlemen handle fencing? But again, no. Legally, in some situations neighbors are required to share fence maintenance duties, and sometimes someone can build a fence and later force his neighbor to pay some of the cost. The cattlemen don't generally know this, and would ignore it if they did. They maintain fences unilaterally; if one of them doesn't do any work for years, the other will complain at them. If they want to build or upgrade a fence, they'll talk to their neighbor in advance, and usually figure out between them a rough way to split the material costs and labor in proportion to how many cattle each has near the fence. (Crop farmers aren't asked to pay to keep the ranchers' animals out.) Occasionally they can't reach an agreement, but this doesn't cause much animosity. This is despite that fences cost thousands of dollars per mile to build, and half a person-day per mile per year to maintain.

So this is a puzzle. Range designation is legally relevant with regard to cattle trespass, but it doesn't change how ranchers act in that regard. Range designation is not legally relevant to motor accidents, and ranchers have no reason to think it is; but that's why they ostensibly care about it.

(And it's not just words. Many of them act on their beliefs. We can roughly divide cattlemen into "traditionalists who don't irrigate and can't afford fences" and "modernists who irrigate and already use fences" - by improving pasture, irrigation vastly decreases the amount of land needed. After a closure, traditionalists drop their grazing leases in the area. Modernists oppose closures like traditionalists, but they don't react to them if they pass.)

What's up with this? Why do the cattlemen continue to be so wrong in the face of, you know, everything?

### What's up with this?

Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes is a study of, well, its subtitle. The author, Robert Ellickson, is a professor and legal scholar. He comes across as a low-key anarchist, and I've seen him quoted at length on some anarchist websites, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he's just a full-blown anarchist. He doesn't identify as one explicitly, at least not here, and he does respect what states bring to the table. He just wishes people would remember that they're not the only game in town. Part of the thesis of the book could be summed up (in my words, not his) as: we credit the government with creating public order, but if you look, it turns out that people create plenty of public order that has basically nothing to do with the legal system. Sometimes there is no relevant law, sometimes the order predates the law, and sometimes the order ignores the law. More on this later.

Part one is an in-depth exploration of Shasta County that I found fascinating, and that I've only given in very brief summary. He goes into much more detail about basically everything.4

One oversight is that it's not clear to me how large the population Ellickson studied is. Given that it's a case study for questions of groups maintaining order, I think the size of the group matters a lot. For example, according to wikipedia on Dunbar's number: "Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150."

Does Shasta County support that? I think not, but it's hard to say. Ellickson admittedly doesn't know the population size of the area he studied. (It's a small part of a census division whose population was 6,784 in 1980, so that's an upper bound.) But I feel like he could have been a lot more helpful. Roughly how many ranchers are there, how many ranchette owners, and how many farmers? (I think most of the relevant people are in one of those groups. I'm not sure to what extent we should count families as units. I'm not sure how many people in the area are in none of those groups.) Overall I'd guess we're looking at perhaps 300-1000 people over perhaps 100-300 families, but I'm not confident.

(I tracked down the minutes of the Shasta County Cattlemen's Association, and they had 128 members in June 2011. I think "most ranchers are in the Association but ranchette owners and farmers generally aren't" is probably a decent guess. But that's over twenty years later, so who knows what changed in that time.)

Near the end of part one, Ellickson poses the "what's up with this?" question. Why are the cattlemen so wrong about what range designation means?

His answer is that it's about symbolism. Cattlemen like to think of themselves as being highly regarded in society. But as Shasta County urbanizes, that position is threatened. A closure petition is symbolic of that threat. Open range gives cattlemen more formal rights, even if they don't take advantage of them. It marks them as an important group of people, given deference by the law. So if the range closes, that's an indication to the whole county that cattlemen aren't a priority.

They care about this sort of symbolism - partly because symbols have instrumental value, but also just because people care about symbols inherently. But you can't admit that you care about symbols, because that shows insecurity. So you have to make the battle about something instrumental, and they develop beliefs which allow them to do so. They're fairly successful, too - there haven't been any closures since 1973. (Though I note that Ellickson documents only one attempted closure in that time. It was triggered by a specific rogue cattleman who left the area soon after. It sounds like there may have been other petitions that Ellickson doesn't discuss, but I have no idea how many, what triggered them, or how much support they got. So maybe it's not so much that the cattlemen are successful as that no one else really cares.)

As for how they remain wrong - it simply isn't costing them enough. It costs them some amount, to be sure. It cost one couple $100,000 when a motorist hit three cattle in open range. They didn't have enough liability insurance, and if they'd understood the law, they might have done. But the question is whether ignorant cattlemen will be driven out of work, or even just outcompeted by knowledegable ones. This mistake isn't nearly powerful enough for that. Nor does anyone else have much incentive to educate them about what range designation actually means. So they remain uneducated on the subject. This all seems plausible enough, though admittedly I'm fairly predisposed to the idea already. For someone who wasn't, I feel like it probably wouldn't be very convincing, and it could stand to have more depth. (Though it's not the focus of the work, so I hope they'd forgive that.) I'd be curious to know more about the couple who didn't have enough insurance - did they increase their insurance afterwards, and do they still think the motorist buys the cow? Did that case encourage anyone else to get more insurance? It seems like the sort of event that could have triggered a wide-scale shift in beliefs. (Is this just standard stuff covered in works like the Sequences (which I've read, long ago) and Elephant in the Brain (which I haven't)? I'm not sure. I think it's analyzing on a different level than the Fake Beliefs sequence - that seems like more "here's what's going on in the brain of an individual" and this is more "here's what's going on in a society". Also, remember that it long predates those works.) A counterpoint might be… these cases aren't all that common, and don't usually go to court, and when they do they're usually settled (on the advice of lawyers) instead of ruled. And "lawyers don't understand this specific part of the law" isn't all that implausible. So although the evidence Ellickson presents is overwhelming that the cattlemen are wrong, I'm not sure I can fault the cattlemen too hard for not changing their minds. ### Against previous work Part one was mostly a case study, with some theorizing. It kind of felt like it was building towards the "what's up with this?" question for part two, but instead it gave a brief answer at the end. Part two is a different style and focus: about evenly split between theorizing and several smaller case studies. We're explicitly told this is what's going to happen, but still, it's a little jarring. Ellickson spends some time criticising previous theories and theorists of social control, which he divides broadly into two camps. His own background is in the law-and-economics camp5, which studies the law and its effects in terms of economic theory. Among other things, this camp notably produced the Coase theorem.6 But law-and-economics theorists tend to put too much emphasis on the state. Hobbes' Leviathan is a classic example: Hobbes apparently saw no possibility that some nonlegal system of social control - such as the decentralized enforcement of norms - might bring about at least a modicum of order even under conditions of anarchy. (The term anarchy is used here in its root sense of a lack of government, rather than in its colloquial sense of a state of disorder. Only a legal centralist would equate the two.) But Coase fell into this trap too: Throughout his scholarly career, Coase has emphasized the capacity of individuals to work out mutually advantageous arrangements without the aid of a central coordinator. Yet in his famous article "The Problem of Social Cost," Coase fell into a line of analysis that was wholly in the Hobbesian tradition. In analyzing the effect that changes in law might have on human interactions, Coase implicitly assumed that governments have a monopoly on rulemaking functions. … Even in the parts of his article where he took transaction costs into account, Coase failed to note that in some contexts initial rights might arise from norms generated through decentralized social processes, rather than from law. As have others: Max Weber and Roscoe Pound both seemingly endorsed the dubious propositions that the state has, and should have, a monopoly on the use of violent force. In fact, as both those scholars recognized elsewhere in their writings, operative rules in human societies often authorize forceful private responses to provocative conduct. (See what I mean about coming across as a low-key anarchist?) There's plenty of evidence refuting the extreme version of this camp. We can see that social norms often override law in people's actions. (The Norwegian Housemaid Law of 1948 imposed labor standards that were violated by the employers in almost 90% of households studied, but no lawsuits were brought under it for two years.) People often apply nonlegal sanctions, like gossip and violence. ("Donald Black, who has gathered cross-cultural evidence on violent self-help, has asserted that much of what is ordinarily classified as crime is in fact retaliatory action aimed at achieving social control.") Even specialists often don't know the law in detail as it applies to their speciality. (The "great majority" of California therapists thought the Tarasoff decision imposed stronger duties than it actually did.) And people just don't hire attorneys very often. We saw examples of all of these in Shasta County as well; part one can be seen as a challenge to the law-and-economics camp. The other camp is law-and-society, emphasizing that the law exists as just one part in the broader scheme of things. These scholars tend to have a more realistic view of how the legal system interacts with other forms of control, but they've been reluctant to develop theory. They often just take norms as given, rather than trying to explain them. The theories they have developed are all flawed, although Ellickson thinks functionalism is on the right track. (This is the idea that norms develop which help a group to survive and prosper.) Ellickson explicitly describes part two as a "gauntlet" thrown towards law-and-society. (Also, some law-and-society scholars go too far in the other direction, thinking that the legal system is ineffectual. They're just as mistaken. See7: Muslim Central Asia after the Russian Revolution; US civil rights laws in the 50s and 60s; range closure in Shasta County; "that the allocation of legal property rights in the intertidal zone affects labor productivity in the oyster industry, that the structure of workers' compensation systems influences the frequency of workplace fatalities, and that the content of medical malpractice law affects how claims are settled." [Footnotes removed.]) ### The hypothesis Ellickson has his own theory of norms, which he formed after studying Shasta County. The main thrust of part two is to elaborate and defend it: Members of a close-knit group develop and maintain norms whose content serves to maximize the aggregate welfare that members obtain in their workaday affairs with one another. … Stated more simply, the hypothesis predicts that members of tight social groups will informally encourage each other to engage in cooperative behavior. [Emphasis original; footnotes removed.] (He doesn't name this theory, calling it simply "the hypothesis". I admire that restraint, but I kind of wish I had a name to refer to it by.) Ellickson makes sure to clarify and caveat the hypothesis here, so that we don't interpret it more strongly than he intends. But before looking at his clarifications, I'm going to jump ahead a little, and look at an example he uses of the hypothesis in action. Consider the Shasta County norm that a livestock owner is strictly responsible for cattle trespass damages. The hypothesis is that this norm is welfare-maximizing. To test that, we have to compare it to alternatives. One alternative would be non-strict liability. Another would be that trespass damages are borne by the victim. Compared to a negligence standard, strict liability requires less investigation but triggers more sanctions. (Apparently there's a "premise that strict-liability rules and negligence rules are equally effective at inducing cost-justified levels of care", but Ellickson doesn't really explain this.) In Shasta County, the sanctions have basically no transaction costs, since they're just neighbors adjusting mental accounts. So strict liability it is. To be welfare maximizing, costs should be borne by whoever can avoid them most cheaply. In this case that's the ranchers; I'm not sure I fully buy Ellickson's argument, but I think the conclusion is probably true.8 So Ellickson argues that the Shasta County trespass norms support the hypothesis.9 He also makes a prediction here that things were different in the mid-nineteenth century. "During the early history of the state of California, irrigated pastures and ranchettes were rare, at-large cattle numerous, and motorized vehicles unknown. In addition, a century ago most rural residents were accustomed to handling livestock. Especially prior to the invention of barbed wire in 1874, the fencing of rangelands was rarely cost-justified. In those days an isolated grower of field crops in Shasta County, as one of the few persons at risk from at-large cattle, would have been prima facie the cheaper avoider of livestock damage to crops." And so the farmer would have been responsible for fencing animals out, and borne the costs if he failed to. ### Clarifications: "close-knit" and "workaday affairs" Before we go further, let's look at Ellickson's clarifications. It's important to know what the hypothesis doesn't say. Ellickson emphasizes that it's descriptive, not normative; it's not a recommendation that norms should be used in preference to other forms of social control. Not all groups are close-knit; welfare isn't the only thing people might want to optimize for; and norms of cooperation within a group often come at the expense of outsiders. He also emphasizes that a loose reading would give a much stronger version of the hypothesis than he intends. The terms "close-knit", "welfare" and "workaday affairs" are all significant here, and Ellickson explains their meanings in some depth. In order of how much I want to push back against them: A "close-knit" group is one where "informal power is broadly distributed among group members and the information pertinent to informal control circulates easily among them." This is admittedly vague, but unavoidably so. Rural Shasta County residents are close-knit, and residents of a small remote island are even closer-knit. Patrons of a singles bar at O'Hare Airport are not. Distributed power allows group members to protect their selves and their property, and to personally enforce sanctions against those who wrong them. Information gives people reputations; it allows for punishing people who commit small wrongs against many group members, and for rewarding people who perform those punishments. Notably, a close-knit group need not be small or exclusive. Someone can be a member of several completely nonoverlapping close-knit groups at once (coworkers, neighborhood, church). And although a small population tends to increase close-knittedness through "quality of gossip, reciprocal power, and ease of enforcement", the size itself has no effect. This is where I think it would be really nice to know how large the relevant population in Shasta County is - as the major case study of the book, it could lend a lot of weight to the idea that large populations can remain close-knit and the hypothesis continues to apply. "Workaday affairs" means to assume that there's a preexisting set of ground rules, allowing group members to hold and trade personal property. (Which also requires, for example, rules against murder, theft and enslavement.) This is necessary because to calculate welfare, we need some way to measure peoples' values, and we can only do that if people can make voluntary exchanges. The hypothesis doesn't apply to those rules. Seems like a fair restriction. A little more hackily, it also doesn't apply to "purely distributive" norms, like norms of charity. If you take wealth from one person and give it to another, the transfer process consumes resources and creates none, reducing aggregate welfare. (This is assuming Ellickson's strict definition of welfare, which he's explained by now but I haven't. Sorry.) But clearly norms of charity do exist. There are theories under which they do enhance welfare (through social insurance, or reciprocity). But those might be too simplistic, so Ellickson thinks it prudent to just exclude charity from the hypothesis. Actually, he goes further than that. He cites Mitch Polinsky (An Introduction to Law and Economics) arguing that for a legal system, the cheapest way to redistribute wealth is (typically) through tax and welfare programs. And so, Polinsky argues, most legal doctrine should be shaped by efficiency concerns, not redistribution. That is, areas like tort and contract law should focus on maximizing aggregate welfare. In a dispute between a rich and a poor person, we shouldn't consider questions like "okay, but the poor person has much more use for the money". In such disputes we should assume the same amount of wealth has equal value whoever's hands it's in, and the point is just to maximize total wealth. Then, if we end up with people having too little wealth, we have a separate welfare system set up to solve that problem. I can buy that. Ellickson doesn't actually present the argument himself, just says that Polinsky's explained it lucidly, but sure. Stipulated. Ellickson assumes that the same argument holds for norms as it does for law. Not only that, he assumes that norm-makers subscribe to that argument.10 That… seems like a stretch. But granted that assumption, norms would follow a similar pattern: most norms don't try to be redistributive, and if redistribution is necessary, there would be norms specifically for that. For example, the hypothesis predicts "that a poor person would not be excused from a general social obligation to supervise cattle, and that a rich person would not, on account of his wealth, have greater fencing obligations." That seems entirely reasonable to me, and it's consistent with Shasta County practice. And actually, I don't think we need the strong assumption to get this kind of pattern? It's the kind of thing that plausibly could happen through local dynamics. I would have been happy if Ellickson had just assumed the result, not any particular cause for it. This is a fairly minor criticism though. (It's a little weird. Normally I expect people try to sneak in strong assumptions that are necessary for their arguments. Ellickson is explicitly flagging a strong assumption that isn't necessary.) (I'm not sure the words "workaday affairs" was the best way to point at these restrictions. I think I see where he's coming from, but the name doesn't hook into the concept very well for me. But that's minor too.) ### Clarification: "Welfare" This gets its own section because apparently I have a lot to say about it. The point of "welfare" maximization is to avoid subjectivity problems with utility maximization. I can work to satisfy my own preferences because I know what they are. But I don't have direct access to others' preferences, so I can't measure their utility and I can't work to maximize it. In Economics, the concepts of Pareto efficiency and Kaldor-Hicks efficiency both work with subjective valuations, people can just decide whether a particular change would make them better off or not. That works fine for people making decisions for themselves or voluntary agreements with others. But third-party controllers are making rules that bind people who don't consent. They're making tradeoffs for people who don't get to veto them. And they can't read minds, so they don't know people's subjective utilities. They could try to measure subjective utilities. Market prices are a thing - but at best, they only give the subjective preferences of marginal buyers and sellers. (That is, if I buy a loaf of bread for$1, I might still buy it for $2 and the seller might still sell it for$0.50.) And not everything is or can be bought and sold. We can slightly improve on this with for example the concept of shadow prices but ultimately this just isn't going to work.

(Ellickson doesn't consider just asking people for their preferences. But that obviously doesn't work either because people can lie.)

And so third-party controllers need to act without access to people's subjective preferences, and make rules that don't reference them. Welfare serves as a crude but objective proxy to utility.

We can estimate welfare by using market prices, and looking at voluntary exchanges people have made. (Which is part of the reason for the "workaday affairs" restriction.) When a fence-maintenance credit is used to forgive a looking-after-my-house debit, that tells us something about how much one particular person values those things. This process is "sketchy and inexact", and we just admitted it doesn't give us subjective utilities - but that doesn't mean we can do any better than that.

To be clear, welfare doesn't just count material goods. Anything people might value is included, "such as parenthood, leisure, good health, high social status, and close personal relationships." Ellickson sometimes uses the word "wealth", and while he's not explicit about it, I take that to be the material component of welfare.

What welfare doesn't consider, as I understand it, is personal valuations of things. That is, for any given thing, its value is assumed to be the same for every member of society. "As a matter of personal ethics, you can aspire to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Because norm-makers don't know your subjective preferences, they can only ask you to do unto others as you would want to have done unto you if you were an ordinary person."

Ellickson doesn't give examples of what this means, so I'll have to try myself. In Shasta County, there's a norm of not getting too upset when someone else's cattle trespass on your land, provided they're not egregious about it. So I think it's safe to suppose that the objective loss in welfare from cattle trespass in Shasta County is low. Suppose, by some quirk of psychology, you found cattle trespass really unusually upsetting. Or maybe you have a particular patch of grass that has sentimental value to you. Cattle trespass would harm your utility a lot, but your welfare only a little - no more than anyone else's - and you'd still be bound by this norm. But if you had an objective reason to dislike cattle trespass more - perhaps because you grow an unusually valuable crop - then your welfare would be harmed more than normal. And so norms might be different. One Shasta County rancher reported that he felt more responsibility than normal to maintain a fence with a neighbor growing alfalfa.

Or consider noisiness and noise sensitivity. Most people get some amount of value from making noise - or maybe more accurately, from certain noisy actions. Talking on the phone, having sex, playing the drums. And most people get some amount of disvalue from hearing other people's noise. In the welfare calculus, there'd be some level of noisemaking that's objectively valued equal to some level of noise exposure. Then (according to hypothesis, in a close-knit group) norms would permit people to be that amount of noisy. If someone was noisier than that, their neighbors would be permitted to informally punish them. If a neighbor tried to punish someone less noisy than that, the neighbor would risk punishment themselves. The acceptable noise level would change depending on the time (objective), but not depending on just "I happen to be really bothered by noise" (subjective). What about "I have young children"? (Or, "some of the inhabitants of that house are young children".) Maybe - that's an objective fact that's likely to be relevant to the welfare calculus. Or "I have a verifiably diagnosed hearing disorder"? Still maybe, but it feels less likely. In part because it's less common, and in part because it's less visible. Both of those seem like they'd make it less… accesible? salient? to whatever process calculates welfare. And if you're unusually noise sensitive and the welfare function doesn't capture that, the cost would fall on you. You could ask people to be quiet (but then you'd probably owe them a favor); or you could offer them something they value more than noise-making; or you could learn to live with it (e.g. by buying noise-cancelling headphones).

So okay. One thing I have to say is, it seems really easy to fall into a self-justifying trap here. Ellickson criticizes functionalism for this, and maybe he doesn't fall into it himself. But did you notice when I did it a couple of paragraphs up? (I noticed it fairly fast, but it wasn't originally deliberate.) I looked at the norms in Shasta County and used those to infer a welfare function. If you do that, of course you find that norms maximize welfare.

To test the hypothesis, we instead need to figure out a welfare function without looking at the norms, and then show that the norms maximize it. In Shasta County, we'd need to figure out how much people disvalue cattle trespass by looking at those parts of their related behaviour that aren't constrained by norms. For example, there seems to be no norm against putting up more fences than they currently do, so they probably disvalue (the marginal cost of cattle tresspass avoided by a length of fence) less than they disvalue (the marginal cost of that length of fence).

How much freedom do we have in this process? If two researchers try it out, will they tell us similar welfare functions? If we look at the set of plausible welfare functions for a society, is the uncertainty correlated between axes? (Can we say "X is valued between $A and$B, Y is valued between $C and$D" or do we have to add "…but if Y is valued near $C, then X is valued near B"?) And even this kind of assumes there's no feedback from norms to the welfare function. Ellickson admits that possibility, and admits that it leads to indeterminacy, but thinks the risk is slight. (He seems to assume it would only happen if norms change the market price of a good - unlikely when the group in question is much smaller than the market.) I'm not so convinced. Suppose there's a norm of "everyone owns a gun and practices regularly". Then it's probably common for people to own super effective noise-cancelling headphones. And then they don't mind noisy neighbors so much, because they can wear headphones. That's… perhaps not quite changing the welfare function, because people still disvalue noisiness the same, they just have a tool to reduce noisiness? But it still seems important that this norm effectively reduces the cost of that tool. I dunno. (For further reading, Ellickson cites one person making this criticism and another responding to it. Both articles paywalled.) Separately, I wish Ellickson was clearer about the sorts of things he considers acceptable for a welfare function to consider, and the sorts of calculations he considers acceptable for them to perform. Subjective information is out, sure. But from discussion in the "workaday affairs" section, it seems that "I give you a dollar" is welfare-neutral, and we don't get that result just from eliminating subjective information. We do get it if we make sure the welfare function is linear in all its inputs, but that seems silly. I think we also get it if we also eliminate non-publicly-verifiable information. The welfare function would be linear in dollars, because I can pretend to have more or fewer dollars than I actually do. But it wouldn't need to be linear in the number of children I'm raising, because I can't really hide those. I feel like Ellickson may have been implicitly assuming a restriction along those lines, but I don't think he said so. Separately again, how closely does welfare correspond to utility? A utility monster couldn't become a welfare monster; I'm not sure if that's a feature or a bug, but it suggests the two can diverge considerably. A few chapters down, Ellickson does some formal game theory where the payoffs are in welfare; is it safe to ignore the possibility of "player gets higher welfare from this quadrant, but still prefers that quadrant"? It seems inevitable that some group members' utilities will get higher weighting in the welfare function than others'; people with invisible disabilities are likely to be fucked over. Ellickson admits that welfare maximization isn't the only thing we care about, but that leaves open the question of how much we should value it at all? Suppose Quiet Quentin is unusually sensitive to noise, and happy to wear drab clothing. Drab Debbie is unusually sensitive to loud fashion, and happy to be quiet. Each of them knows this. One day Debbie accidentally makes a normal amount of noise, that Quentin isn't (by norm) allowed to punish her for. But wearing a normally-loud shirt doesn't count as punishing her, so he does that. Debbie gets indignant, and makes another normally-loud noise in retaliation, and so on. No one is acting badly according to the welfare function, but it still seems like something's gone wrong here. Is there anything to stop this kind of thing from happening? It feels weird to me that things like parenthood and personal relationships are a component of the welfare function. Obviously they're a large part of people's subjective utility, but with so much variance that putting an objective value on them seems far too noisy. And what does a system of norms even do with that information?11 This one feels very out-there, but for completeness: the reason for using welfare instead of utility is that a norm can't reference people's individual preferences. Not just because they're subjective, but also because there's too many of them; "Alice can make loud noise at any time, but Bob can only make loud noise when Carol isn't home" would be far too complicated for a norm. But when people interact with people they know well, maybe subjectivity isn't a problem; maybe people get a decent handle on others' preferences. And then norms don't need to reference individual preferences, they can just tell people to take others' preferences into account. The norm could be "make loud noise if you value making noise more than others nearby value you not doing that". This feels like it wouldn't actually work at any sort of scale, and I don't fault Ellickson for not discussing it. Despite all this, I do think there's some "there" there. A decent amount of "there", even. I think Ellickson's use of welfare should be given a long, hard look, but I think it would come out of that ordeal mostly recognizable. ### Clarification: Dynamics There's another clarification that I think is needed. The phrase "develop and maintain" is a claim about dynamics, partial derivatives, conditions at equilibrium. It's not a claim that "all norms always maximize welfare" but that "norms move in the direction of maximizing welfare". Ellickson never says this explicitly, but I think he'd basically agree. Partly I think that because the alternative is kind of obviously ridiculous - norms don't change immediately when conditions change. But he does also hint at it. For example, he speculates that a group of court cases around whaling arose because whalers were having trouble transitioning from one set of norms to a more utilitarian set (more on this later). Elsewhere, he presents a simple model of a society evolving over time to phase out certain rewards in favor of punishments. Taken to an extreme, this weakens the hypothesis significantly. If someone points at a set of norms that seems obviously nonutilitarian, we can just say "yeah, well, maybe they haven't finished adapting yet". I don't think Ellickson would go that far. I think he'd say the dynamics are strong enough that he can write a 300-page book about the hypothesis, not explicitly admit that it's a hypothesis about dynamics, and it wouldn't seem all that weird. Still, I also think this weakens the book significantly. When we admit that it's a hypothesis about dynamics, there's a bunch of questions we can and should ask. Probably the most obvious is "how fast/powerful are these dynamics". But there's also "what makes them faster or slower/more or less powerful" and "to what extent is the process random versus deterministic" and "how large are the second derivatives". (For those last two, consider: will norms sometimes update in such a way as to make things worse, and only on average will tend to make things better? Will norms sometimes start moving in a direction, then move too far in that direction and have to move back?) I'd be interested in "what do the intermediate states look like" and "how much do the individual personalities within the group change things". I don't even necessarily expect Ellickson to have good answers to these questions. I just think they're important to acknowledge. (I'd want to dock Ellickson some points here even if it didn't ultimately matter. I think "saying what we mean" is better than "saying things that are silly enough the reader will notice we probably don't mean them and figure out what we do mean instead".) I think this is my biggest criticism of the book. ### Substance With all these clarifications weakening the hypothesis, does it still have substance? Yes, Ellickson says. It disagrees with Hobbes and other legal centrists; with "prominent scholars such as Jon Elster who regard many norms as dysfunctional"; with Marxism, which sees norms as serving only a small subset of a group; with people who think norms are influenced by nonutilitarian considerations like justice; and with "the belief, currently ascendant in anthropology and many of the humanities, that norms are highly contingent and, to the extent that they can be rationalized at all, should be seen as mainly serving symbolic functions unrelated to people's perceptions of costs and benefits." And it's falsifiable. We can identify norms, by looking at patterns of behavior and sanctions, and aspirational statements. And we can measure the variables affecting close-knittedness. ("For example, if three black and three white fire fighters belonging to a racially polarized union were suddenly to be adrift in a well-stocked lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, as an objective matter the social environment of the six would have become close-knit and they would be predicted to cooperate."12) But what we can't do is quantify the objective costs and benefits of various possible norm systems. So we fall back to intuitive assessments, looking at alternatives and pointing out problems they'd cause. This is not quite everything I'd hoped for from the word "falsifiable", but it'll do. Ellickson spends the next few chapters doing this sort of thing, at varying levels of abstraction but often with real-world examples. He also makes occasional concrete predictions, admitting that if those fail the hypothesis would be weakened. I'll only look at a few of his analyses. ### Lying, and things like it A common contract norm forbids people from lying about what they're trading. The hypothesis predicts we'd find such norms among any close-knit group of buyers and sellers. I bring this up for the exceptions that Ellickson allows: Falsehoods threaten to decrease welfare because they are likely to increase others' costs of eventually obtaining accurate information. Honesty is so essential to the smooth operation of a system of communication that all close-knit societies can be expected to endeavor to make their members internalize, and hence self-enforce, norms against lying. Of course a no-fraud norm, like any broadly stated rule, is ambiguous around the edges. Norms may tolerate white lies, practical joking, and the puffing of products. By hypothesis, however, these exceptions would not permit misinformation that would be welfare threatening. The "entertaining deceivers" that anthropologists delight in finding are thus predicted not to be allowed to practice truly costly deceptions. [Footnotes removed; one mentions that "A cross-cultural study of permissible practical joking would provide a good test of the hypothesis."] It's not clear to me why norms would allow such exceptions, which still increase costs of information and are presumably net-negative. To sketch a possible answer: the edge cases are likely to be where the value of enforcing the norm is lower. I'd roughly expect the social costs of violations to be lower, and the transaction costs of figuring out if there was a violation to be higher. (I feel like I've read a sequence of three essays arguing about one particular case; they wouldn't have been necessary if the case had been a blatant lie.13) So, okay, minor violations don't get punished. But if minor violations don't get punished when they happen, then (a) you don't actually have a norm against them; and (b) to the extent that some people avoid those violations anyway, you've set up an asshole filter (that is, you're rewarding vice and punishing virtue). So plausibly, the ideal situation is for it to be common knowledge that such things are considered fine to do. We might expect this to just push the problem one level up; so that instead of litigating minor deceptions, you're litigating slightly-less-minor deceptions. But these deceptions have a higher social cost, so more value to litigating them, so maybe it's fine. (Aside, it's not clear to me why the hypothesis specifically expects such norms to be internalized, rather than enforced some other way. Possible answer: you do still need external enforcement of these norms, but that enforcement will be costly. It'll be cheaper if you can mostly expect people to obey them even if they don't expect to get caught, so that relies on self-enforcement. But is that a very general argument that almost all norms should be internalized? Well, maybe almost all norms are internalized. In any case, I don't think that clause was very important.) ### Pandering to the SSC audience: dead whales The second-most-detailed case study in the book is whalers. If a whale is wounded by one ship and killed by another, who keeps it? What if a dead whale under tow is lost in a storm, and found by another ship? The law eventually developed opinions on these questions, but when it did, it enshrined preexisting norms that the whalers themselves had developed. Ellickson describes a few possible norms that wouldn't be welfare maximizing for them, and which in fact weren't used. For example, a whale might simply belong to whichever ship physically held the carcass; but that would allow one ship to wait for another to weaken a whale, then attach a stronger line and pull it in. Or it might belong to the ship that killed it; but that would often be ambiguous, and ships would have no incentive to harvest dead whales or to injure without killing. Or it might belong to whichever ship first lowered a boat to pursue it, so long as the boat remained in fresh pursuit; but that would encourage them to launch too early, and give claim to a crew who might not be best placed to take advantage of it. Or it might belong to whichever ship first had a reasonable chance of capturing it, so long as it remained in fresh pursuit; but that would be far too ambiguous. In practice they used three different sets of norms. Two gave full ownership to one party. The "fast-fish/loose-fish" rule said that you owned a whale as long as it was physically connected to your boat or ship. The "first iron" (or "iron holds the whale") rule said that the first whaler to land a harpoon could claim a whale, as long as they remained in fresh pursuit, and as long as whoever found it hadn't started cutting in by then. Whalers used these norms according to the fishery14 they hunted from, and each was suited to the whales usually hunted from that fishery. Right whales are weak swimmers, so they don't often escape once you've harpooned them. Fast-fish works well for hunting them. Sperm whales do often break free, and might be hunted by attaching the harpoon to a drogue, a wooden float that would tire the whale and mark its location. The concept of "fresh pursuit" makes first-iron more ambiguous than fast-fish, which isn't ideal, but it allows more effective means of hunting. (Sperm whales also swim in schools, so ideally you want to kill a bunch of them and then come back for the corpses. If you killed a whale, you could plant a flag in it, which gave you claim for longer than a harpoon. You had to be given reasonable time to come back, and might take ownership even if the taker had started cutting in. Ellickson doesn't say explicitly, but it sounds like American whalers in the Pacific might have had this rule, but not American whalers operating from New England, for unclear reasons.) The other was a split-ownership rule. A fishery in the Galápagos Islands split ownership 50/50 between whoever attached a drogue and whoever took the carcass. This norm gave whalers an incentive to fetter lots of them and let others harvest them later, but it's not clear how or why that fishery developed different rules than others. On the New England coast, whalers would hunt fast finback whales with bomb-lances; the whales would sink and wash up on shore days later. The killer was entitled to the carcass, less a small fee to whoever found it. This norm was binding even on people unconnected with the whaling industry, and a court upheld that in at least one case. I'm not sure how anyone knew who killed any given whale. Perhaps there just weren't enough whalers around for it to be ambiguous? (Ellickson notes that the "50/50 split versus small fee" questions is about rules versus standards. Standards let you consider individual cases in more detil, taking into account how much each party contributed to the final outcome, and have lower deadweight losses. But rules have fewer disputes about how they should be applied, and thus lower transaction costs.) So this is all plausibly welfare-maximizing, but that's not good enough. Ellickson admits that this sort of ex post explanation risks being "too pat". He points out two objections you could raise. First, why did the norms depend on the fishery, and not the fish? (That would have been more complicated, because there are dozens of species of whale. And you had to have your boats and harpoons ready, so you couldn't easily change your technique according to what you encountered.) More interestingly, what about overfishing? If norms had imposed catch quotas, or protected calves and cows, they might have been able to keep their stock high. Ellickson has two answers. One is that that would have improved global welfare, but not necessarily the welfare of the current close-knit group of whalers, as they couldn't have stopped anyone else from joining the whaling business. This is a reminder that norms may be locally welfare-maximizing but globally harmful. His other answer is… that that might not be the sort of thing that norms are good at? Which feels like a failure of the hypothesis. Here's the relevant passage: Establishment of an appropriate quota system for whale fishing requires both a sophisticated scientific understanding of whale breeding and also an international system for monitoring worldwide catches. For a technically difficult and administratively complicated task such as this, a hierarchical organization, such as a formal trade association or a legal system, would likely outperform the diffuse social forces that make norms. Whalers who recognized the risk of overfishing thus could rationally ignore that risk when making norms on the ground that norm-makers could make no cost-justified contribution to its solution. [Footnote removed] There's some subtlety here, like maybe he's trying to say "norms aren't particularly good at this, so if there's another plausible source of rules, norm-makers would defer to them; but if there wasn't, norm-makers would go ahead and do it themselves". That feels implausible on the face of it though, and while I'm no expert, my understanding is that no other group did step up to prevent overfishing in time. This section is one place where Ellickson talks about the hypothesis as concerning dynamics. There are only five American court cases on this subject, and four of them involved whales caught between 1852 and 1862 in the Sea of Okhotsk; the other was an 1872 decision about a whale caught in that sea in an unstated year. Americans had been whaling for more than a century, so why did that happen? The whales in that area were bowheads, for which fast-fish may have been more utilitarian than first-iron. Ellickson speculates that "American whalers, accustomed to hunting sperm whales in the Pacific, may have had trouble making this switch." (He does give an alternate explanation, that by that time the whaling industry was in decline and the community was becoming less close-knit. "The deviant whalers involved in the litigated cases, seeing themselves nearing their last periods of play, may have decided to defect.") There's something that stuck out to me especially in this section, which I don't think Ellickson ever remarked upon. A lot of norms seem to bend on questions that are unambiguous given the facts but where the facts are unprovable. If I take a whale that you're in fresh pursuit of, I can tell everyone that you'd lost its trail and only found me days later. Who's to know? Well, in the case of whalers, the answer is "everyone on both of our ships". That's too many people to maintain a lie. But even where it's just one person's word against another's, this seems mostly fine. If someone has a habit of lying, that's likely to build as a reputation even if no one can prove any of the lies. ### Remedies In private (i.e. non-criminal) law, when someone is found to be deviant, the standard remedy is to award damages. That doesn't always work. They might not have the assets to make good; or they might just be willing to pay that price to disrupt someone's world. So the legal system also has the power of injunctions, requiring or forbidding certain future actions. And if someone violates an injunction, the legal system can incarcerate them. Norms have analagous remedies. Instead of damages, one can simply adjust a mental account. Instead of an injunction, one can offer a more-or-less veiled threat. Instead of incarcerating someone, one can carry out that threat. Incarceration itself isn't a credible threat ("kidnapping is apt both to trigger a feud and to result in a criminal prosecution"), but other forms of illegal violence are. ("Indeed, according to Donald Black, a good portion of crime is actually undertaken to exercise social control." cite) Remedial norms require a grievant to apply self-help measures in an escalating sequence. Generally it starts at give the deviant notice of the debt; goes through gossip truthfully about it; and ends with sieze or destroy some of their assets. Gossip can be omitted when it would be obviously pointless, such as against outsiders. This is consistent with the hypothesis, since the less destructive remedies come first in the sequence. It's also consistent with practice in Shasta County, and we see it as well in the lobstermen of Maine when someone sets a trap in someone else's territory. They'll start by attaching a warning to a trap, sometimes sabotaging it without damaging it. If that doesn't work, they destroy the trap. They don't seem to use gossip, perhaps because they can't identify the intruder or aren't close-knit with him. "Sieze or destroy" - which should you do? Destroying assets is a deadweight loss, so it might seem that siezing them would be better for total welfare. But destruction has advantages too. Mainly, it's more obviously punitive, and so less likely to be seen as aggression and to lead to a feud. The Shasta County practice of driving a cow somewhere inconvenient isn't something you'd do for personal gain. But also, it's easier to calibrate (you can't sieze part of a cow, but you can wound it instead of killing). And it can be done surreptitiously, which is sometimes desired (though open punishment is usually prefered, to maintain public records). ### Incentives all the way up We don't have a good understanding of how norms work to provide order. But the key is "altruistic" norm enforcement by third parties. (Those are Ellickson's scare quotes, not mine.) How do we reconcile that with the assumption of self-interested behavior? One possibility is internalized norms, where we feel guilty if we fail to act to enforce norms, or self-satisfied if we do act. (I feel like this is stretching the idea of self-interest, but then we can just say we reject that assumption, so whatever.) Another is that the seemingly altruistic enforcers are themselves motivated by incentives supplied by other third parties. This seems to have an infinite regress. Ellickson gives as example a young man who tackled a pickpocket to retrieve someone's wallet. The woman he helped wrote into the New York Times to publicly thank him, so there's his incentive. But we also need incentives for her to write that letter, and for the editor to publish it, and so on. (I'm not actually entirely sure where "so on" goes. I guess we also need incentive for people to read letters like that. Though according to Yudkowsky's Law of Ultrafinite Recursion there's no need to go further than the editor.) This infinite regress seems bad for the chances of informal cooperation. But it might actually help. Ellickson's not entirely detailed about his argument here, so I might be filling in the blanks a bit, but here's what I think he's going for. Suppose there's a virtuous third-party enforcer "at the highest level of social control". That is, someone who acts on every level of the infinite regress. They'll sanction primary behavior as appropriate to enforce norms; but also sanction the people who enforce (or fail to enforce) those norms themselves; and the people who enforce (or fail to enforce) the enforcement of those norms; and so on, if "so on" exists. Then that enforcer could create "incentives for cooperative activity that cascade down and ultimately produce welfare-maximizing primary behavior." They don't need to do all the enforcement themselves, but by performing enforcement on every level, they encourage others to perform enforcement on every level. This might work even with just the perception of such an enforcer. God could be this figure, but so could "a critical mass of self-disciplined elders or other good citizens, known to be committed to the cause of cooperation". Art and literature could help too. ### Anarchy in academia Academia seems to have a disproportionate number of legal centrists. So you might think professors would be unusually law-abiding. Not when it comes to photocopying. The law says how they should go about copying materials for use in class: fair-use doctrine is quite restrictive unless they get explicit permission, which can be slow to obtain15. Professors decide they don't really like this, and they substitute their own set of norms. The Association of American Publishers tells us that campus copyright violation is (Ellickson quotes) "widespread, flagrant, and egregious". They seem to be right. Ellickson asked law professors directly, and almost all admit to doing it - though not for major portions of books. The managers of law school copy rooms don't try to enforce the rules, they let the professors police themselves. Several commercial copy centres made multiple copies for him of an article from a professional journal. "I have overheard a staff member of a copy center tell a patron that copyright laws prevented him from photocopying more than 10 percent of a book presented as a hardcopy original; the patron then asked whether he himself could use the copy center's equipment to accomplish that task and was told that he could."16 So professors' norms seem to permit illegal repeated copying of articles and minor parts of books. That lets them avoid knowing fair-use doctrine in detail. And since the law would require them to write (and respond to) many requests for consent, it lets them avoid that too. Professors sense that Congress is unlikely to make welfare-maximizing copyright law. (Publishers can hire better lobbyists than they can.) This lets them frame their norms as principled subversion. I'm not sure if it's particularly relevant though - if copyright law was welfare-maximizing overall, but not for the professors, I think the hypothesis would still predict them to develop their own norms. But thinking back to the stuff on symbolism, maybe "being able to frame your actions as principled subversion" is a component of welfare. Why will they copy articles, but not large portions of books? Authors of articles don't get paid much for them, and for no charge will mail reprints to colleagues and allow excerpts to be included in compilations. "It appears that most academic authors are so eager for readers to know and cite their work that they usually regard a royalty of zero or even less as perfectly acceptable. For them small-scale copying is not a misappropriation but a service." But book authors do receive royalties, and large-scale copying would diminish those significantly. So according to the hypothesis, this restraint comes from wanting to protect author-professors' royalty incomes, not from caring about publishers' and booksellers' revenues. (Though they might start to care about those, if they thought there might be a shortage of publishers and booksellers. They also might care more about university-affiliated publishers and booksellers.) (There's a question that comes to mind here, that Ellickson doesn't bring up. Why do professors decline to copy books written by non-academics? I can think of a few answers that all seem plausible: that this is a simpler norm; that it's not necessarily clear who is and isn't an academic; and that it makes it easier to sell the "principled subversion" thing.) Notably, in the two leading cases around academic copying, the plaintiffs were publishers and the primary defendant was an off-campus copy center. This is consistent with the hypothesis. In these situations, those two parties have the most distant relationship. Publishers have no use for copy centers, and copy centers don't buy many books, so neither of them has informal power over the other. Even more notably, in one of these cases, university-run copy centers weren't included as defendants - that might anger the professors, who do have power over publishers. ### Counterexamples? But Ellickson admits that all of this could be cherry-picking. So he looks at two well-known cases that he expects people to point to as counterexamples. (I hadn't heard of either of them, so I can't rule out that he's cherry-picking here, too. But I don't expect it.) The first is the Ik of northern Uganda. These are a once-nomadic tribe with a few thousand members. Colin Turnbull found an unsettling pattern of inhumanity among them. Parents were indifferent to the welfare of their children after infancy, and people took delight in others' suffering. In Turnbull's words: "men would watch a child with eager anticipation as it crawled toward the fire, then burst into gay and happy laughter as it plunged a skinny hand into the coals. … Anyone falling down was good for a laugh too, particularly if he was old or weak or blind." Ellickson replies that the Ik were "literally starving to death" at the time of Turnbull's visit. A few years prior, their traditional hunting ground had been turned into a national park, and now they were forced to survive by farming a drought-plagued area. (Turnbull "briefly presented these facts" but didn't emphasize them.) "Previously cooperative in hunting, the Ik became increasingly inhumane as they starved. Rather than undermining the hypothesis, the tragic story of the Ik thus actually supports the hypothesis' stress on close-knittedness: cooperation among the Ik withered only as their prospects for continuing relationships ebbed." [Footnote removed.] I note that Wikipedia disputes this account. "[Turnbull] seems to have misrepresented the Ik by describing them as traditionally being hunters and gatherers forced by circumstance to become farmers, when there is ample linguistic and cultural evidence that the Ik were farmers long before they were displaced from their hunting grounds after the formation of Kidepo National Park - the event that Turnbull says forced the Ik to become farmers." To the extent that Ellickson's reply relies on this change in circumstances, it apparently (according to Wikipedia) falls short. But perhaps the important detail isn't that they switched from hunting to farming, but that they switched from "not literally starving to death" to "literally starving to death" (because of a recent drought). Ellickson also cites (among others) Peter Singer as criticising Turnbull in The Expanding Circle, pp 24-26. Looking it up, Singer points out that, even if we take Turnbull's account at face value, Ik society retains an ethical code. Turnbull refers to disputes over the theft of berries which reveal that, although stealing takes place, the Ik retain notions of private property and the wrongness of theft. Turnbull mentions the Ik's attachment to the mountains and the reverence with which they speak of Mount Morungole, which seems to be a sacred place for them. He observes that the Ik like to sit together in groups and insist on living together in villages. He describes a code that has to be followed by an Ik husband who intends to beat his wife, a code that gives the wife a chance to leave first. He reports that the obligations of a pact of mutual assistance known as nyot are invariably carried out. He tells us that there is a strict prohibition on Ik killing each other or even drawing blood. The Ik may let each other starve, but they apparently do not think of other Ik as they think of any non-human animals they find - that is, as potential food. A normal well-fed reader will take the prohibition of cannibalism for granted, but under the circumstances in which the Ik were living human flesh would have been a great boost to the diets of stronger Ik; that they refrain from this source of food is an example of the continuing strength of their ethical code despite the crumbling of almost everything that had made their lives worth living. This seems to support the hypothesis too. I do think there's some tension between these two defenses. Roughly: their circumstances made them the way they were; and anyway, they weren't that way after all. But they don't seem quite contradictory. The other potential counterexample is the the peasonts in Mentegrano, a southern Italian village, as studied by Edward Banfield. Banfield found no horrors as graphic as [those of the Ik], but concluded that the Italian peasants he studied were practitioners of what he called "amoral familialism," a moral code that asked its adherents to "maximize the material, short-run advantage of the nuclear family; assume all others will do likewise." According to Banfield, this attitude hindered cooperation among families and helped keep the villagers mired in poverty. [One footnote removed; minor style editing.] Ellickson has two replies here. Firstly, the evidence is arguably consistent with the hypothesis: some of Banfield's reviewers suggested that, going by Banfield's evidence, the villagers had adapted as well as possible to their environment. Secondly, Banfield's evidence often seems to contradict Banfield's thesis: neighbors have good relationships and reciprocate favors. Banfield apparently discounted that because they did so out of self-interest, but it's still compatible with the hypothesis. (I don't think these replies are in the same kind of tension.) For a more general possible counterexample, Ellickson points at primitive tribes believing in magic and engaging in brutal rites. (This is something I did have in my mind while reading, so I'm glad he addressed it.) Some anthropologists are good at finding utilitarian explanations for such things, but Ellickson rejects that answer. Instead, he simply predicts that these practices would become abandoned as the tribe becomes better educated. "A tribe that used to turn to rain dancing during droughts thus is predicted to phase out that ritual after tribe members learn more meteorology. Tribes are predicted to abandon dangerous puberty rites after members obtain better medical information. As tribe members become more familiar with science in general, the status of their magicians and witch doctors should fall. As a more contemporary example, faith in astrology should correlate negatively with knowledge of astronomy. These propositions are potentially falsifiable." This was my guess as to an answer before I reached this part of the book, which I think says good things about both myself and the book. And I basically agree with his prediction. But I also think it's not entirely satisfactory. It seems like we need to add a caveat to the hypothesis for this kind of thing, "if people believe that rain dances bring rain, then norms will encourage rain dances". And I kind of want to say that's fair enough, you can't expect norms to be smarter than people. But on the other hand, I think the thesis of The Secret of Our Success and the like is that actually, that's exactly what you can expect norms to be. And it seems like a significant weakening of the hypothesis - do we now only predict norms to optimize in ways that group members understand? Or to optimize not for welfare but for "what group members predict their future welfare will be"? I dunno, and that's a bad sign. But if the hypothesis doesn't lose points for rain dances, it probably shouldn't gain points for manioc. (Though as Ben Hoffman points out, the cost-benefit of manioc processing isn't immediately obvious. Maybe the hypothesis should lose points for both manioc and rain dances.) If a ritual is cheap to implement, I'd be inclined to give it a pass. There's costs of obtaining information, and that could apply to whatever process develops norms like it does to individuals. Plus, it would only take a small benefit to be welfare-maximizing, and small benefits are probably less obvious than larger ones. (Though if that's what's going on, it's not clear whether we should expect education to phase the rituals out.) But for vicious and dangerous rituals, this doesn't seem sufficient. Ellickson mentions a tribe where they "cut a finger from the hand of each of a man's close female relatives after he dies"; what medical knowledge are they lacking that makes this seem welfare-maximizing? I think this is my biggest criticism of the hypothesis. Another possible counterexample worth considering would be Jonestown, and cults in general. (h/t whoever it was brought this to my attention.) I don't feel like I know enough about these to comment, but I'm going to anyway. I wonder if part of what's going on is that cults effectively don't have the rule of law - they make it costly for you to leave, or to bring in outside enforcers, and so you can't really enforce your property rights or bodily autonomy. If so, it seems like the "workaday" assumption is violated, and the hypothesis isn't in play. Or, what about dueling traditions? We might again say the "workaday" assumption (that brings rules against murder) is violated, but that seems like a cheat. My vague understanding, at least of pistol dueling as seen in Hamilton, is it was less lethal than we might expect; and fell out of favor when better guns made it more lethal. But neither of these feels enough to satisfy, and we should demand satisfaction. Did the group gain something that was worth the potential loss of life? Alternatively, were such things only ever a transition phase? ### Formal game theory Something I haven't touched on is Ellickson's use of formal game theory. To do justice to that section, I split it into its own essay. The tl;dr is that I think he handled it reasonably well, with forgiveable blind spots but not outright mistakes that I noticed. I don't feel like I need to discount the rest of the book (on subjects I know less well) based on his treatment of game theory. ### Summing up Is this a good book? Yes, very much so. I found it fascinating both on the level of details and the level of ideas. Ellickson is fairly readable, and occasionally has a dry turn of phrase that I love. ("A drowning baby has neither the time nor the capacity to contract for a rescue.") And I don't know if this came across in my review, but he's an unusually careful thinker. He owns up to weaknesses. He rejects bad arguments in favor of his position. He'll make a claim and then offer citations of people disagreeing. He makes predictions and admits that if they fail the hypothesis will be weakened. I think he made some mistakes, and I think his argument could have been clearer in places, but overall I'm impressed with his ability to think. Is the hypothesis true? I… don't think so, but if we add one more caveat, then maybe. The hypothesis says that norms maximize welfare. Note that although Ellickson calls the welfare function "objective", I think a better word might be "intersubjective". The welfare function is just, like, some amorphous structure that factors out when you look at the minds of group members. Except we can't look at their minds, we have to look at behaviour. The same is true of norms themselves: to figure out what the norms are in a society we ultimately just have to look at how people in that society behave. And so if we're to evaluate the hypothesis properly, I think we need to: look at certain types of behaviour, and infer something that's reasonable to call "norms"; and then look at non-normative behavior - the behaviour that the inferred system of norms doesn't dictate - and infer something that's reasonable to call a "welfare function". And then the hypothesis is that the set of norms will maximize the welfare function. ("Maximize over what?" I almost forgot to ask. I think, maximize over possible systems of norms that might have been inferred from plausible observed behaviour?) Put like that it sounds kind of impossible. I suspect it's… not too hard to do an okay job? Like I'd guess that if we tried to do this, we'd be able to find things that we'd call "norms" and "a welfare function" that mostly fit and are only a little bit circular; and we wouldn't have an overabundance of choice around where we draw the lines; and we could test the hypothesis on them and the hypothesis would mostly come out looking okay. But to the extent that we can only do "okay" - to the extent that doing this right is just fundamentally hard - I suspect we'll find that the hypothesis also fails. There are problems which are known to be fundamentally hard in important ways, and we can't program a computer to reliably solve them. Sometimes people say that slime molds have solved them and this means something about the ineffable power of nature. But they're wrong. The slime molds haven't solved anything we can't program a computer to solve, because we can program a computer to emulate the slime molds.17 What happens is that the slime molds have found a pretty decent approach to solving the problem, that usually works under conditions the slime molds usually encounter. But the slime molds will get the wrong answer too, if the specific instance of the problem is pathological in certain ways. In this analogy, human behavior is a slime mold. It changes according to rules evaluated on local conditions. (Ellickson sometimes talks about "norm-makers" as though they're agents, but that feels like anthropomorphising. I expect only a minority of norms will have come about through some agentic process.) It might be that, in doing so, it often manages to find pretty good global solutions to hard problems, and this will look like norms maximizing welfare. But when things are set up right, there'd be another, better solution. (I'm not sure I've got this quite right, but I don't think Ellickson has, either.) So I want to add a caveat acknowledging that sort of thing. I don't know how to put it succinctly. I suspect that simply changing "maximize" in the hypothesis to "locally maximize" weakens it too far, but I dunno. With this additional caveat, is the hypothesis true? I still wouldn't confidently say "yes", for a few reasons. My main inside-view objections are the ritual stuff and duelling, but there's also the outside-view "this is a complicated domain that I don't know well". (I only thought of duelling in a late draft of this review; how many similar things are there that I still haven't thought of?) But it does feel to me like a good rule of thumb, at least, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's stronger than that. ### Further questions I want to finish up with some further questions. • The world seems to be getting more atomic, with less social force being applied to people. Does that result in more legal force? Ellickson gives a brief answer: "In [Donald Black's] view, the state has recently risen in importance as lawmakers have striven to fill the void created by the decline of the family, clan, and village." (Also: "increasing urbanization, the spread of liability insurance, and the advent of the welfare state". But Black speculates it'll decline in future because of increasing equality. And although the number of lawyers in the US has increased, litigation between individuals other than divorce remains "surprisingly rare".) • Can I apply this to my previous thoughts on the responsibility of open source maintainers? When I try, two things come to mind. First, maintainers know more about the quality of their code than users. Thus, if we require maintainers to put reputation on the line when "selling" their code, we (partially) transfer costs of bad code to the people who best know those costs and are best able to control them. So that's a way to frame the issue that I don't remember having in mind when I wrote the post, that points in the same directions I was already looking. Cool. Second, I feel like in that post I probably neglected to think about transaction costs of figuring out whether someone was neglecting their responsibility? Which seems like an important oversight. • To test the hypothesis, I'd be tempted to look at more traditions and see whether those are (at least plausibly) welfare-maximizing. But a caveat: are traditions enforced through norms? I'd guess mostly yes, but some may not be enforced, and some may be enforced through law. In those cases the hypothesis doesn't concern itself with them. • Making predictions based on the hypothesis seems difficult. Saying that one set of norms will increase welfare relative to another set might be doable, but how can you be confident you've identified the best possible set? Ellickson does make predictions, and I don't feel like he's stretching too far - though I can't rule it out. But I'm not sure I'd be able to make the same predictions independently. How can we develop and test this skill? • Sometimes a close-knit group will fracture. What sort of things cause that? What does it look like when it happens? What happens to the norms it was maintaining? • What are some follow-up things to read? Ellickson approvingly cites The Behavior of Law a bunch. If we want skepticism, he cites Social Norms and Economic Theory a few times. At some point I ran across Norms in a Wired World which looks interesting and cites Ellickson, but that's about all I know of it. • How does this apply to the internet? I'd note a few things. Pseudonymity (or especially anonymity) and transience will reduce close-knittedness, as you only have limited power over someone who can just abandon their identity. To the extent that people do have power, it may not be broadly distributed; on Twitter for example, I'd guess your power is roughly a function of how many followers you have, which is wildly unequal. On the other hand, public-by-default interactions increase close-knittedness. I do think that e.g. LessWrong plausibly counts as close-knit. The default sanction on reddit is voting, and it seems kind of not-great that the default sanction is so low-bandwidth. For an added kick or when it's not clear what the voting is for, someone can write a comment ("this so much"; "downvoted for…"). That comment will have more weight if it gets upvoted itself, and/or comes from a respected user, and/or gets the moderator flag attached to it. Reddit also has gilding as essentially a super-upvote. For sanctioning remedial behavior, people can comment on it ("thanks for the gold", "why is this getting downvoted?") and vote on those comments. But some places also have meta-moderation as an explicit mechanism. • How much information is available about historical norms and the social conditions they arose in? Enough to test the hypothesis? • There's a repeated assumption that if someone has extraordinary needs then it's welfare maximizing for the cost to fall on them instead of other people. I'm not sure how far Ellickson would endorse that; my sense is that he thinks it's a pretty good rule of thumb, but I'm not sure he ever investigates an instance of it in enough detail to tell whether it's false. It would seem to antipredict norms of disability accomodation, possibly including curb cuts. (Possibly not, because those turn out to benefit lots of people. But then, curb cuts are enforced by law, not norm.) This might be a good place to look for failures of the hypothesis, but it's also highly politicized which might make it hard to get good data. • Ellickson sometimes suggests that poor people will be more litigous because they have their legal fees paid. We should be able to check that. If it's wrong, that doesn't necessarily mean the hypothesis is wrong; there are other factors to consider, like whether poor people have time and knowledge to go to court. But it would be a point in favor of something like "the hypothesis is underspecified relative to the world", such that trying to use it to make predictions is unlikely to work. • Is Congress close-knit? Has that changed recently? Is it a good thing for it to be close-knit? (Remember, norms maximizing the welfare of congresspeople don't necessarily maximize the welfare of citizens.) • Does this work at a level above people? Can we (and if so, when can we) apply it to organizations like companies, charities, and governments? • Suppose the book's analysis is broadly true. Generally speaking, can we use this knowledge for good? 1. In this review, I use the present tense. But the book was published in 1991, based on research carried out in the 1980s. 2. Something like this is familiar to me from the days when most of my friendships took place in pubs. Small favours, even with specific monetary value, would typically be repaid in drinks and not in cash. Once, apparently after a disappointing sexual experience, I was asked my opinion on the exchange rate between drinks and orgasms. It strikes me that your neighbor is still clearly worse off than if your goat hadn't eaten his tomatoes. He's gone from having tomatoes-now to only having future-tomatoes. But that means your neighbor has no reason to be careless with his tomatoes. And helping to replant may encourage you to control your goat more than paying money would. 3. Ellickson never says explicitly what one of these is, but my read is a small ranch, more a home than a business and operated more for fun than profit. Only a handful of animals or possibly none at all, and sometimes crops. 4. If you want a teaser, the first three chapters were based on his previous article Of Coase and Cattle (1986). I haven't compared closely, but they seem to have a lot of text in common. I should note here that I read part one a few years ago. I took reasonably detailed notes, with the intent of editing them into something worth publishing before moving on to part two. Then I didn't do that. My review of part one is largely based on my notes, although I have skimmed or reread large amounts of it. I read part two recently, specifically for this contest. 5. He was a founding member of the American Law and Economics Association in 1991, and its President 2000-2001. 6. "This counterintuitive proposition states, in its strongest form, that when transaction costs are zero a change in the rule of liability will have no effect on the allocation of resources. … This theorem has undoubtedly been both the most fruitful, and the most controversial, proposition to arise out of the law-and-economics movement." The paper which first presented the theorem used cattle trespass as an example, directly inspiring the study in part one. 7. Ellickson offers citations but (apart from Shasta County) no elaboration on these. 8. Ellickson makes two points. First, that ranchers are more familiar than ranchette owners with barbed-wire fencing. To some extent that seems circular, since they're the ones who are expected to know about it, but it's also in part because many ranchette owners have moved from the city. Second, that ranchers can fence in their own herds unilaterally, while victims would have to coordinate; motorists in particular would have trouble with that, and arguably they benefit the most. But motorists aren't part of the relevant close-knit group, so we should ignore them for this analysis. And as far as I know the other noteworthy victims are all landowners, who don't need to coordinate to protect their own interests. But: even if victims wouldn't need to coordinate, they'd all need to act individually, and acquiring the skills would be a cost to them. Ranchers would presumably still need those skills, and even if not, there are presumably fewer of them. So it seems cheaper for all ranchers to acquire the skills, than all of their potential victims. 9. Of course, since this example was a generator of the hypothesis, that says little by itself. This isn't a big deal, Ellickson looks outside Shasta County plenty, I'm just pointing it out because it's important to notice things like this. 10. No, really. This isn't him saying one thing and me saying "well that only works if…". He says explicitly that the hypothesis "assumes that norm-makers in close-knit groups would subscribe to an unalloyed version of this principle". 11. Actually, for parenthood, a plausible answer does come to mind: deciding who society celebrates as parents (rich couples who can mostly pay the costs of parenthood themselves) and who it shames (poor single mothers who socialize the costs). Then I guess the hypothesis predicts that you're allowed to socialize the costs of parenthood to the same extent that parenthood is welfare-positive. Except… that doesn't really work, because the total welfare change seems like it would be more-or-less the same whether the costs are borne by the parents or by society. I dunno, I think I'm still confused. 12. This is kind of a weird example, as he all-but-admits in a footnote: "This statement assumes the continuing presence of foundational rules that forbid the firefighters from killing, maiming or imprisoning each other." If we want to know what actually happens in this situation, he points us to Dudley and Stephens and a book named Cannibalism and the Common Law 13. I haven't read these recently, and might be misremembering. 14. Minor complaint: I wish Ellickson had been clearer about what exactly a "fishery" is. Did two boats from different fisheries ever encounter each other? 15. In one case study, 23 permission letters were sent to publishers and only 17 received a response in six months. Ellickson doesn't say how many were denied. 16. I looked it up out of curiosity. Although the 10% figure may have come from the relevant guidelines, they're unsurprisingly a lot more restrictive than that. For prose the maximum seems to be "1,000 words or 10% of the work, whichever is less, but in any event a minimum of 500 words." 17. At least, if we can't in practice, there's nothing stopping us in theory. I'm not sure if we know exactly what the slime molds are doing. But I'm sure that if we did know, there wouldn't turn out to be anything fundamentally mysterious and unprogrammable-in-computers about it. Posted on 10 July 2021 | Comments ### 99% shorter I listen to podcasts while doing chores or at the gym, and often feel like I'm learning something but then can't really remember anything afterwards. So for the past ~month I've been doing an experiment where I write brief summaries of them afterwards, usually same-day but sometimes a bit later. Generally I avoid all forms of fact checking, both "what did the episode say" and "what is actually true", though I don't stop myself if I feel like doing it. I've been posting them to my shortform on LessWrong. Mostly in reply to a single comment for tidiness, but two of them I accidentally posted to the top of the thread and one as a reply to another. Initially that was just because I wanted to be able to write them from both my work and personal laptops. (This blog is published through git. I don't have the repo on my work laptop, and probably shouldn't do.) But I kind of like it. A downside is it's slightly less convenient to include episode numbers or air dates or even titles unless I remember them. So I might be less consistent about that, though it feels good to have a fairly straightforward way to look up the episode given my summary. I've skipped all the fiction podcasts I listen to, because that's not why I listen to fiction. Also most interviews, those seem generally hard to summarize, though it would probably be reasonable to extract a few individual points. And one Planet Money episode seemed like it would be irresponsible to summarize carelessly, and I didn't feel like trying to be careful about it. But I've summarized every episode of 99% Invisible and History of English, and all but that one episode of Planet Money, that I've listened to in this time. Also one episode of Rationally Speaking and one of Corecursive. I'm not really sure what this experiment was trying to test. I was curious, so I did it. Some things I've maybe vaguely learned: first, I think I can generally do a decent summary. I frequently get distracted for a few seconds at a time, but there's a difference between that and being actually distracted, and I think it shows. (I listened to 99% Invisible, "Tanz Tanz Revolution", while looking at parking restrictions in my area and anticipating my evening plans. There's significant parts of that episode that just rolled right past me.) I don't think you could reliably pick out the episodes I didn't do same-day, I mostly don't even remember myself. (Hot Cheetos was several days later, but I did go over it a bit in my head in between, which I wouldn't have done if not for this project.) Second, I seem to retain less of History of English than other podcasts. That feels like it matches my intuition. I expect Causality, too, but that only recently released a new episode and I haven't listened to it yet. Third, this causes a marginal shift from podcasts towards music for me. I predicted this and I'm okay with it, I feel like I don't listen to music enough relative to how much I enjoy it. If I wanted to make it more of an experiment, I could randomly select some episodes to write up quickly, some to write up the next day, the next week, next month. Not sure how much I feel like this, but maybe. Another thing would be quizzing me on the episodes I did and didn't write up, without rereading. And I'm curious whether I'll ever actually want to refer to these, and if so whether I can predict which ones I will. I haven't been tracking my time closely, but I think they mostly take me 20-30 minutes to write? I listen between 1.5x and 2.1x speed depending on the podcast, so that's considerably longer than they usually take to listen to. Dunno what I'll do in future. Maybe write up some summaries, of episodes I found particularly interesting? I'm including here three that I particularly liked, but if you feel like reading the rest see the LW thread. ### Planet Money (14 May 2021): Blood Money America lets you sell blood plasma for money. The centers will call it a donation, but you get money for it, so. You can come in a couple of times a week and especially for low income people it can be a significant addition to their income. There are referral bonuses, and you get paid more if you come in more often. (Seems weird?) These centers are mostly located in low-income areas. There's a history here involving Nicaragua. Under a dictator there was a center doing this, and a journalist was writing about concerns, and eventually the dictator had the journalist killed. Riots in the aftermath left the center burned down and eventually the dictator got deposed. At some point the WHO wrote up an agreement or something not to allow blood plasma to be sold. Almost everyone's signed, but not the USA. Now almost everyone gets their blood plasma from the USA. Four exceptions, who allow it to be sold and are self-sufficient: Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary. We speak to a Canadian healthcare person about why Canada doesn't allow it. Three concerns. He's not too worried about incentives for people to sell bad blood, apparently we can sanitize it, even of HIV. He's also not too worried about health impacts on sellers; they get a checkup every four months to make sure they're still good, and there's some anecdotal evidence that maybe it should be more frequent but basically it seems fine. He seemed more concerned about "if people can sell plasma, will they do other things like regular blood donation for free?" I don't remember the commentary on that. I think he said that if the USA didn't allow selling they'd probably have to in Canada, but as long as they do it's unlikely to change. We also speak to a Brazilian doctor saying that plasma and the things it's used for are essential, there are people who will die without it, get over yourselves. Concerns that if either demand raises (finding new uses: there are studies showing promise in Alzheimers) or supply drops, there might not be enough. In fact supply has dropped during Covid: possible reasons include "sellers need the money less thanks to stimulus"; "if your kids are at home all the time you might be too busy"; "a lot of the sellers near the border are Mexicans who can't come over any more". ### 99% Invisible #434 (9 Mar 2021): Artistic License This is the most American story. (I actually wrote it up before starting this experiment.) After states start requiring license plates, Idaho realizes they can be used for advertising, and start boasting about Idaho potatoes on their plates. North Idahoans grumble because that’s more of a Southeast Idaho thing. Tourists start stealing plates as souvenirs, causing people to be very confused when they’re pulled over because who checks whether they still have a license plate. Anyway, New Hampshire’s state motto is Live Free or Die, I don’t know if that’s just a generic America thing or a specifically fuck-communists America thing. But a super fuck-communists guy gets them to put the motto on the license plate, presumably for fuck-communists reasons but I dunno if that was explicit or just subtext. And then a Jehova’s Witness is like, no, I don’t want to, God gave me life and I’m not gonna give that up for freedom. So he starts covering up that bit with tape. And he gets arrested and the fuck-communists guy is now governor and not inclined to give an inch, so it goes to the Supreme Court who split 6-3 but the pro-freedom side wins, the government is not allowed to compel you to express your love of freedom. Later: Texas allows specialty plates, some group designs a plate to support a cause and then you pay a little extra for it, some going to the group and some to the state. Most of these designs are just rubber stamped. But this is Texas, so the Sons of Confederate Veterans want a license plate supporting their cause, and they want the Confederate flag on it. The state says no, they sue the state, and the Supreme Court sides with the state 5-4. ### Corecursive (2 May 2021): Etherium Rescue "Daryl" was an ETH user who fat-fingered a transaction. Went online for help, guest said sorry, nothing anyone can do. Then later guest went o shit maybe there is. Daryl was playing with uniswap, a smart contract letting people provide liquidity for exchanging crypto, e.g. ETH for USDC. Normally when providing liquidity you'd do two things in one transaction, with something like a try/catch letting you do them atomically. I guess Daryl had only done one of them? Anyway, his money was just sitting there, and as soon as anyone tried to take their liquidity from uniswap they'd get Daryl's money as well. Guest realized this and went to check, and the money was still there. But! He also remembered stories of generalized ETH frontrunners. These will examine the pending transactions, see if there's something in there they can use to make money, and if so, submit their own transaction with a higher fee so it gets executed first. Guest worried that one of these would show up if he tried to recover the money. He asked on a group chat if others would also be worried, some of them were, and they got together to try to figure something out. Ultimately they'd need to do some kind of obfuscation so that a bot wouldn't try the thing they were doing. They settled on two separate transactions in one block, where the second one wouldn't do anything unless the first had already happened, hoping bots would only try them separately. But there's stuff set up to protect you from making transactions that don't do anything, and it was stopping them from making the second. Guest was tired and stressed and the money might disappear at any minute, so eventually Guest said YOLO we'll do them in two different blocks and hope. The second transaction got front-ran and they lost the money. On the plus side his worries were vindicated. Guest and Adam (host) discuss Meditations on Moloch. The thing they take away from it is that you need regulation/Leviathan. Guest says for Hobbes the Leviathan was hereditary monarchy, recently we've been trying democracy and that seems better overall, but he's optimistic that smart contracts will be another solution. Posted on 27 May 2021 | Comments ### A command-line grammar of graphics Sometimes I'm at my command prompt and I want to draw a graph. Problem: I don't know gnuplot. Also, there's a couple things about it that bug me, and make me not enthusiastic about learning it. One is that it seems not really designed for that purpose. It implements a whole language, and the way to use it for one-off commands is just to write a short script and put it in quotes. The other is its whole paradigm. At some point in the distant past I discovered ggplot2, and since then I've been basically convinced that the "grammar of graphics" paradigm is the One True Way to do graphs, and everything else seems substandard. No offense, gnuplot, it's just… you're trying to be a graphing library, and I want you to be a graphing library that also adheres to my abstract philosophical notions of what a graphing library should be. If you're not familiar with the grammar of graphics, I'd summarize it as: you build up a graph out of individual components. If you want a scatter plot, you use the "draw points" component. If you want a line graph, you use the "draw line segments" component. If you want a line graph with the points emphasized, you use both of those components. Want to add a bar chart on top of that too? Easy, just add the "draw bars" component. Want a smoothed curve with confidence intervals? There's a "smooth this data" component, and some clever (but customizable) system that feeds the output of that into the "draw a line graph" and "draw a ribbon" components. Here's a gallery of things it can do So, rather than adapt myself to the world, I've tried to adapt the world to myself. There's a python implementation of the paradigm, called plotnine.1 (It has its own gallery.) And now I've written a command-line interface to plotnine. It's not as powerful as it plausibly could be. But it's pretty powerful2, and if I stop developing now I might find it fully satisfies my needs in future. For example, I took a dataset of covid cases-per-capita timeseries for multiple countries. Then both of these graphs came from the same input file, only manipulated by grep to restrict to twelve countries: (The second one isn't a type of graph that needs to be implemented specifically. It's just a combination of the components "draw points", "draw line segments" and "draw text".) Now admittedly, I had to use a pretty awful hack to get that second one to work, and it wouldn't shock me if that hack stops working in future. On the other hand, I deliberately tried to see what I could do without manipulating the data itself. If I wasn't doing that, I would have used a tool that I love named q, which lets you run sql commands on csv files, and then there'd be no need for the awful hack. Anyway. If you're interested, you can check it out on github. There's documentation there, and examples, including the awful hack I had to use in the above graph. To set expectations: I don't anticipate doing more work on this unprompted, in the near future. But if people are interested enough to engage, requesting features or contributing patches or whatever, I do anticipate engaging back. I don't want to take on significant responsibility, and if this ever became a large active project I'd probably want to hand it over to someone else, but I don't really see that happening. 1. I'm aware of two other things that could plausibly be called python implementations of the grammar of graphics, but on reflection I exclude them both. The first is a package that used to literally be called ggplot. The creator of the original ggplot2 (if there was a prior non-2 ggplot, I can't find it) pointed out that the name was confusing, so it got renamed to ggpy, and now it's defunct anyway. But I don't count it, because under the hood it didn't have the grammar thing going on. It had the surface appearance of something a lot like ggplot2, but it didn't have the same flexibility and power. The other is one I started writing myself. I exclude it for being nowhere near complete; I abandoned it when I discovered that plotnine existed and was further along. I did think mine had the nicer API - I was trying to make it more pythonic, where plotnine was trying to be a more direct translation of ggplot2. But that hardly seemed to matter much, and if I really cared I could implement my API on top of plotnine. I only remember two things plotnine was missing that I supported. One was the ability to map aesthetics simultaneously before and after the stat transform (ggplot2 only allows one or the other for each aesthetic). I'm not convinced that was actually helpful. Coincidentally, a few days ago plotnine 0.8.0 came out with the same feature, but more powerful because it supports after-scale too. The other was a rudimentary CLI, and now plotnine has one of those too. 2. Most of this power, to be clear, comes from plotnine itself, from the grammar of graphics paradigm, and from python's scientific computing ecosystem. My own contribution is currently less than 250 lines of python; I may have used some design sense not to excessively limit the power available, but I didn't provide the power. Posted on 30 March 2021 | Comments ### Haskenthetical update: user-defined macros A while back I wrote about Haskenthetical, a language that I'm implementing for fun. I'm still working on it, at least from time to time. The thing I'm pleased to have implemented recently is user-defined macros. This makes it potentially a lot more ergonomic. (You still can't do anything with it, really. It has no I/O except for printing a single value at the end, and that's in a constrained format. It's beyond the reach even of sysfuck. But, like. If you could do things with it, user-defined macros would make it nicer to do those things.) These aren't hygienic macros, partly because when I used Racket a little at my old job I never really got my head around those, but also because they would have been more work. I'm more inclined to go for Clojure's approach of namespace qualifying, but since I don't have any kind of namespaces yet it seems premature to think of that. ### Quasiquote The biggest test of Haskenthetical yet has been using these macros to implement quoting (quote, like a standard lisp ') and quasiquoting (qq, like , using ↑ and ↑↑ for splicing). Quasiquoting in particular was one of the hardest pieces of code I think I've ever written, and it's only 100 lines in the end. Some of the things that made it difficult: • Haskenthetical is deficient. Pattern-matching causes deep nesting and the chance of forgetting a case, while type eliminators are hard to read and flow poorly. (It's deficient in many many ways, but those are the ones that seem particularly relevant here.) • More importantly, the current implementation of Haskenthetical is deficient. The error messages are completely unhelpful, telling you that two types didn't unify but not where they occured. Both the debugging output and the output from the program itself are hard to read. I also uncovered one straight-up bug in the process, which was easy to fix when I tracked it down but hard to track down because the error messages are completely unhelpful. • Also, I'm deficient as a thinker. I have a brain architecture that can't easily distinguish between the object and the meta levels, or the meta and the meta-meta levels. Wtf, who designed this piece of shit? • The problem itself is well-targeted to hit those last two deficiencies. The quasiquote function simply converts syntax trees to syntax trees, but some of the trees in question represent Haskenthetical expressions of certain types, and some of the transformations need to preserve or manipulate those types. The type checker could tell me "you're passing a list of trees somewhere you should be passing a single tree", but since everything is either a tree or a list of trees that doesn't narrow things down much. And it couldn't tell me "you're trying to convert this list-of-trees to a tree-evaluating-to-a-list but you've actually created a tree-evaluating-to-a-type-error". Eventually I simplified the problem by first parsing a syntax tree into a new datatype, and then converting that new datatype into another syntax tree, giving slightly more type information. That also made it easier to perform some simplifications in the parsing step, which made the output simpler and easier to check. Ultimately this brought it to a level that my brain could handle. The result is that you can implement macros by describing the shape of the code they could generate, rather than implementing something that evaluates to that shape. Here are two ways to write an if-elsif-else macro (technically only the "else" is necessary): (defmacro if (λ ts (if~ ts (Cons$else Nil)
else
(if~ ts (Cons $cond (Cons$then $rest)) (STTree (» Cons (STBare "if~") cond (STBare "True") then (STTree (Cons (STBare "if") rest)) Nil)) (error! "if must have an odd number of args"))))) (defmacro if-qq (λ ts (if~ ts (Cons$else Nil)
else
(if~ ts (Cons $cond (Cons$then $rest)) (qq (if~ (↑ cond) True (↑ then) (if-qq (↑↑ rest)))) (error! "if must have an odd number of args")))))  In the first, we manually construct a SyntaxTree with the STTree constructor (which represents syntax like (...)), passing it an argument of type List SyntaxTree. In the second, we construct the same SyntaxTree using quasiquoting, with splices ↑ and ↑↑ to indicate where the input parameters go. ↑ expects its parameter to be a SyntaxTree, which gets interpolated directly, while ↑↑ expects its parameter to be a List SyntaxTree, each element of which gets interpolated. So (if-qq a b c d e) macroexpands once to (if~ a True b (if-qq c d e)), and ultimately to (if~ a True b (if~ c True d e)). There's another macro I use in the first definition: » and « can be used to "make functions variadic" by threading them in between other parameters like a fold. We have (» f a b c d) === (f a (f b (f c d))) (« f a b c d) === (f (f (f a b) c) d)  These are built-in, but they don't need to be. It's partly a matter of convenience, and partly because I implemented them to test macroexpansion before I implemented user-defined macros. ### Implementation There's a circularity problem when defining macros. Sometimes you'll want to do so using functions you've previously defined. And sometimes you'll want to use a macro to help define a function. Allowing either one of these seems easy enough, but how do you do both? I don't know how lisps handle this problem. I don't remember it ever tripping me up when I used them (I have some experience with Common Lisp, Clojure and Racket), but that was years ago and maybe I just didn't stress test them properly. Haskell solves it with modules. You can't call a macro in the same module you define it. In Haskell's case that also means not in the same file you define it. That's fine for Haskell I guess, but I wouldn't want it for Haskenthetical. But getting rid of one-module-per-file, this seemed like a reasonable solution. So I added a new top-level form, (declarations ...). With this, the order of events is: 1. Parse the input file into a list of SyntaxTree (trees whose leaves are barewords, floats and strings). Separate trees into those of the form (declarations ...) and all others. 2. For each (declarations ...) block, 1. Parse its children into statements ((def ...), (type ...), (defmacro ...)) and expressions (underneath def and defmacro). In this step, we have a list of macros available in the environment, and recognize when those are being called, declining to parse the arguments to macros. 2. Recursively macroexpand the result, evaluating macros (which can be builtins written in Haskell or Haskenthetical closures) on their arguments. Since macros convert SyntaxTrees directly to SyntaxTrees, we have to parse the result of each expansion. 3. Add all the type declarations ((type ...)) to the environment, along with their constructors and eliminators. We have to do this simultaneously, because types can be mutually recursive. 4. Type check all the value definitions. This has to be simultaneous too, for the same reason. If type checking passes, add them to the environment, which doesn't strictly need to be simultaneous but is forced to be by my implementation. (Every defined value is a thunk storing a copy of the environment at the time it was defined. These environments do need to be mutually recursive.) 5. Type check the macro declarations, and add them to the environment. The type of a macro is -> (List SyntaxTree) SyntaxTree, I think it's pretty okay for macros to be impure but in future they'll need to be augmented with some way for macros to consult the environment. We can do these one at a time, because macros declared in the same block can't reference each other directly. (They can generate references to each other.) 3. Treat the remaining top-level trees as another (declarations ...) block, and go through the same process. But this block is required to also contain a single top-level expression, after macroexpansion. 4. Type check that expression. If type checking passes, evaluate it in the environment we've been building up. I don't know if this approach is standard. It seems to work. It doesn't allow macros to expand to declarations blocks, which is a shame. In future, if I implement importing from other files, I might figure out how to allow macros defined in other files to expand to those blocks. On the other hand, once I have IO it would be interesting to see if I can implement importing from other files purely in Haskenthetical, and use declarations blocks as the only built-in form of module. That would be great and terrible. ### Other things I've added comments now. # is a comment to end of line, but it has to be surrounded by whitespace1, because I don't want to eliminate the possibility of using that character in combination with other things. #! works the same, to allow shebang lines. I don't yet have multiline comments, or single-form comments. I also have an emacs major mode, which parses comments badly because emacs' easy-mode syntax highlighting only supports fairly specific kinds of syntax. But it's better than nothing. I discovered two bugs writing the previous post. The type checker was ignoring type annotations on λ parameters. I've fixed that. It also wasn't giving an error if a type annotation in a pattern match was more general than the type it matched. I've only partly fixed that. I think to fix it more thoroughly I'd need to implement constraints and constraint solving. I might also decide to eliminate that feature - GHC is going in that direction. ### What's next? (Assuming I continue at all, that is. This is fun, but it's not the only fun thing.) I dunno. The test suite is looking a bit embarrassing, I've only added a handful of new tests since I first wrote about this project. At first I wanted them to be nicely grouped, tests about type checking and type declaration and evaluation, but there's no clear division and I shouldn't try for it. Instead I think I'll just have one big file with lots of examples and some metadata. One thing is that macros can't currently be used in types or patterns. So you can write (list a b c) instead of (Cons a (Cons b (Cons c Nil))) when constructing a list, but not when destructing it. And you can't write a three-argument function type as (» -> a b c d). This should be some fairly low-hanging fruit. Writing the quasiquoter made me want better error messages. That's definitely not low-hanging fruit though. Especially with macros in play - how do you give the location of an error in the file when any given piece of syntax might not have been in the original file? There are options here but also, annotating everything with a source location sounds boring even if I didn't have to worry about macros. Another possibility is to look at the type checker only. Write You a Haskell implements it in two different ways in the same chapter. I followed the second approach, section "constraint generation", because Diehl says it "becomes easier to manage as our type system gets more complex and we start building out the language". But it means that by the time I get a type error, I've lost all context. The types String and Float should unify but don't, great, but I have no idea why I'd expect either of those. And I'm not convinced it accomplishes its goal - the point is to separate constraint solving from traversing the tree, but you still need to solve constraints when you generalize a variable during traversal (the implementation on the page is buggy). I think the first approach in WYAH is also used by Typing Haskell in Haskell, where you solve constraints as you traverse the program. Then the context is still there when you encounter a type error, which might make it easier to report a helpful error message. Half the macros I've written so far (», «, list) could simply be functions, except Hindley-Milner doesn't have variadic functions. Can it be expanded to have them? The paper practical variable-arity polymorphism looks interesting on this question, though I haven't looked closely or thought deeply. I'd be going even further out of my comfort zone, but that's not a bad thing. I've been thinking about nomenclature a bit. Right now the Either type is called +, which might make sense if the , type was called * but it's called ,. List and Maybe aren't built-in, but when I've been defining them I've been calling them List and Maybe with constructors Nil Cons Nothing Just. I'm thinking I might go with regex-inspired names, • The unit type becomes ε, with constructor also ε. • +$a $b becames ||$a $b. Constructors _|$a and |_ $b, perhaps. (But which way around? I have no intuition for that.) • Maybe$a becomes ?? $a. Constructors ι$a and ?ε. (ι is the inclusion map -> $a (??$a). But lots of types might want one of those, so maybe it should be ?ι, with ι for the only constructor of the type ι $a. Will Haskenthetical find that type useful like Haskell does?) • List$a becomes ** $a. Constructors ::$a (** $a) and *ε, but I'm not sold on ::. This seems pretty terrible, how do you pronounce any of that? But it also seems kind of fun. 1. Writing that I wasn't sure if it needed whitespace in front. Turns out it does. I didn't deliberately write it that way, I didn't think about the question at the time, but I think I prefer it. Posted on 14 March 2021 | Comments ### Specialized Labor and Counterfactual Compensation I have three purposes in this post. The first is to review the formal game theory found in Robert Ellickson's Order Without Law. It's not a large part of the book, but it's the part that I'm most qualified to judge. Not that I'm a formal game theorist myself, but I'm closer to being one of them than to being any kind of social scientist, historian or lawyer. If his formal game theory is nonsense, that would suggest that I ought to discount his writing on other fields, too. (Perhaps not discount it completely, especially because formal game theory is outside his main area of study. Then again, lots of the book is outside his main area of study.) Spoiler alert: I think he holds up reasonably well. I want to ding him a few points, but nothing too serious, and he possibly even contributes a minor original result. My second purpose, which is valuable for the first but also valuable of itself, is to try to extend it further than Ellickson did. I don't succeed at that. My third is simply to be able to cut it from my in-progress review of the rest of the book. Ellickson discusses two games. One is the classic Prisoner's Dilemma, in which you either Cooperate (for personal cost but social benefit) or Defect (for personal benefit but social cost).1 The other he calls Specialized Labor, in which two people must choose whether to Work on some common project or Shirk their share of it. It differs from the Prisoner's Dilemma in two ways. First, it's asymmetrical; one player is a less effective worker than the other, and gets less payoff from Working while the other Shirks than does the other player. The other is that in this game, the socially optimal outcome is Work/Shirk, not Work/Work. (Many authors consider that the second change isn't really a change, and that a Prisoner's Dilemma can perfectly well have Cooperate/Defect be socially optimal. So they'd say Specialized Labor is simply an asymmetrical version of the Prisoner's Dilemma. In my taxonomy I define the Prisoner's Dilemma more narrowly than that; see also this comment. Ellickson uses the same narrow definition as me. I'd instead say Specialized Labor is an asymmetrical version of Too Many Cooks.) Note that payoffs aren't measured in utility. They're measured in something Ellickson calls "welfare". He doesn't really explore the formal consequences of this. But what it gives us is that, since welfare is supposed to be objective, we can sum different people's welfare; when I used the phrases "social cost" and "socially optimal" in the previous paragraphs, talking about the sum of both players' results, that was a meaningful thing to do. I'm not sure exactly what it costs us, except that I don't expect results about mixed strategies to hold. (Someone won't necessarily prefer "50% chance of 3 welfare" to "certain chance of 1 welfare". I wasn't planning to consider mixed games anyway.) We can still assume that people prefer higher amounts of welfare to lower amounts of it.2 I'm going to pretend that Cooperate and Defect are also called Work and Shirk, so that I don't have to use both names when talking about both games. In normal-form, these games look like this: Prisoner's Dilemma Player 2 Work Shirk Player 1 Work$ ww_* $,$ ww_*  ws_* $,$ sw_* $Shirk$ sw_* $,$ ws_*  ss_* $,$ ss_*  sw_* > ww_* > ss_* > ws_* $, and$ 2ww_* > sw_* + ws_* $Specialized Labor Player 2 Work Shirk Player 1 Work$ ww_* $,$ ww_*  ws_1 $,$ sw_* $Shirk$ sw_* $,$ ws_2  ss_* $,$ ss_*  sw_* > ww_* > ss_* > ws_1 > ws_2 $, and$ 2ww_* < sw_* + ws_1 $How to read these symbols: the subscript is the player who gets the payoff, the first letter is their move, and the second letter is the other player's move. If the subscript is $ * $, then this combination is symmetric.3 So $ ws_1 $ is the payoff to Player 1, if he Works while Player 2 Shirks. $ ws_2 $ is the payoff to Player 2, if she Works while Player 1 Shirks.4 $ ws_* $ is both of these values, when they're equal to each other. And to be clear, when they're equal, $ ws_1 $ can stand in for $ ws_* $ just as easily as the other way around. To help make the structure more visible, I've colored the symbols in green or red according to local incentive gradients - green for "this player prefers this outcome to the outcome they get from changing their move", red for the opposite of that. So when $ ws_1 $ is red, that means $ ss_1 > ws_1 $, since $ ss_1 $ represents Player 1's payoff if he changes his move while Player 2 keeps hers the same. A quadrant is a Nash equilibrium (meaning "neither player wants to change their move unilaterally") iff it has two green symbols. I've also given a slightly darker background to the socially optimal quadrants. Comparing these games, Ellickson claims for example that norms will tend to punish someone who Shirks in a Prisoner's Dilemma, rather than rewarding those who Work, because eventually most people will Work and it's cheaper to sanction the thing that happens rarely. But in a Specialized Labor game, norms will tend to reward the efficient worker ("cheapest labor-provider") for Working, because that encourages people to obtain the skills necessary to perform this work. There's a background level of skills that everyone is expected to have, and people are punished for falling short of them and rewarded for exceeding them. So most of the points I want to ding Ellickson here are because this is kind of a strange choice of games. For one thing, it seems to assume that: teaming up to work is more expensive than working individually, iff players have unequal skill levels. Honestly I don't think that's so implausible as a heuristic. I think "most work projects have gains from working together" is a decent guess, and then one way to remove those gains could be if one player is much more skilled than the other. Still, Ellickson doesn't make this argument, or acknowledge that the assumption is kind of weird. Another way to justify the omission is if the ommitted possibilities don't add much of interest. Prisoner's Dilemma and Specialized Labor are opposite corners in a two-by-two grid parameterized by "synergistic/discordant" (gains or no gains from cooperation) and "symmetrical/asymmetrical". If our tools for working with them can also be applied to the other corners without much extra effort, then there's no need to consider the others in detail. More on this later. Something weird on the face of it is that in Specialized Labor, Work/Work results in the same payoff to both players. Why assume that that's symmetrical? But I don't think this is a big deal. Plausibly people can calibrate how hard they work if they think they're getting a worse result than the other. Also I suspect you just don't change much by allowing it to be asymmetrical, provided that both payoffs are in between $ sw_* $ and $ ss_* $. Similarly you might suppose that the efficient worker doesn't just pay less to Work than the inefficient worker, he also does a better job. In which case we might want to set $ sw_1 < sw_2 $. But again, I doubt that matters much. Here's my largest objection: Ellickson doesn't consider that work might be worth doing selfishly. In both games, you maximize your own outcome by Shirking, and if that means the work doesn't get done, so be it. But that puts a narrow band on the value of a piece of work. From a social perspective, it's not worth doing for the benefits it gives to one person, but it is worth doing for the benefits it gives to two. I think a lot of the situations Ellickson looks at don't really fit that model. For example, building a fence seems like something you'd often do of your own accord, simply for the benefits it gives to yourself, but Ellickson considers it a Prisoner's Dilemma because most people have the relevant skills. (He doesn't analyse whether fence-building is more easily done in tandem.) To model this possibility, we'd set $ ws_1 > ss_* $, and maybe $ ws_2 > ss_* $ as well. This gives the game that I like to call the Farmer's Dilemma and others call Chicken, Hawk/Dove or Snowdrift. (Here's why I call it that.) Normally I think of the Farmer's Dilemma as symmetrical, but the asymmetrical case seems fine to count as an instance of it, at least right now. The tricky thing about this game is that even though you'd be willing to do the work yourself if no one else benefitted, the fact that someone else does benefit makes you want them to join in and help with the work. If they decline, your only in-game way to punish them is not to do the work, which hurts you too - but if you don't punish them, you're a sucker. This is fundamentally different from the tricky thing with Prisoner's Dilemma and Specialized Labor, which in both cases is simply that people have no selfish incentive to work. So it seems like an important omission. Especially because depending on the exact payoffs, it may be that "one player is a sucker while the other makes out like a bandit" is both a Nash equilibrium and socially optimal. The thesis of the book is to propose a certain hypothesis. Roughly speaking, and for the purpose of this essay, we can assume the hypothesis says: norms will evolve to maximize the aggregate welfare of the players. (And so Farmer's Dilemmas might be a good place to look for failures of the hypothesis. When the socially optimal result is for one player to be a sucker, and that's also a Nash equilibrium, the hypothesis thinks this is fine. Humans might not think that, and norms might evolve that the hypothesis would have ruled out. But note that this is only the case in the Discordant Farmer's Dilemma - when there are no gains from cooperation. In the Synergistic Farmer's Dilemma, the socially optimal result is for both players to Work. The Discordant Farmer's Dilemma might be rare in practice - I wouldn't expect it with fence-building, for example.) Let's pretend we're creating a system of norms for these games. Something we can do is mandate transfers of welfare between players. In each quadrant, we can take some of one player's payoff and give it to the other. Total payoff stays the same, and so the socially optimal outcome stays in the same place. But the distribution of welfare changes, and the Nash equilibria might move. How do we encourage the socially optimal result by doing this? This is Ellickson's possible minor contribution. He points out that we can do it by introducing a debt from those who Shirk to those who Work, and that the value $ ww_* - ws_1 $ works in both these games. He calls this the "liquidated-Kantian formula" but doesn't explain the name, and I have only a vague understanding of where he might be going with it. Since the name hasn't caught on, I'm going to propose my own: counterfactual compensation. If I Shirk, I compensate you for your losses compared to the world where I worked. (To compare: actual compensation would be compensating you for the losses you actually suffered from working, $ ss_* - ws_1 $. Actual restitution would be handing over to you the gains I got from your work, $ sw_* - ss_* $. Counterfactual restitution would be handing over to you the gains I got from not working myself, $ sw_* - ww_* $. Each of these takes one player's payoff in one quadrant, and subtracts the same player's payoff in an adjacent quadrant. Compensation is about your costs, and restitution is about my gains. The actual variants are about differences between the world where no one worked and the worlds where one of us worked; they're about the effects of work that actually happened. The counterfactual variants are about the differences between the worlds where only one of us worked and the world where we both worked; they're about the effects of work that didn't happen.) (Also: yes, obviously there are caveats to apply when bringing this formula to the real world. Ellickson discusses them briefly. I'm going to ignore them.) If we apply this formula to the Prisoner's Dilemmma, we get this: Prisoner's Dilemma with counterfactual compensation Player 2 Work Shirk Player 1 Work$ ww_* $,$ ww_*  ww_* $,$ sw_* + ws_* - ww_* $Shirk$ sw_* + ws_* - ww_* $,$ ww_*  ss_* $,$ ss_*  sw_* > ww_* > ss_* > ws_* $, and$ 2ww_* > sw_* + ws_* $Since $ ww_* > sw_* + ws_* - ww_* $, this puts the incentives in the correct place. The Nash equilibrium is now for both players to Work, which is socially optimal. (In my taxonomy, depending on whether $ sw_* + ws_* - ww_* ≷ ss_* $, this new game is at the point where The Abundant Commons meets either Cake Eating or Studying For a Test. It's not unique in either case, because there are at most three distinct payout values.) Specialized Labor is more complicated. There are three ways we might decide to apply counterfactual compensation. We could say that the Shirker compensates the Worker for the Worker's costs, either $ ww_* - ws_1 $ or $ ww_* - ws_2 $ depending on who Worked. Or we could say that the Shirker compensates the Worker for what the efficient Worker's costs would have been, $ ww_* - ws_1 $ regardless of who Worked. Or we could say that the efficient worker never owes anything to the inefficient worker; he gets to just say "sorry, I'm not going to pay you for work I could have done more easily". Lets call these approaches "actual-costs", "efficient-costs" and "substandard-uncompensated" Ellickson doesn't discuss these options, and I ding him another point for that. He just takes the substandard-uncompensated one. Here's what it looks like. Specialized Labor with counterfactual compensation (substandard-uncompensated) Player 2 Work Shirk Player 1 Work$ ww_* $,$ ww_*  ww_* $,$ sw_* + ws_1 - ww_* $Shirk$ sw_* $,$ ws_2  ss_* $,$ ss_*  sw_* > ww_* > ss_* > ws_1 > ws_2 $, and$ 2ww_* < sw_* + ws_1 $Player 2 has no incentive to Work, regardless of what Player 1 does, because $ ss_* > ws_2 $ and (unlike in the Prisoner's Dilemma) $ sw_* + ws_1 - ww_* > ww_* $. And given that Player 2 is Shirking, Player 1 has incentive to Work. So again, we've moved the Nash equilibrium to the socially optimal quadrant. This isn't, like, a mind-shattering result that's going to blow open the field of game theory. But I don't remember seeing it before, and Ellickson doesn't attribute it to anyone else. I'm inclined to give him some credit for it. Even if others have had the insight before - which I expect they have - it seems like he's still doing competent work in a field outside his own. Not amazing work, not particularly difficult work, but competent. One objection: the inefficient worker gets a better result than the efficient worker. That seems bad to me, because it discourages people from becoming the efficient worker. I don't think this is a big deal, though. For one thing, acquiring skills probably does increase your own payoff; your skills will feed into $ ww_* $, not just your $ ws $. (So it directly increases your payoff in Work/Work, and reduces your debt in Shirk/Work.) Someone else acquiring skills will increase your payoff even more, perhaps, but that's not a big problem. For another thing, such incentives can be handled out-of-game. I do think Ellickson should have acknowledged this issue, and I ding him a point for not doing so. But a brief note would have been fine. What happens if we apply counterfactual compensation in the other possible ways? The only difference is in the bottom left quadrant, which becomes either $ sw_* + ws_2 - ww_* $, $ ww_* $ (actual-costs) or $ sw_* + ws_1 - ww_* $, $ ww_* + ws_2 - ws_1 $ (efficient-costs). The problem with both of these is that that quadrant might now be a Nash equilibrium. In the first case, Player 1 might prefer that quadrant over Work/Work, depending on $ 2ww_* ≷ sw_* + ws_2 $, and Player 2 will certainly prefer it over Shirk/Shirk. In the second case, Player 1 will certainly prefer that quadrant over Work/Work, and Player 2 might prefer it over Shirk/Shirk, depending on $ ww_* + ws_2 - ws_1 ≷ ss_* $. That's not great, we only want a Nash equilibrium in the socially optimal quadrant. On the other hand, I note that if $ ws_1 - ws_2 $ is small, then the social cost is low; and if it's large, then (except perhaps with some fairly specific payoff values?) that quadrant isn't a Nash equilibrium. Meanwhile, if payoffs are uncertain - if people might disagree about who the more efficient worker is - then either of the other choices seems more robust. And this is more of an aesthetic judgment, but it feels like the kind of aesthetic judgment that sometimes hints at deeper problems: there's something a bit weird about how substandard-uncompensated is discontinuous. A small change in Player 2's skills lead to a small change in her compensation in each quadrant, until she gets equally skilled as Player 1, at which point there's a large change in the Shirk/Work quadrant. On the other other hand, a feature of how these games translate to the real world is that players encourage each other to discuss in advance. Someone building unilaterally may not get to claim this debt. So if they disagree about who the efficient worker is, that's unlikely to cause much grief. What about measures other than counterfactual compensation? Actual compensation ($ ss_* - ws_1 $) doesn't work. If a player expects the other to Shirk, they'd be indifferent to Working; and in a Prisoner's Dilemma, if they expect the other to Work, they might prefer to Work or not depending on $ ww_* ≷ sw_* + ws_1 - ss_* $. (In Specialized Labor, that inequality always resolves as $ < $ which gives the incentives we want.) Actual restitution ($ sw_* - ss_* $) is sometimes okay in a Prisoner's Dilemma, but if $ ws_* + sw_* < 2ss_* $ then Shirk/Shirk remains a Nash equilibrium; players will only want to Work if they expect the other to also Work. In Specialized Labor it has the problem that players would prefer to Work than to pay restitution, and so Work/Shirk cannot be a Nash equilibrium. Counterfactual restitution ($ sw_* - ww_* $) has much the same problem in a Prisoner's Dilemma; if $ ws_* + sw_* < ww_* + ss_* $ then Shirk/Shirk is a Nash equilibrium. And in both games, a player who expects the other to Work will be indifferent to Working. There are other options for payment one might consider; I haven't even looked at all of them of the form "one raw payoff minus another raw payoff". But so far, counterfactual compensation seems like the best option. (We could even consider values of the debt based on information outside of the original payoff matrix. But Ellickson points out that when deciding how to act in the first place, players will already want to figure out what the payoff matrix looks like. If the debt was based on other information, there'd be a further cost to gather that information.) While we're here, let's look at the other games implied by Prisoner's Dilemma and Specialized Labor. The Asymmetrical Prisoner's Dilemma (or Synergistic Specialized Labor) has $ ws_1 ≠ ws_2 $ but $ 2ww_* > ws_1 + sw_* $. In this case, counterfactual compensation does exactly what we want it to do, just like in the symmetrical Prisoner's Dilemma; except that substandard-uncompensated is no good, it doesn't give us a Nash equilibrium at all. (Player 1 prefers Shirk/Work to Work/Work, and Work/Shirk to Shirk/Shirk. Player 2 prefers Work/Work to Work/Shirk, and Shirk/Shirk to Shirk/Work.) If Ellickson had considered this game, he'd have had to discuss the possible ways one might apply counterfactual compensation, which would have been good. So I ding him a point for it. Symmetrical Specialized Labor (or Discordant Prisoner's Dilemma, or Too Many Cooks) has $ ws_1 = ws_2 $ but $ 2ww_* < ws_* + sw_* $. The difficulty here is that there's no way to break the symmetry. Any of the three ways to apply counterfactual compensation will be equivalent, and leave us with two Nash equilibria in the two socially equal quadrants. The "discuss in advance" feature saves us again, I think; players don't need to somehow acausally cooperate to select one to Work and one to Shirk, they can just, like, talk about it. So I think it was basically fine for Ellickson to not consider this game, though it would have been worth a brief note. How does this work in the Farmer's Dilemma? First we need to clarify exactly what set of games that refers to. In symmetrical games, I think of it as having $ sw_* > ww_* > ws_* > ss_* $; that is, each player would prefer the other to do all the work, or failing that to help; but they'd still rather do it all themselves than for the work not to get done. I'm going to break symmetry by separating $ ws_1 $ from $ ws_2 $ as before. Without loss of generality, we can specify $ ws_1 > ws_2 $, but I'm not going to decide whether $ ws_2 ≷ ss_* $. It might be that only one player is skilled enough to benefit from Working alone. So in normal form, the Farmer's Dilemma looks like this: Farmer's Dilemma Player 2 Work Shirk Player 1 Work$ ww_* $,$ ww_*  ws_1 $,$ sw_* $Shirk$ sw_* $,$ ws_2  ss_* $,$ ss_*  sw_* > ww_* > ws_1 > ss_*$, and$ ws_1 > ws_2 $Either of the top two quadrants could be socially optimal, depending whether the game is synergistic or discordant (that is, whether $ 2ww_* ≷ sw_* + ws_* $). Shirk/Work may or may not be a Nash equilibrium, depending whether $ ws_2 ≷ ss_* $. So how does it look with counterfactual compensation? I'll consider the synergy and discord cases separately. Synergistic Farmer's Dilemma with counterfactual compensation (substandard-uncompensated) Player 2 Work Shirk Player 1 Work$ ww_* $,$ ww_*  ww_* $,$ sw_* + ws_1 - ww_* $Shirk$ sw_* $,$ ws_2  ss_* $,$ ss_*  sw_* > ww_* > ws_1 > ss_*$,$ ws_1 > ws_2 $, and$ 2ww_* > sw_* + ws_1 $Oh dear. Substandard-uncompensated compensation is clearly not going to work; Shirk/Work might still be a Nash equilibrium. In Specialized Labor it was fine that the efficient Worker would prefer the inefficient Worker to do all the work, because the inefficient worker would say "nuts to that". In a Farmer's Dilemma she might continue to Work, which we don't want. Even if we specified $ ws_2 < ss_* $, we'd simply have no Nash equilibrium; like in the Asymmetrical Prisoner's Dilemma, one player would always get a better result by changing their move. Fortunately, either of the others seems fine. The payoffs for these are the same as in Specialized Labor, but their values have changed relative to adjacent quadrants. Actual-costs gives us $ sw_* + ws_2 − ww_* $, $ ww_* $ in that quadrant, which isn't a Nash equilibrium because $ ww_* > sw_* + ws_2 − ww_* $. (Compared to this quadrant, Player 1 would rather Work and Player 2 would rather Shirk.) And efficient-costs again gives us $ sw_* + ws_1 − ww_* $, $ ww_* + ws_2 - ws_1 $, which isn't a Nash equilibrium because $ ww_* > sw_* + ws_1 − ww_* $. (Player 1 would still rather Work. Player 2 may or may not prefer to Shirk; if $ ws_2 > ss_* $ she'll certainly prefer this quadrant, might prefer it even if not, but it's not a problem either way.) What about the discordant case? If $ ws_2 < ss_* $ we actually already have the desired result. The only Nash equilibrium is Work/Shirk which is socially optimal. But as discussed above, it's a crap result for Player 1, and my sense is that the "no incentive to become the efficient worker" problem now becomes a lot more of an issue. Let's see what happens with counterfactual compensation. Discordant Farmer's Dilemma with counterfactual compensation (substandard-uncompensated) Player 2 Work Shirk Player 1 Work$ ww_* $,$ ww_*  ww_* $,$ sw_* + ws_1 - ww_* $Shirk$ sw_* $,$ ws_2  ss_* $,$ ss_*  sw_* > ww_* > ws_1 > ss_* $,$ ws_1 > ws_2 $, and$ 2ww_* < sw_* + ws_1 $Again, substandard-uncompensated doesn't really help; Shirk/Work will be a Nash equilibrium iff it was one before. But at least Player 1 gets a less-bad result from Work/Shirk. (Player 2 still does better than him.) Actual-costs might also be a Nash equilibrium in that quadrant, if $ ww_* < sw_* + ws_2 − ww_* $. And so might efficient-costs, if $ ww_* + ws_2 - ws_1 > ss_* $. (Again, this always holds if $ ws_2 > ss_* $, so looking only at the Nash equilibria, this is strictly worse than having no compensation.) So this is unfortunate. We can't reliably remove that Nash equilibrium with counterfactual compensation. Depending how we apply it, we might even make it an equilibrium when it wasn't before. (Actual restitution also works in the synergistic game, but moves the Nash equilibrium to Work/Work in the discordant game. Counterfactual restitution makes players indifferent to Working if they expect their partner to Work, so in practice I guess Work/Work is the Nash equilibrium there, too. And actual compensation would be negative, which is silly.) Summing up, counterfactual compensation: • Gives people good incentives in Prisoner's Dilemma. In an Asymmetrical Prisoner's Dilemma, substandard-uncompensated doesn't work. • Gives people good incentives in Specialized Labor, using substandard-uncompensated. Mostly-good incentives using the other implementations. • Gives people good incentives in the Synergistic Farmer's Dilemma, except that substandard-uncompensated only works sometimes. • Maybe kinda sorta helps a bit in the Discordant Farmer's Dilemma. Maybe not. So that's not amazing. I do think the Discordant Farmer's Dilemma is just fundamantally, in technical terms, a real bastard of a game. But even in the synergistic variant, the way we calibrate it to get the best incentives is different from the way we calibrate it for the best incentives in Specialized Labor. So I appreciate Ellickson's contribution, and I think it's a real one. But it's not as much as we might have hoped. I think he had a blind spot about the Farmer's Dilemma, and his tools don't really work against it. He also would have done well to consider counterfactual compensation schemes other than substandard-uncompensated. With counterfactual compensation in mind, Ellickson proposes a variant Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma tournament, and a strategy for it that he calls "Even-Up". Even-Up takes advantage of features of the tournament that make it more realistic, and is modelled on real-world behaviours that he describes elsewhere in the book. The tournament has rounds of both Prisoner's Dilemma and Specialized Labor, and payoffs for them can vary considerably. He suggests that perhaps one in five rounds might have each payoff increased twentyfold. Additionally, in between rounds, players can unilaterally choose to make a side payment to their partner. To apply the Even-Up strategy, a player would use an internal balance to keep account of standing with their partner. Whenever counterfactual compensation would be owed, according to the analysis above, they'd adjust the balance by its value. (Ellickson doesn't specify, but presumably they'd also adjust whenever their partner makes a payment to them.) Whenever the balance was close to zero, they'd play the socially optimal strategy. If they were in debt, they'd make a side payment. And if they were in credit, they'd "exercise self-help": Shirk when they'd otherwise Work.5 (But only if the debt owed was more than half the value of the compensation, so that the balance would become closer to zero.) There are three parameters I might be inclined to play with. One: which variant of counterfactual compensation should we use? (Ellickson's wording doesn't make it clear which he intends. Above he took substandard-uncompensated for granted, but is wording here sort of hints ambiguously at efficient-costs. He doesn't note or justify the change if there is one.) As noted, substandard-uncompensated gives the right incentives where the other options sometimes don't. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if the other options sometimes helped to avoid a feud (a loop of mutual defections or alternating defections). Related, two: suppose we do use substandard-uncompensated. When in credit, and facing a Specialized Labor game as the efficient worker, should we Shirk? (Since we'd never Work as the inefficient worker, this is the only time the choice of counterfactual compensation variants is relevant.) Regardless of the other player's move, no compensation is owed. So Shirking will destroy communal resources, but not bring players' standings back in balance. On the other hand, it does stop us from extending more credit that may never be paid back. It may be worth having a higher threshold for this than for Shirking in a Prisoner's Dilemma, but I'd say never Shirking in this case would be a mistake. And three: is "brings the balance closer to zero" the optimal condition to use for when to exercise self-help? If we exercise it more readily, others may be more inclined to cooperate with us in the first place, but that effect is probaby minor - there's only so much we can be exploited for, over the whole game. On the other hand, we're also destroying more total payoff, per round. It may be worth only exercising self-help if our credit is more than say three-quarters the value of counterfactual compensation. (If we're looking at modfications to the tournament: as well as tweaking the probability distribution of the various possible payoff matrices, I'd be interested to see what changes if you add a small or large transaction fee to the side payments. Naturally I'd also like to see what happens if you add the possibility of Farmer's Dilemmas, but then Even-Up needs to be altered to account for it. Of other games in the genre, a Discordant Abundant Commons ($ ws_1 > ww_* > \{ sw_*, ss_* \} $, $ 2ww_* < ws_1 + sw_* $, and I'm not sure what the constraints on $ ws_2 $ should be) would also be a good addition. Maybe an asymmetrical Anti-Coordination variant, with a single socially optimal outcome so as not to confuse SociallyOptimalOutcomeBot. The others don't seem like they'd add much; they all have $ ww_* $ as the highest payoff, so their socially optimal outcomes are also individually optimal. That doesn't mean there's no reason not to play Work, but the reasons mostly boil down to "I'm willing to hurt myself to threaten or punish you" and you already get that from the Farmer's Dilemma. So I'm not convinced the other games add much strategic depth, and they do add noise.) Ellickson predicts that Even-Up would do well in this tournament, and I agree. It's inexploitable, rewards its partners for cooperating, forgives past transgressions, and plays well against itself. I'd be concerned about what happens if it plays against some similar strategy with different ideas of fairness - might you get into a situation where only one of them is ever satisfied at a time, leading to alternating defections? More generally I just don't trust either myself or Ellickson to have especially reliable intuitions about this. Ellickson also says that if Even-Up turns out not to be evolutionary stable - that is, if a society of Even-Up players can be exploited by other strategies, or wouldn't be able to enter groups currently dominated by other strategies - his hypothesis would no longer be credible. I think it would be stable, but even if not, I'd be somewhat forgiving. I'd want to know why not, before deciding how it reflects on the hypothesis. 1. Strictly speaking: if you Defect, that always harms your opponent and benefits yourself, relative to you Cooperating. And if your opponent Cooperates, this will always be a social cost as well, harming your opponent more than it benefits you. But if your opponent is also Defecting, then the structure of a Prisoner's Dilemma is agnostic on whether your defection is a social cost; it might benefit you more than it harms your opponent. 2. I'm not actually sure we can assume that, but that question is out of scope. 3. This notation is kind of experimental on my part. Ellickson instead uses symbols $ A, B, C, D, E $ in descending order, but that makes it hard to remember which goes where in the grid. And when I look at the Farmer's Dilemma later on, the ordering will be lost, making it even more confusing. 4. I tossed a coin to choose how to assign pronouns. 5. Incidentally, in in a typical IPD tournament, with only Prisoner's Dilemmas and no variance in payoffs, Even-Up plays identically to Tit-for-Tat. An Even-Up player would never be in debt in such a tournament, since they'd never Shirk except to correct a balance, and doing so would either leave the balance unchanged (if their partner also Shirked) or bring it to exactly zero. Posted on 14 November 2020 | Comments ### Against boots theory The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness. – Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms This is a compelling narrative. And I do believe there's some truth to it. I could believe that if you always buy the cheapest boots you can find, you'll spend more money than if you bought something more expensive and reliable. Similar for laptops, smartphones, cars. Especially (as Siderea notes, among other things) if you know how to buy expensive things that are more reliable. But it's presented as "the reason that the rich [are] so rich". Is that true? I mean, no, obviously not. If your pre-tax income is less than the amount I put into my savings account, then no amount of "spending less money on things" is going to bring you to my level. Is it even a contributing factor? Is part of the reason why the rich are so rich, that they manage to spend less money? Do the rich in fact spend less money than the poor? That's less obvious, but I predict not. I predict that the rich spend more than the poor in total, but also on boots, laptops, smartphones, cars, and most other things. There might be exceptions where rich people consume less of the thing than poor people - bus tickets, for example - but I think if you group spending in fairly natural ways, the rich will spend more than the poor in almost every group. • Maybe they spend less money on their daily wear boots, but own more pairs of shoes for different occasions. Or maybe they decide that they care about other things than lifetime cost for their daily wear boots, and spend more on those, too. (Being rich means they can afford to care about other things than lifetime cost.) • Apparently famous people often get comped meals, but I bet most of them still spend more money on food than I do. • I spent £500 on a laptop in 2013, and before that, £300 in 2008. If I'd gone for £200 laptops each time, maybe they would only have lasted two years each. But if I weren't a techno-masochist, maybe I'd realize that using old laptops actually kind of sucks, and I'd upgrade far more often. My work laptop, bought by people who want me to be maximally effective at my job, cost over £1000 and isn't going to last ten years. • Financial services are a case where I'd guess the rich and the poor spend money on very different things. I assume the rich don't have to pay to cash a cheque, and very rarely visit loan sharks. But the poor rarely have Amex Platinum cards ($550/year), or personal accountants. (Maybe it's unfair to count those because they save you money in other areas?)

• Buying a house may be cheaper in the long run than renting a similar house nearby. But rich people tend to live in nicer houses and/or nicer areas.

Those are all guesses. I don't have good data on this, and I'd love to see it if you do.

For what data I do have, the first google result was this page from the UK's Office of National Statistics. Specifically, look at figure 4, "Indexed household income, total spending and spending by component by income decile, UK, FYE 2019".

They split households into ten income levels, and look at four categories of spending plus total spending. Each of those is a near-strictly increasing line from "poor people spend less" to "rich people spend more". (I see two blips: the 90th percentile of income spends slightly less on housing than the 80th, and the 70th spends slightly less on food and non-alcoholid drinks than the 60th. The other categories are transport, and recreation and culture. These four are the largest spending categories on average across all income levels. The graph also has disposable income, which I think is irrelevant for current purposes.)

(I repeat that this specific data is not strong evidence. The source for it is the living costs and food survey, which might have more detail. (Link goes to the previous year's version because that's what I could find.) Unfortunately it's not open access. It might be freely available if I register, but I don't care enough to try right now. In any case, we'd also want data from outside the UK.)

There will obviously be some exceptions. There will be some rich people who spend less money than some poor people. There will probably even be some rich people who spend less money than some poor people, and would not be rich otherwise. But as a general theory for why the rich are rich? I just don't buy it.

I believe boots theory points towards one component of socioeconomic unfairness. But boots theory itself is supposed to be a theory of why the rich are so rich. It's very clear about that. It's clearly wrong, and I predict that even a weakened version of it is wrong.

To be a little more precise, I think boots theory as written makes three increasingly strong claims, that we could think of as "levels of boots theory":

1. Being rich enables you to spend less money on things. (More generally: having incrementally more capital lets you spend incrementally less money. Also, being rich is super convenient in many ways.) This phenomenon is also called a ghetto tax.
2. Also, rich people do in fact spend less money on things.
3. Also, this is why rich people are rich.

All of these levels have stronger and weaker forms. But I think a quick look at the world tells us that the first level is obviously true under any reasonable interpretation, and the third level is obviously false under any reasonable interpretation. The second I predict is "basically just false under most reasonable interpretations", but it's less obvious and more dependent on details. There may well be weak forms of it that are true.

It may be that most people, when they think of boots theory, think only of levels one or two, not level three. I don't know if you can read this quora thread that I found on Google. It asks "How applicable to real life is the Sam Vimes "Boots" Theory of Economic Injustice?" The answers mostly agree it's very applicable, but I think most of them are on level one or two. (The one talking about leverage seems like level three, if it's talking about boots theory at all. I'm not convinced it is.)

But it seems to me that boots theory is usually presented in whole in its original form. Its original form is succinct and well written. When people want to comment on it, they very often include the very same quote as I did. And the original form starts by very clearly telling us "this is a theory of why the rich are so rich". It is very obviously level three, which is very obviously wrong.

So I have a few complaints here.

One is, I get the impression that most people don't even notice this. They link or quote something that starts out by saying very clearly "this is a theory of why the rich are so rich", and they don't notice that it's a theory of why the rich are so rich.

(I wouldn't be too surprised (though this is not a prediction) if even the author didn't notice this. Maybe if you had asked him, Terry Pratchett would have said that no, obviously Sam Vimes does not think this is why the rich are so rich, Sam Vimes just thinks this is a good illustration of why it's nice to be rich.)

This disconnect between what a thing actually says, and what people seem to think it says, just bothers me. I feel the desire to point it out.

Another is, I think there's a motte-and-bailey going on between levels one and two. A quora commenter says it's "far more expensive to be poor than it is to be rich, both in a percentage of income respect and a direct effect". He gives examples of things that rich people can spend less money on, if they choose. He doesn't provide data that rich people do spend less money on these things. Another describes how being rich lets you save money on food staples by stocking up when there's a sale. He doesn't provide data that rich people do spend less money on food or even staples. You could certainly make the case that neither of these people is explicitly claiming level two. But I do think they're hinting in that direction, even if it's not deliberate.

And relatedly: if we want to help people escape poverty, we need to know on what levels boots theory is true or false.1 If we want to know that, we need to be able to distinguish the levels. If "boots theory" can refer to any of these levels, then simply calling boots theory "true" (or even "false") is uninformative. We need to be more precise than that. To be fair, the quora commenters make specific falsifiable claims, which is commendable. But the claims are meant to be specific examples of a general phenomenon, and the general phenomenon is simply "boots theory", and it's not clear what they think that means.

I advise that if you talk about boots theory, you make it clear which level you're talking about. But maybe don't use that name at all. If you're talking about level one, the name "ghetto tax" seems fine. If you do want to talk about levels two or three, I don't have a good altiernative name to suggest. But since I don't think those levels are true, I'm not sure that's a big problem.

1. I'm not too confident about this, and I don't want to get too distracted with object-level claims about how to actually fight poverty. But my sense is that: to the extent that level two is true, giving someone money fairly reliably sets up positive feedback loops that help them save more money in future. To the extent that it's not true, these feedback loops don't come for free. Maybe we can seek out spending categories where it is true, or groups of people for whom it is true. Maybe we can teach people how to find and take advantage of these feedback loops. If even level one isn't true, we don't get these loops at all. Of course, maybe it's worth giving people money even if we don't get the feedback loops.

Posted on 14 September 2020 | Comments

### Classifying games like the Prisoner's Dilemma

Consider games with the following payoff matrix:

Player 2
Krump Flitz
Player 1 Krump $(W, W)$ $(X, Y)$
Flitz $(Y, X)$ $(Z, Z)$

One such game is the Prisoner's Dilemma (in which strategy "Krump" is usually called "Cooperate", and "Flitz" is usually called "Defect"). But the Prisoner's Dilemma has additional structure. Specifically, to qualify as a PD, we must have $Y > W > Z > X$. $Y > W$ gives the motivation to defect if the other player cooperates, and $Z > X$ gives that motivation if the other player defects. With these two constraints, the Nash equilibrium is always going to be Flitz/Flitz for a payoff of $(Z, Z)$. $W > Z$ is what gives the dilemma its teeth; if instead $Z > W$, then that equilibrium is a perfectly fine outcome, possibly the optimal one.

I usually think of a Prisoner's Dilemma as also having $2W > X + Y > 2Z$. That specifies that mutual cooperation has the highest total return - it's "socially optimal" in a meaningful sense1 - while mutual defection has the lowest. It also means you can model the "defect" action as "take some value for yourself, but destroy value in the process". (Alternatively, "cooperate" as "give some of your value to your playmate2, adding to that value in the process".) We might consider instead:

• If $2W < X + Y$, then defecting while your playmate cooperates creates value (relative to cooperating). From a social perspective, Krump/Flitz or Flitz/Krump is preferable to Krump/Krump; and in an iterated game of this sort, you'd prefer to alternate $X$ with $Y$ than to get a constant $W$. Wikipedia still classes this as a Prisoner's Dilemma, but I think that's dubious terminology, and I don't think it's standard. I might offhand suggest calling it the Too Many Cooks game. (This name assumes that you'd rather go hungry than cook, and that spoiled broth is better than no broth.)
• If $2Z > X + Y$, then defecting while your playmate defects creates value. I have no issue thinking of this as a Prisoner's Dilemma; my instinct is that most analyses of the central case will also apply to this.

By assigning different values to the various numbers, what other games can we get?

As far as I can tell, we can classify games according to the ordering of $W, X, Y, Z$ (which determine individual outcomes) and of $2W, X + Y, 2Z$ (which determine the social outcomes). Sometimes we'll want to consider the case when two values are equal, but for simplicity I'm going to classify them assuming there are no equalities. Naively there would be $4! · 3! = 144$ possible games, but

• Reversing the order of everything doesn't change the analysis, it just swaps the labels Krump and Flitz. So we can assume without loss of generality that $W > Z$. That eliminates half the combinations.
• Obviously $2W > 2Z$, so it's just a question of where $X + Y$ falls in comparison to them. That eliminates another half.
• If $W > Z > • > •$ then $X + Y < 2Z$. That eliminates another four combinations.
• If $• > • > W > Z$ then $X + Y > 2W$, eliminating another four.
• If $W > • > • > Z$ then $2W > X + Y > 2Z$, eliminating four.
• If $W > • > Z > •$ then $2W > X + Y$, eliminating two.
• If $• > W > • > Z$ then $X + Y > 2Z$, eliminating two.

That brings us down to just 20 combinations, and we've already looked at three of them, so this seems tractable. In the following, I've grouped games together mostly according to how interesting I think it is to distinguish them, and I've given them names when I didn't know an existing name. Both the names and the grouping should be considered tentative.

### Cake Eating: $W > • > • > Z$ (two games)

In this game, you can either Eat Cake or Go Hungry. You like eating cake. You like when your playmate eats cake. There's enough cake for everyone, and no reason to go hungry. The only Nash equilibrium is the one where everyone eats cake, and this is the socially optimal result. Great game! We should play it more often.

(If $X > Y$, then if you had to choose between yourself and your playmate eating cake, you'd eat it yourself. If $Y > X$, then in that situation you'd give it to them. Equalities between $W, Z$ and $X, Y$ signify indifference to (yourself, your playmate) eating cake in various situations.)

### Let's Party: $W > Z > • > •$ (two games)

In this game, you can either go to a Party or stay Home. If you both go to a party, great! If you both stay home, that's cool too. If either of you goes to a party while the other stays home, you'd both be super bummed about that.

Home/Home is a Nash equilibrium, but it's not optimal either individually or socially.

In the case $W = Z$, this is a pure coordination game, which doesn't have the benefit of an obvious choice that you can make without communicating.

(Wikipedia calls this the assurance game on that page, but uses that name for the Stag Hunt on the page for that, so I'm not using that name.)

### Studying For a Test: $W > X > Z > Y$ (two games)

You can either Study or Bunk Off. No matter what your playmate does, you're better off Studying, and if you Study together you can help each other. If you Bunk Off, then it's more fun if your playmate Bunks Off with you; but better still for you if you just start Studying.

The only Nash equilibrium is Study/Study, which is also socially optimal.

### Stag hunt: $W > Y > Z > X$ (two games)

You can either hunt Stag or Hare (sometimes "Rabbit"). If you both hunt Stag, you successfully catch a stag between you, which is great. If you both hunt Hare, you each catch a hare, which is fine. You can catch a hare by yourself, but if you hunt Stag and your playmate hunts Hare, you get nothing.

This also works with $Y = Z$. If $Y > Z$ then two people hunting Hare get in each other's way.

The Nash equilibria are at Stag/Stag and Hare/Hare, and Stag/Stag is socially optimal. Hare/Hare might be the worst possible social result, though I think this game is usually described with $2Z > Y + X$.

### The Abundant Commons: $X > W > • > •$ (five games)

You can Take some resource from the commons, or you can Leave it alone. There's plenty of resource to be taken, and you'll always be better off taking it. But if you and your playmate both play Take, you get in each other's way and reduce efficiency (unless $X = W$).

If $2W > X + Y$ then you don't intefere with each other significantly; the socially optimal result is also the Nash equilibrium. But if $2W < X + Y$ then the total cost of interfering is more than the value of resource either of you can take, and some means of coordinating one person to Take and one to Leave would be socially valuable.

If $Y > Z$ then if (for whatever reason) you Leave the resource, you'd prefer your partner Takes it. If $Z > Y$ you'd prefer them to also Leave it.

An interesting case here is $X > W > Z > Y$ and $X + Y > 2W$. Take/Leave and Leave/Take are social optimal, but the Leave player would prefer literally any other outcome.

Take/Take is the only Nash equilibrium.

### Farmer's Dilemma: $Y > W > X > Z$ (two games)

In this game, you can Work (pitch in to help build a mutual resource) or Shirk (not do that). If either of you Works, it provides more than its cost to both of you. Ideally, you want to Shirk while your playmate Works; but if your playmate Shirks, you'd rather Work than leave the work undone. The Nash equilibria are at Work/Shirk and Shirk/Work.

If $2W > X + Y$ then the socially optimal outcome is Work/Work, and a means to coordinate on that outcome would be socially useful. If $2W < X + Y$, the socially optimal outcome is for one player to Work while the other Shirks, but with no obvious choice for which one of you it should be.

Also known as Chicken, Hawk/Dove and Snowdrift.

### Anti-coordination: $• > • > W > Z$ (two games)

In this game, the goal is to play a different move than your playmate. If $X = Y$ then there's no reason to prefer one move over another, but if they're not equal there'll be some maneuvering around who gets which reward. If you're not happy with the outcome, then changing the move you play will harm your playmate more than it harms you. The Nash equilibria are when you play different moves, and these are socially optimal.

### Prisoner's Dilemma/Too Many Cooks: $Y > W > Z > X$ (three games)

Covered in preamble.

(I'm a little surprised that this is the only case where I've wanted to rename the game depending on the social preference of the outcomes. That said, the only other games where $X + Y$ isn't forced to be greater or less than $2X$ are the Farmer's Dilemma and the Abundant Commons, and those are the ones I'd most expect to want to split in future.)

### A graph

I made a graph of these games. I only classified them according to ordering of $W, X, Y, Z$ (i.e. I lumped Prisoner's Dilemma with Too Many Cooks), and I drew an edge whenever two games were the same apart from swapping two adjacent values. It looks like this:

source

The lines are colored according to which pair of values is swapped (red first two, blue middle two, green last two). I'm not sure we learn much from it, but I find the symmetry pleasing.

### A change of basis?

I don't want to look too deep into this right now, but here's a transformation we could apply. Instead of thinking about these games in terms of the numbers $W, X, Y, Z$, we think in terms of "the value of Player 2 playing Flitz over Krump":

• $α = X - W$, the value to Player 1, if Player 1 plays Krump.
• $β = Y - W$, the value to Player 2, if Player 1 plays Krump.
• $γ = Z - Y$, the value to Player 1, if Player 1 plays Flitz.
• $δ = Z - X$, the value to Player 2, if Player 1 plays Flitz.

These four numbers determine $W, X, Y, Z$, up to adding a constant value to all of them, which doesn't change the games. For example, Prisoner's Dilemma and Too Many Cooks both have $α < 0, β > 0, γ < 0, δ > 0$. A Prisoner's Dilemma also has $α + β < 0$ while Too Many Cooks has $α + β > 0$.

So what happens if we start thinking about these games in terms of $α, β, γ, δ$ instead? Does this give us useful insights? I don't know.

Of course, for these numbers to point at one of the games studied in this post, we must have $α - β = γ - δ$. I think if you relax that constraint, you start looking into games slightly more general than these. But I haven't thought about it too hard.

1. My use of the phrase comes from Ellickson's Order Without Law. Part of why I'm writing this is to help clarify my thinking about that book. I don't mean to imply anything in particular by it, I just like the ring of it better than alternatives like "welfare maximizing".

2. Calling them your "opponent" assumes a level of antagonism that may not be present.

Posted on 04 July 2020 | Comments

### Short essays on various things I've watched

Sometimes I write things in places that aren't here. Sometimes I think those things are worth preserving. Some of those things follow, with minor editing, mostly on the subject of various movies that I've watched. Also two stage musicals, one TV show, one short story, and one music video. They were written over the past four years, so I can't necessarily talk intelligently about these things any more. When I name a thing, spoilers generally follow.

### I don't really get The Hurt Locker

It seemed like it was going to be a film about a cowboy with a death wish, who should be removed from duty but isn't because of institutional dysfunction in the US army. Or something along those lines.

Instead it turned out to be… a film about a cowboy with a death wish?

Like there's that bit where he's just been a fucking idiot who could have gotten everybody killed

(not very specific so far)

And someone who I got the impression outranks him comes up to him like «oh you seem like hot shit. Just how hot shit are you? Yeah that's pretty hot shit» in a tone that I swear is subtextually «I'm about to rip you a new one»

and then the scene just ends. No one gets ripped a new anything.

What?

His team mates realise how dangerous he is to be around. But they don't do anything about it, just get pissed at him. And also he's supposedly defused almost a thousand bombs. There's tension there, a question of how he hasn't died yet (did he used to be good at his job and recently something happened to make him so reckless?) but the film doesn't acknowledge it, it doesn't seem to think "being a fucking dangerous idiot cowboy" and "successfully defusing almost a thousand bombs" are at all incompatible?

This was a really well regarded movie. It won six Oscars, including best picture, best screenplay and best director. Part of me would be inclined to chalk that up to politics, but the movie isn't even especially political from what I could tell; I'm pretty sure it could have been made both more political and a better movie. So I don't think that's a complete explanation.

I suspect all the praise came for reasons that I missed either because I was distracted by this stuff or because I'm just not into the kind of movie it was trying to be or something. But that's really not very specific.

### The Jungle Book (2016) is surprisingly pro-human?

I don't think it was intended, and I might be putting too much of myself into it. But like-

Right up until the climax, tool use is shown as almost unambiguously good. Mowgli bangs rocks together to get a sharp stone to cut vines to make rope so he can climb down a cliff face and knock honeycombs with a stick, armored in clothes he makes. He collects honey on an unprecedented scale. Then he saves an elephant from a pit.

(The music to that scene is "The Bare Necessities", a song about how you should just take life easy and all your needs will be met. Everything you need is right within your reach. The implication seems to be that "using tools to extend your reach" is just the obvious, natural, path-of-least-resistance thing to do?)

And the counterpoint isn't really there, though there's plenty of opportunity. Shere Khan says man isn't allowed in the jungle, but doesn't talk about why. Akela and Bagheera tell Mowgli to act more like a wolf and less like a man, his "tricks" are not the wolf way, but don't say what the problems are with manhood. Kaa shows fire being dangerous, but then with more realism shows fire being used to fight off Shere Khan and save Mowgli's life. Mowgli refuses to give fire to King Louie but doesn't explain his refusal. The elephant could have fallen into a human trap, but instead it was apparently just a pit. And the bees?

From the bees' perspective, I imagine Mowgli is probably terrifying. He knocks down honeycomb after honeycomb and he just keeps going. He's an existential threat to their society and there's nothing they can do about it, though they throw their lives away trying to stop him. I imagine.

But the movie doesn't show that or invite us to think about it. In a world where the animals all talk to each other, the bees are silent. When they sting, it's to teach us about Baloo's trickery and Mowgli's cleverness. They might as well be thistles.

The film has so many opportunities to show or at least tell us that man is destructive, man will kill everyone in the jungle. But it mostly doesn't seem to take them.

So when Mowgli goes to steal fire - well, we know what's going to happen, but only because we already know fire. The movie hasn't given us any particular reason to be scared of it. Also, the mythical associations of stealing fire are fairly pro-fire.

And yes, the fire spreads and Mowgli throws his torch away. But then he fights using some other things humans excel at: coalition-building, getting other people to fight for you, and making a wolf think you're part of its family.

(Here I do think I'm putting in too much of myself. I think the climax is meant to be about winning by combing animal things and man things. The coalition-building is introduced with the law of the jungle, "the strength of the pack is the wolf and the strength of the wolf is the pack". Then Bagheera says "fight him like a man". Then Mowgli says "dead tree" calling back to what Bagheera taught him in the beginning. And in the end Mowgli stays in the jungle. I think that's what is going for, but it's not what I got from it.)

And the fire is put out without too much trouble (when the elephants decide "actually, it would be better if this river went in this direction" and do some engineering works, not done by humans but very human of them), and we haven't actually seen it kill anyone.

So the film roughly seems to be about how the things that separate man from the animals are actually really great. And that's… not what I was expecting.

### Review: The Book of Mormon

From memory, Team America was funny and it had decent music. But what made it so great was that while parodying action films, it still managed to be just legitimately good as an action film.

The Book of Mormon was funny and it had decent music.

### How many levels of irony is Goodbye Mr A on?

The lyrics are overtly critical of Mr A, but subtextually feel critical of the singers, who dislike him for exposing their flaws to themselves. ("You claim science ain't magic and expect me to buy it"; "you promised you would love us but you knew too much" "so busy showing me where I'm wrong, you forgot to switch your feelings on". And like, "if love is subtraction, your number is up / your love is a fraction, it's not adding up" - I could believe that was written seriously, but I hope not.) And the first part of the video clearly makes out the Hoosiers to be the villains, partly the whole "kidnapping a superhero" thing and partly idk, they just look subtly villainous. Possibly related to camera angles.

But then they go on to take his place, and as far as I can see they do it fine? We only see two of their deeds, but they rescue a cat and stop a burglary. Wikipedia says they fight crime as incompetent antiheros, but I'm not seeing the incompetence. And they become immensely popular.

If we're meant to see them as incompetent, then it reads to me like a criticism of society-at-large; a claim that the singers' narcissism is widespread. But if we're not, then…?

Also relevant: if it's critical of society, or even just the singers, then by extension it's defensive of Mr A. And if Mr A is meant to be identified with the comic book character, it becomes a defense of objectivism, which feels implausible on priors to me. (But maybe it was more likely in 1997? Wizard's First Rule only came out a few years before, I think that was objectivist? By reputation that wikipedia doesn't immediately confirm.)

I've been idly wondering this for over ten years. Today I got around to actually rewatching/relistening to it. It didn't help much.

### Superhero origin stories: Matilda and Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman has the overt message that ordinary people can't do very much (though not literally nothing). You need someone with super powers to beat up the villain and then everything will be fine. The love interest keeps trying to tell the hero that things are just not that simple, and he keeps getting proved wrong. This message is undercut by the historical realities of WWI.

Matilda has the overt message that ordinary people, even young children, can save the day if they stand up to villainy. Before she gets powers, Matilda tells us that even young kids can do something to make things right, and she turns her dad's hair green and glues his hat on his head. In the climax, the kids revolt against Miss Trunchbull, saying "she can't put us all in chokey". This message is undercut by the fact that all of this is completely ineffectual. Matilda's dad doesn't become any less abusive or criminal. Trunchbull can and does put them all in chokey. What saves the day is someone using super powers to scare Miss Truchbull into running away, and then someone using the Russian mafia to scare the dad into running away.

### Face/Off as a retelling of the Gospel narrative

Admittedly I haven't really read the gospels, so maybe I'm completely off base here. But consider:

God (signified by Sean Archer) takes on the form of a sinner (signified by Castor Troy), in order to redeem the sinners. He's pretty successful. Most notably, when Sasha dies, it comes from acting as a force for good, sacrificing herself to save an innocent. She tells Archer not to let her son grow up like him. And so her son (named Adam, signifying Man) grows up in the house of God.

Meanwhile, the Devil (also signified by Castor Troy) attempts to seduce God's followers (Archer's family and colleagues) off of the righteous path, but he's ultimately unsuccessful. People learn to see past outward appearances to what really matters: we know him by his works (the story of his date with Eve). Evil contains the seeds of its own downfall, and Jamie stabs him with the butterfly knife he gave her.

Assorted other thoughts:

"Sean" is derived from John, meaning "God is gracious". Arrows are of course both straight and narrow, signifying the path of God; "Archer" doesn't just follow the path of God, he directs it.

Meanwhile, "Castor" is cognate to (or at least sounds a bit like) "caster", as in a witch; and "Troy" refers to the Trojan war, signifying violence and trickery. Castor's brother is named "Pollux", a decidedly ugly name that sounds a lot like "pox", the plague. According to Wikipedia, Castor and Pollux (brothers of Helen of Troy) spent some time being venerated with Christian saints; and one of them may even have been the basis of John (Sean) the Apostle.

"Adam", as I said before, signifies Man; Archer's daughter is named "Jamie", a gender-neutral name, to ensure we know that God loves his sons and daughters and nonbinary children equally.

Archer's blood type is O-, the "purest" blood type (i.e. fewest antigens in the cells), which gives to all. Troy's is AB (unspecified, so probably AB+), the most "contaminated" type, which takes from all and never gives back. (House has used this same metaphor.)

Canonically, I think Jesus is supposed to get crucified and stabbed with the holy lance. The film has both of these elements, but gets it a bit confused; while Troy is in the classic raised-arms position, Archer shoots him with a harpoon gun.

The final confrontation, in which Good defeats Evil once and for all, is kicked off in a church; symbolically, in The Church, the hearts of God's followers. The battle startles the doves in the church, but we never see a dove die: the peace in our hearts may be disturbed, but will always return.

It's hard to miss the symbolism of Archer breaking out of a hellish prison.1 (The part of Thomas is briefly played by Jamie, when she shoots him.) The prison being named Erewhon ("nowhere" spelled almost backwards) probably intends to take a position on some Christian point of contention that I'm not familiar with.

You never see the butterfly knife being opened or closed. The cuts are kind of jarring, as if to draw attention to this fact. I think it's trying to tell us something about temptation: we may think we can stray a little, and turn back before we go too far down the wrong path. But by the time we know we're going too far, we've already gone too far. (cf)

This is perhaps the most overtly anti-makeup film I remember seeing ever.

Don't think too hard about the fact that Archer's wife, Adam's adoptive mother, is named Eve.

### Hot take: the Saw franchise as exploration of meritocracy

Members of the underclass are given tests. If they pass, they get a new life. Thus, the meritorious are elevated to the elite. Meritocracy!

(Once you've survived a Saw trap, food tastes nicer, your addiction vanishes, you quit the job you hate and get the one you've always dreamed of, puppies and rainbows and so on. I'm not sure how much this is actually shown in the series, but it's what Jigsaw is going for, and the series is much more interesting if it works.)

This would be pretty dumb, but not obviously dumber than some of the other stuff out there.2

### Review: A Yellow Rose

(Someone on reddit was wondering whether books are worth it. Someone recommended Borges to them, and in particular this story. The version I initially read was a slightly different translation to the one linked. I didn't like the story, but it has the virtue of being considerably shorter than this review.)

I gotta admit, this does not sell Borges to me.

Fair warning, this is gonna come across as fairly dismissive/derisive/antagonistic. I could try to describe my reaction without coming across like that, but it would be hard to do, and especially hard to do honestly.

To me it feels like a short piece of philosophy ("it lay within… the world's contents"), wrapped in some prose.

I don't feel like the prose adds anything to the philosophy. Like for example I don't see it as an illustration of the thing the philosophy is meant to teach us. (If anything, the philosophy is trying to teach us that the prose can't illustrate it.) So if that's all it is, then I'd rather the philosophy be presented by itself, so that I could read it more easily, and comment on it without feeling like someone's going to tell me I'm missing the point.

Commenting on the prose by itself… stylistically, it uses too many words in too few sentences, and feels like a chore to read.

One thing that strikes me is that for Borges to write this story, he must have had the same epiphany as Marino and (maybe) Homer and Dante. Since those are the only people mentioned in relation to the epiphany, it seems that Borges is comparing himself to the three of them. Is that deliberate?

Another thing that strikes me is that if "the motionless and silent act that took place that afternoon" is meant to be "Marino having an epiphany", then we're told that: it happened "on the eve of his death"; that it was "the last thing that happened in his life"; but also that "it was neither that afternoon nor the next that Giambattista Marino died". This seems inconsistent, and given the focus on it, I assume it was intentional. But I have no idea why.

I don't know what the poetry means, or whether the meaning is important.3

I could well be missing something here, and whether I am or not I suspect it's partly just a question of taste.

### Captain Fantastic is such a good movie

It's an exploration of culture. Ben and Leslie created their own culture and raised their kids in it. The kids have almost no exposure to American culture. Culture Fantastic isn't perfect, and Ben isn't a flawless exemplar of it. There are some things it does better than American culture, and other things it does worse. But it's fine.

But when Culture Fantastic meets American culture, they clash. American kids seem weak, uneducated, not formidable. Fantastic kids seem - weird, socially unskilled, vaguely autistic.

And this should be fine, but none of the adults really respect the other culture. Ben's not especially rude, he knows he's on foreign ground and tries to be respectful to people's faces except when it matters, he just sometimes fails because he's human and hurting. It probably helps that he was probably raised in American culture, too. But he clearly does not approve of the culture. Meanwhile, Leslie's parents give her a Christian funeral, despite her own wishes. Two couples threaten to have the Fantastic kids taken away, because in their eyes, not being raised in American culture means they'll never survive in the real world - by which they mean American culture.

(And no one particularly respects the kids' wishes. That's not a part of either culture. They mostly like Culture Fantastic and want to stay in it, but if they didn't… I think Ben would come around and let them leave, but not easily.)

And it's particularly resonant for me because damn it, I like Culture Fantastic. He's raising those kids to be much like I want to be, even if it causes friction with the world around me.

Sometimes I read things that feel like the author thinks my culture is bad and should be destroyed. My culture is not bad. You do not get to take it away from me.

Captain Fantastic comes down firmly on the side of "not bad", and vaguely-noncomitally on the side of "do not take away".

### Hacksaw Ridge is three different films

Act 1: Stick to your principles.
Act 2: War is hell.
Act 3: The War Prayer, but unironically.

### Once Upon a Time has terrible ethics

(Spoilers only up to season 2.)

Snow is way too forgiving of Regina. Fine, characters are allowed to be silly in boring ways. Snow finally makes the right decision and kills Cora, go her! I don't even mind that she feels guilty about it, though I'd much prefer if that was combined with "but I know it was the right thing to do anyway".

But the world of the show is like, nope! That was objectively wrong of you! Your heart is black now! Fuck you for wanting to protect your family, fuck consequentialism.

And because of her black heart, supposedly she's now inevitably going to go bad and tear apart her family. (That came from Regina, who may have been making it up, but… I'd give at least 3:1 that it pays off.4)

Other people are allowed to kill, either without their hearts getting black spots or at least without becoming the sort of people that destroy the people they love. But Snow gets held to a higher standard than everyone else, apparently because she's So Good?

So like, if you're the type of person who kills people, you're allowed to kill people. If you're not the type of person who kills people, but you decide that killing someone is the right thing to do anyway, you're not allowed, and if you do it you become Objectively Bad, unlike people for whom killing is just a thing they do.

And! I don't remember if we've ever definitely seen Snow kill someone yet (at the very least she shot someone with an arrow, it's possible he survived), but she led an army to overthrow two kingdoms! At least one of those kingdoms was her suggestion! People die in war! Even if she hasn't directly killed anyone, she has been responsible for lots of deaths! But those don't count because ???

(And it's not because it was indirect, because Cora was indirect too.)

(It could be because she did it with the candle, but that's not how the narrative is pushing.)

It's like only named characters matter. Not just in the sense that the narrative focuses on them, not just in the sense that the named characters only care about other named characters, those both feel like common mistakes that fiction makes. But as a fundamental moral truth of the universe of the show, which feels less common and more annoying.

There's a related thing where… we met Regina and she's evil, and then we see her backstory and she becomes sympathetic even when she's still evil. (And the same with Rumple, and to some extent with Cora.)

But when she's the Evil Queen she tells her people to kill an entire village and they just do it. Regina has sympathetic motives, but her enforcers are anonymous. We don't see whether they're doing it out of fear, sadism, loyalty, a twisted sense of the greater good, whatever. We've been given a glimpse into the lives of the subjects who hate her, but not the ones who serve her.

(Stanley Glass is an admitted exception, and there was her father, and a brief conversation with a henchman of "I hired you even though you were drunk" or something, but there's really not much.)

Her followers don't get backstories or redemption narratives or people refusing to kill them because There Must Be Another Way. They just get killed, and the narrative doesn't care.

(Compete aside, Regina blames Snow for turning her evil, while Snow credits Regina for turning her good. Neat twist on "I made you? You made me first.")

1. Confession: I totally missed that when I first wrote this.

2. I haven't actually seen 3%. From memory, this was inspired by a reddit discussion where someone said good things about the show as an exploration of meritocracy. Based on wikipedia, I disagree.

3. In the version I initially read, the poetry was (I assume) untranslated from the original Spanish. But even translated, I still don't know what it means.

4. I stopped watching part-way through season 3, so I don't know if it did.

Posted on 12 June 2020 | Comments

This is a toy language I've been designing, or at least implementing, for about a year.

It's another take on "Haskell with a Lisp syntax". I'm aware of prior art: Hackett, Axel and Liskell. I haven't looked closely at any of them, because doing that seemed like it might make me less likely to keep working on Haskenthetical.

I call it "toy" in the sense of… well, right now it's a toy like an RC plane is a toy. But my vague goal is to make it into a toy like the Wright flyer would have been a toy if it had been built in 2003. I'd like to get it, say, 80% of the way to being a "real" language. I have no intention or expectation of taking it the other 800% of the way. I have no intention or expectation of taking on responsibility-according-to-me here.

(And honestly, even the first 80% is super ambitious. I don't expect to get that far, it would just be nice to. If I never touch the project again after this, I won't consider my time wasted.)

If you're curious, the source code is available here1. If you have stack, stack build --fast should suffice to build and then stack exec -- haskenthe -h to run the executable.

So far I've implemented basic Hindley-Milner type inference, the ability to define new types, and pattern matching. The only built-in types are ->, Float (which is a Haskell Double under the hood), and String (a Haskell Text). Builtin functions are +, - and * (all of type -> Float (-> Float Float) and err! (of type -> String $a). I don't yet have division because I haven't decided how I want to handle division by 0. I don't expect I'll come up with anything particularly exciting there, but also I haven't felt the need for division yet. (Actually, the types Either and , are also builtin, along with functions to work with them: constructors Left, Right and ,, and destructors either, car and cdr. But that's just because I added them before I added custom types, and I haven't bothered to remove them yet.) I have a long list of things I'd like to include in future. Probably the ones that interest me most right now are macros2, extensible records, and compilation. I don't know how macros and compilation are supposed to fit together, but I have some vague ideas in my head. And clearly it's been done in the past, so I assume I can find out how. Other things include IO, comments, imports, exhaustiveness checking and FFI. Maybe typeclasses, but I'm curious whether macros and lazy evaluation can make those less useful. Maybe lazy evaluation, but I'm on the fence about that. Open variants (the sum-type version of extensible records) might be on that list too, but I'm not familiar with any prior uses of them so I guess there's probably something that makes them difficult? Maybe they're just not very ergonomic in actual use, in which case cool, they'll fit right in. What I have so far isn't very interesting as a language, but it might be interesting enough to be worth writing about. ### General language overview There are seven types of expression right now. I'm going to assume you'll understand most of them just by name. Literal values are Strings and Floats. Variables are bare words with very few restrictions. (Right now they can contain any combination of printable characters other than whitespace, ", ( and ); except that they can't start with something that would parse as a Float.) Lambdas have the syntax (λ (arg1 arg2 ...) expr), or if there's only one argument, (λ arg expr) is also acceptable3. Function calls, unsurprisingly, look like (func arg1 arg2 ...), where all of those are expressions. There are two forms of let-binding. Syntactically they're similar: ([let/letrec] ((name1 expr1) (name2 expr2) ...) body-expr). let is nonrecursive, so that exprN can only refer to nameM for M < N. (You can reuse names, e.g. (let ((a 1) (a (+ 1 a))) a) gives 2.) letrec is recursive, so that any exprN can refer to any nameM. (I haven't implemented any checks to forbid you from reusing names here, but probably only the first or last use of a name would have any effect.) Finally there's pattern binding with (if~ val pat if-match else). Pattern pat can be a literal string or float, or a variable name prefixed with $, or a constructor name possibly with other patterns as arguments. If the value matches the pattern, if-match gets evaluated, with any variables bound to the relevant parts of the pattern. Otherwise, else-match gets evaluated. For example:

(if~ 0 0 "zero" "nonzero") # "zero"
(if~ 1 0 "zero" "nonzero") # "nonzero"
(if~ (Just 3) Nothing "Nothing" "Just") # "Just"
(if~ (Just 3) (Just $x) x 0) # 3 (if~ Nothing (Just$x) x 0) # 3
(if~ (, 1 2) (, $a$b) (+ a b) (err! "impossible")) # 3


(I'm leaning towards # for comments when I get around to that. Also, I'm assuming here that the Maybe type has been defined.)

There's no equivalent of a case statement that matches the same thing against multiple patterns. For that you'd need nested if~, and there's no exhaustiveness checking (i.e. nothing that would say "you missed a possibility").

This is all typechecked, so that you get a compilation error if you try to multiply a string by a float or whatever.

You can add explicit type declarations to expressions, or to parts of patterns or to the variables in let or letrec bindings.4 A type declaration looks like (: expr type) and a type is either a bare name for a type constructor, or a $name for a type variable, or a type application like e.g. Maybe$a or -> (Maybe Float) String. The root of a type application has to be a constructor, not a variable.

(: 0 Float)
(: (λ x (+ x 1)) (-> Float Float))
(if~ (Just 3) (Just (: $x Float)) x 0) (if~ (Just 3) (: (Just$x) (Maybe Float)) x 0)
(let (((: id (-> $a$a)) (λ x x))) (id 3))


If a type declaration is more specific than it could be, it constrains the type of the expression; if it's more general, that's an error5:

(let (((: x (Maybe $a)) Nothing)) x) # valid, (Maybe$a) is the inferred type
(let (((: x (Maybe Float)) Nothing)) x) # valid, Float is more specific than $a (let (((: x (Maybe Float)) (Just "foo"))) x) # not valid, Float /= String (let (((: x (Maybe$a)) (Just "foo"))) x) # not valid, $a is more general than String  Apart from expressions, the statements I've implemented so far are def for global definitions, and type to declare a new type. Currently all the def statements get pulled together and brought into a single letrec around the top-level expression. (Each program currently is required to have exactly one of those.) So (def foo ...) (foo bar) (def bar ...)  is sugar for (letrec ((foo ...) (bar ...)) (foo bar))  Type declaration introduces new types, constructors, and eliminator functions. For example, (type (Maybe$a) Nothing (Just $a))  introduces three values into the environment: Nothing of type Maybe$a; Just of type (-> $a (Maybe$a)); and elim-Maybe of type (-> $a (-> (->$b $a) (-> (Maybe$b) $a)))6. This last is the standard Haskell maybe function, but you get one for free whenever you declare a type. Other type declarations would look like: (type Bool False True) (type (List$a) Nil (Cons $a (List$a)))
(type (, $a$b) (, $a$b))
(type (Either $a$b) (Left $a) (Right$b))
(type Unit Unit)
(type (Proxy $a) Proxy) (type Void)  (I'm tempted to name the standard unit type and its value ∅ instead. That's a bad name for the type, which is not an empty set, but it's a decent name for the value. It would be a fine name for the void type, but that type isn't useful enough to deserve such a concise name.) letrec has something that's either a bug or, generously, a "missing feature that looks an awful lot like a bug when you don't realize that you're expecting it to be there". The way the typechecking works, inside the bindings for letrec, you can only use each bound variable at a single type. So you can't do (letrec ((id (λ x (let ((a (id 3)) (b (id "foo"))) x)))) ...)  because that uses id at types -> Float Float and -> String String. (Never mind that if you could it would be an infinite loop.) Haskell has this limitation too, though I'm not sure I've ever run into it naturally; I couldn't think of a non-contrived example. In Haskenthetical, this applies across an entire binding group. So you also can't do this: (letrec ((id (λ x x))) (some-float (id 3)) (some-str (id "foo"))) ...)  But that example would work if you translated it to Haskell. What gives? Well, since id doesn't depend on some-float or some-str, you could easily rewrite that example as (letrec ((id (λ x x)))) (letrec ((some-float (id 3)) (some-str (id "foo"))) ...))  And it turns out that Haskell just does that transformation for you automatically. It figures out what depends on what and groups them in such a way as to impose the fewest possible restrictions. If you make that impossible by adding some contrived mutual references, you can make Haskell fail in the same way: let id_ x = const (const x someFloat) someStr someFloat = id_ (3 :: Int) someStr = id_ ("foo" :: String) in ... -- error: Couldn't match type ‘[Char]’ with ‘Int’  (You actually only need to reference one of someFloat or someStr, because once id_ is used at a specific type, it no longer generalizes to a -> a in the body of the let.) I haven't implemented this in Haskenthetical yet. ### Implementation I don't think there's anything particularly exciting about the implementation, if you're familiar with such matters. But for those who aren't, and who want to hear about them from me, read on. I parse the input text into a list of syntax trees using Megaparsec. The syntax tree only knows about a few types of token: data SyntaxTree = STString Text | STFloat Double | STBare Text | STTree [SyntaxTree]  Then I parse each tree into a statement (or expression, but that's just a type of statement) by recognizing specific STBare values (at the head of an STTree) as needing special handling and passing everything else through to "assume this is a function getting called". Typechecking is Hindley-Milner. When I wrote that essay, I said I didn't know how to implement HM typechecking. I have some idea now, and would describe it vaguely like this: Recurse down the parse tree. At each step there are a few relevant types that you get to say "unify" with each other, roughly meaning "these are two different ways of writing the same type". Sometimes you look those types up in the environment, sometimes you just generate fresh type variables, and sometimes you generate fresh type variables and then add them to the environment. But as you go, you're building up a big list of constraints, pairs of types that unify. Also, each node gets a specific type assigned to it, which will generally be placed in a constraint. This stage is called "unification". For example, if you see the function call (foo bar), you'll recurse down to get types t1 for foo and t2 for bar, and you'll generate a fresh type variable t3 for the result. Then you'll say that t1 unifies with -> t2 t3. When you've finished, you loop back over the list of constraints, and build up a substitution. Any time you see "this type variable should be the same as this other type", you add that to the substitution, and you make that substitution in the remaining constraints before looking at them. If you see two types that should be the same but the non-variable parts of them don't match up, that indicates a type error in the program. This stage is called "solving". For example, if we have the constraint that types ->$a String and -> (Maybe Float) String unify, then whenever we see type variable $a in future we can replace it with Maybe Float; if the second one had instead been -> (Maybe Float) Float, then those don't match up and the program doesn't typecheck. In the end, you apply your substitution to the type of the program as a whole that you got from unification, and that's the ultimate type inferred for the program. If there are any type variables left, the program doesn't fix them. (An example of this would be if the program was simply Nothing.) Of course it's more complicated than that. For example, let and letrec need you to run solving during the unification phase. Also, declared types need to be treated specially so that you can reject if the user declares Just 3 as Maybe$a.

Aside, a thing I don't fully understand: I haven't tried timing it, but this implementation looks to me like it's something like O(n²) in the size of the input. It's supposed to be roughly linear. I'm not sure if I'm missing something or if there's just a more efficient algorithm.

Anyway, that's roughly how I do it. I take this approach mostly from Write You a Haskell (notably chapter 7, section "constraint generation"7, but also other chapters were useful for other parts of Haskenthetical). But I had to figure out how to handle letrec myself, because the language implemented there uses fix instead8. I also took a lot from Typing Haskell in Haskell, especially pattern matching. (I hadn't discovered it by the time I implemented letrec.) Neither source implements explicit type declarations9, so I had to figure out those for myself too. I'm not convinced I did a very good job.

Finally, evaluation: for the most part that's fairly straightforward. For example, when we evaluate a variable, we look up its value in the environment. When we evaluate a let, we evaluate something, add it to the environment under the relevant name, and go on to the next thing. There are a few types of values that we need only when evaluating:

• A closure is the thing that gets returned when we evaluate a λ expression. It captures a snapshot of the current environment, the name of the argument, and the body expression. If a λ has multiple arguments, it returns nested closures.
• A builtin is a regular Haskell function of type Val -> Either Text Val (plus a name to distinguish them). Builtins and closures are ultimately the only things that can be called as functions.
• A Thunk is an unevaluated expression, with a copy of its environment. They get evaluated as soon as anything returns them. Currently they're used in two places. letrec needs them because we can't evaluate bindings before adding them to the environment or we'd get infinite recursion. Type eliminators are builtin values, but the Val they return is a Thunk (with empty environment) to avoid the Haskell file Env.hs from having to reference Eval.hs.
• A tag is just a symbol (a Haskell Text under the hood) paired with a list of other values. Constructors wrap their arguments in a tag, and eliminators and pattern matching compare those symbols. There's no way to look at or manipulate the symbol directly in Haskenthetical, but I'd be curious to explore that direction.

I'll mention a couple other things that might be of note. These probably require more background knowledge of Haskell to make sense.

Firstly: I have the data type

data Pass = Parsed | Typechecked
type Ps = 'Parsed
type Tc = 'Typechecked


which some types use as a parameter, like

data TVar (p :: Pass) = TV !(XTV p) Name
type family XTV (p :: Pass)
type instance XTV Ps = NoExt -- data NoExt = NoExt
type instance XTV Tc = Kind  -- the kind of a Haskenthetical type


This lets us use a slightly different type TVar in different parts of the codebase. When we've merely parsed the program, we have no way to tell the kind of a type variable, so we have NoExt there. When it's been typechecked, the kind is known, so we include it. If there was a pass in which type variables simply shouldn't exist, we could write

type instance XTV NoTVarPass = Void


and we wouldn't be able to use a TVar in that pass at all.

This technique is called "trees that grow", and I copied it directly from GHC. I'm not currently using it everywhere I could, for no principled reason that I can recall. There's a chance it'll be more trouble than it's worth at the level I'm working at. An annoying thing about it is that you can't use a regular deriving clause, so I have

deriving instance Eq (TVar Ps)
deriving instance Eq (TVar Tc)
deriving instance Show (TVar Ps)
deriving instance Show (TVar Tc)
deriving instance Ord (TVar Ps)
deriving instance Ord (TVar Tc)


which kind of sucks10.

Secondly: builtin functions are kind of a pain to write manually. For example, either was previously defined as Builtin $Builtin' "either" heither where rbb :: Name -> (Val -> Either Text Val) -> Either Text Val rbb name func = Right$ Builtin $Builtin' name func heither :: Val -> Either Text Val heither l = rbb "either.1"$ \r -> rbb "either.2" $\case Tag "Left" [v] -> call l v Tag "Right" [v] -> call r v _ -> Left "final argument of either must be an Either"  (Builtin is a constructor of type Val containing a Builtin, and Builtin' is the only constructor of type Builtin. These names do not spark joy.) It works, but it always felt like I should be able to do better. I spent a while trying to figure that out and now the value is simply heither where heither :: Val heither = mkBuiltinUnsafe$ do
l <- getArg "either"
r <- getArg "either.1"
e <- getArg "either.2"
pure $case e of Tag "Left" [v] -> call l v Tag "Right" [v] -> call r v _ -> Left "final argument of either must be an Either"  I dunno if this is much better, honestly, but there we are. It needs ApplicativeDo; I never managed to either figure out a Monad that could do this, or prove that no such monad exists. (There's no Monad instance for the specific type that I use to implement this, because to write join for that monad you'd need to be able to extract the inner [w] from ([w], r -> ([w], r -> a)) without having an r to pass to the outer function, and that's not a thing that even makes sense to be able to do11. But there might be a different type that enables what I'm trying to do and does admit a Monad instance.) So that's where it's at right now. Feel free to point out ways that it sucks, although not-sucking isn't the point. I'm also interested in pointers to how I might implement some of the things on my future list (I'm aware of Implementing a JIT Compiled Language with Haskell and LLVM), or other cool things I may like to put on that list, or even things you might happen to like about Haskenthetical. 1. I don't think I'll try for hygienic macros, despite recent events. My only experience with those has been in the small amount of Racket I've worked on, and I didn't manage to get my head around them. 2. I want unicode in languages to be more mainstream. There are good reasons why it's not, but at least some of those are chicken-egg problems. For example, most people aren't set up to easily write in unicode, but that's partly because most people never have to. Fortunately, I'm in a position where I can ignore all the good reasons not to do something. 3. While writing this I realized that while you can attach them to λ params as well, those currently aren't typechecked at all. 4. But the error doesn't seem to work for type declarations in pattern bindings. That's another thing I noticed while writing this. 5. Gee, you ever think maybe there's a reason Haskell doesn't use Lisp syntax? I feel like Lisp syntax kind of needs variadic applications to be readable, but Haskell semantics don't go well with those. I'm hoping to solve this disconnect with macros. 6. Be aware that the implementation of let on that page doesn't work. It's been fixed in the repository, but not on the website. 7. It's possible to implement fix in Haskenthetical without letrec, so maybe I didn't need to figure it out. I could have just waited until I get macros and then implemented letrec in terms of fix 8. THIH does have them for binding groups (like found in let and at the top level), but not expressions. That made me wonder if those weren't in the Haskell 98 report, like how Elm doesn't have them. But they're there: §3.16, "Expression Type-Signatures". 9. If it annoys me too much, I can enable UndecidableInstances and do deriving instance Eq (XTV p) => Eq (TVar p) deriving instance Show (XTV p) => Show (TVar p) deriving instance Ord (XTV p) => Ord (TVar p)  10. You could actually get somewhere by passing in undefined, as long as the inner [w] doesn't depend on the outer r and everyone involved is careful about strictness. I don't recommend this. Posted on 19 May 2020 | Comments ### Chris Masterjohn on Coronavirus, Part 2 Update (May 8th 2020): Some small updates to the interferon and vitamin D sections. Update (29th April 2020): I've made a significant update to the vitamin D section in response to version 3 of the report. Background on this in part one. ### General info: Interferon Interferon is an antiviral that our immune system naturally releases when it detects invasion. But SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV (the virus that causes MERS) manage to avoid this response. The trigger is the presence of double-stranded RNA, which viruses need but our own cells don't. (We make single-stranded RNA from DNA, and then proteins from single-stranded RNA. We never need to copy our RNA. But viruses do need to copy their RNA, and apparently that means viral RNA needs to be double-stranded.) SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV hide their double-stranded RNA inside "double-membrane vesicles" to avoid detection. Update May 8th 2020: I've seen multiple sources saying SARS-CoV-2 is a single-stranded RNA virus, and wikipedia says SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV are too. I'm a bit confused by this, and frustratingly Chris doesn't cite this part. From a quick google, the abstract of this paper sounds like a single-stranded RNA virus can still have double-stranded RNA, or produce double-stranded RNA at some point, or something? Note that Chris doesn't say that the viruses are double-stranded RNA viruses, just that they have double-stranded RNA. They also have a bunch of other ways to limit production of interferon, and on top of that they limit the response to the interferon that does get produced. This all sounds like "so we should ramp up interferon". But that's probably a bad idea. During early stages of the virus, interferon is suppressed, so the virus can replicate quickly. But when the infection is established, macrophages generate a lot of interferon, leading to a cytokine storm. In a mouse trial, deleting the genes for the main interferon receptor made the subjects very resistant to SARS-CoV, but very vulnerable to mouse hepatitis virus and influeza A, compared to normal mice. (0% died to a dose of SARS-CoV1 that killed 85% of normal mice; but 100% died to a dose of the other viruses that killed 10-20% of normal mice.) (Question: "During the replication of the virus, macrophages are recruited to the lung". These are what release the interferon. What is a macrophage and what is recruiting them and why?) We don't yet know that any of this applies to SARS-CoV-2 as well, but it seems likely. So high levels of interferon might be slightly helpful in early stages, but make later stages much worse. Thus, Chris recommends avoiding them. (Question: LW user CellBioGuy is bullish on inhaled interferon pretreatment, which I take it means "inhaling interferon before the disease gets bad". Does this square with Chris' recommendations? It wouldn't surprise me if inhaling interferon increases your levels in the short term but not the long term, which is exactly what we want. On the other hand, he links a paper whose abstract says SARS-CoV-2 "is much more sensitive [than SARS-CoV] to type I interferon pretreatment", so maybe this is just a case of "generalizing from SARS-CoV didn't work here".) On April 25, Chris wrote more about this on his mailing list. My own summary: in hamsters infected with SARS-CoV-22, eliminating the type 1 interferon response increased the amount of virus in various body parts including the lungs; but dramatically reduced lung damage. Chris notes that this is a bit weird, but takes it as supporting his hypothesis, and I'm inclined to agree. ### Every-day optional add-on: Garlic or stabilized allicin Allicin is the thing we care about here, garlic is just one way to get it. Garlic doesn't actually contain any, though. Garlic contains alliin. Alliin is converted to allicin when the garlic is crushed and left at room temperature in the open air for ten minutes. (Who decided to name those things with an edit distance of one, and how do we stop them from naming anything ever again?) Alternatively, we can mix garlic powder with water, and let that sit at room temperature in the open air for ten minutes. That gives us a more reliable dose, since garlic cloves vary in size. Or we can just take stabilized allicin supplements, which is a still more reliable dose. Most garlic extract won't work, and "potential allicin" is unreliable. Meals containing garlic won't work, because allicin isn't robust to heat or acids. 180mg allicin daily makes people less likely to get colds. (I note that Chris here seems more confident than the authors of that review, who only found one study matching their inclusion criteria and who say at different times that the evidence is "poor-quality" and "moderate". Looking at the excluded studies, two seem worth noting. Both were excluded because they grouped colds and influenza together. Andrianova 2003 found that a specific brand of garlic tablets "allicor" reduced morbidity from acute respiratory diseases 1.7-fold. So that seems to support Chris' recommendation. Nantz 2012 used aged garlic extract, and found that it didn't reduce the incidence of (colds + flu) but did reduce the number and severity of symptoms. It's not clear to me whether aged garlic extract even contains allicin, but these results seem a little confusing to me whether it does or not.) We also see antiviral effects in vitro against six different viruses: "herpes simples virus type 1, herpes simplex virus type 2, parainfluenza virus type 3, vaccinia virus, vesicular stomatitis virus, and human rhinovirus type 2". It seems to work by damaging the lipid envelope of those viruses. So it might also work against coronaviruses, which also have a lipid envelope. Separately, allicin has antibacterial effects, which work by the same mechanism as zinc and copper inhibit SARS-CoV enzymes, so maybe it also inhibits those enzymes. (Note, this is not the same mechanism as how copper surfaces destroy SARS-CoV.) And it inhibits papain, so maybe it also inhibits papain-like proteases. (It sounds like papain-like protease 2 could be targeted by both these effects, and there are other papain-like proteases that could only get targeted by the second?) Chris recommends this as an optional daily add-on, because although it's never been tested directly against coronaviruses, it's plausible and seems to be safe. ### If you get sick, optional add-on: Echinacea I've never heard of this. Apparently it's a herb. It "has been used for the common cold", which isn't saying much (what hasn't?) but the citation suggests it was also at least somewhat effective. But this seems to be the only evidence Chris provides that it has any positive effects at all; Wikipedia is skeptical. The mechanism of its effect seems to be boosting the immune system, so we might worry that it does so by increasing interferon. But instead it seems to work by increasing "inducible nitric oxide synthase" (iNOS). That doesn't seem to be protective against contracting SARS, but in mice it helps protect against the long-term damage that SARS does to the lungs. Chris thinks this is less important than all of the preceding compounds, because "there is no clear evidence echinacea will offer specific protection against COVID-19". He no longer thinks it's safe long-term (though he hasn't updated the in-depth section of his report to reflect that), so he recommends only taking it when you get sick. ### Everyday optional add-on: Vitamin C Vitamin C supplements seem to prevent colds, but not necessarily cure them. Intravenous vitamin C reduced mortality of acute respiratory distress syndrome by half; but none of those patients had SARS. Studies have shown conflicting effects of vitamin C on interferon levels, variously increasing and decreasing it. Chris recommends getting enough vitamin C "to support normal immune function", which means taking supplements if and only if you don't get enough from your diet. He thinks the chance of it increasing interferon is too risky to take high doses. In the first version of the report, Chris considered this an optional add-on. He no longer includes it in his list of recommendations, but the sections where he explained his recommendation are still in the report, unchanged. I'm not sure what's up with that. Another thing that I'm not sure what's up with. In one section, Chris says: Normally we get cysteine by eating protein. NAC helps us get more cysteine into our cells, and the extra cysteine is good for the immune system and lung health. In another section, he says NAC "is a precursor to glutathione, which is critical for lung function." He's not very detailed about either of these claims, so I'm not sure how to put them together, and a quick glance at wikipedia doesn't really help. (There's totally room in my lack-of-understanding for them both to be true, it's just a bit weird that we have two different descriptions of its effects.) Apart from being generally good for the lungs, the reason for recommending it - if he does recommend it - seems to be a single case where large amounts of NAC helped someone to recover from pneumonia caused by H1N1. There's no reason to think it might help prevent COVID-19, but it might help mitigate the damage. ### Limit: Vitamin A Vitamin A is vital to the immune system, and you shouldn't get deficient. But its active metabolite is all-trans retinoic acid. In many rat studies, that's increased ACE2: "in the heart of rats whose blood pressure was raised by constricting their aortas, in the heart and kidney of spontaneously hypertensive rats, in the kidney of rats with glomerular sclerosis (to much higher levels than even healthy control rats), and in rat tubular epithelial cells subject to hypoxia-repurfusion." Since that effect seems fairly consistent, there's a significant risk that increased levels of vitamin A would increase levels of ACE2, which (as discussed in part 1) seems likely bad. So Chris recommends getting only enough vitamin A to avoid deficiency. (Question: how easy is it to avoid publication bias / confirmation bias / etc. here? If some people found situations where ACE2 didn't get raised by Vitamin A, would that result have been published and would Chris have found it? He does mention studies like that for vitamin D, so that's at least evidence for yes and yes.) ### Supplement to a point: Vitamin D Like vitamin A, vitamin D runs the risk of increasing ACE2 levels. We have three rat studies supporting this, two rat studies contradicting it, and one human study contradicting it. The supporting rat studies show that: "Calcitriol, the active metabolite of vitamin D, increases ACE2 mRNA and protein in rat pulmonary microvascular endothelial cells treated with lipopolysaccharide, synergizes with diabetes to increase ACE2 protein in the renal tubules of rats, and in the brains of both hypertensive and healthy rats." Of the contradicting evidence, the human study and one of the rat studies looked at serum ACE2, i.e. ACE2 which has been shed from cells and is circulating (I guess in the bloodstream). Serum ACE2 won't help the virus gain entry to cells, and might help protect against it. (No citation or explanation for this, but I guess the reasoning is that if the relevant part of the virus binds to serum ACE2, it won't subsequently be able to bind to ACE2 on the cell wall.) Serum ACE2 might not correlate with docked ACE2. Additionally, the rat study showed that vitamin D depletion had no effect on serum ACE2, but that doesn't mean an abundance of vitamin D would also have no effect; and the human study only showed a statistically significant difference in people with stage 5 kidney disease (with less severe kidney disease, the difference wasn't statistically significant; in healthy controls there was no difference). The final rat study was looking at injury response of rat kidneys; the injury in question would normally increase ACE2 levels but vitamin D (or at least calcidiol, its partially activated metabolite) reduces that effect. But this seems to be caused by vitamin D making the kidneys more resilient to injury, not by directly suppressing ACE2. So it probably isn't relevant here. Weighing up, vitimin D seems likely to increase ACE2, and in versions one and two of the report Chris recommended against supplementing it (but still against becoming deficient). Update (April 29th 2020): The rest of this section is based on info added in version three of the report, which Chris released less than an hour after I published. However, vitamin D may affect some of the factors that predict a severe or lethal case of COVID-19. The factors Chris mentions are: "low lymphocytes, a high ratio of neutrophils to CD8+ T cells, and high interleukin-6 (IL-6)." (These are all in the bad direction, i.e. low lymphocytes predicts worse disease progression.) There's lots of confusing and somewhat contradictory studies here. Some of it is to do with CD4 T cell counts, which I'm not sure what the relevance is. But it seems there's at least some reason to think that vitamin D supplementation may sometimes increase lymphocyte counts and/or decrease the ratio of neutrophils to lymphocytes. (I guess that last is good for at least one of those factors whether it incseases the numerator or denominator, as long as it doesn't decrease CD8+ T cells.) There's also lots of studies on the effect of vitamin D on IL-6 in specific contexts. "Middle-age and older adults": four studies, no effect. "Hemodialysis patents": four studies, no effect. "Obese and overweight patients": eight studies, no effect. "Diabetes": five studies, no effect. "Heart failure": reduction in one study, not in another. "Diabetic kidney disease": three studies, reduction in all. "Ventilator-associated pneumonia": one study, reduction. Notably, this last is most relevant to COVID-19. Chris sums up: "A reasonable interpretation of these studies is that vitamin D does not affect IL-6 under conditions of chronic low-grade inflammation, but does lower IL-6 during acute and highly inflammatory conditions." (I note two reasons to be unsure of this. Firstly, that with this many conditions being tested, and so few positives, we should probably make sure we're not accidentally p-hacking. Secondly, that the the pneumonia study involved "intramuscular injection of 300,000 IU vitamin D" which may not tell us much about oral vitamin D supplements of less than 1% that amount.) But we also have observational studies between vitamin D levels and COVID-19 severity. Chris has written about one of them publicly3; the other is here, though I think all the specific numbers in the report are from the first one. The summary is that given a case of COVID-19, case severity is strongly correlated with low levels of vitamin D in the bloodstream. We haven't established causality here, and there's reason to think it goes the other way (inflammation depletes vitamin D). We have no information on high levels, and Chris is worried about a U-shaped curve. I note a complexity penalty: if the correlation is monotonic in the region of the space that we've explored, expecting it to shift direction in the space we haven't explored requires some justification. Is there a reason it doesn't shift in the space we explored, or just bad luck? Chris doesn't really address this. But the space we haven't explored here is [anything above the level associated with the lowest all-cause mortality] ("in all relevant studies except a single outlier that was only published as a conference abstract"). Plus, if we assume the patients mostly weren't supplementing vitamin D, then maybe the space we haven't explored here is also [anything above the highest natural levels humans seem to reach], and it's not too surprising if things shift direction in that space. So it's not as suspicious as it looks at first. Anyway. Based on all this, Chris now recommends aiming for a specific level of vitamin D in the bloodstream: 30 ng/mL. He thinks the ideal is to test your levels every 2-4 weeks, but the home testing kit he links to seems to cost$65/test plus shipping, and he hasn't convinced me it's worth that much. Failing that, he recommends supplementing 1000 IU/day.

(I also note that, by recommending against both supplementation and deficiency, Chris was always implicitly predicting a U-shaped curve - just with the inflection point at a lower level. By comparison, different institutions generally recommend daily intakes around 600 IU/day. So supplementing 1000 IU, on top of whatever you get from food and sunlight, seems like give-or-take doubling his previous recommendation.)

Update May 8th 2020: Chris has now also written about the second study as well as two others that don't change his recommendation. We now have a little data about patients with high vitamin D levels - not enough to draw strong conclusions, but at least one of them did have a severe case. He says these studies make the link between vitamin D and severity seem to be more robust but weaker - that is, he's more confident that there is a link, but the link seems less strong than previously.

### Limit: Calcium

And balance it with phosphorus. There's a complex system keeping them balanced in the blood, and they often have opposite effects. Notably, a high calcium:phosphorus ratio suppresses fibroblast growth factor 23, and a low calcium:phosphorus ratio increases it. FGF23 suppresses ACE2, so a high calcium:phosphorus ratio might increase ACE2. Chris recommends limiting calcium supplements to 1000 mg/day, and matching supplemental calcium with supplemental phosphorus 1:1.

### Avoid: Pelargonium Sidoides

This is also called Umcka. I don't think I've previously heard of it under either name. It has many of the same components as elderberry, but only a small amount of caffeic acid. Caffeic acid was what gave us most reason to think elderberry would work, so Umcka seems inferior to elderberry.

Umcka does have some antiviral effects, including against HCoV-229E, but the mechanism for that is unclear. In cell cultures it increaes iNOS like echinacea; but also interferon, so if that generalizes it would be risky to take. It also increases neutrophil activity; those are part of the immune system, so naively we might think that was a good thing, but high neutrophil counts seem to make SARS worse.

So basically this seems like it offers nothing we can't get from elderberry and echinacea, and is too risky. So Chris recommends avoiding it.

### Avoid: Honeybee Propolis

This hasn't been found to have significant direct antiviral properties against any viruses. It increases interferon responses in mice and chickens, so it may be somewhat helpful against some viruses, but it's too risky to use here. Chris recommends avoiding it.

### Avoid: Monolaurin

Monolaurin seems to damage lipid envelopes, as well as the membrane of cells without cell walls, so SARS-CoV-2 is probably vulnerable to it. But so are human T cells. The risk of impairing those seems unacceptably high, and Chris recommends avoiding monolaurin.

There's an argument that it hurts only pathogens "because it is effective against yeast and the bacteria that cause bacterial vaginosis, but not against lactobacillus", but Chris thinks that's just because lactobacillus has a cell wall, and there are probiotics which don't have anything like that which would probably be vulnerable too.

(I think the idea that this would only hurt pathogens seems absurd, but what do I know. The citation for that clause doesn't seem to present the argument, so I'm not sure who's making it or if Chris is representing it accurately, but people have been to occasionally say absurd things.)

1. In the first reference to this study, Chris says this was a dose of SARS-CoV-2. I think that was just a typo/brain fart. Though actually, it wasn't SARS-CoV either, it was MA15 which is a strain of SARS-CoV adapted to infect mice. Chris doesn't mention this, but to be fair the paper calls it SARS-CoV. I guess the idea is that it's a close enough model as we ever really get in this kind of work? An alternative is mice engineered to express human ACE2

2. This was actual SARS-CoV-2. Unlike mouse ACE2, hamster ACE2 is similar enough to human ACE2 that they can get a severe infection going from the regular virus.

3. He also briefly discusses some of the studies mentioned above, in that post.

Posted on 28 April 2020 | Comments

### In my culture: the responsibilities of open source maintainers

If you maintain an open source project, what responsibilities do you have towards your users? Some recent drama (that I won't link to) reminded me that there are large differences in how people answer that question.

(In the drama in question, this wasn't the only thing at issue. But it was a relevant question.)

I thought I'd take a stab at describing my best guess as to how we answer it in my culture: in the culture that exists only in my mind, but that I think (and hope) many copies of me would implement, if we had that opportunity. (That culture doesn't attempt to exclude people who aren't copies of me, so it does need to be robust to attack. In my culture, we do not just assume in defiance of all evidence that everyone is friendly and trustworthy.)

Some of this will probably seem obvious to many readers, like "in my culture, murder is considered bad". Probably different bits to different readers. I'm interested in discovering which bits seem obvious to almost everyone, and which bits are controversial.

A lot of it follows from how I think about responsibility in general. But if you start to think "extending this response to this other situation, you'd get this, and that's a terrible idea"… in my culture, we don't immediately assume from this that I'm endorsing a terrible idea. Instead we check. Maybe I disagree that that's how it extends. Maybe I hadn't thought about this, and you can change my mind about the initial response. Maybe I just straightforwardly endorse a terrible idea: in that case, it'll be much easier to push back once you've gotten me to admit to it.

I do not intend, in this essay, to discuss whether any particular person or group is living up to the standards I outline here. I may do that in future. But how likely that is, and what that follow-up looks like, depends on whether the responses to this essay suggest a lot of people agree with my culture.

I think there are at least three important limitations to this essay. One is that I've never been a maintainer of an open source project that had users other than myself (that I knew of), though I've made small contributions to a few. As such, I don't really know what the experience is like or how my culture deals with its challenges, much like I don't really know how my culture deals with the challenges of living in Antarctica. I can make educated guesses, but that's all they are. I'm not going to explicitly flag them as such in the main body. (I'm already using the words "in my culture, we…" far too much. I'm not changing it to "in my culture, my educated guess is that we…") Ideally, I wouldn't write this essay because there was already a conversation taking place between people who knew what they were talking about. Unfortunately, as far as I've seen there mostly isn't, so I offer what I can.

Another is that I don't talk at all about the responsibilities of users, which is also an important part of the question. I'd like to, but… this essay has been knocking around in my head for at least a year and a half, I've made at least one previous attempt to write it that I gave up on, and I'm worried that if I don't publish it quickly I never will. I hope and believe that even with this omission, it is better for this essay to be published than to not be published.

(I also omit the question "what is this responsibility thing anyway?", but that seems less important to me right now. I've probably also overlooked important parts of the things I do talk about, but that too may not be a big deal.)

And a third is that without specific examples, what I've written is less constrained than what's in my head. It may well be possible to read this and agree with what I've written, and then to discover that your culture has a much stricter or much looser conception of responsibility than mine does.

With all of that out of the way: there are three questions I'm going to be focusing on here. When is responsibility taken on; what does it entail; and how do we react if people fail at it?

### When is responsibility taken on?

In my culture, taking on responsibility requires active involvement, but not explicit consent. It's possible to take on responsibility through negligence - to draw responsibility towards yourself without realizing that's what you're doing. In my culture, we're sympathetic towards people who do that, but we don't consider that this absolves their responsibility.

In my culture, merely making something available does not make you responsible for it. If you want to put something online and ignore anyone who tries to use it, you can do that. You are allowed to shithub.

In my culture, you take on more responsibility for a project if…

• If you start encouraging people to use your project. If someone happens to stumble across a repository you never specifically shared, you have no responsibility for it. If you see them describe a problem they have, and you say "oh hey, I had that problem too, you might want to check out my repo" you have a little. If you create a website for your project where you describe it as "the best way to solve this problem", you have more.

• If you have many users. If you shirk your responsibilities, most of the harm done is to your users1. With fewer users, the harm from not-acting-responsibly is lower, and so the responsibilities themselves are lower.

• If your users are invested in your project. If they can't easily stop using it, you have more responsibility to treat them well.

Your users' exit costs are probably low if you make a video game, or "libpng but 30% faster" or "find but with a nicer command line syntax". In that case your users can probably just play a different game, or easily replace your tool with libpng or find.

They're higher if you make a programming language, where migrating away requires rewriting a codebase. Or a document editor that can only save in its native binary format or pdf, so that there's no way to edit the documents without your tool.

• If you have the ability to accept responsibility. Handling responsibility takes time and it takes multiple skill sets. One person hacking on their side project simply cannot act in the same ways as a team of two full-time developers plus twenty volunteers. That team can't act in the same ways as the Mozilla Foundation.

• If you act like you're accepting responsibility. If you have a history of ignoring issues and pull requests, people should probably pick up on this. If you tell people you're going to break backwards compatibility, they shouldn't expect you to maintain it. Words like "production ready" increase your level of responsibility. Words like "alpha" decrease it, as do version numbers below 1.0.

A common thread here is that responsibility is related to justified expectations. "Expectations" in both the moral sense and the probabilistic sense. If someone can make a compelling argument "this person morally ought to accept responsibility here", or a compelling argument "I predict based on past behaviour that this person will act as though they've accepted responsibility here", then in my culture, that person has some degree of responsibility whether they like it or not.

Accordingly, in my culture you can disclaim responsibility in advance, simply by saying that you're doing this. Note that a pro forma warranty disclaimer in your LICENSE file isn't sufficient here. Instead you should say it at the entry points to your project - probably the README and the website (if there is one). Something like…

Note that while I think this project will be useful to many people, I am not devoting much attention to it, and I'm prioritizing my own use cases. Bugs may be fixed slowly if at all. Features may be removed without warning. If this isn't acceptable to you, you should probably not rely on the project; or at least you should be willing to fork it, if necessary.

Or even:

Note that while I think this project will be useful to many people, I have no interest in accepting responsibility for other people's use of it. Feel free to submit issues and pull requests; but I may ignore them at whim, and my whim may be arbitrary and capricious.

This won't usually be necessary. But if you feel in danger of taking on more responsibility than you'd like, you can do this.

### If you have responsibility, what does that entail?

In my culture, if we've taken on responsibility and now we want to discharge it, we do so with care. We give advance notice, and we try to find replacement maintainers. If we can't find a replacement maintainer, we still get to quit. But we try.

In my culture, we acknowledge that different people have different needs and goals, and not every project will be suitable for all users. We try to help users figure out whether our projects will be suitable for them before they get invested. We're open about the limitations of our projects, and about the design goals that we explicitly reject.

In my culture, we don't need to reply to every critic. But we do try to notice common threads in criticism, and address those threads. ("Address" doesn't mean that we necessarily try to solve them in a way that will satisfy the critics. It simply means we give our thoughts about them. We try to do that in such a way that even if the critics aren't happy with what we're doing, they at least feel like we've heard them and understood them.)

In my culture, we accept that some critics will be unkind, unfair and unproductive. This sucks, but it's a reality of life right now. We distinguish these critics from others. We are free to ignore them, and to ban them and delete their posts from the spaces we control. We do not use their actions to justify shirking our responsibilities to other critics.

In my culture, we also take care to check whether we're unfairly rounding people off as being unkind, unfair and unproductive. We don't require perfection from our critics. We try to hold ourselves and our supporters to the standards we expect of our critics. We moderate our spaces, but we try not to silence all criticism from them.

In my culture, we still introduce bugs, because we're still human. We try not to, of course. But we accept fallibility. When we fail, we do our best to fix it. We put more effort into avoiding more catastrophic bugs.

In my culture, we do not accept incompetence or indifference. These are signs that a person should not have taken on responsibility in the first place. We expect people to know the limits of their ability and of how much they care.

In my culture, we can set boundaries around how our future actions are constrained. We distinguish public APIs (where we mostly try to maintain backwards compatibility) from private APIs (where we mostly don't, and if people expect us to we point to the word "private"). We may reject bugfixes that we expect to cause too much ongoing future work, in hope of finding a better fix in future.

In my culture, sometimes we hurt people deliberately because the alternatives are worse. When we do, we own it. For example, sometimes we decide to remove a feature that people were relying on. We don't make that decision lightly. When we do it, we explain why we decided to do it, and we apologize to the people who were relying on it. We don't try to minimize their pain. We try to suggest alternatives, if we can; but we try not to pretend that those alternatives are any more suitable than they actually are. We give advance notice, if we can. We can be convinced to change our minds, if new information comes to light.

Of course, the degree to which we feel bound by all of this depends on the degree to which we've actually taken on responsibility. And note that in all of this, there's very little requirement for positive action. If we don't want to include a feature, we don't need to write it, or even merge the PR if someone else writes it. If we don't want to go in the direction our users want us to, we don't have to go there. We just have to make it clear that that's what we're doing.

### What if someone fails to act responsibly?

That is, if someone has taken on responsibility, whether intentionally or not, and then has failed to act like someone who's taken on responsibility… how do we respond?

In my culture, we mostly respond by acting as though this will happen in future.

We don't treat this as an indelible black mark against all aspects of the person. We'll still accept their contributions to other open source projects, for example. (Though perhaps not technically complex contributions, that will likely need a lot of maintenance from the same person going forward.) We'll accept their conference talks. We'll stay friends with them.

But we won't rely on their projects, because we don't expect their projects to be reliable. We warn others about this, but if others decide to use their projects anyway, we consider that none of our business.

We accept that people have a right to run projects as they see fit. We acknowledge that our conception of "responsibility" is a mere social convention. But social conventions are important. We provide an opt-out for this particular social convention, but if you don't opt out explicitly, we'll make it explicit for you.

We give second chances. If they want to take on responsibility in future, and if they seem to understand how they failed in the past, and they say they'll try to do better, we give them a shot, because that's reason to think it won't happen in future. If they still fail, and want a third chance, we take their second failure into account too.

We may fork a project, even if the maintainer doesn't approve, but we'll rarely attempt a hostile takeover from the outside. We'll make sure our fork is clearly distinguished from the original project.

1. To the extent that this isn't true, I think most of the responsibility comes from something other than "being an open source maintainer". For example, if you're making a web scraper, I would suggest you have a responsibility to make it well-behaved by default - sleep between requests, stop after a certain number of failures, and so on. But that responsibility comes from the product, not the process. You can't avoid it with a disclaimer. And so it's not the focus of this essay.

Posted on 13 April 2020 | Comments

### Chris Masterjohn on Coronavirus, Part 1

Update (April 28th 2020): Part 2 published. Also a minor update to the ACE2 section.

Update (April 5th 2020): Chris released version two of his recommendations on April 2nd. There are some fairly major revisions. In particular, Chris now thinks Coronavirus infects the throat, not just the lungs. He was already making recommendations just in case this turned out to be true, so he hasn't specifically added anything, but it's still an important update. The other thing of note is that he no longer recommends using copper spray or taking echinacea until you get sick, except (for the copper) before and after potential exposure. I've updated this post accordingly. You can still read version 1.

Chris Masterjohn is a nutritionist who has some advice on supplements to take to help protect against Covid-19, and some to avoid. The raw advice is available for free, but the full report with explanation and references costs $10. I bought a copy. (The public advice has not been updated to reflect version 2.) Should we trust him? On the one hand, "nutritionist" is not a profession I necessarily hold much respect for (it's not a protected term). Nor do I tend to think highly of people emphasizing that they have a PhD. Also, his website looks super sketchy to my eyes. Also also, something that costs money gets fewer eyeballs than something free, and so mistakes are less likely to be discovered. (Only the last one of those should be considered a problem with the report; the rest are just priors.) On the other hand, Chris previously turned me on to zinc so he has some credibility with me. Also, although I'm out of my depth in actually evaluating the science, I do think I have a decent bullshit detector, and the report is superficially very convincing to me.1 I get the sense that he actually really knows what he's doing, is weighing the evidence appropriately and making claims that are justified by it. He admits to uncertainty, and some of his recommendations are "this probably won't help, but just in case"; but he does speak precisely enough to be falsifiable. This doesn't mean he's right, of course. But I think he's worth some people paying some attention to. My intention here is mostly to summarize his reasoning, in more detail than is on the linked page but less detail than is in the full report. You can make up your own minds. Much of it I haven't even checked how actionable it is right now (i.e. are these things available in stores or for delivery, and how much do they cost). I do have some questions and commentary of my own that I've scattered about, possibly not always well-flagged. The report makes fifteen recommendations about fifteen supplements (some supplements are in multiple recommendations, and some recommendations are about multiple supplements): • Four everyday "essentials": elderberry, nutritional zinc, ionic zinc, and copper. • Two everyday "potential add-ons": garlic or stabilized allicin, and vitamin C. Chris takes allicin, and plans to take a low-dose supplement of vitamin C if he runs out of fresh food. • Two things to use before and after every potential exposure: copper spray, and more ionic zinc. • Two additional "essentials" only when you get sick: again, copper spray and more ionic zinc. • One "optional add-on" only when you get sick: echinacea. Chris used to take this daily, but has since decided against that. • Four "things to limit or avoid": these are much less pithy. "Don't take high doses of vitamins A or D" (but don't get deficient either); "Limit Calcium and Don't Use Calcium Supplements That Aren't Balanced by Phosphorus"; "Don't Use Monolaurin"; "Don't Use High-Dose Vitamin C, Pelargonium Sidoides (Umcka), or Bee Propolis". "Potential exposure" is quite broad, including: • Going into public spaces to perform essential errands. • Accidentally encountering someone you don’t live with face-to-face within six feet, or making physical content with such a person. • Touching any surfaces that someone you don’t live with may have touched in the last nine days without any personal protective equipment. • Incorrect use of personal protective equipment (for example, taking gloves off your hands in any other way than explained here or reusing a mask without following these guidelines). • Putting your fingers into your mouth or nose, regardless of whether you washed them beforehand. I think he's mostly expecting these won't happen very often. Personally, I'm doing most of them about once a week to go shopping, and the last one probably several times a day. It includes any physical contact with someone you don't live with, coming face-to-face with such a person within six feet, and putting your fingers in your mouth or nose even if you washed them first. In this post I'm going to focus on elderberry, zinc and copper; my current plan is to do the rest in future posts. So far, I've followed this advice to the extent of: • I've stopped taking daily vitamin D supplements, and advised my partner to do the same. (Somewhat to my embarassment, as they'd only started taking them on my recommendation. I've been taking it 5x/week for years.) He says not to supplement with vitamin D at all, but he also says to get normal amounts from sunshine and vitamin D-rich foods, and we're not doing that. So maybe we should take one a week instead of one a day. • I bought a bulb of garlic, but I haven't done anything with it yet. • I took one of the zinc capsules that came free with my last order of zinc lozenges. Then I had a bad gastrointesinal day. Possibly unrelated, but they also had something of an unpleasant smell that I don't know whether it was normal. I haven't tried again. Maybe I will. They're 50mg, which is more than Chris recommends at one time. • I recently started developing cold symptoms, so I would have been taking ionic zinc anyway. But I've probably taken more than I would have done otherwise. (I'm down to about 40 lozenges and they're currently out of stock, so I may not use them daily.) If you're going to follow any of it yourself, you should at least read his public post, and ideally also the full report. ### General info: ACE2 SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes the disease Covid-19) is not like the common cold or the flu, and things which work against those may not be helpful here. On the other hand, it's very like SARS-CoV (the virus that causes SARS). The genomes are 80% identical, and "the majority of its proteins are 85-100% homologous, with an average homology of 87%". (Question: That seems like a really low average, given that range? Though I guess it includes the ones below 85%.) The two main things the report focuses on are ACE2 and interferon. ACE2 is an enzyme used in regulating blood pressure. SARS-CoV-2 enters our cells by docking to ACE22. It has this in common with just two other human coronaviruses, SARS-CoV and HCoV-NL63. So heightened levels of ACE2 could increase susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2. (Question: "The binding of SARS-CoV to ACE2 is thought to downregulate ACE2 expression, leading to a loss of the anti-proliferative and anti-fibrotic actions of ACE2 in the lung, thereby contributing to the lung damage that occurs in SARS." That seems to point in favor of increasing levels of ACE2, so that it getting downregulated is not such a big deal. How to weigh these two concerns? I haven't read it closely, but this sounds like NL63 only affects ACE2 on infected cells, and doesn't so much "downregulate" it as "obliterate" it. So my super tentative take is: even if we start with high levels, that may not be sufficient to be protective if the infection gets bad; it would be more important to focus on stopping it from getting bad. But followup questions would be: what percent of cells express ACE2? What percent of those get infected, in a (light/moderate/bad) infection? When we do things that increase/decrease ACE2, does that increase the amount of ACE2 on individual cells, or the number of cells with any ACE2, or both? If a cell has lots of ACE2, does it do more of the sorts of things that ACE2 is good for?) Update 28th April 2020: Chris has written more about this, see section "ACE2: Friend or Foe?" He points out that differing ACE2 levels are likely to have much more effect on viral replication (which is an exponential process) than on normal bodily functioning (which isn't). I'll talk about interferon in a future post, because it's not relevant to anything in this post. ### Daily essential: Elderberry "In rhesus monkey kidney cell culture, elderberry has virucidal, anti-plaque, anti-replication and anti-attachment activity toward HCoV-NL63". Most of the effect seems to come from caffeic acid. That binds directly to ACE2, which suggests elderberry would be similarly effective against SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2. (Question: is that in vitro? Doesn't seem very reliable in general, but maybe the specific mechanism makes it moreso.) As a bonus, elderberry is also effective against avian infectious bronchitis virus through compromising the lipid envelope. Since all coronaviruses have one of those, that effect might generalize to SARS-CoV-2. Other foods include caffeic acid, but only black chokeberries have anything like a comparable amount. And elderberry extract is the thing that's been actually studied, so that's what Chris recommends. There are studies using elderberry in humans to treats colds, the flu, and cardiovascular disease, but Chris doesn't mention their results. He just uses them to determine a safe dose. ### Daily essential: Nutritional zinc This is zinc from food or most supplements (including tablets or capsules). Zinc "inhibits at least two proteins required for SARS-CoV replication, papain-like protease-2 and helicase." So it probably inhibits the homologous proteins in SARS-CoV-2. (In version 1 Chris thought it also inhibited the protein helicase, but he no longer believes that.) (Question: how similar do proteins need to be for this to be a decent guess? This suggests proteins called "homologous" might be only 40% similar in sequence. If I guess that "homologous" means this is likely to be a decent guess; and that these ones are >85% similar (based on base rates of similarity between the viruses)… that suggests it's probably a pretty good guess? But I'm not at all cofident in this thinking.) So we should try to deliver zinc to the relevant tissues. What are those? The infection would begin somewhere between the nose or throat (where the virus mostly enters our body) and lungs (where it primarily infects), wherever the virus first encounters ACE2. (Question: this seems to assume that the virus doesn't first infect something outside of this path, and then move on to the lungs. Is that a safe assumption? I would guess so.) In version one, Chris thought the virus wouldn't find any ACE2 until it reached the lungs. To quote the previous version of this post: There are two papers trying to answer this question, and they give different opinions. … Hamming et al (2004)3 suggests that the virus wouldn't find any ACE2 until it reached the lungs. They did find ACE2 in the oral and nasal mucous membranes, but on the wrong side to be any use to the virus. Xu et al (2020)4 argues that ACE2 is highly expressed through the surface of the mouth, especially the tongue. The two used different methods. Xu had better resolution, down to single-cell. But Hamming could tell where on the cells the ACE2 was expressed. The second thing matters, and the first doesn't. Xu's results are what Hamming would have predicted, they just aren't relevant. (The symptoms are also what Hamming would predict: a cough suggests lung infection, and is present. A runny nose or other cold symptoms would suggest throat infection, but they aren't present.) But now there's direct evidence that the virus infects the throat too. (Note that the "not-yet peer reviewed" paper is now peer reviewed.) So it seems that although the main infection site is the lungs, the infection starts in the mouth, nose or throat. We can specifically target those with ionic zinc, for which see below. We don't have a specific mechanism to target the lungs with zinc. We just have to take it orally in the normal way (that is, in food or supplements) and let it be distributed there. Chris recommends 7-15mg of zinc four times a day, away from sources of phytate ("whole grains, nuts, seeds, and legumes") which can inhibit zinc intake. (At one point he says 10-15mg, and at one point 7-10, but I think this is just bad proofreading. Mostly he says 7-15.) Conventional wisdom says we can't absorb nearly that much, but Chris thinks we just need more dakka: "the relevant studies have been limited to less than 20 mg/d. Supplementation with 100 mg/d zinc sulfate has been shown to more than double total zinc absorbed from 4.5 to 10.5 mg/d, while decreasing the fraction absorbed from 43% to 9%." At such high doses, side effects have been observed. "Zinc at 50 mg/d has been shown to lower superoxide dismutase, and at 85 mg/d increased self-reported anemia. Both of these could probably have been averted by proper balancing with copper, which is addressed in the section below. However, the increased need for copper at high zinc intakes reflects increased expression of metallothionein, which can bind to many positively charged metals besides copper." I confess I'm not sure what this "however" is meant to mean. It kind of sounds like "so we still probably shouldn't go that high", but then we go that high anyway. I'm a bit concerned about this. (I also confess that I have no idea what superoxide dismutase is.) If you take zinc, you should balance it with copper. ### Multi essential: Ionic zinc This specifically means zinc from the kind of lozenges that work for a cold, or failing that from an ionic zinc throat spray. (The mechanism that makes this work against a cold will not help with SARS-CoV-2.) It delivers ionic zinc to the mouth, nose and throat tissues, like we couldn't do with the lungs. Chris recommends using one lozenge a day preventatively; plus several a day on the first sign of symptoms; plus an extra one before and after any potential exposure. (Question: to be effective against the cold, this delivers ionic zinc to the surfaces of these tissues. Here we want it on the inside. Will that work?) ### Daily essential: Copper Copper surfaces work great against coronaviruses. This knowledge is not super helpful, since we are not copper surfaces. It does suggest that copper ions in our cells might be toxic to the virus. But this has never been well studied. Like zinc, copper inhibits papain-like protease 2 of SARS CoV. But it's much less effective at it. The main reason to take copper is to keep the zinc-to-copper ratio acceptable. It should be between 10:1 and 15:1. (At one point he says 2:1 - 15:1, but again, I think that's bad proofreading.) ### Essential if you get sick, before and after exposure: Copper spray He doesn't actually have loads of detail on this in the report. That was less of a problem in version 1, when he considered it a hedge. Now that he calls it essential, it feels lacking. Fortunately, he's actually written about it publicly in more detail. (Though I think still less detail than the report usually contains.) He recommends also using an ionic copper spray for the throat infections. This is similar to his recommendation for ionic zinc as well as nutritional zinc, but he doesn't say anything about copper lozenges. I assume those don't exist and/or wouldn't work for some reason. The goal in this case is to get the copper to the surface of the relevant tissues, in hopes that this destroys the virus in much the same way copper surfaces do. It's not clear whether he has specific evidence for this effect (even against other viruses), or just expects it to work based on theory (and if so how robust he considers that theory). Based on what he's written I don't think I'd put this in "essentials" (even acknowledging that "essential" is already an exaggeration). He doesn't recommend using it daily. Partly because he thinks the effects wouldn't last long enough for that to be worthwhile. (Question: why is zinc different here?) But also partly because he's not convinced it's safe long term. Stop if you notice irritation. He recommends a specific brand (named in the above link) that seems to have some evidence for short-term safety. 1. There are some things that kind of smell like bullshit to me. Most notably, I feel like at times, the report goes into a lot of detail on things that aren't super relevant, like the renin-angiotensin system that ACE2 plays a part in. As far as I've seen so far, the precise mechanics of that don't really matter. Meanwhile, a lot of the important claims are speculative - necessarily so, because things are moving too fast to have good evidence here, but speculative all the same. In combination, this can kind of feel like… "throw a lot of impeccably researched, uncontroversial and unimportant science at the reader; then try to sneak in the difficult bits under the radar"? I'm sure there's a term for this that I'm forgetting. I don't actually think this is what's happening. My sense is that it's more likely to be bad editing, and I'm not even confident it's that. But it seemed important to note. I've also noticed some inconsistencies that I chalk up to bad proofreading. 2. Some papers talk about "ACE2 receptors". I currently think they're being imprecise, and there's no such thing. By comparison, the common cold is mostly caused by rhinoviruses, and most of those dock to ICAM-1. Some colds are caused by coronaviruses, but those dock to aminopeptidase N or sialic acid. The flu docks to sialic acid. So if something protects against those by preventing them from docking, it's likely to have no effect on Covid-19. 3. Hamming, I. et al. Tissue distribution of ACE2 protein, the functional receptor for SARS coronavirus. A first step in understanding SARS pathogenesis. J. Pathol. 203, 631–637 (2004). 4. Xu, H. et al. High expression of ACE2 receptor of 2019-nCoV on the epithelial cells of oral mucosa. Int. J. Oral Sci. 12, 8 (2020). Posted on 29 March 2020 | Comments ### My Bet Log I occasionally make bets about future events. I think I probably should do that more often than I currently do. Given that, I think it's good practice to have a public record of the bets I've made and their outcomes, when available. I'll try to keep this updated going forward, if I continue to make bets. As of 24-Oct-2021, I'm up £205.571 with ten wins and four losses. (This has nothing to do with the matched betting that I previously wrote about. There I was earning money from sign-up bonuses. Here I'm trying to earn money by being better at predicting the future than other people.) In order of date I made the bet: ### I won: NO on Trump leaving before the end of his first term. I placed this bet on 20-Oct-2019, on Betfair, after a friend said on Facebook that the odds seemed very favorable to him. The odds at the time were 1.3, giving an implied probability of${1.3 - 1 \over 1.3} = 30\%$that he'd leave. I bet £50 against this, giving me £15 profit if he doesn't. (Minus commission, so £14.25.) As of 19-Mar-2020 the odds are 1.12, for an implied probability of 11% that he'll leave. (I could cash out now, taking my £50 back immediately and £7.56 minus commission when the market closes2. I'm not inclined to do that.) ### I lost: NO on a large increase in working from home. LessWrong user Liron said: I also bet more than 50% chance that within 3 years at least one of {Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon} will give more than 50% of their software engineers the ability to work from home for at least 80% of their workdays. I took him up on this for$100 each. We confirmed on 02-Jan-2020. I don't think I'd heard the term "coronavirus" at the time.

This cost me $100 (£92.69 over Paypal, which I think included £2.99 transaction fee). But I got a bunch of LW karma for it. Swings and roundabouts. ### I won: YES on someone contracting Covid-19. In a Telegram group chat I'm in, I bet another member €30 each that at least one person in the chat would contract Covid-19 by 28-Feb-2021. (We made the bet on 28-Feb-2020.) As of first writing this post: I wasn't confident of winning at the time, and I'm still not. Confirmed infection rates are lower than I'd anticipated - for example, Hubei has had just over 0.1% of its population confirmed as having had the disease at one point, and Italy just over 0.05%. I think an ambiguous result is more likely than I used to, because people who get mild cases of the disease often aren't tested. Resolution: I won this some time in November 2020, and my friend paid me what in Sterling turned out to be £25.89. ### I won: DECLINE in Trump's odds of being re-elected. On 04-Mar-2020, I noticed that the betting markets' odds on Trump's re-election had gone up since Covid-19 became a thing. (According to Election Betting Odds, rising from about 40% mid-november to about 56% at the time.) At the time, the number of officially diagnosed cases in the US was very small. I predicted that as the official number rose, and as it became more widely known that the CDC and FDA had basically fucked up, the odds would drop again. The obvious objection was: "if you can predict that happening, so can anyone. Why haven't the odds changed already?" I didn't have an answer for that, but the stock markets had seemed to react slowly to the news3 so maybe it would happen here too. (And the next obvious objection was: "oh, so you're expecting the same thing to work twice in a row?" I didn't have an answer for that either.) Less obvious objections that I realized/someone pointed out after I'd made the bet: • Bush's popularity rose after 9/11. • Covid-19 seems to play very nicely into Trump's anti-immigrant, anti-globalist narrative. In any case, I went ahead. Again on Betfair, I bet £100 against Trump at odds of 1.76. The odds started to drop pretty soon after that. Two weeks later, on 18-Mar-2020, I cashed out (by betting £110.26 for Trump at odds of 2.1, but actually by pressing the "cash out" button). I've claimed my initial £100 back, and no matter who wins I'll earn £21.29. (£20.23 after commission, but nothing if the market is voided.) ### I won: BIDEN to win the 2020 election. On 05-Sep-2020, I put £30 on Biden at the same market as my previous Trump bets, at odds of 1.98 (implied probability ~51%). At the time, FiveThirtyEight, Metaculus and Good Judgment Open all gave Biden at least 65% to win (with different caveats). I have no strong opinion; my bet was on the basis that I think I trust those predictors more than I do the market. If the market gets more in line with what they're saying, I may cash out, whether I'm up or down at the time. Note that Betfair settles the market according to projected Electoral College votes. A faithless elector, or an incumbent refusing to stand down, don't affect the result. My interpretation is that 538 and Metaculus are also trying to forecast that, so that's not the source of the difference. (I can't see any fine print on GJ Open.) I can think of a few other possible sources: • People might misunderstand the Betfair rules. (Or the Metaculus ones, but that's close to 538's forecast, the fine print is much more obvious there, and it has a comment thread.) • I think 538 is modelling under the assumption that Biden stays in the race until the election. If he doesn't, I think including if he dies, I lose my bet. But the Metaculus and GJO forecasts aren't conditional on that (they don't mention Biden at all). • If a Trump victory would raise the value of GBP compared to a Biden victory, the Betfair market will exaggerate Trump's chances of victory. Lowering the value of USD might work, too. Or if people just want to hedge against a Trump victory. But I don't really expect that any of these explains it. Resolution: Biden won the election. I won £29.40 before commission, £27.93 after. ### I won 3, lost 3: VARIOUS US presidential election markets. On 25-Oct-2020, I placed four more bets: • £500 on Biden to win overall, odds of 1.47 giving me £235 if I win (plus the £50.71 I already had on him). 538 at the time gave Biden 87%. • £50 on Democrats to win Pennsylvania. Partially matched at 1.47 and partially at 1.48, I'll get £23.64 if he does. 538 gave this 86%. • £50 on Democrats to win Florida. Specifically, £48.71 against Republicans, since I got slightly better odds that way, partially matched at 1.98 and partially at 1.97. I'll get £50 if the Democrats win. 538 gave this 67%. • £50 on Democrats to win Texas. Implemented as a combination of a bet against the Republicans at 1.45, and a bet for the Democrats at 3.2, because that gave me a few pennies extra profit which probably weren't worth the effort of writing this. If Democrats win I'll get £110.64. This is an implied probability of 31%, which is only a little below 538's 37%. But Less Wrong commenter Liam Donovan recommended it, and I figured why not. (I didn't do any actual research myself, and I hadn't seen any of the follow up comments at the time.) I didn't choose Pennsylvania and Florida by any particularly rigorous search process, I just vaguely remembered hearing that they were good choices. Then on 05-Nov-2020, I put another £49.63 on Biden to win the election, at odds of 1.10. (That was the amount I had in Betfair at the time.) I was pretty confident this was a damn good bet, but nervous about increasing my exposure enough to really take advantage of it. I somewhat regret this in hindsight. Then on 08-Nov-2020, I also placed £10 against Republicans to win Alaska, at odds of 1.04, winning £250 if the Democrats won. I didn't think that was likely, but I wasn't sure it was that unlikely, and I thought maybe if mail-in votes leaned Democrat, even if it wasn't enough to take the state it might be enough to cash out at higher odds. Honestly this was probably a bit silly. Resolution: Biden won the election (£235 + £4.96 to me, £227.96 after commission) and the Democrats won Pennsylvania (23.64 to me, £22.46 after commission). I lost the others. Overall this set of bets earned me £117.96, and overall my bets on the presidential market specifically (including from September and March) earned me £276.14. (Because commission is calculated on all of them together, rounding errors make that £0.02 higher than you get by calculating my profit on them individually.) ### I won: NO on Trump leaving before the end of his first term. Also on 25-Oct-2020, I put another £100 on Trump lasting his term, at odds of 1.08. I'll get £8 if he does (plus the £15 I already had). I won these bets on 20-Jan-2021, after what was certainly a sequence of events. I didn't even have to pay commission on them: I'd placed a bet in the opposite direction on someone else's behalf, so according to Betfair I made a loss but according to me I earned £23. ### I won: NO on Brian Rose to win the London Mayoral election. Brian Rose ran for Mayor of London in 2021. On 4-May-2021 I bet £940 against him at odds of 95, giving me £10 (£9.50 after commission) if he didn't win. I didn't know much about him, but I had seen him boast about his betting odds in ads and on an instagram post I found through google. So I assumed his supporters were adding dumb money to the markets, rather than him actually having a 1% chance of winning. (And Vitalik Buterin points out (section "capital costs") that a small amount of dumb money can cancel out a lot of smart money.) He did not win. ### I won: YES on Ethereum to switch to proof of stake. On 3-Jun-2022 (or possibly the day after), I bet £50 against £50 from my older brother that Ethereum would switch to proof of stake within two years. If there was a fork, with people mining on both the original chain and the proof-of-stake chain, and no consensus about which was the "real" Etherum, then this would be a loss for me. I didn't get around to adding this to this log until October, at which point I discovered that I'd won. The switch happened on 15-Sep-2022 with no controversy I found from a quick search. My brother agreed and sent me the money. 1. When I try to balance my accounts, I find instead that I'm up £0.03 more than this. Mostly out of curiosity, I might try at some point to figure out what mistake(s) I've made - there might be one on this page, and/or that amount might include something it shouldn't. 2. I can't take any profit now, because if he gets assassinated the market is void. 3. This didn't do me any good. I hadn't sold any stocks at the time, and I still haven't. Posted on 19 March 2020 | Comments ### Tapping Out In Two I'm one of those people who feels personally called out by xkcd's "Duty Calls" ("someone is wrong on the internet"). (Not as much as I used to. At some point I stopped reading most of the subreddits that I would argue on, partly for this reason, and Hacker News, for unrelated reasons, and now I don't do it as much.) As pastimes go, there's nothing particularly wrong with internet arguments. But sometimes I get involved in one and I want to stop being involved in one and that's not easy. I could just, like, stop posting. Or I could let them say something, and then respond with something like, "yeah, I'm still not convinced, but I don't really have time to get into this any more". But then the other person wins, and that's terrible. It potentially looks to onlookers like I stopped because I couldn't find something to say any more. And in at least some cases, it would feel kind of rude: if they've put a lot of thought into their most recent post, it's a bit dismissive to just leave. In the past, when people have done that to me, I've disliked it, at least some times. (Well, at least once. I remember one specific occasion when I disliked it, and there may have been others.) Another thing I could do is respond to their most recent post, and then say "and now I'm done". But that feels rude, too, and I certainly haven't liked it when people have done it to me. (Why not? It puts me in the position where I don't know whether to respond. Responding feels petty, and kind of a waste of time; not responding feels like they win, and that's terrible.) If they do reply, then I'm shut off completely; I can't even make a minor clarification on the order of "no, you somehow interpreted me as saying exactly the opposite of what I actually said". So I don't like those tactics. There are probably mental shifts I could make that would bring me more inclined towards them, but… about a year ago I came up with another tactic, which has seemed quite helpful. What I do now is say something to the effect of: "after this, I'm limiting myself to two more replies in this thread." This has various advantages. It feels less rude. It doesn't look like I'm quitting because I have no reply. It helps the conversation reach a more natural conclusion. And it also feels a lot easier to do, partly for the above reasons and partly for the normal reasons precommitment helps me to do things. For some quantitative data, I went over my reddit history. It looks like I've used it ten times. (I don't think I've ever used it outside of reddit, though I initially thought of this after an argument on Facebook.) 1. "(This doesn't seem super productive, so I'm going to limit myself to two more relies in this thread.)" This was my third comment, and we each made one more afterwards. 2. "Limiting myself to two more replies in this thread." This was my third comment, and afterwards, I made two more and they made three more. Their final two replies got increasingly rude (they'd been civil until then), but have subsequently been deleted. This is the only time I ran into the two-more-comments limit. Also, someone else replied to my first comment (in between my final two comments in the main thread) and I replied to that as well. 3. "I find myself getting annoyed, so I'm limiting myself to two more replies in this thread." This was my fourth comment, and afterwards we made each made one more. (This was the only person who questioned why I was continuing to reply at all. A perfectly reasonable question, to which I replied "not going down this rabbithole".) 4. "(Limiting myself to two more replies in this thread.)" This was my third comment, and afterwards we made two more each. If their final comment had come after I hit the limit, I would have been tempted to reply anyway. (Uncharitably paraphrased: "oh, we've been talking past each other, this whole time I've been assuming X and you've been assuming Y, which is very silly of you" / "well I explicitly said I was assuming Y and not X in my very first post in this thread, and even if we assume X and not Y your behaviour still makes no sense".) All of their comments in this thread have since been deleted. 5. "Pretty sure this is all a big waste of time, so I'm limiting myself to two more replies in this thread." This was my sixth comment linearly, but only second in reply to this specific user, and I'd previously made another two in different subthreads below my first comment. Afterwards, the person I'd been most recently replying to didn't make any more comments. But someone else replied to this comment, and I replied to them; and two other people replied in those other subthreads, and I replied to both of them as well (but one of those replies was just a link to the other). 6. "Limiting myself to two more replies in this thread." This was my fifth comment, and neither of us replied afterwards, though I did quickly edit this comment to add a clarification that arguably could have counted as its own comment. Someone else replied to one of my comments higher up the chain, and I replied to them. 7. "(I don't want to get sucked into this, so I'm limiting myself to two more replies in this thread.)" This was only my second comment, and neither of us replied further. 8. "(Limiting myself to two more replies in this thread.)" But in their next reply, they made a mistake that I had previously explicitly pointed out. So instead of replying in depth, I said, "It's quite annoying that you continue to misunderstand that, so I'm out." They replied saying "I think you're struggling to justify your initial comments and that's why you're "out", but that's fine. I accept your unconditional surrender." I didn't reply further. Since it was /r/science, and I was quite miffed, I reported this comment as unscientific to see if it would help me feel better. I don't remember if it worked. The comment did not get removed. 9. "I think I'm going to reply at most twice more." This was my fifth comment, and neither of us made any more afterwards. Their first and final comments are still there, but their other three have been deleted. 10. "I'm going to limit myself to two more replies after this." This was my third comment, plus I'd made one in another subthread below my first comment. Afterwards we each replied twice more. In thread #5, I made 11 comments in total; but in others, my max comment count was 6. This feels like I mostly did a decent job of not getting sucked in too deeply. And since I generally got the last word in (threads #2 and #7 were the only exceptions), I think (though I don't specificly remember) I rarely had the feeling of "if I don't reply now then they win and that's terrible". Thread #7 is the only one I think I still feel lingering resentment about. From before I thought of this tactic, I can think of at least two arguments where I didn't get the last word and I still feel lingering resentment. (One is the argument that triggered me to think of this tactic.) So generally this seems like a success. Ideally we'd compare to a world where I didn't think of this tactic, but I'm not really sure how to do that. (We could go over my reddit arguments where I didn't use it, but that's clearly going to have sampling bias. We could go over my reddit arguments from before I thought of it, but we can't know when I would have used it or how things would have progressed. Possible experiment: going forward, each time I want to limit my future replies, I toss a coin for whether I actually do it in that comment. Keep track of when I did this. I am unlikely to actually run this experiment.) For a way it plausibly might not have been a success: I suspect it's the case that having limited my total investment, I spent more effort on many of these comments than I would have otherwise. If these arguments would have ended just as quickly in any case, then this tactic caused me to spend more time and effort on them. I'm a bit surprised that I only ran into the two-more-comments limit once. A part of me would like to interpret that along the lines of: once I started putting more effort into my comments, I demolished my opponents' arguments so thoroughly that they accepted defeat. But this seems unlikely at best. I will say that none of these comment chains felt like collaborative discussions. Some of them started that way, but by the end, they all just felt like "I am right and you are wrong". (This is not very virtuous of me, I admit.) My thinking had been that this tactic would be most valuable in collaborative discussions. But it seems I don't have many of those on reddit, at least not ones that I spend much time on. So, no direct evidence on that yet. I'm not sure how to handle replies to other people, or replies in subthreads other than the main one. A strict wording would suggest that I should count subthreads against the limit, but I haven't so far and it hasn't caused me problems. Even a weak wording would suggest that I should count replies to other users against the limit, but I've only had one of those and didn't reach the limit whether you count them or not. I'd ideally like to have a get-out clause like "…unless I actually decide that replying after that is worth my time". But I'm not quite sure that's the "unless" that I want. (Plus it seems kind of rude, but it's not like I'm being super polite as-is.) Anyway, I haven't needed that clause yet. Posted on 05 December 2019 | Comments ### The Effect pattern: Transparent updates in Elm I don't like writing tests in Elm1. Naively, it seems like the fact that all Elm functions are pure would make it easy. But I've still never really been able to test the things I really want to. It's possible that I'm not very good at writing tests in general. But even if that's true, I don't think it's the whole story. I have another hypothesis, which is: much of the reason is that although Elm functions are pure, in the sense of "given the same input, they return the same output" - they aren't necessarily transparent, in the sense of "you can look at the output and verify that it's correct". To recap2, I would describe the Elm architecture as consisting of: • Model - a type describing the data you're interested in. This is usually mostly transparent. There are some opaque blobs where components haven't exposed their internals, but I think those mostly aren't the kind of opacity that gets in the way3. • Msg - a type describing the messages your app passes around. Again, mostly transparent, with opaque blobs where components haven't exposed their messages. I feel like this opacity is maybe a bit more annoying, but still not very. • update : Msg -> Model -> (Model, Cmd Msg) - a function describing the logic of your app (or whatever it is you're architecting). The Model and Msg are still transparent, but the second return value is a Cmd Msg which is completely opaque, and which is the main source of the problem. • view : Model -> Html Msg - a function describing the rendering of your app. Html Msg is also arguably opaque, but you can inspect it using elmer4, or (as I discovered while writing this post) the Test.Html modules in the test package. I'm not sure if you can inspect it as deeply as you might want, I haven't explored these much yet. Now, in my experience5, a lot of the logic in an app is contained in the way the update function chains. "After receiving this message, we send a command which eventually results in receiving that message, and then we want to put some value in the model." And we can't test those chains, because Cmd is opaque. So that's part of why I haven't liked writing Elm tests. But I think I've found a method that will help, at least somewhat. You don't need to rewrite anything except your update function, and I actually think it's a mild improvement even if you ignore testing. I call it the Effect pattern. We've implemented this pattern at work, in a couple of places. When I first did so, the first two tests that I wrote both revealed bugs in my code. (I think I'd known about both of those bugs but forgotten them. I wasn't consciously expecting the tests to fail.) Neither of those tests needed to be updated when I fixed the bugs. I think this is a good sign, but it's not very strong evidence. Beyond that, I mostly have theory. ### Example I'm going to demonstrate with a simple app. It'll be buggy, and the bug will be hard to test for. Then I'm going to refactor the app to make it more testable, and write a test. Then I'm going to fix the bug, and verify that the test now passes. I think the app is too simple to make the benefits really obvious, but hopefully I can convince you anyway6. So here's the app. It has a number, and a button to increase the number by one, and a button to multiply it by two. When you press one of those buttons, the number gets "saved to the server"; normally that would be an http request, but we emulate that by just sending a time delayed response. There's a message telling you whether the number has been successfully saved yet. Actually, most of the app supports increasing the number by any integer, and multiplying it by any integer. That's not implemented in the view though. The Watsonian explanation for this is that the developer has a habit of overengineering things. The Doylist explanation is that it makes the interesting bits more interesting, but not significantly more complicated; and the view code is boring. The bug is: if you press buttons quickly, the "saved" message will temporarily be wrong. You've sent two messages to the server, and one hasn't come back yet; the number that's been saved is not the number on display. Silly, but I think it works as a demonstration. (There are surely also bugs related to the size of numbers, but I'm not interested in those right now. Additionally, a real life server would have other problems like "sometimes requests will fail" and "sometimes requests will be handled out of order"; the second in particular is hairy, but I haven't emulated these possibilities.) Here's the update function: update : Msg -> Model -> (Model, Cmd Msg) update msg model = case msg of IncBy n -> ( { model | count = model.count + n, saved = False } , fakeSaveCount (model.count + n) ) MultBy n -> ( { model | count = model.count * n, saved = False } , fakeSaveCount (model.count * n) ) Saved -> ( { model | saved = True }, Cmd.none )  You can probably guess roughly what Model and Msg look like just from that. As written, how would you test for the bug? I think the way to do it is to write a wrapper update1 msg model = Tuple.first <| update msg model that ignores the Cmd. Then test that initialModel |> update1 (IncBy 1) |> update1 (IncBy 1) |> Saved |> .saved  is False. And that works to detect the bug, but you need to know exactly what messages get sent in response to IncBy 1. In this case that's easy. In more involved cases, you'll need to know it for every Msg constructor, and you're going to make a mistake. Here's how I'd rewrite for testability: type Effect = ESaveCount Int update : Msg -> Model -> (Model, Cmd Msg) update msg model = let (newModel, effs) = updateE msg model in (newModel, Cmd.batch <| List.map (\e -> runEffect e model) effs) updateE : Msg -> Model -> (Model, List Effect) updateE msg model = case msg of IncBy n -> ( { model | count = model.count + n, saved = False } , [ESaveCount (model.count + n)] ) MultBy n -> ( { model | count = model.count * n, saved = False } , [ESaveCount (model.count * n)] ) Saved -> ( { model | saved = True }, [] ) runEffect : Effect -> Model -> Cmd Msg runEffect eff _ = case eff of ESaveCount n -> fakeSaveCount n  That is, we split it into two parts. One part updates the model, and describes the side effects transparently. The other part turns the transparent side effects into opaque ones. Even if we're not testing this, I kind of like it. It's nice to have a complete list of possible side effects in one place, where it isn't mixed in with model updates. But I do also want to be able to test it. Obviously, now we test updateE instead of update. Is that any better? I think so. Here's a simple example of something we can now test that we couldn't before: "whenever update changes model.count, it makes a server request to save the new value; and whenever it makes a server request to save a value, that value is now in model.count." (We may need to write fuzzers for our Msg and Model to do this.) To do this, we need to trust that runEffect works properly, that ESaveCount actually generates a server request; but I think that's a fairly okay thing to trust. But that's small fry. I spoke above about chaining the update function, and that's harder. If you're going to do it properly, you still need to know what messages get sent in response to every Effect constructor, and you can't learn that from calling the function. But I still think this is an improvement: if done right, I would expect (and my limited experience agrees) that typically Effect will have many fewer constructors than Msg, and for each one, the transformation to messages is fairly simple. Here's a helper function that you can use to test updateE: runUpdates : (state -> msg -> model -> (state, (model, List effect))) -> (state -> effect -> model -> (state, List msg)) -> state -> model -> List (List msg) -> (state, model) runUpdates updateE runEffect initialState initialModel messages = let go = runUpdates updateE runEffect in case messages of [] -> (initialState, initialModel) [] :: moreMsgs -> go initialState initialModel moreMsgs (msg1 :: moreMsgs1) :: moreMoreMsgs -> let (newState1, (newModel, effs)) = updateE initialState msg1 initialModel (newState2, newMsgs) = List.foldl (\e (s, m) -> runEffect s e newModel |> Tuple.mapSecond ((++) m) ) (newState1, []) effs in go newState2 newModel ((moreMsgs1 ++ newMsgs) :: moreMoreMsgs)  On a high level, the way it works is this: you pass it your regular updateE function and a mocked runEffect function, together with an initial model and a list of messages to send. The messages get sent, one at a time, to the model. Any effects caused by updateE are handled by the mock runEffect, which returns a list of additional messages to be sent in future. We keep running until there are no more messages. There are two complications. One is that we also thread through some arbitrary state, that can be updated both by updateE and runEffect7. We'll see the value of that later, but if you don't need it, stateless : (a -> b -> c) -> (() -> a -> b -> ((), c)) stateless f () a b = ((), f a b)  is a helper function that lets you forget about it. The other complication is that we pass in a nested list of messages. That's to give us some control over timing. Any messages returned by runEffect will be handled after the current "batch" of messages, but before the next "batch". So if you want to test the sequency "run msg1, then msg2, then handle the results of msg1", you would pass in [[ msg1, msg2 ]]. If you want to test the sequence "run msg1, handle its results, then run msg2", you would pass in [ [msg1], [msg2] ]. I have a feeling this won't always be enough control, and in future the mocked runEffect will need to return List (List msg) in place of List msg. (With the first item being messages to run immediately, the second being items to run between the current and the next batch, and so on. You'd get the current behaviour by returning [ [], msgs ].) But it suffices for now. And here's one way to test the app: type alias TState = (Int, List Expectation) testSave : Test testSave = let mockUpdateE : TState -> Msg -> Model -> (TState, (Model, List Effect)) mockUpdateE (n, exps) msg model = let (newModel, effs) = updateE msg model newState = case msg of Saved -> ( n - 1 , (newModel.saved |> Expect.equal (n - 1 == 0)) :: exps ) _ -> (n, exps) in (newState, (newModel, effs)) mockRunEffect : TState -> Effect -> Model -> (TState, List Msg) mockRunEffect (n, exps) eff model = case eff of ESaveCount _ -> ( (n+1, exps), [Saved] ) in test "Doesn't pretend to be saved" <| \() -> let ((_, exps), _) = runUpdates mockUpdateE mockRunEffect (0, []) initialModel [[IncBy 1, IncBy 1]] in Expect.all (List.map (\e () -> e) exps) ()  I admit, this is pretty ugly. But I think it's conceptually quite simple. The state keeps track of two things: how many save requests are currently "in flight", which gets updated as we step through; and a list of assertions, which we verify at the end. Every time we send a request (with ESaveCount), we increase the in-flight count. Every time we receive a Saved message, we decrease it, and add a new assertion to the list: model.saved should be True iff there are no requests remaining in-flight. You can see this version of the app here. Note that to avoid the hassle of playing with Test.Runner, I've replaced the Test with an Expectation by commenting out the test "..." line (but nothing underneath), and put the result in the view. You can remove the second IncBy and check that it now passes (because if there's only one IncBy, the bug doesn't exhibit). Now to fix the bug, and see what effect that has on the tests. If you can't fix a bug without changing the tests you wrote for it, that's a bad sign about your tests. The test uncovered the bug by keeping track of some additional state. So the obvious thing to do is to move that state into the model. Count the number of requests in-flight, and only count as "saved" if there are none8. In fact, we no longer need saved as a field at all; as written in the test, saved is true iff there are no in-flight requests. (This doesn't work in the real world, where requests can fail. I think it's fine as a demonstration.) Removing saved actually does mean we need to rewrite the test. But only minorly, and we can do that before fixing the bug. All we need is to replace the reference newModel.saved with isSaved newModel where isSaved = .saved. Then when we fix the bug, we rewrite that as isSaved m = m.inFlight == 0, and the test passes with no more changes. We'll want to use that function in the view anyway. (Avoiding this kind of thing is one reason people like to write opaque models.) You can see the fixed version of the app here. However… now that we've put that state in the model, although the test still works, it's looking a bit silly. We've got some state in the tests that should always be identical to the state in the model; why not just test that the model is updating the state correctly? So here are some other tests that we could write (but that I'm not going to, for time reasons): • We could test that, given the same messages as above, the model doesn't become isSaved until the very end of runUpdate. We can still do that with runUpdates; our state parameter is now List Model, we use mockUpdateE to keep track of every intermediate model (and mockRunEffect no longer needs to deal with state at all), and then finally verify that isSaved is false for all but the last. (This test we could have written with the old model. As described it fails if, in future, Saved starts having other effects - maybe it wants to send something to a port. We can get around that by doing more bookkeeping, but we could also simply decide that mockRunEffect will pretend it doesn't have those effects.) • We could test that any update which returns an ESaveCount also increases inFlight; and further, that any messages sent in response to ESaveCount will decrease inFlight. I think this test is most valuable if it uses a mocked runEffect that's also used in other tests. Really though, I'm not sure what's best. I do think the Effect pattern will help. ### Further thoughts We haven't used this much yet, so there's a lot left to explore. Here are some thoughts I've had, but not developed very far, in no particular order. Nomenclature. We've gone from update to update, updateE and runEffect. I currently think runEffect is an okay name, but I feel like with no historical baggage, the name update would have gone to updateE. Then what would update be called? I left it as-is partly to avoid stepping on historical toes, and partly because I don't know. runUpdate? That would give us the pattern "update functions update the model and return some kind of what-next value, run functions produce Cmds". (Of course, runUpdates violates that pattern. Maybe that should become foldUpdate…?) Also, we'll want a helper function to convert updateE and runEffect into the correct form. What do we call that function? The only sensible suggestion I have is liftUpdate, but I'm not sure I like it. Randomness. The test I've demonstrated was deterministic. So have all the tests I've written for Effect so far. (At least one used a fuzzed input, but that doesn't feel like it counts.) To get randomness I imagine you'd need to put a Seed in the state parameter of runUpdates, and then use Random.step (maybe with Test.Runner.fuzz to get you the Generator that you need). Simpler test helpers. runUpdates is quite complicated, and as mentioned, I suspect it'll need to be even more so. I think most tests probably won't use all of its features. What simpler variants of runUpdates are worth creating (and what should they be named)? An obvious candidate is a variant with no state. Maybe also a variant that returns a list of models instead of just the final model. Full state machine. In Haskell we use quickcheck-state-machine, which I really like. Could we do something similar in Elm? I think it would be possible, though probably looking quite different. Elm doesn't have all of the type-level features that QSM relies on, but it also doesn't have all of the features that QSM needs to support. Should runEffect see the model? Reasons yes: it simplifies the Effect constructors; it reduces total amount of code; it allows one stateless function to work with both updateE and runEffect.9 Reasons no: it gives runEffect more rope to hang you with (more likely to be complicated, more likely to diverge in the codebase and test suite). We went with yes because in one of our components, many constructors would have needed many parameters. But we probably could have refactored a little so that many constructors would have needed only one parameter each. Can you reuse mocked runEffect functions? I touched on this above. That is, will you be able to write just one or two per component and use those in most of the tests for that component? (If not directly, then just wrapping them in some state-updating code that doesn't change the Msg they return.) Or will each test need a separate one? I certainly hope you can reuse them. If not, that might diminish a lot of the value. The fewer you have, the easier it is to keep them all correct when the real one changes. (What if you have a potentially large number of functions, but selected by a configuration parameter? I think depending on how this is handled, it could be closer to either end of the scale.) Composability. A component using this pattern can be embedded in one that doesn't, no problem. You just don't get any of the benefits in the parent. What if you embed a non-Effect component in an Effect component? This forces you to put some Cmd in your Effect type. How do you test that? I'm not sure you reasonably can. So far I think we've just avoided testing those parts of our components. What if you embed an Effect component in another Effect component? In the codebase, I imagine your parent's Effect type has a constructor ChildEffect Child.Effect which in turn calls Child.runEffect. That lets you test the parent component, but… you may need to mock runEffect for every child component, and that doesn't sound fun. (If the mocked functions do turn out to be fairly reusable, maybe not so bad.) Also, if you want to provide an Effect component in a library, you may want the Effect type to be opaque (like Model and Msg often are today). But then if you want people to be able to test your component in theirs, maybe that makes you responsible for providing suitable mocked runEffect functions. Unconventional updates. I've been assuming your existing update function has type Msg -> Model -> (Model, Cmd Msg). But a lot don't. A common pattern is something like Msg -> Model -> (Model, Cmd Msg, MsgToParent) where MsgToParent is something that the parent may need to act on. (In our case, it's often just global state that needs to be sent back up in turn.) How do you handle this kind of thing? In the codebase, I think the correct decomposition for this is still to change only the Cmd Msg return value, since that's the only opaque one, and for runEffect to be the same as it would be otherwise. (You could give it MsgToParent as an extra parameter, but like with Model that won't give you any extra power. By default I wouldn't do it, but I don't think it would be an obviously bad idea.) If you had two opaque return values… honestly I don't think I've seen this and I don't think I want to speculate about what to do in that situation. In the test suite, you won't be able to use the existing runUpdates function. What to do instead? It might prove useful to have a runUpdates3 (or something) which can handle this case, but I'm not sure exactly how that would work. Another possibility would be using wrappers to put your updateE in the right shape. For example, maybe you can do type EffectOrMsg = Effect Effect | MsgToParent MsgToParent, and then combine the final two results of updateE. I don't know if that would always get you what you want. ### tl;dr You can take your existing function update : Msg -> Model -> (Model, Cmd Msg), and decompose it into two others: • updateE : Msg -> Model -> (Model, List Effect) • runEffect : Effect -> Model -> Cmd Msg defining the new Effect type as whatever makes this decomposition work nicely. I think this is a slight improvement in the codebase; and independently of that, I think it helps you to write better tests. ### See also Delayed update, 13-Mar-2021: A commenter on /r/elm points out that elm-program-test does something similar. It looks like you use it by rewriting your program in basically the same way I recommend here, and then it implements a bunch of test helpers you can use on top of that. If you're interested in this direction, I recommend checking it out. 1. I'm not a fan of writing Elm code in general, but that's for mostly unrelated reasons 2. I'm not going to recap in detail. This post is mostly targeted at people who already know Elm. I kind of hope others can get something from it too, but I'm not trying hard for that. 3. I'm somewhat philosophically opposed to this kind of opacity, even if practically I don't think it's a big problem. But my philosophical objections aren't relevant here. 4. I'm confused about how Elmer works. It uses kernel code, which isn't supposed to be available to mere mortals. The elm.json file says its package name is "elm-explorations/elmer", which would explain how it can use kernel code; but the name typically points at a github repository, and that repository doesn't exist. Has Elmer found some way to circumvent the kernel code restrictions? It seems to be something to do with the elmer-test library on npm, but… maybe I'm blind, but I can't even find the source code for that online? It'll be in my filesystem at work somewhere. Maybe some day I'll investigate further. I wish Elmer had a README section like "oh, you thought this was impossible? Surprise, sucker! Here's how it works!" I've seen many projects that I wish had that. 5. My vast experience of writing one Elm app, in one company, mostly with other developers who have approximately the same amount of experience. 6. Or, if it happens that I'm wrong about the benefits, I hope I can explain myself well enough that someone can understand why I'm wrong, and then convince me 7. My initial version only exposed state to runEffect, because we didn't need it for updateE on the tests we've written so far at work. But I couldn't see a way to avoid it, or something like it, for this example. I weakly guess that if the state updates generated by updateE depend on the message, that's already a bad sign. We need it for the test I'm about to write, but that's precisely because the model doesn't keep track of everything it needs to. 8. I had planned to take a different approach, storing both "current count" and "the count saved on the server" (which would be placed in the model through a new argument on the Saved constructor). But that has its own bugs: suppose the count starts at 0 and quickly goes 1, 0, 1. Then we'll get messages Saved 1, Saved 0, Saved 1. After the first Saved 1, we'll think we're saved until Saved 0 arrives. 9. Update 13-Mar-2021: A coworker points out another reason yes. Often you need to update model state and send a command using the new state value - you can see this when I handle IncBy and MultBy in both versions of the app, repeating model.count + n and model.count * n. If runEffect sees the model, it automatically uses the new state value. Sometimes you do want to use the old value, and then you can keep passing it in the effect constructor. But now you're doing so deliberately and explicitly. This eliminates a subtle class of bugs where you accidentally pass in the old value, or some other incorrect value. In the first published version of this post, I had an ESaveCount (model.count + n) where I should have written ESaveCount (model.count * n), but simply writing ESaveCount model.count would also have been easy, wrong, and hard to catch. I find this fairly compelling. Posted on 20 October 2019 | Comments ### A reckless introduction to Hindley-Milner type inference (I've been editing this post on and off for almost a year. I'm not really happy with it, but I suspect I never will be.) Several months ago I gave a talk at work about Hindley-Milner type inference. When I agreed to give the talk I didn't know much about the subject, so I learned about it. And now I'm writing about it, based on the contents of my talk but more fleshed out and hopefully better explained. I call this a reckless introduction, because my main source is wikipedia. A bunch of people on the internet have collectively attempted to synthesise a technical subject. I've read their synthesis, and now I'm trying to re-synthesise it, without particularly putting in the effort to check my own understanding. I'm not going to argue that this is a good idea. Let's just roll with it. I'm also trying to tie in some quasi-philosophy that surely isn't original to me but I don't know if or where I've encountered it before.1 ### Background When people write software, sometimes it doesn't do exactly what we want. One way to find out is to try running it and see, but that's not ideal because any complicated program will have way too many possible inputs to test. (Especially when you consider that inputs include things like "amount of free space on disk" and "time taken for a web server to respond to a request".) So it would be nice if we could mathematically prove whether our software does what we want, without actually running it. Can we do that? That's not a very well-defined question, but we can ask more precise versions of it. Here's a well-known one: given some possible input to our software, we might want to prove that our software will eventually stop running. Can we prove that? That question is known as the halting problem, and the simple answer is that we can't, not in general; the halting problem is undecideable. But the full answer is more complicated. To solve the halting problem, we want a program that, when shown another program and some input to be fed to that program, satisfies three different conditions: 1. It will always return an answer. 2. The answer will always be either "yes, this always terminates" or "no, sometimes this doesn't terminate". 3. The answer is always correct. And that's not possible. But we can compromise on any of the three. We can make a program that sometimes doesn't return an answer, or one that sometimes gets the answer wrong. But perhaps most interestingly, we can make a program that sometimes says "I don't know". And when you allow that answer, you can create a language on which the halting problem is decideable. You can write a program that will tell you truthfully whether any program written in that language will terminate; and for any other program, will say "I don't know". (Perhaps expressed in words like "syntax error on line 1".) Now, the halting problem is tricky. It turns out that if you create a language like that, there are a lot of interesting things that programs written in that language just won't be able to do; the language will necessarily be Turing incomplete.2 But there are also lots of interesting things that they can do. To give three examples of such languages3: • Regular expressions are really useful for certain operations on strings, but that's about all they're good for. • SQL is really useful for working with databases. According to some people on stack overflow, the ANSI SQL-92 standard was Turing incomplete and the ANSI SQL-99 standard is Turing complete. (No mention of the SQL-96 standard that came between these, but reading between the lines, probably Turing incomplete.) If I understand correctly, the feature required to make SQL-99 Turing complete4 is one I've literally never used; so for my purposes, it may as well be Turing incomplete. • Coq is used for proving math theorems. It's an interesting one because when you write your program, you have to also provide a proof that your program terminates. (I think this is slightly false, but again, good enough for the point I'm making.) So although these languages can't do everything, they can still be incredibly useful in their domains. More useful than a more general purpose language might be. One reason for this is that being able to prove non-termination is a useful property of the language. If you had to write a SQL query in C, it would be all too easy to write some C code that would accidentally loop forever. I'm trying to illustrate here something that seems to me important, which is that there's a tradeoff between what I'll call expressiveness and legibility. A programming language is expressive if you can easily write many interesting programs in it5; it's legible if you can easily say many interesting things about the programs you've written in it. And I claim that the most expressive programming languages won't be the most legible, and vice-versa; though there will certainly be languages which are neither expressive nor legible. This tradeoff seems fundamental to me, and I expect that some approximation of it has been proven as a theorem.6 I haven't defined these very well, but hopefully some examples will help. I will also clarify that both of them are highly dimensional; and that "raw computational power" is one of the things that expressiveness can point at, but not the only thing; and "human readability" is not really one of the things that legibility points at, but many things that increase legibility will also increase human readability. • Perl-compatible regular expressions can classify sets of strings that normal regular expressions can't. But they're harder to make time and space guarantees about. And it's possible to prove whether two regular expressions are equivalent, but that's not possible in general for PCREs (proof: PCREs can encode CFGs; CFGs can't be proved equivalent). • Under certain assumptions, Haskell's monadic IO lets you look at the type of a piece of code and know that it won't depend on external state. In return, a function can only bring in external state if its caller allows it to (which requires having permission from its own caller, and so on). The assumptions in question are false (partly because unsafePerformIO exists), but I've been able to get away with pretending they're true (partly because unsafePerformIO is punishable with excommunication). • Custom operators (at least as implemented in Haskell and Elm) are equivalent to named functions, and don't gain or cost much in terms of legibility and expressivity. They simply make code more or less readable. But operator overloading, at least when combined with dynamic typing, gains expressivity at the cost of legibility (you no longer know that a + b will do anything remotely like an addition). • Macros make it easier to do things like create DSLs, reduce boilerplate, and set compile-time config options. But they mean that a function call might not look like one, or vice-versa; expressions might get evaluated many times, or not at all; and the code might perform differently depending on the phase of the moon when it was compiled. ### Motivation So we've got this tradeoff, and in our programming language design we try to navigate it. We try to find kinds of legibility that can be bought for little cost in expressiveness. Or more precisely, we try to find kinds of legibility that we care about, and that can be bought for little cost in kinds of expressiveness that we care about. And Hindley-Milner type systems are a tradeoff that's proved fairly successful, both in direct use and as inspiration. At my company7, we use Elm8, which runs on an approximately HM type system. (I don't think it's pure HM, due to extensible record types.) We also use Haskell9, which runs on a type system that extends HM in many directions. Haskell's system is more expressive and less legible, but still successful. (I'll mostly be using Elm for examples in this post, and not extensible records.) ML and OCaml are other notable languages based on HM, though I haven't used either. The legibility HM offers is, roughly, the ability to prove that a program typechecks. I'm not going to clarify exactly what that means, but we probably all have a decent idea. It's the thing that lets the Elm compiler say "no, that program is trying to add a string to an int, bad program", while the Python interpreter doesn't know that's going to happen until it's too late. The Elm compiler will refuse to compile your program unless it can logically prove that it will typecheck. More precisely, what HM offers isn't type checking but the more general type inference. (And beyond that, type inference in roughly linear time.) Type inference doesn't just tell you whether a program typechecks, but what its type is; a program fails to typecheck iff no type can be inferred for it. What this means is that there's no need to supply type annotations. And indeed, in Elm you can get away without them, except I think for extensible records. In Haskell you sometimes can't, because Haskell loses some of the legibility that HM offers. (We typically do supply type annotations, but that's because they're useful. Partly as documentation for humans, partly to help pinpoint errors when our programs fail to typecheck.) And so in an HM system you get no runtime type errors. And although not all runtime errors are type errors, in many cases they could be. For example, an array out-of-bounds exception isn't a type error. But when designing a language, you can decide that array out-of-bounds exceptions won't exist, any array lookup will return either a value from the array or null. If type errors are possible, you've just eliminated one source of errors by pushing them somewhere else, and possibly somewhere harder to debug. But in HM, you've eliminated one source of errors by pushing them somewhere more visible, where they can be ruthlessly executed. Elm actually tries to promise no runtime errors, period, provided you stay inside Elm. On one level, I think that's a fairly minor imposition on language design, something you get "for free" by deciding that none of the built-in functions you provide will ever throw a runtime error. On another level, it seems completely impractical to decide for example that cons will return a meaningful value if it can't allocate more memory. I'm not aware that Elm even tries to handle those errors. (Haskell doesn't try to promise the same thing, and allows functions to return undefined. This is another legibility-expressiveness tradeoff.) So HM's legibility gain is: type inference, powerful type system, no runtime type errors, optionally no runtime errors at all. It's good. Meanwhile, the expressiveness cost is that you need to write your programs in ways that the type inference algorithms can work with, which forbids some things that you might like to do. For example, suppose you want to clamp a number to between -1 and +1. In Python, you could write that like def clamp(x): sorted([-1, x, 1])[1]  and as long as sorted always returns a list of the same length it started with, that works fine10. But it only works because the Python interpreter allows you to be reckless with array indexing. Elm doesn't let you be reckless, and so Elm has no equivalent way to perform array lookup. If you tried to write the same function in the same way in Elm, the result in the compiler's eyes would not be a number but a Maybe number - AKA "either a number or Nothing". (Nothing is roughly equivalent to None in python or null in many other languages, but you have to explicitly flag when it's allowed.) When you actually run this code, you will always get a number and never Nothing. But the compiler can't prove that. (Again, I stress that you will never get Nothing as long as your sort function always returns a list of the same length it started with. That's something you can prove for yourself, but it's not something the Elm compiler can prove. It's not even the sort of thing the Elm compiler knows can be proven. And so in turn, it can't prove that you'll never get a Nothing here.) And then the Elm compiler would force you to account for the possibility of Nothing, even though there's no way that possibility could occur at runtime. One option is to pick an arbitrary result that will never be exposed. That works fine until the code goes through several layers of changes, an assumption that used to be true is now violated, and suddenly that arbitrary result is wreaking havoc elsewhere. Or in Haskell, your program is crashing at runtime. To be clear, that's not significantly worse than what we get in Python, where the code can also go through several layers of changes that result in it crashing at runtime. But we were hoping for better. And in this case "better" is easy enough, you can just write your function to avoid indexing into a list, and then it can return a number with no need for trickery. The point isn't that you can't do the thing. The point is that (a), even if the thing is safe, the compiler might not know that; (b), if you decide it's safe anyway and find some way to trick the compiler, the compiler no longer protects you; and (c), if you want to do it in a way the compiler knows is safe, you might need to put in some extra work. For another example, HM type systems can't implement heterogenous lists. So this is really easy in python: def stringify_list(l): return [ repr(x) for x in l ] stringify_list(["hello", 0, ["here's a", "nested list", {"and": "maybe", "a": "dict"}], "it can even be passed itself, like so:", stringify_list])  but impossible in Elm. You can sort of get the same effect by creating a type with many constructors type HeteroType = HTInt Int | HTString String | HTBool Bool | HTList (List HeteroType) | ...  but it's not quite the same, because it can only accept types you know about in advance. Also, it's a massive pain to work with. For a third example: Haskell is known for its monads. But Elm has no equivalent, because an HM type system can't support generic monad programming. You can implement the generic monad functions for specific cases, so there's Maybe.map and List.map, but there's no equivalent of Haskell's fmap which works on all monads. ### Hindley-Milner type systems I've talked about the tradeoffs that HM type systems offer, but not what HM type systems actually are. So here is where I get particularly reckless. This bit is more formal than the rest. It's based on the treatment at wikipedia, but I've tried to simplify the notation. I'm aiming for something that I would have found fairly readable several months ago, but I no longer have access to that version of me. Also, this part is likely to make more sense if you're familiar with at least one HM-based language. That's not a design feature, I just don't trust myself to bridge that inferential gap. For an HM system, you need a language to run type inference on, and you need types to run type inference with, and you need some way to combine the two. You could use the language with no type inference, if you didn't mind crashes or weird behaviour at runtime, when you made a mistake with typing. (Haskell allows this with a compiler option.11) And you could run type inference without caring about the semantics of the language, treating it as essentially a SuDoku, an interesting puzzle but meaningless. (Haskell supports this, too.) But by combining them, the semantics of the language are constrained by the type system, and runtime type errors are eliminated. #### Types Types come in a conceptual hierarchy which starts with type constants. That's things like, in Elm, Int, Float, Bool, String, Date, (). It also includes type variables, which in Elm are notated with initial lower-case, like a and msg. (Though the type variables number, comparable and appendable are special cases that I won't cover here.) Next in the type hierarchy is applied types. Here a "type function" is applied to arguments, which are type constants and/or other applied types. These are things like List Int, Maybe (List Float), Result () Date, and a -> String. (In that last one, the type function is the arrow; Haskell would allow you to write it (->) a String. Aside, (->) is the only type that HM specifically requires to exist; a -> b is the type of functions taking a parameter of type a and evaluating to a result of type b.) Notably, an applied type must have a specific named type function as its root; you can't have m Int, which you would need for generalised monads. Type constants and applied types are monotypes. You get a polytype by optionally sticking one or more "∀"s in front of a monotype. ("∀" is pronounced "for all", and in Haskell can be written forall.) So for example a -> Int is a monotype, but ∀a. a -> Int is a polytype. So is ∀a. ∀b. a -> Int -> b, which is written equivalently as ∀a b. a -> Int -> b. ∀b. a -> Int is also a polytype; since the quantified variable doesn't show up, it's equivalent to the monotype a -> Int. We can do something like that to any monotype, so for simplicity we might as well decide that monotypes count as a special case of polytypes, not as a distinct set. Type signatures in Elm typically have an implied "∀" over whichever variables it makes sense to quantify. (There's no syntax for explicitly writing the "∀".) So the type of List.map would be written map : (a -> b) -> List a -> List b  but I'll be writing map : ∀a b. (a -> b) -> List a -> List b  for clarity. Because there's one place where Elm doesn't give an implied ∀, which is when you have scoped types. To demonstrate by example, const : ∀a b. a -> b -> a const x = let foo : b -> a foo y = x in foo  const has a polytype here, but foo has a monotype, because (in context) its argument type and return type are constrained. If you tried to swap a and b in the type signature for foo, or rename either of them, the Elm compiler would complain. #### Language The language has four kinds of expression, and each has a rule relating it to the type system. You need variables and constants, function calls, lambda expressions, and let statements. ##### Variables and constants Variables and constants are things like True, 0.2, Just, "Hello", [], (), List.map. Each of these has a declared type, which in Elm is notated with :. So True : Bool, 0.2 : Float, Just : ∀a. a -> Maybe a, "Hello": String, [] : ∀a. List a, () : (), List.map : ∀a b. (a -> b) -> List a -> List b. The rule that relates these to the type system is that type declarations imply type judgments. Mathematically it looks like $$\frac{x : π \quad π ⊑ μ}{x \sim μ}.$$  Reading clockwise from top left, this says: if you have a variable$x$declared to have some polytype$π$, and if the monotype$μ$is a specialisation of$π$, then$x$can be judged to have type$μ$. ($π$always denotes a polytype, and$μ$always denotes a monotype.) A type judgment, as opposed to a declaration, provides a type that an expression can be used as. A judgment is always as a monotype. And type specialisation, denoted$⊑$, is the process of replacing quantified variables with less-quantified ones. So for example the type ∀a b. a -> b -> a might be specialized to ∀a. a -> String -> a, or to ∀b. Int -> b -> Int; and from either of those, it could be further specialised to Int -> String -> Int. Of course String -> Int -> String and List Float -> (Float -> String) -> List Float are valid specialisations too. Thus: we have the type declaration [] : ∀a. List a, and we have (∀a. List a) ⊑ List Int, and so we can form the type judgment [] ~ List Int. We also have (∀a. List a) ⊑ List String, and so [] ~ List String. And [] ~ List (List (Maybe Bool)), and so on. ##### Function calls Function calls are things like not True, (+ 1), List.Map Just. And the rule relating them to the type system is that function calls consume function types. This is the simplest of the rules. Mathematically it looks like $$\frac{f \sim μ → μ' \quad v \sim μ}{f v \sim μ'}.$$  Or: if$f$can be judged to have a function type$μ → μ'$, and$v$can be judged to have type$μ$, then the function call$fv$can be judged to have type$μ'$. Thus: we can infer the type judgment toString ~ (Int -> String), and we can infer 3 ~ Int, and so we can infer toString 3 ~ String. Also, we can infer List.map ~ ((Int -> Maybe Int) -> (List Int -> List (Maybe Int))), and we can infer Just ~ (Int -> Maybe Int). So we can infer List.map Just ~ (List Int -> List (Maybe Int)) ##### Lambda expressions Lambda expressions are things like \x -> Just x, and in Elm they're used implicitly when something like const x y = x is turned into const = \x -> \y -> x. The type system rule is that lambda expressions produce function types. Mathematically: $$\frac{x : μ ⇒ e \sim μ'}{λx.e \sim μ → μ'}.$$  Or: suppose that the type declaration$x : μ$would allow us to infer the judgment$e \sim μ'$. In that case, we could judge that$λx.e \sim (μ → μ)'$. Typically$e$would be some expression mentioning the variable$x$, but it's no problem if not. In that case, if you can get$e \sim μ'$at all, you can get it assuming any$x : μ$, and so you have$λx.e \sim (\mathtt{Int} → μ')$and$λx.e \sim (\mathtt{String} → μ')$and$λx.e \sim (\mathtt{Result\ String\ (List\ (Maybe\ Float))} → μ')$and so on. Thus: given the declaration x : Int, we can infer the judgment [x] ~ List Int. And so we can infer the judgment (\x -> [x]) ~ (Int -> List Int). ##### Let expressions Let expressions read like let x = y in a. Semantically, this is very similar to using a lambda expression, (\x -> a) y. But HM treats them differently in the type system, allowing a let expression to introduce polytypes. That permits code like let f x = [x] in (f "", f True) -- returns ([""], [True])  If you tried to rewrite this as a lambda, you would get (\f -> (f "", f True))(\x -> [x])  But type inference fails here, because there's no monotype declaration for f that allows a type judgment for (f "", f True). So the precondition for the lambda rule never obtains, and so in turn, no type judgment can be made for the expression \f -> (f "", f True). Let expressions compensate for this deficiency, with the rule let expressions are like polymorphic lambda applications. (I don't have a good name for it.) Mathematically: $$\frac{a \sim μ \quad x : \bar{μ} ⇒ b \sim μ'} {(\mathtt{let}\ x = a\ \mathtt{in}\ b) \sim μ'}$$  Or: suppose that$a$can be judged to have type$μ$, and that the declaration$x : \bar{μ}$would allow us to infer the judgment$b \sim μ'$. In that case, we could judge that$(\mathtt{let}\ x = a\ \mathtt{in}\ b)$has type$μ'$. This introduces the notation$\bar{μ}$, which generalises a monotype to a polytype. How it works is: if$μ$mentions a type variable$a$, and$a$isn't quantified over in the surrounding context, then$\bar{μ}$contains a "$∀a$". Thus: we can infer (\x -> [x]) ~ (a -> List a), where a is a type variable unused in the surrounding context. That type generalises to ∀a. a -> List a. And given the declaration f : ∀a. a -> List a, we can infer (f "", f True) ~ (List String, List Bool). So in total, we can infer $$(\mathtt{let\ f\ x\ =\ [x]\ in\ (f\ "",\ f\ True)}) \sim \mathtt{(List\ String,\ List\ Bool)}.$$  (It seems a little strange to me that the approach here is to first construct a meaningless type, and then quantify over it. Still, that's my understanding. It's of course possible I'm mistaken.) Why do we need both let and lambda? Well, we can't replace lambda expressions with let expressions: they're not re-usable. (When you translate a let expression into a lambda expression, you actually generate a lambda applied to an argument. There's no way to translate a lambda expression by itself into a let expression.) Meanwhile, I'm not entirely sure why we can't make lambdas polymorphic in the same way let expressions are. I think the answer is that if we tried it, we'd lose some of the legibility that HM offers - so let can be more powerful in the type system because it's less powerful in the language. But I'm not sure exactly what legibility would be lost. #### Recursion There's an interesting thing about the system I just described: it may or may not be Turing complete. The problem is that there's no specified way of doing recursion. A function can't call itself, and it can't call any other function that can call it. But a fixed-point combinator allows recursion, and might be included in the initial set of variables. Failing that, the proper recursive types can be used to define one. (Elm and Haskell allow us to define such types12.) Failing both of those, we can introduce a new kind of expression $$\frac{x : μ ⇒ a \sim μ \quad x : \bar{μ} ⇒ b \sim μ'} {(\mathtt{letrec}\ x = a\ \mathtt{in}\ b) \sim μ'}.$$  This is much the same as let, but makes the variable x = a available when evaluating a. It's only available as a monotype when evaluating a, and still doesn't get generalised to a polytype until evaluating b. (Elm and Haskell provide letrec as let and don't provide simple let at all.) But if an HM language doesn't provide the appropriate variables or types, and doesn't implement letrec or something similar, it won't be Turing complete. Legibility gain, expressivity cost. ### Wrapping up And modulo some small details, that's the entirety of a Hindley-Milner type system. If you have a language with those features, and a suitable set of types, you can perform type inference. What we have is a set of rules that allows us to construct proofs. That is, if we look at a program written in this language, we would be able to construct a proof of its type (or lack thereof). But I already said HM is better than that: it lets us mechanically construct a proof, in (roughly) linear time. I confess, I'm not entirely sure how to do that. The outline is obvious, recurse down the parse tree and at each step apply the appropriate rule. But since a constant can be judged as one of many types, you need to keep track of which types are acceptable. Wikipedia hints at how it works, but not in a way that I understand particularly well. Elm and Haskell both support many things not covered so far. To look at some of them briefly, and occasionally getting even more recklesss, • It seems obvious, but both allow you to evaluate the language, something I haven't touched on much. And it does need to be touched on, because there's more than one way to do it. Haskell uses a lazy evaluation model, while Elm is strict. • Both have ways to introduce new types. That doesn't change what we've seen, but it does separate the languages into two parts. One part describes the types used in a program and one part implements the semantics of a program. • Both also support case statements along with destructuring, like mHead : Maybe (List a) -> Result Bool a mHead ml = case ml of Just (a::_) -> Ok a Just _ -> Err True Nothing -> Err False  To implement these, you'd want to add a fifth class of language expression. But I think it would be possible in theory to write a "thin" first-pass compiler to translate these statements into the existing language. By "thin" I mean to do this in such a way that we don't lose any of the legibility guarantees we care about.13 (For example, if this compiler turned$n$bytes of code in a case statement into more than$O(n)$bytes of code in the base language, or if it ran in more than O(n) time, this condition would fail.) If I'm right about that, then case statements neither make the language more expressive nor less legible, at least in one important sense. • (By comparison, if-then-else statements are also another class of language expression, but one which can obviously be thinly compiled down to the existing ones.) • In the type system, Elm supports record types, which are a lot like tuples but with nicer syntax. I believe these too could be thinly compiled down. But it also supports extensible records, which are more complicated. On one level you can think of a type like {a | x : Int, y : Int} like a tuple ∀a. (a, Int, Int). But then this tuple needs to be unpacked and manipulated when you pass it into a function expecting an {a | x : Int}. I believe this is unresolvable, and extensible records represent an extension of Elm from HM. (But one with fairly minor legibility costs, in comparison to the expressiveness gains.) • Haskell supports typeclasses, which are a way of allowing functions to operate on multiple different types. (For example, the show function can be applied to a String, an Int, a (), a [Float], ….) Elm doesn't, but simple typeclasses can be emulated with only a little added verbosity. Another thing I'll say is that I've been talking about legibility and expressivity of a language. But a type system is itself a language, and may be more or less legible and expressive. I don't have a strong intuition for how these interact. There's a lot more I could add to this post. Some things that I omitted for brevity, some that I omitted because I don't know enough about them yet14, and some that I omitted because I don't know about them at all. I don't know what a sensible cutoff point is, so I'm just going to end it here. From writing my original talk, and subsequently this blog post, I think I understand HM type systems much better than I used to. Hopefully you think the same. Hopefully we're both correct. If you see any inaccuracies, please point them out. 1. While writing this essay I came across the talk Constraints Liberate, Liberties Constrain. From the title and the context I encountered it, it sounds like it's on the same subject. But I haven't watched it, because it's in the form of a 50 minute video. 2. If the halting problem is decideable on a language, the language is Turing incomplete. I don't know whether the reverse is true: are there Turing incomplete languages on which the halting problem is still undecideable? I'm mostly going to assume not. At any rate, I don't think I'm going to discuss any such languages. 3. To nitpick myself: these aren't just languages for which you can prove termination, they're languages which never terminate, at least not for finite inputs. I don't offhand know any languages which are Turing incomplete but have the ability to loop forever, though such a thing can exist. 4. Specifically, it looks to me like SQL-99 without recursive common table expressions is Turing incomplete. I've only ever used nonrecursive CTEs. 5. I've subsequently discovered that wikipedia uses the same name for this concept. 6. I think this is related to the way that ZF set theory can encode Peano arithmetic. Thus, ZF is more expressive than PA. But because ZF allows you to construct objects that PA doesn't, there are more things you can say about "all objects in PA" than about "all objects in ZF". So PA is more legible than ZF. I don't understand the Curry-Howard correspondence, but I think that's related too. 7. "My company" is a phrase which sometimes means "the company I own or run" and sometimes "the company I work for". Here it means the latter. I don't know an unambigous way to phrase that which I don't find slightly awkward, so instead I'm using a super-awkward footnote. But, y'know. Ironically, or something. 8. We use Elm 0.18. 0.19 is a fairly significant version change, but I think not different enough to be relevant for this post. 9. Specifically GHC, which offers many extensions over Haskell proper. Whenever I refer to Haskell, I'm really talking about the language that GHC implements. 10. At any rate, it works fine when you pass it a number. If you pass it something else, it might do anything. 11. Well, sort of. It still performs type inference, it just allows it to fail. I'm not sure if "no type inference at all" would work for Haskell; but I do think it would work for a pure HM system, if you count things like "3 is of type Int" as a raw fact, non-inferred. 12. Minor brag: I myself contributed the Elm implementation on that page. 13. I think it might look something like this: mHead ml = if *isJust ml && (*fromJust ml (\_x -> *isCons _x)) then *fromJust ml (\_x -> *fromCons _x (\a _ -> Ok a)) else if *isJust ml then *fromJust ml (\_ -> Err True) else if *isNothing ml then Err False else *fail  functions marked with a * can be hidden from the language user. Additionally, *fromJust, *fromCons and *fail would be able to throw runtime errors. These don't violate Elm's "no runtime errors" policy, because the compiler would only generate them in contexts where it could prove they wouldn't throw. (In the case of *fail, when it could prove that code branch was unreachable, so it could also just not bother.) I'm very much spitballing here. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that the approach I've described is completely unworkable. 14. Not that that stopped me from writing this entire post. Posted on 05 May 2019 | Comments ### "Now here's why I'm punching you..." A premise of this post is that punching people is sometimes better than the alternatives. I mean that literally, but mostly metaphorically. Things I take as metaphorical punching include name calling, writing angry tweets to or about someone, ejecting them from a group, callout posts, and arguing that we should punch them. Given that punching people is sometimes better than the alternatives, I think we need to be able to have conversations about when "sometimes" is. And indeed we can and do have those conversations. Many words have been spilled on the subject. But I think it's probably a good idea to try to avoid having those conversations while actually punching people. Here's what I mean. Alice thinks that punching Bob is better than the alternatives. But she thinks that if she just starts punching, Carol and Dave and Eve might not understand why. Not even if she tells them what Bob has done. She thinks punching Bob is better than the alternives, but she thinks the reasons for that are slightly complicated and haven't previously been articulated very well, at least not in a way that makes them common knowledge. So she writes an essay in which: 1. She proposes a theory for when punching people is better than the alternatives. (She readily admits that the theory is not complete, nor is it intended to be, but it covers part of the space.) 2. She describes the situation with Bob, and how the theory justifies punching him. 3. She punches Bob. I think this could be a mistake. I think she should maybe split that post into at least two parts, published separately. In the first part, she proposes the theory with no mention of Bob. Then, if Carol and Dave and Eve seem to more-or-less agree with the theory, she can also publish the part where it relates to Bob, and punch him. I think this has a few advantages. • Suppose Alice can't convince anyone that the theory holds. Then Bob is kept out of things entirely, unless Alice wants to go ahead and punch him even knowing that people won't join in. In that case, people know in advance that Alice is punching under a theory that isn't commonly subscribed to. • Suppose the theory is sound, and also justifies punching Fred. Then someone can link to the theory post separately, without implicitly bringing up the whole Bob thing. This is especially good if the theory doesn't actually justify punching Bob, but it's somewhat good regardless. • Suppose Bob disagrees with some part of the argument. When he gets punched, he's likely to be triggered or at least defensive. That's going to make it harder for him to articulate his disagreement. If it comes split up, the "thing he has to react to while triggered" may be smaller. (It may not be, if he has to react to the whole thing; but even then, he may have seen the first article, and had a chance to respond to it, before getting punched.) • Suppose that splitting-things-up like this becomes a community norm. Now, if Alice just wants to come up with excuses to punch Bob, it's harder for her to do that and get away with it, harder for her to make it look like an honest mistake. It might seem even better to split into three posts: theory, then application ("and here's why that justifies punching Bob"), and then wait for another post to actually punch him. But since "arguing that we should punch Bob" is a form of punching Bob, splitting those two out isn't necessarily possible. At best it would be "theory, then application and mild punching, then full-strength punching". It's more likely to be worth it if there's a big difference between the two levels. "Here is why I think I should kick Bob out of the group" is considerably weaker than "I hereby kick Bob out of the group". But "here is why I think you all should stop trusting Bob now" is not much weaker than "you all should stop trusting Bob now". However, I don't think this is always unambiguously a good thing. There are some disadvantages too: • The initial post is likely to be drier, less compelling, without concrete examples.1 And perhaps harder to evaluate, especially for less abstract thinkers. • You can't really remove the initial post from its context of "Alice thinks we should punch Bob". You can hide that context, but that doesn't remove its influence. For example, if there are cases similar to Bob's that would be covered by the same theory, Alice's post is likely to gloss over the parts of the theory that relate to them-but-not-Bob, and to focus too much on the parts that relate to Bob-but-not-them. • Suppose the theory is sound, but the facts of the case don't support punching Bob. Splitting the posts adds more opportunity for sleight-of-hand, such as using a term to mean different things in different places. This would be harder to notice in a split post than a monolithic post, if each part is internally consistent. • It may be harder to write this way, which may cause some better-than-the-alternatives punching to go unperformed. • It's slower. Sometimes that's probably neutral-to-good. But often, if punching someone is better than the alternatives, it's because they're currently hurting other people. If punching them will make them stop, then ideally we want to punch quickly. I'm not sure how all these factors really shake out, and I expect it'll vary from case to case. So I don't want to offer a blanket suggestion. I think my advice is: if you're thinking of writing one of those all-in-one posts, consider splitting it up. It won't always be the right thing to do, but I think it's an option to bear in mind. Here are some questions to ask that might sway you in one direction or the other: • How hard are you punching?2 If someone googles Bob, will they find your punches? (At least once, Scott Alexander used a pseudonym for a person he was punching; this seems like a useful tool.) • If the punching is delayed, does anything bad happen? • Does the theory apply more generally than it needs to for this specific case? Thinking of similar cases might help, especially real ones but also fictional. (If you can think of lots of real cases, the value of having a reference post for the theory goes up, and its value as a reference post goes up if it has less baggage.) (As an aside: I want to note that a post which looks like an all-in-one might not be. It may be recapping previously established theory. Common knowledge is rarely absolutely common, so I suspect this will usually be a good idea.) 1. See for example, this post. (Though the reason I don't have examples here is different. My motivating example hasn't been written yet3, and I didn't go looking for others. Still, I expect the effects of not having examples are similar.) 2. And not just you personally, but your audience. If your audience is large and vicious, then no matter how gently you yourself punch someone, they're going to experience a lot of pummelling. 3. And there's a decent chance it won't ever, given my track record. Posted on 16 October 2018 | Comments ### The Mathematics of Matched Betting I've been doing a little bit of matched betting lately1. The idea is that you place two opposite bets on the same event, calibrated so that your profit will be the same no matter which bet wins. If you do this entirely with your own money, your profit will (under reasonable assumptions) be negative. But bookmakers often offer free bets; you can use matched betting to extract most of the amount of that free bet as actual money. This post isn't advice about how to get into matched betting. That market is probably saturated; if you want to learn, I used this guide and it served me well. (However, if anyone is inspired to try it by this post, I have a referral code for smarkets: safto14. It looks like if you sign up with that and bet$£20$, both you and I will receive$£10$in risk-free bets. I swear that's not why I'm posting this. I might not even get around to using it.) (Um, but after that I feel obliged to give at least some safety information. So here goes: if you're not a UK citizen currently in the UK, this may be a bad idea. Don't use credit cards to deposit funds; it seems they interpret that as a cash transaction and charge fees. Start small; that way there's less at risk in case you do something silly like use a credit card to deposit funds. Probably don't expect to earn lots of money this way, either in total or per-hour.) Instead, I want to go into the math behind it, in more depth than I've seen in other places. None of this math is complicated, but some of it is useful, and I haven't found it anywhere else. (I even deliberately went looking.) ### A simple example (If you've seen one example of matched betting, you've seen them all, and you can skip this particular one.) You have a$£10$free bet at a bookmaker. You find a football game, say Manchester Utd versus Liverpool, that you want to bet on. The bookmaker offers odds of$4$on Liverpool, and you bet your$£10$on them. (A note on odds: the usual convention in gambling seems to be to use decimal odds. Odds of$x$mean that your potential winnings are$x-1$times your stake. Thus, odds of$4$mean a bet of$£10$has the potential to pay out$£30$. If you're used to odds notated$a:b$or (equivalently)$a/b$, then the decimal odds are given by$a/b + 1$.) So if Liverpool wins, you'll earn$£30$; if they lose or draw, you lose nothing. You then look up the same match at a betting exchange. An exchange allows you to take both sides of a bet, which a bookmaker won't. The exchange offers odds of$4.3$to lay Liverpool; this means that you win your bet in the exchange only if Liverpool doesn't win. You accept a stake of$£6.98$, which means your own stake is$£23.03$. Now if Liverpool wins the match, the bookmaker pays you$£30$and you lose$£23.03$in the exchange, for a net profit of$£6.97$. And if Liverpool loses, you earn$£6.98$in the exchange and lose nothing at the bookmaker, for a net profit of$£6.98$. You've turned a$£10$free bet into almost$£7$of actual money. (I'm ignoring for now the commission that the exchange will usually collect when you win a bet on them. With$2\%$commission, you would instead accept stakes of$£7.01$, wagering your own$£23.13$; if Liverpool doesn't win, you would earn$£7.01 · 0.98 = £6.87$, which is also what you'd earn if Liverpool does win.) Before bookmakers will give you a free bet, you'll usually have to place a bet with them using your own money. You lose a small amount of money on this bet, but you can use the same principles to ensure that you lose the same amount no matter who wins. You might lose around$£0.50$on a$£10$qualifying bet, in which case you end up with around$£6.50$profit when all's said and done. This has been a very brief introduction to matched betting. Now, into the math. I'm going to be focusing on two kinds of bet: qualifying bets, which are usually known as just bets, and free bets, where you don't lose anything if your back bet loses. I'm also going to ignore rounding; let's just pretend that the sterling is infinitely divisible. ### Some definitions We can think of a paired bet as having six parameters,$(O_b, O_l, S_b, S_l, C_b, C_l)$. These are three parameters for each of a pair of back and lay bets.$O_b, O_l ≥ 1$are the odds on the back and lay bets. It's typically safe to assume$O_b < O_l$; otherwise, modulo commission, you could make a profit even on your qualifying bets2. They can't be less than$1$because we're using decimal odds; that would correspond to a probability below$0$.$S_b, S_l ≥ 0$are the stakes on the back and lay bets. Note that$S_l$is the stake offered by the other party to your lay bet; it's (roughly) the amount you stand to win on that bet, not the amount you stand to lose. This may seem strange, but it's the convention used. And$C_b, C_l ∈ [0, 1]$are the commission charged on your winnings on each side. Usually$C_b = 0$: bookmakers don't charge commissions, they make money by offering low odds. The two exchanges I've used have$C_l = 2\% = 0.02$(Smarkets) and$C_l = 5\% = 0.05$(Betfair). I'm also going to introduce the symbol$C^+ = (1 - C_l)(1 - C_b)$. If you passed$£1$through your bookmaker and exchange, and they each charged commission and nothing else, you would have$£C^+$left at the end.$C^+$isn't enough for us to fully understand a matched bet, we need the individual back and lay commissions as well, but it'll be convenient shorthand. Now let$R_{xy}$(where$x,y ∈ \{b,l\}$) be your return on side$y$if your bet on side$xwins. So for a qualifying bet (which is just a regular bet, outside the context of matched betting), we have: \begin{align*} R_{bb} &= S_b (O_b - 1) (1 - C_b) \\ R_{bl} &= - S_l (O_l - 1) \\ R_{lb} &= - S_b \\ R_{ll} &= S_l (1 - C_l). \end{align*}  For a free bet, the only change is $$R_{lb} = 0.$$  So your profit isR_{bb} + R_{bl}$if your back bet wins; and$R_{lb} + R_{ll}$if your lay bet wins. And now we can say that a matched bet is simply a paired bet, where your profit is the same in either case. I won't need to talk about simple paired bets from now on; all bets are matched. When I talk about a "free bet" or "qualifying bet", those are matched bets too.3 Incidentally, the six prameters are over-determined. Most commonly we want to learn$S_l$given the other five; but knowing any five of them will fix the value of the sixth. ### Optimal lay stake The first question we'll ask is, given$O_*$,$C_*$and$S_b$, what must$S_l$be to make our bet a matched bet? Or in other words, what$S_l$should we choose to eliminate all risk? We need $$R_{bb} + R_{bl} = R_{lb} + R_{ll}$$  which after some (perhaps silly-seeming) substitution and rearrangement gives $$S_l = { R_{bb} - R_{lb} \over R_{ll}/S_l - R_{bl}/S_l }.$$  This looks circular, but when we substitute for the values of$R_{**}$,$S_l$disappears from the right hand side. For a qualifying bet, this gives $$S_l = S_b { (O_b - 1)(1 - C_b) + 1 \over O_l - C_l },$$  and for a free bet, $$S_l = S_b { (O_b - 1)(1 - C_b) \over O_l - C_l }.$$  A thing to note here is that$O_l$and$C_l$only appear in the term$O_l - C_l$. In other words, the effect of lay commission is to decrease the effective lay odds in the most natural way. It would be nice if this happened in other contexts too, but unfortunately I haven't come across it. The$O_l - C_l$term is common, but it's usually accompanied by another$O_l$and/or$C_l$somewhere else in the expression. ### Profit Next, we'll want to know how much profit we make. This is given by$R_{lb} + R_{ll}$, where we calculate$R_{ll}$using the lay stake we just found. But since both of these terms are proportional to$S_b$, we'll find it more convenient to think in terms of profit per unit of back stake, $$P = { R_{lb} + R_{ll} \over S_b }.$$  Under a qualifying bet, this is $$P_q = C^+ { O_b + C_b/(1 - C_b) \over O_l - C_l } - 1,$$  and for a free bet, it's $$P_f = C^+ { O_b - 1 \over O_l - C_l }.$$  We can look at these functions graphically: (all images link to larger versions) each line represents a contour of the function, a set of points that all have the same profit. The sets of contours look superficially similar, but they're generally steeper for a free bet, and they get cut off on the bottom edge instead of the left edge. In both cases, profit increases with$O_b$and decreases with$O_l$. We can reparameterise in terms of$O_b$and$σ = O_l - O_b$, the spread between the back and lay odds. Since$O_l ≥ O_b$, we only need to consider$σ ≥ 0. This gives us \begin{align*} P_q &= C^+ { O_b + C_b/(1 - C_b) \over O_b + σ - C_l } - 1 \\ P_f &= C^+ { O_b - 1 \over O_b + σ - C_l }. \end{align*}  These are slightly more distinct. Looking at these graphs, it seems that for a qualifying bet, having lowσ$is more significant than having high$O_b$; but for a free bet, having high$O_b$is more significant than having low$σ$. If so, that suggests you might want to be looking for different sorts of bets at each stage. (It is so, and we'll make it more precise later.) We can also look at$P_f - P_q$, the difference in profit between a qualifying bet and a free bet. This isn't particularly useful to compare bets: you place qualifying bets to get free bets, and you place free bets to get money, and if you're doing pure matched betting, I don't think you'll ever be asking yourself should I place this bet free or as a qualifier? Still, the difference is $$P_f - P_q = 1 - { (1 - C_l)(1 - 2C_b) \over O_l - C_l }.$$  The more$O_l$grows, the worse a qualifier becomes relative to a free bet. This is another suggestion that you should be looking at different sorts of bets for your qualifiers and your free bets. ### Liability One more thing is important when making a matched bet: lay liability. This is how much you stand to lose on the exchange where you make your lay bet. (It's only important for boring real-world reasons like liquidity and the possibility of doing something stupid, but those are still important.) You need to have this much money in your account at the exchange, which means you need to be able to spare it from your bank account for a week or so. Low-liability bets are also safer if something goes wrong, which makes them a good choice for early dabblers in matched betting. Liability is simply given by$-R_{bl} = S_l (O_l - 1)$, which is $$S_b (O_l - 1) { (O_b - 1)(1 - C_b) + 1 \over O_l - C_l }$$  for a qualifying bet and $$S_b (O_l - 1) { (O_b - 1)(1 - C_b) \over O_l - C_l }$$  for a free bet. (I made the graphs in$σ$as well, but they're too boring to include inline) Unlike profit, liability increases with both$O_b$and$O_l$. But it increases arbitrarily with$O_b$, and asymtotically with$O_l$; it's bounded above by roughly$S_b O_b$for a qualifying bet and$S_b (O_b - 1)$for a free bet. (If the graphs were extended further, as they stretch upwards the lines would become ever more vertical, but they'd always stay separate. To the right, the lines would become ever more horizontal, all of them converging on$O_l = 1$.) ### Improving on a free bet Matched bet calculators aren't hard to find, and what I've given so far is nothing that they can't do for you. But they don't tell you everything you might want to know. Let's look at a bet, and see how we might find a better bet. Since the two types have different behaviours, we'll treat them separately. To maximise profit, we usually need to consider that$S_b, C_b$and$C_l$are fixed, and find the dependence of$P$on$O_b$and$O_l$. For a free bet, that means we want to maximise the term $$P_f ∝ {O_b - 1 \over O_l - C_l}.$$  This tells us a few things. The first is that we want high back odds and low lay odds. We already knew that, and it's not very helpful; we expect back and lay odds to more-or-less rise and fall together. It also tells us that adding a constant to both odds will increase profit; odds of 5 and 6 will be better than odds of 4 and 5. (This, too, we could have deduced before; or we could have seen it on the graph of$P_f(O_b, σ)$.) But consider what happens when$σ = 0$. Then the term in question is $${ O_b - 1 \over O_b - C_l }$$  which, as$O_b$ranges from$1$to$∞$, takes all values in$[0, 1)$. But when$σ > 0$, the possible values are exactly the same; high$σ$changes the$O_b$that gives you any particular profit, but it doesn't make any profit value available or unavailable. What that means is: given any free bet, we can construct another free bet with equal profit but$σ = 0$, not changing$S_b$or$C_*$. Or: given odds$O_b, O_l$, we can calulate the odds$O'$that would give you the same profit, if you could find these odds for both a back and a lay bet. In turn, that tells you that if you want to improve your profits, you can ignore bets with$O_b < O'$. (Because for those bets,$P_f(O_b, σ) < P_f(O', σ) ≤ P_f(O', 0)$. The first inequality comes from adding a constant to both odds, and the second comes from reducing$O_l$.) This is a useful thing to know, that matched bet calculators don't tell you. To find$O', we set $${ O_b - 1 \over O_l - C_l } = { O' - 1 \over O' - C_l }$$  and deduce \begin{align*} O' &= { O_l - O_bC_l \over 1 + O_l - O_b - C_l } \\ &= O_b { 1 - C_l + σ/O_b \over 1 - C_l + σ }. \end{align*}  The expression withσ$isn't exactly simpler, but I think it's more aesthetically pleasing. (Consider that$1-C_l$is approximately as fundamental as$C_l$itself.) Graphically: We can also calculate$O'$simply as a function of profit, and vice versa: $$P_f = C^+ { O' - 1 \over O' - C_l } \\ O' = { C_lP_f - C^+ \over P_f - C^+ }$$ $P_f$approaches an asymtote at$C^+$, but slowly. With$C_b = 0, C_l = 0.02$, extracting$80\%$of a free bet is only possible if$O_b ≥ 5.36$. For$90\%$, you need$O_b ≥ 12.03$. Such bets are somewhat rare in my experience, and typically have high spread. We can go more general. Given a profit, we can calculate the level curve of all bets which generate that profit; the case$σ=0gives us only a single point on that curve. The curve divides bet-space into two regions, so that it's easy to see whether a bet gives more or less than this amount of profit. (Earlier we saw this level curve graphically, for certain specific profits. Now we find the explicit formula for the curve, which I secretly already used to draw the graphs.) We already have \begin{align*} P_f &= C^+ { O_b - 1 \over O_l - C_l } \\ &= C^+ { O_b - 1 \over O_b + σ - C_l }, \end{align*}  and it's just a matter of rearranging these: $$O_b C^+ = P_f (O_l - C_l) + C^+\\ O_b (C^+ - P_f) = P_f (σ - C_l) + C^+.$$  These two equations can be used to findO_b$in terms of$O_l$or$σ$, and vice-versa. Both are very simple at heart: they're linear relationships, that could be rearranged to the form$y = mx + c$. Looking more closely at the second one, notice that$C^+$is the upper bound on profit. So the term$C^+ - P_f$can be thought of as how much profit is being left on the table, compared to what you could hypothetically get if odds of$∞$were a thing. The less profit you leave behind, the less$σ$has to change to compensate for a given change in$O_b$. In other words, when profit is high, the level curve on the graph of$P_f(O_b, σ)$becomes shallower, as we saw above. ### Improving on a qualifying bet For a qualifying bet, we can't quite do the same thing. If we temporarily assume$C_b = 0$, then the term we want to maximise is $$P_q + 1 ∝ {O_b \over O_l - C_l}.$$  This doesn't work the same as the equivalent term for a free bet. If you keep$σ$fixed and consider profit as a function of$O_b$, then this function acts differently depending on the sign of$σ - C_l$. If$σ ≤ C_l$, then regardless of$O_b$you get more profit than is ever possible with$σ > C_l$. This isn't immediately practically important, because$σ > C_l$is a pretty safe assumption. But it's mathematically significant. For a free bet, setting$σ$to$0$doesn't rule out any profit levels, so we could ask "how would we get this particular profit with$σ = 0$?" If we try to ask that for a qualifying bet, the answer is typically that we can't. So the approach we used for a free bet doesn't work on a qualifying bet. We also can't set$O_b$to its best possible value, because it can go arbitrarily high. But we can try setting it to its limiting worst value ($O_b = 1$). We find$σ'$such that $${ O_b + C_b/(1 - C_b) \over O_b + σ - C_l } = { 1 + C_b/(1 - C_b) \over 1 + σ' - C_l },$$  which gives us $$σ' = { σ + (O_b - 1)(1 - C^+) \over 1 + (O_b - 1)(1 - C_b) }.$$  Now we know that any bet with a spread less than$σ'$will give better profit than the bet we started with. Unfortunately, I think this still isn't as good as what we got for a free bet, for three reasons. 1. For a free bet, we had an easy negative test: some bets (those with$O_b < O'$) could be ruled out on a glance, but verifying them took more work. Here, the test is positive: some bets (those with$σ < σ'$) can be accepted on a glance, but verifying the others takes more work.4 In practice, I expect the positive test will almost alway be inconclusive, meaning you still need to do the more difficult check on every bet. (I haven't done enough betting myself, while writing this, to say from experience.) 2. My workflow is to find a plausible-looking back bet and then see how it would be matched. With a free bet, I can run the easy test without looking for the match. For a qualifying bet, I need to find both sides of the bet before I can run the easy test. 3. Qualifying bets often must be placed at a minimum odds (on the back side) in order to count. That typically rules out the lowest-spread bets (see below digression). Still, this is what we have. Following a similar theme as before, we can calculate$σ'$and$P_q$as functions of each other: $$P_q = { 1 - C_l \over 1 - C_l + σ' } - 1 \\ σ' = { 1 - C_l \over P_q + 1 } + C_l - 1.$$  (Note that these equations don't contain$C_b$. That's not because we're assuming it's$0$: when you set$O_b = 1$,$C_b$completely disappears from the equation for$P_q$.) Interestingly, the bounds of$P_q$don't depend on commission at all. As$σ'$grows,$P_q$always approaches an asymtote at$-1$, which isn't surprising: you can't quite lose your entire back stake, but you can get arbitrarily close to that, even with no commission. On the other edge of the graph, we always have$P_q(O_b=1, σ'=0) = 0$. (That may not be clear on this image, but it's easy to see algrebraically.) That's because at$O_b = O_l = 1$, both bets are completely one-sided. On the back side you have a chance of losing money, but no way to win it; on the lay side you have a chance of winning money, but no way to lose it. In particular, if the back bet wins, you make no profit or loss on either bet, so commission is irrelevant. And so the lay stake is calibrated for your lay winnings, after commission, to cancel out your back loss. (But if someone is willing to give you free maybe-money, you might as well ask for as much maybe-money as they're willing to give you.) And again, given profit, we can calculate the level curve of bets which return that profit. Unsurprisingly, we find another linear relationship; it comes to $$O_bC^+ + C_b(1 - C_l) = (Pq + 1)(Ol - Cl) \\ O_b(1 - C_b - Λ) + C_b = Λ(σ - C_l),$$  where $$Λ = { P_q + 1 \over 1 - C_l }.$$  I'm afraid I can offer no particular interpretation of what$Λ$means, though I observe that we can substitute it into a previous equation,$σ' = 1/Λ + C_l - 1$. Note that if$Λ ≥ 1 - C_b$, equivalently if$P_q + 1 ≥ C^+$, then$σ$and$O_b$start to move in opposite directions: for fixed profit,$σ$goes up as$O_b$goes down. At this point, you get more profit with low$O_b$as well as with low$σ$, which would be convenient if it was ever realistically going to happen. (It turns out that$P_q + 1 ≥ C^+$precisely when$σ ≤ C_l + C_b/(1 - C_b)$. I noted above that if$C_b = 0$, the possible values of$P_q + 1$depend on the sign of$σ-C_l$. This is the same result, generalized to all values of$C_b$.) ### A digression on odds Note that in general, you can expect spread to be lower at lower odds. That's because odds are more sensitive to evidence when they're high than when they're low. There's a technical interpretation of that, but I'm just going to illustrate by example. Consider the probabilities$1/5$and$1/6$. These are complementary to$4/5$and$5/6$- the two pairs of probabilities encode the same information. Converting to decimal, probabilities$1/5$and$1/6$are decimal odds$1.25$and$1.2$; and probabilities$4/5$and$5/6$are decimal odds$5$and$6$. So the difference between the odds$1.25$and$1.2$is, in a very important sense, the same as the difference between$5$and$6$. But when it comes to betting, the spreads of$0.05$and$1$are very different. The takeaway from this is that for qualifying bets, you should be looking at bets with low odds. High odds have better returns, but the effect of low spread is much more significant, and low spread comes with low odds. ### The effects of commission I want to explore one more question: how does profit depend on commission? For this, we'll keep$C_b$and$O_b$fixed, and explore how$O_l$and$C_laffect profit. Conveniently, the term we want to maximise is the same, \begin{align*} P_q + 1 ∝ { 1 - C_l \over O_l - C_l } \\ P_f ∝ { 1 - C_l \over O_l - C_l }. \end{align*}  So if we find the same lay bet on two different exchanges, we can compare them without regard for the back bet we'd be matching. The two exchanges I've used haveC_l$of$0.02$and$0.05$, so they give equal profits when $${ 0.98 \over O_S - 0.02 } = { 0.95 \over O_B - 0.95 }$$  where$O_S$is the odds offered on Smarkets and$O_B$is the odds offered on Betfair. This rearranges to $$98·O_b = 95·O_S.$$  Since$98/95 ≈ 1.03$, it's better to use Betfair than Smarkets if the offered odds are roughly$3%$lower, which happens to be the difference in commission. So for example, odds of$6$on Betfair correspond to roughly$6.19$on Smarkets. It should be easy to take a bunch of equivalent bets on the two sites, and compare to see which seems likely to give better profit in general. I started doing that, but then I looked at three football games and got bored and stopped. They all had exactly the same odds on all three positions (win/draw/win), even when they fluctuated slightly pre-game. (I did look at one game as it began, and the two sites didn't quite stay in sync then. But betting while odds are fluctuating a lot is a bad idea.) This suggests that Smarkets typically offers better profits. But Betfair is a more popular site, which probably has advantages; in particular, it's plausible that a large bet would be harder to fully match on Smarkets. And that's it. There are plenty more interesting questions you could ask5, but I'm going to stop there. Something that would be nice would be a calculator that can make use of this. The online calculators all seem pretty crap: they only tell you profit, lay stake and lay liability, and only for one bet at a time. Being able to compare bets seems like it would be a pretty important feature, but I haven't seen it anywhere. (Some of them have features to work with more complicated types of bets than I've looked at, but I don't care about that. Here's one that's no worse than any other.) I've also seen an excel calculator, which had the neat feature of automatically adding bets to a spreadsheet. But again, only one bet at a time; plus, I don't have excel, and don't keep track of my bets in a spreadsheet. (I use ledger, though it's not a great fit.) I've written a command-line tool that can show you multiple bets at a time for comparison purposes. It also shows you, for a free bet, the lowest possible back odds to improve on your highest-profit bet ($O'$); or, for a qualifying bet, the highest possible spread that won't improve on it ($σ'$). But the interface isn't very good, I think partly because of the limits of the command line and partly because of a questionable design decision (see the README). And it can't show graphs, which I think would be nice. If you want to use it anyway, it's on github. If I were to dedicate more time to the project, I currently think I'd start again in Javascript. I think I have a vague idea of how a decent one could work. But right now, as far as I can tell there are no good calculators. 1. Well, I haven't done any for a few months now. This post took a long time to write. 2. I think maybe sometimes bookmakers will offer improved odds as a special offer, and maybe then sometimes you'll find$O_b > O_l$. But it's not a case I'll particularly consider in this post. 3. I'm also assuming that all free bets are "stake not returned". In a standard bet, if you win, you get your stake back and also collect your winnings. If you win a stake not returned free bet, you collect your winnings; but you don't also get to keep the stake, because that wasn't yours in the first place. If you have a "stake returned" free bet, that effectively increases the odds on the back side by$1$. I've not yet encountered one of these, myself. Another type is the "risk-free" bet, which I won't go into here partly because I'm not 100% sure what it means. But I think that "£10 in risk-free bets" allows you to make a bet of more than £10, and if you lose, you get £10 back. I think the way to treat it is as putting £10 into a free bet (stake not returned) and the remainder of your stake into a qualifying bet, and so by default you should put in no more than the risk-free amount. 4. Another way to look at this is by the shape of the "more profitable" space on the graphs of$P_q(O_b, σ)$and$P_f(O_b, σ)$, as seen here. On the$P_f$graph,$O'$carves up the "less profitable" space without entering the "more profitable" space. On the$P_q$graph,$σ'$carves up the "more profitable" space without entering the "less profitable" space. There's no equivalent of$O'$for a qualifying bet, or of$σ'$for a free bet. 5. A thing I'd like to explore at some point, is qualifying bets where you only win a free bet under certain circumstances. For example, you bet on a team to win a football match, and you win a free bet iff your team is winning at the end of both halves. I think you can still guarantee a profit with the right combination of bets, but there are more variables involved. (On the exchange, you lay your team to win, like normal. That way you turn a profit if they win both halves, and lose a small amount otherwise. So you also lay them to win both halves - that's not a standard win/lose/draw bet, but I think it's generally available. If you pick the right stakes, you can turn a profit in both cases. Though probably not exactly the same profit in both cases, because you can't easily predict exactly how much the free bet will be worth.) Posted on 02 June 2018 | Comments ### Pareto improvements are rarer than they seem this is surely not an original insight, but I haven't seen it before A Pareto improvement is where you make one party better off and no parties worse off. Suppose Adam has a rare baseball card. He assigns no intrinsic value to baseball cards. Adam likes Beth, and somewhat values her happiness. Beth collects baseball cards, and would happily pay$100 for Adam's card.

If Adam just gives Beth his baseball card, is that a Pareto improvement? Naively, yes: he loses the card that he doesn't care about, and gains her happiness; she gains the card. Both are better off.

But I claim not, because if Adam has the card, he can sell it to Beth for $100. He would much prefer doing that over just giving her the card. But if Beth has the card, he can't do that. He assigns no intrinsic value to the card, but he can still value it as a trading chip. Now suppose Adam has the baseball card but Beth also has a copy of that card. Then Beth has less desire for Adam's card, so this situation also isn't a Pareto improvement over the original. By giving something to Beth, we've made Adam's situation worse, even though Adam likes Beth and values her happiness. And I think situations like this are common. The ability to give someone something they want, is a form of power; and power is instrumentally useful. And the less someone wants, the less able you are to give them something they want1. For a closer-to-reality example, the reddit comment that sparked this post said: bringing Platform 3 back into use at Liverpool Street Underground Station was denied because the platform would not be accessible. Neither of the platforms currently in use for that line is accessible, so allowing Platform 3 to be used would be a Pareto improvement The model here is that there are two parties, people who can access the platforms at Liverpool St and those who can't. If Platform 3 is brought back into use, the first group gains something and the second group loses nothing. But I think that if Platform 3 is brought back into use, the second group loses some power. They lose the power to say "we'll let you bring back Platform 3 if you give us…". Maybe Platform 3 can be made accessible for$1 million. Then they can say "we'll let you bring it back if you make it accessible", but they can't do that if it's already back in use.

And they lose some power to say "if you ignore us, we'll make things difficult for you". Maybe it would take \$1 trillion to make Platform 3 accessible. If Platform 3 remains out of use, people are more likely to spend \$1 million to make their building projects accessible, because they've seen what happens if they don't. Conversely, if Platform 3 comes back, people are more likely to exaggerate future costs of accessibility. "If I say it costs \$1 million, I'll have to pay. If I say it costs \$10 million, maybe I won't."

I haven't researched the situation in question, and I expect that the actual power dynamics in play don't look quite like that. But I think the point stands.

(My original reply said: "If it's easier to turn an unused inaccessible platform into a used accessible platform, than to turn a used inaccessible platform into a used accessible platform - I don't know if that's the case, but it sounds plausible - then opening the platform isn't a Pareto improvement." That still seems true to me, but it's not what I'm talking about here. There are lots of reasons why something might not be a Pareto improvement.)

This doesn't mean Pareto improvements don't exist. But I think a lot of things that look like them are not.

Update 2018-02-02: some good comments on reddit and LessWrong. Following those, I have two things in particular to add.

First, that I like /u/AntiTwister's summary: "If you have the power to prevent another party from gaining utility, then you lose utility by giving up that power even if you are allies. There is opportunity cost in abstaining from using your power as a bargaining chip to increase your own utility."

Second, that there is a related (weaker) concept called Kaldor-Hicks efficiency. I think that a lot of the things that look-like-but-aren't Pareto improvements, are still Kaldor-Hicks improvements - meaning that the utility lost by the losing parties is still less than the utility gained by the winners. In theory, that means that the winners could compensate the losers by giving them some money, to reach a Pareto improvement over the original state. But various political and practical issues can (and often do) get in the way of that.

1. This feels like it generalizes far beyond questions of Pareto efficiency, but I'm not sure how to frame it. Something like game theory is more competitive than it appears. Even when no two players value the same resource, even when all players genuinely want all other players to do well, players still have an incentive to sabotage each other.

Posted on 27 January 2018 | Comments

### Improving goimports

Epistemic status: Pure dilettantism. I have never used Go. This might make me unqualified to say what I'm about to say. But it's okay, because I use the word "seems" a lot.

In Go, if you have an unused import, your program fails to compile. This has made a lot of people mildly annoyed and been sometimes regarded as a bad idea, but not universally.

The devs decline to add a compiler flag to change this behaviour, "because compiler options should not affect the semantics of the language and because the Go compiler does not report warnings, only errors that prevent compilation". This strikes me as reasonable, if not the decision I personally would make.

Instead, they suggest this pattern:

import "unused"

// This declaration marks the import as used by referencing an
// item from the package.
var _ = unused.Item  // TODO: Delete before committing!


- that is, add a line of code to trick the compiler into thinking that you're using the import, even though you're not. (Unless you forget to delete the trick line, which the compiler won't verify for you.)

This does not strike me as a very good substitute. With a compiler flag, I could turn it on while debugging and turn it off for production to make sure I had no unused imports. I could use a commit hook to keep unused imports out of the repository. By tricking the compiler, there's no particularly easy way to do this. (I suppose I could put the string "FAKEIMPORT" is a comment on those lines, and grep for that string. This is still not a great solution.)

I also refer to the devs' opinion that "if it's worth complaining about, it's worth fixing in the code. (And if it's not worth fixing, it's not worth mentioning.)" I claim that there's no fundamental difference between

import unused


and

import unused
var _ = unused.Item


Neither affects the semantics of the program, if we ignore that the first one doesn't compile1. If one is worth complaining about, so is the other. But the devs are sending mixed signals. It seems the first is worth complaining about, because the compiler complains. But it seems the second is not, because the devs recommend it. This should be a sign that something about this whole situation is less than ideal2.

(For myself, I would say that both are worth complaining about in production, and neither is worth complaining about when debugging. But the trick works equally well in both instances.)

There is another solution, in the form of a tool called goimports. The idea is that you don't write imports at all. If you have a symbol that isn't imported, it searches your filesystem for an appropriate package and adds an import line. If you have an unused import, it deletes it.

But word on the street is that some names are ambiguous, supplied by multiple packages, and goimports has no way to choose which one you mean. So if you comment out a line, and then uncomment it, goimports might add back a different import than the one you originally used. This, too, seems less than ideal.

All of which is to say: although I don't use Go, it seems to me that Go has a problem, and that the existing solutions aren't perfect.

I propose a new solution, which could be implemented as two new modes for goimports to run in or as one or two completely new tools.

In the first mode, this tool acts like goimports, but more conservatively. Instead of removing unused imports, it merely comments them out. And instead of searching your filesystem for packages, it merely searches your comment lines, and uncomments them if there's a match.

So if you're debugging, and comment out the only use of a package, this tool will comment out the import for you. When you uncomment that use, the import will be added back in, but without the ambiguous naming problem. At no point do you have to trick the compiler, so you don't have to remember to stop tricking the compiler.

In the second mode, this tool checks for commented out import lines, and tells you whether it found any (or optionally deletes them). It can be called in commit hooks, to prevent such lines from cluttering up a repository.

This seems to me like it would be an improvement on the status quo.

1. At least, they don't look like they do. Not knowing Go, it's conceivable that they could. If the second can have effects, then the devs' recommendation seems particularly bad. In that case, if a var _ = unused.Item line shows up in a codebase, it's probably a mistake - but you can't be sure without checking, which takes much longer.

2. I want to clarify three things. First, I do not think the devs are wrong to recommend using this trick. Second, I do not think the second version is just as bad as the first. The second version has a more obvious smell, which is valuable, because bad code that smells bad is less bad than bad code that smells good. Third, I said the situation is less than ideal, and that's what I meant. I do not think the situation is terrible.

Posted on 13 January 2017 | Comments

### The Parable of the Clock

The monk Dawa had a clock that had stopped, and he was content. When he wished to know the hour, he would glance at the clock, and discover that it was noon.

One day a visiting friend commented on the clock. "Why does your clock say that the hour is noon, when I am quite sure that it is six in the evening?"

Dawa found this unlikely, for the hour had always been noon in his experience. But he had been instilled with the virtues of curiosity and empiricism. If the hour is noon, I desire to believe it is noon. If the hour is six in the evening, I desire to believe it is six in the evening. Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want. Thus fortified, he sought out other clocks.

The time was indeed six in the evening. In accordance with the virtue of relinquishment, and gently laughing inside at his past foolishness, Dawa serenely set his broken clock forwards by six hours.

Posted on 22 December 2016 | Comments

### Data surgery is not rocket science

This is a story of me failing to do something, and some thoughts on how I might have succeeded.

A friend had a problem. He'd been recording some audio on his phone when the battery died, leaving him with a .m4a file that couldn't be played. He had a look at the contents and it contained a bunch of data, so he offered 40 if someone could recover the audio for him. This seemed like a fun challenge that would exercise skills there isn't much call for. I didn't necessarily expect to succeed, but I decided to give it a go. (I only remember doing something like this once before, when I had a corrupt FAT partition that I managed to fix with some bit-flipping.) To help, the friend provided two small files from the same app: one a successful recording, and one corrupt like the target file. The simplest thing was to simply try playing the broken files with mplayer, just in case. It didn't work, and gave an error message saying (among other things) "moov atom not found". The next thing was to look at all the files in a hex editor, which in this case was "hexdump -C piped into less" because I don't think I have a dedicated hex editor installed. I quickly noticed that the good recording had the bytes moov at location 0x1d, while the corrupt recordings both had the bytes free there. I also noticed that all three files had the bytes mdat at location 0xc95, followed by some low-entropy data, and then some apparently high-entropy data that seemed to go on to the end of the file. I guessed that this was the actual audio data, while the start of the good recording was a valid audio header. 00000000 00 00 00 18 66 74 79 70 6d 70 34 32 00 00 00 00 |....ftypmp42....| 00000010 69 73 6f 6d 6d 70 34 32 00 00 0c 79 66 72 65 65 |isommp42...yfree| 00000020 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| * 00000c90 00 3f 3f 3f 3f 6d 64 61 74 01 40 22 80 a3 7f f8 |.????mdat.@"....| 00000ca0 85 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d |.---------------| 00000cb0 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d |----------------| * 00000da0 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2d 2e ff f1 0a |------------....| 00000db0 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a |ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ| * 00000eb0 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a 5a 5d e0 e2 14 b4 |ZZZZZZZZZZZ]....| 00000ec0 b4 b4 b4 b4 b4 b4 b4 b4 b4 b4 b4 b4 b4 b4 b4 b4 |................| 00000ed0 b4 b4 bc 00 e2 36 2e 70 5b 0c 09 88 8b b1 2a ae |.....6.p[.....*.| 00000ee0 9d 55 6c 14 4c 2a 2a 55 45 44 01 c5 35 93 14 a0 |.Ul.L**UED..5...|  The start of the target file. hexdump prints a * to indicate that several lines have been skipped which were identical to the one above. The audio data seems to start around position 0xed2. So that gave me another simple thing to try. I took the first 0xc95 bytes from the good file, and byte 0xc95 onwards from the small corrupt file, and concatenated them. head -c 3221 tinytest_notbroken.m4a > fixtest-1.m4a tail -c +3222 tinytest_broken.m4a >> fixtest-1.m4a  After this, fixtest-1.m4a played in mplayer. It printed lots of warning messages while it did so, but whatever. So I did the same thing with the target file, and recovered two seconds of the original audio. I could report to my friend that it started with him saying "um". This is what I was expecting, since the good recording was only two seconds, and it would presumably have had the length in the header. But now I needed to work out how to lengthen it. I played around with ffmpeg, but it didn't seem to have an option for "ignore the audio duration stated in the header", so it seemed I would have to fix the header myself. ftyppm42 seemed like it might be a file type indicator, so I googled that. A few clicks led to the MP4 registration authority, which suggested that the relevant standard was called "ISO/IEC 14496-14". So I then googled "ISO/IEC 14496-14 track header", and found a pdf of the relevant standard. Unfortunately this is a high-context document, I didn't particularly understand it, and it didn't help me very much. I also found wikipedia on MP4, which pointed me to ISO base media file format, ISO/IEC 14496-12. Google then gave me a pdf of that standard, which was much more detailed, helpful, and lengthy. I didn't attempt to understand it all. But I searched for "mdat", and shortly after one of the hits, I found the following description of a data structure: aligned(8) class MovieHeaderBox extends FullBox(‘mvhd’, version, 0) { if (version==1) { unsigned int(64) creation_time; unsigned int(64) modification_time; unsigned int(32) timescale; unsigned int(64) duration; } else { // version==0 unsigned int(32) creation_time; unsigned int(32) modification_time; unsigned int(32) timescale; unsigned int(32) duration; } template int(32) rate = 0x00010000; // typically 1.0 template int(16) volume = 0x0100; // typically, full volume const bit(16) reserved = 0; const unsigned int(32)[2] reserved = 0; template int(32)[9] matrix = { 0x00010000,0,0,0,0x00010000,0,0,0,0x40000000 }; // Unity matrix bit(32)[6] pre_defined = 0; unsigned int(32) next_track_ID; }  Promising! My header contained the following two lines: 00000020 00 00 00 6c 6d 76 68 64 00 00 00 00 d4 6b 4f 0d |...lmvhd.....kO.| 00000030 d4 6b 4f 0d 00 00 03 e8 00 00 08 17 00 01 00 00 |.kO.............|  That's mvhd from the description, followed by four null bytes, followed by two identical 32-bit ints - the creation and modification times would naturally have been the same - and then two more ints. timescale was 0x3e8, decimal 1000, which per spec means 1000 time units pass in a second. duration was 0x817, decimal 2071, indicating a track 2.071 seconds long. So presumably I need to edit this value. What to set it to? As long as it's sufficiently long, it's not important. So I set it to 0x10000817, using emacs (in hexl-mode) as my editor, and tried again. No dice, it still cut off at two seconds. So I searched "duration" in the same file, and found two more places to edit. One soon after the bytes tkhd, which used the same timescale as the mvhd; and one soon after the bytes mdhd, which had its own timescale. In this case the timescale was 0xac44, decimal 44100. But adding 0x1000000 to both of these durations didn't help either. (After one of these three edits - I don't remember which - mplayer started reporting the file as being 74 hours long. But it still cut out after two seconds.) At this point I was up late and out of ideas. But I realized that I could just ask my friend to record another long track, and then use the header from that to do the job. So I left him instructions, plus some notes on where I'd got to, so someone else could pick up where I'd left off if that didn't work. Then while I was asleep, someone else came along and fixed it for him before he tried that. I don't know how. But here are some thoughts on how I might have proceeded, if my friend hadn't been able to record the longer audio. For one thing, I might have been able to generate my own long file in ffmpeg. But attempting this now, I can't make it work. I concatenate several copies of the good recording, and get a file that starts with these three lines: 00000000 00 00 00 18 66 74 79 70 4d 34 41 20 00 00 02 00 |....ftypM4A ....| 00000010 69 73 6f 6d 69 73 6f 32 00 00 00 08 66 72 65 65 |isomiso2....free| 00000020 00 07 93 5e 6d 64 61 74 01 40 22 80 a3 7f f8 85 |...^mdat.@".....|  It plays fine. But when I try to mix it with the target file, it doesn't play. It complains about the missing moov atom, even though that's also missing in the working concatenated file. I'm not sure what's wrong. Failing that, I could have recorded the long file myself in the same app my friend used, to spare his attention for things he actually wanted to be doing. (Which, after all, was the reason he was willing to pay someone else to fix the file.) I could also, for curiousity's sake, have recorded another short file, and attempted to find more durations by comparing the headers. But perhaps the simplest thing would have been to take a completely different approach from the beginning. It turns out that other people have encountered this problem before, and paved the way for those like me. For example, someone on facebook posted this page, which teaches you to fix these files using a piece of software called "faad.exe". More research reveals that this is open source, and even available in portage. (I also find references to FAAD if I google "fix corrupt m4a file".) It looks like this was a case of "more haste, less speed". At least the haste was fun, but probably not worth the40 I might have earned by being thorough.

Posted on 17 December 2016 | Comments

### The Sally-Anne Fallacy

I'd like to coin a term. The Sally-Anne fallacy is the mistake of assuming that somone believes something, simply because that thing is true.1

The name comes from the Sally-Anne test, used in developmental psychology to detect theory of mind. Someone who lacks theory of mind will fail the Sally-Anne test, thinking that Sally knows where the marble is. The Sally-Anne fallacy is also a failure of theory of mind.

In internet arguments, this will often come up as part of a chain of reasoning, such as: you think X; X implies Y; therefore you think Y. Or: you support X; X leads to Y; therefore you support Y.2

So for example, we have this complaint about the words "African dialect" used in Age of Ultron. The argument goes: a dialect is a variation on a language, therefore Marvel thinks "African" is a language.

You think "African" has dialects; "has dialects" implies "is a language"; therefore you think "African" is a language.

Or maybe Marvel just doesn't know what a "dialect" is.

This is also a mistake I was pointing at in Fascists and Rakes. You think it's okay to eat tic-tacs; tic-tacs are sentient; therefore you think it's okay to eat sentient things. Versus: you think I should be forbidden from eating tic-tacs; tic-tacs are nonsentient; therefore you think I should be forbidden from eating nonsentient things. No, in both cases the defendant is just wrong about whether tic-tacs are sentient.

Many political conflicts include arguments that look like this. You fight our cause; our cause is the cause of [good thing]; therefore you oppose [good thing]. Sometimes people disagree about what's good, but sometimes they just disagree about how to get there, and think that a cause is harmful to its stated goals. Thus, liberals and libertarians symmetrically accuse each other of not caring about the poor.3

If you want to convince someone to change their mind, it's important to know what they're wrong about. The Sally-Anne fallacy causes us to mistarget our counterarguments, and to mistake potential allies for inevitable enemies.

1. From the outside, this looks like "simply because you believe that thing".

2. Another possible misunderstanding here, is if you agree that X leads to Y and Y is bad, but still think X is worth it.

3. Of course, sometimes people will pretend not to believe the obvious truth so that they can further their dastardly ends. But sometimes they're just wrong. And sometimes they'll be right, and the obvious truth will be untrue.

Posted on 09 April 2016 | Comments

### Political Polarization in the US House of Representatives

I've created an interactive graph of historical levels of political polarization in the US House of Representatives. It would be tricky to embed in this blog, so I'm only linking it. Summary:

The x-axis on this graph is based on DW-NOMINATE left-right scores of each member of each U.S. House of Representatives from 1865 to 2015. This uses a member's voting record to measure the direction and extremity of their political views, regardless of party affiliation.

If a member's score on this axis is known, it's possible to predict their vote on any given issue with high confidence, given no other information about the member. Members whose votes are typically left-aligned receive negative scores, while members whose votes are typically right-aligned receive positive scores.

(However, see The Thin Blue Line That Stays Strangely Horizontal, which questions the validity of DW-NOMINATE.)

Background: I made this last year for a Udacity course, "Data Visualization and D3.js". I needed to submit a visualization for marking, and this was my submission. I'm grateful for feedback provided by Udacity and by some of my friends. Without that, the result would certainly have been worse.

The source is available on GitHub, including datasets and some python scripts I used to process them. The README also documents some of the design history.

I'm aware of one bug: in firefox (38.6.1 on linux), the legend appears to display the 5-95 and 25-75 percentile boxes identically. They're implemented as rects with fill-opacity: 0.3: the 25-75 boxes have two of these rects on top of each other. This is also how the paths on the graph itself are colored.

I assume there are other bugs.

Posted on 26 February 2016 | Comments

### Officially faceblind

I realized a few years ago that I was at least somewhat faceblind/prosopagnosic. A while back I took an online test out of curiousity, and scored low. They said that if I was in London and interested in further tests, I should leave my email address. A few days ago I went in for those tests, and now I have a PhD student (Katie) also telling me I'm faceblind. Which makes it official, I guess.

Next she wants to run EEGs on me, which should be cool. That will help work out where my brain is going wrong, in the long chain between "photons stimulate nerve endings in my eyeballs" and "I recognize a face" (whatever that means). Also, apparently there's a phenomon which sounds to me like blindsight, where some prosopagnosics' brains are clearly reacting to faces on some level that doesn't reach their consciousness. She wants to learn more about that too.

What follows is discussion of the tests, my scores, and what they mean. I've been given a powerpoint with my scores reported as percentiles, along with absolute scores and average control scores. 2% or lower is counted as "impaired". Percentiles are only given as integers, or as "<1%". On the day, Katie also gave me some numbers in terms of standard deviations (σ). Under a normal distribution, 2.5% would be approximately -2σ, but I'm not sure any of these results will be normally distributed, so I don't know if σ scores really tell me anything.

A note: if you think you might be faceblind, and you'd be interested in getting more detailed tests, it might be a good idea not to read the below. I expect it wouldn't significantly bias the results if you did, except for one bit that I've rot13ed. But I don't trust myself to make that call. If you're in London, you can take the above test like me and see what happens. Otherwise I'm not sure how you'd go about getting more tests.

The object/face recognition tests were "memorise these things, then we show you a sequence of things and you have to say if each of these things was a thing in the first set". The things were houses, cars, horses, and bald women's faces. I was bad at all of these: 4% for cars, 2% for houses, and <1% for horses and women. (Average score was higher for women than horses, and my score was higher for horses than women, so I'm worse at women than horses. I think Katie told me I was somewhere between -5σ and -6σ for women. Under normality, -5σ is one in thirty million, but this is clearly not normal.) So it seems I have some level of general object agnosia, but more specific prosopagnosia on top of that.

I was 11% for reading emotions from eyes, which is a point for Team Phil Does Not Have Aspergers (some of my friends are divided about that). In fact, the average score is 26 and I scored 23, and there were a few cases where I said an answer, then thought "wait no it's this" and didn't say anything because I wasn't sure if I should. (I was speaking my answer and Katie was recording it. I had to choose from four emotions, so I'm not sure why this wasn't recorded by a computer like most of the other tests.) So plausibly I'm actually above 11%.

I was <1% at famous face recognition, recognising five out of fifty that I'd been exposed to, out of sixty in total. (I got Jvyy Fzvgu, Uneevfba Sbeq, Dhrra Ryvmnorgu, Ebova Jvyyvnzf, and surprisingly Ovyy Pyvagba.) It seems that controls tend to get above 40, so even counting that "exposed to" is vague, I did really badly at this. I think Katie said I was -9σ, which would be one in 10^19 under normality.

I'm <1% at the Cambridge Memory Test for Faces, which is the one I linked above. I actually scored worse in the lab than online. (47% versus 58%, IIRC, with a control average of 80%, and 60% indicating impairment. But the lab score I've been given is 34 against control of 58, so it's clearly been adjusted.) There could be any number of reasons for this, including "chance". But when I took it online, I often thought that one of the faces looked a little like Matt Damon, and chose that one. I like to think that "mistaking people for Matt Damon" is the way forward in face recognition.

I was somewhat okay at half of the Cambridge Face Perception Test. In this one, they showed me a face at an angle, and below it the same face face-on, six times, with varying degrees of modification. I had to order them according to how similar each was to the original face, within a minute. For half the tests, the faces were all upside down. For all of the tests, they all looked incredibly similar and my instinctive reaction was WTF.

On the upright test, I got <1%. On the inverted test, I got 7%. One strategy I used a few times was to focus on the lips, specifically on the size of the dip in the bow. I just ordered them according to that. I guess it helps, but I found it a lot easier for inverted faces.

Doing better at inverted would seem to suggest that I'm doing some kind of holistic face processing that goes wrong and blocks off later avenues for perception. Buuut, objectively I scored worse on the inverted faces, just not as much worse as average, so I'm not sure if this does suggest that. (And I'm not sure it is "objectively" - if all the faces had been assigned to the other condition, would my scores have changed?)

Hypothetically, high scores on both tests could indicate my problem is with memory, not initial perception. The low score here doesn't mean I don't have a problem with memory, but it does seem to hint that I do have a problem with initial perception. And I suspect the famous faces test points at me also having a memory problem.

Posted on 19 January 2016 | Comments

### A Scream of Swifties

Inspired by Slate Star Codex

Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog: it's one way to learn about frogs. If you want me to explain any of these, ask, and I will explain without making fun of you.

"I hear someone playing a triangle in the corridor," said Tom haltingly.

"We've got to overturn every last insect in this garden," said Tom flippantly.

"Goose feathers are annoyingly fragile," said Tom, breaking down.

"Anastasia gives me pins and needles," said Christian gratingly.

"I miss my submissive," René opined.

"I didn't do it, and nor did any of my siblings," Tom insisted.

"It's not much paint, it won't hurt to run your tongue up it," said Tom metallically.

"I'm so sick, even my flu has the flu," said Tom metallurgically.

"It's pitch black and I can hear a monster doing arithmetic," said Tom gruesomely.

"Man City don't hold a candle to the real heros of Manchester," said Tom manually.

"I just bought Manchester United," said Tom virtuously.

"Lancelot told me I was his favourite!" said Tom, surprised.

"I don't think this tube of semen is entirely straight," said the incumbent.

"I can fit inside my GameCube!" said Tom inconsolably.

"In a former life, I was a priest in pre-Columbian Peru," said Tom inconsolably.

"I need a name for my squid-and-flatfish restaurant," said Tom inconsolably.

"I make a living as the red tellytubby," said Tom, apropos.

"I'm doing crunches so I can get a six-pack," said Treebeard absently.

"I'm half-fish and made of lithium," said Treebeard limerently.

"Figure three plots counts of close-ups on male versus female genitals," said Tom pornographically.

"My breasts don't have enough room in this corset," said Victoria, double depressed.

"Bring me the head of my enemy," said Emacs vicariously.

"I have affirming the consequent, base rate neglect, and now also ad hominem," said Tom, getting cocky.

"We lost the treaty, so we had to ratify it again," said Tom, resigned.

"I'm in the group supporting Shiva's wife," said Tom with satisfaction.

Posted on 01 January 2016 | Comments

### Unix pro tip: Print and pipe

Sometimes you (or at least, I) want to run a command for its output, but also want to pipe it through another command. For example, see the results of a find but also count how many hits it got. I've sometimes lamented that there's no easy way to do this. But the other day I had a flash of insight and figured out how:

find . | tee /dev/stderr | wc -l
proc1 | tee /dev/stderr | proc2    # general case


(I'm pretty proud of this. I don't know if it's original to me, but I discovered it independently even if not.)

tee will print the output of proc1 to both stdout and stderr. stderr goes to the terminal and stdout goes to proc2.

You can make it more convenient with an alias:

alias terr='tee /dev/stderr | '
find . | terr wc -l


(Putting a pipe in an alias seems to work in both zsh and bash.)

If you want to concatenate the streams, to pipe them to another process, you can use subshells:

proc1 | ( terr proc2 ) 2>&1 | proc3


but note that stderr output from proc2 will also get sent to proc3, unless you send it somewhere else. I haven't yet thought of a use for this.

There are potential issues with buffering here. I'm not aware that tee makes any promises1 about which order it writes the streams in. It's going to be interlacing them while it writes, so that it doesn't need to keep a whole copy in memory. So (if the input is large enough) proc2 will be receiving input before it's finished being written to stderr, and might start writing output, and then the output streams can get interlaced.

For some values of proc2, commands which start printing before they've finished reading, this is inevitable. But I think useful proc2s are likely to be aggregators2 - by which I mean, commands which can't do anything until they've finished reading all their input3. In my tests so far, those have been safe, but that doesn't prove much.

We can do a more reliable check with strace:

find . | strace tee /dev/stderr | wc -l


By the looks of things, tee will read into a buffer, then write it to stdout (the pipe), then write it to the specified target (stderr, which goes to the terminal), and repeat to exhaustion. But the important thing is, it doesn't close any file descriptors until it's finished writing everything, and then it closes the target before it closes stdout. If this is consistent amongst tee implementations - and it seems sensible4 - then aggregators almost definitely won't interlace their output with the output from proc1. I don't want to say "definitely", because there might be other stuff going on that I haven't accounted for. But at any rate, tee will finish writing before the aggregator starts.

Anyway, I see this as being the sort of thing that you're likely use manually, not in an automated process. So if the output does get interlaced a little, it's probably not that big a deal.

1. Note how I didn't say guaranTEEs? You're welcome.

2. In fact, wc is the only proc2 I can currently think of, that I expect to be regularly useful. (And then just piping through cat -n does something similar, but it's not ideal.) numsum or perhaps some other tools from num-utils could conceivably be handy from time to time.

3. You can turn a non-aggregator into an aggregator with moreutils' sponge command, which is like cat but reads all its input before writing anything.

4. They could reasonably close their outputs in either order, which might make a difference. But I don't think it's usual for programs to explicitly close their std* streams, that gets taken care of by the surrounding infrastructure. So if tee explicitly closes its target, I'd expect that to happen before stdout gets closed.

Posted on 07 October 2015 | Comments

### London Cycle Hires and Weather

Preface: I wrote this report for Udacity's "Explore and Summarize Data" module. The structure is kind of strange for a blog post, but I'm submitting the finished report essentially unchanged.

One thing I will note. I find that the cycle hire usage doesn't change much throughout the year. Shortly after submitting, I read this article which finds that it does vary quite a lot. I'm inclined to trust that result more. It's intuitively sensible, and it looks directly at the number of rides taken, instead of looking at a proxy like I do.

Take this as evidence for how much to trust my other results.

My goal is to investigate usage of the London cycle hire scheme, and in particular how it varies with the weather. I'm running an analysis from July 2013 to June 2014.

I'm using two data sets here. Daily weather data comes from Weather Underground, using the weather station at London Heathrow airport.

(London City Airport is closer to the bike stations that I use, but the data from that airport reports 0 precipitation on every single day. The data from Heathrow seems to be more complete, and I expect it to be almost as relevant.)

I collected the cycle hire data myself, over the course of the year, by downloading CSV files from an unofficial API which now appears to be defunct. It has a granularity of about ten minutes. That's about 50,000 entries per docking station for the year, so for this analysis, I'm only using the data from four docking stations near my office.

All data and source code used for this project can be found in the git repository.

## Exploring the weather data

#### Temperature

These variables measure the minimum, average, and maximum daily temperatures. The graphs all look similar, and overlap a lot. The shape is a little surprising, as I didn't expect the density graphs to be bimodal. It could potentially be caused by significant differences between summer and winter, with an abrupt shift between the two.

#### Rainfall

According to the rain column, There are over 225 rainy days and only about 125 non-rainy days. But by far the most common bin for precip.mm is the leftmost one. Table of values of precip.mm:

##
##     0  0.25  0.51  0.76  1.02  2.03  3.05  4.06  5.08   6.1  7.11  7.87
##   207    35    20     9    17    22    12     8    12     4     4     2
##  8.89  9.91 10.92 11.94 13.97
##     3     5     2     1     2


Although more than half of observations have rain == TRUE, more than half of them also have precip.mm == 0, which needs more investigation. Rainfall as measured by precip.mm versus as measured by rain:

The two measures don't always agree. Sometimes rain is false but precip.mm is nonzero; and often rain is true but precip.mm is zero. Neither of those is surprising individually: if rain is only counted when the rainfall exceeds a certain threshold, then that threshold could be large (giving false/nonzero) or small (giving true/zero). But the combination suggests that that isn't what's going on, and I don't know what is.

This table counts the anomalies by turning precip.mm into a boolean zero/nonzero (false/true) and comparing it to rain:

##
##         FALSE TRUE
##   FALSE   119    9
##   TRUE     88  149


There are 88 instances of true/zero, 9 instances of false/nonzero, but the cases where they agree are the most common.

I find precip.mm to me more plausible here. I feel like fewer than half of days are rainy. This website agrees with me, saying that on average, 164 days out of the year are rainy (rain - 237, precip.mm - 158).

#### Wind

These three measures of wind speed are all averages. wind is simply the average wind speed over a day. wind.max is the daily maximum of the average wind speed over a short time period (I think one minute). gust is the same thing, but with a shorter time period (I think 14 seconds).

Unlike with temperature, the three measures look different. All are right-skewed, although gust looks less so. There are several outliers (the isolated points on the box plots), and the quartiles don't overlap. The minimum gust speed (about 24) is almost as high as the median wind.max.

## Exploring the bike data

#### Time between updates

There are a few outliers here. Not all the lines are visible due to rendering artifacts, but above 5000, we only have five entries:

##                     name        prev.updated             updated
## 46779    Earnshaw Street 2013-10-03 08:50:23 2013-10-13 09:20:28
## 46899  Southampton Place 2013-10-03 08:50:22 2013-10-13 09:20:27
## 46918       High Holborn 2013-10-03 08:50:24 2013-10-13 09:20:30
## 47049         Bury Place 2013-10-03 08:50:26 2013-10-13 09:20:32
## 175705 Southampton Place 2014-06-20 17:36:06 2014-06-30 08:30:03


The first four of these happened when my collection script broke and I failed to realize it. The other occurred when Southampton Place was taken out of service temporarily.

Let's zoom in on the lower ones:

There are several instances where the time between updates is unusually large, on the order of hours or days. The times of entries with between 2000 and 5000 minutes between updates:

##                     name        prev.updated             updated
## 32650       High Holborn 2013-08-31 15:10:07 2013-09-02 12:30:05
## 32660         Bury Place 2013-08-31 15:10:08 2013-09-02 12:30:07
## 32672  Southampton Place 2013-08-31 15:10:05 2013-09-02 12:30:04
## 32674    Earnshaw Street 2013-08-31 15:10:06 2013-09-02 12:30:05
## 38546       High Holborn 2013-09-14 22:39:00 2013-09-16 08:24:22
## 38719         Bury Place 2013-09-14 22:39:02 2013-09-16 08:24:23
## 38734  Southampton Place 2013-09-14 22:38:58 2013-09-16 08:24:20
## 38735    Earnshaw Street 2013-09-14 22:38:59 2013-09-16 08:24:21
## 84066         Bury Place 2013-12-27 15:40:08 2013-12-29 23:10:14
## 84069       High Holborn 2013-12-27 15:40:06 2013-12-29 23:10:13
## 84073  Southampton Place 2013-12-27 15:40:05 2013-12-29 23:10:11
## 84078    Earnshaw Street 2013-12-27 15:40:05 2013-12-29 23:10:12
## 84186    Earnshaw Street 2013-12-30 00:10:05 2013-12-31 13:10:07
## 84202       High Holborn 2013-12-30 00:10:06 2013-12-31 13:10:09
## 84269  Southampton Place 2013-12-30 00:10:05 2013-12-31 13:10:06
## 84330         Bury Place 2013-12-30 00:10:07 2013-12-31 13:10:11
## 89443  Southampton Place 2014-01-12 20:20:10 2014-01-14 18:40:07
## 89459       High Holborn 2014-01-12 20:20:13 2014-01-14 18:40:11
## 89467         Bury Place 2014-01-12 20:20:14 2014-01-14 18:40:16
## 89524    Earnshaw Street 2014-01-12 20:20:11 2014-01-14 18:40:09
## 121381   Earnshaw Street 2014-03-15 14:50:06 2014-03-17 01:50:04
## 121398      High Holborn 2014-03-15 14:50:07 2014-03-17 01:50:05
## 121444        Bury Place 2014-03-15 14:50:10 2014-03-17 01:50:07
## 121591 Southampton Place 2014-03-15 14:50:05 2014-03-17 01:50:04
## 133765      High Holborn 2014-04-11 16:59:37 2014-04-14 01:29:07
## 133900   Earnshaw Street 2014-04-11 16:59:36 2014-04-14 01:29:05
## 133961        Bury Place 2014-04-11 16:59:38 2014-04-14 01:29:08
## 134027 Southampton Place 2014-04-11 16:59:35 2014-04-14 01:29:05


It looks like these happened to all stations simultaneously, suggesting problems with either my collection script or the API, rather than problems with individual locations.

Entries with less than 60 minutes between updates, no longer on a log scale:

In the vast majority of cases, updates are approximately ten minutes apart. This encourages me to take a subset of the data (bikes.all -> bikes), considering only entries with d.updated` less than 15 minutes. This eliminates many outliers in future graphs.

#### Date and time of update

All times of day are approximately equally represented to within ten minutes, which is good. There are five noticeable troughs preceeded by spikes, but they probably don't signify much. Dates are a lot less uniform, however. Even apart from the ten-day period where my script was broken, many days have significantly fewer updates than typical, and some have none at all.