Mark P Neyer.com

Two years ago I treated myself to a new guitar. This guitar, the RG-4-EX-1, has what’s called a ‘floating bridge’. It allows you to go nuts with the whammy bar, while still keeping the guitar in tune. That’s good. The downside of a floating bridge is that the guitar becomes much, much harder to tune.  I tuned it for just the second time this morning, and this time things went much more smoothly than they did the last time. I thought I’d share some tips for tuning such a guitar, because when I did a Google search I didn’t find a decent article explaining how to do it.

A floating bridge is different from a normal bridge because it is not connected solidly to the body of the guitar - it ‘floats’ on a hinge. On the back of the guitar there are springs connected to the bridge; the tension between these springs in the back and the strings of the guitar balance out, holding the bridge roughly in place.  Because the bridge floats, increasing the tension on one string pulls the entire bridge closer to the neck of the guitar, decreasing the tension in all of the other strings. This means you can’t tune the guitar one string at a time - if you try that, the first string you tune will fall out of tune by the time you get to the last string.

How do you tune the guitar? First, use an appropriately sized Allen wrench to remove the screws holding the locking plates in place at the top of the neck. My guitar is Japanese, so I had to use a metric set of Allen wrenches. I found that out the hard way.  Once you have the locking plates off, loosen the fine-tuning screws almost all the way. Normally the guitar falls down out of tune as the strings stretch out over time, so you want to give yourself plenty of space to increase the tension on the strings.  If you’re replacing the strings, you want to replace them one at a time; taking them all out of the guitar at once will release all of the tension on the springs in the back, and make your life that much more difficult.

You’re going to need a decent tuner.  I used my new Macbook to tune the guitar, with a handy little program called (oddly enough) Guitar Tuner.  The nice thing about the problem is that it shows you how far away your current string is from the note you want it to be - that’s important.

First, get the guitar roughly in tune - i.e. get all of the strings within a few semitones of their proper tuning. When you’re doing this, you want to alternate which string you tune. Don’t just go e-B-G-D-A-E; alternate from the bottom to the top of the neck: E-e-A-B-D-G.

Once you have the guitar roughly in tune, you’re going to follow this iterative process over and over until your guitar is in tune: Strum each of the strings one at a time, and note how out of tune it is.  Choose the string that is the most out of tune, and bring it closer to the right tune - not all the way, just a little bit; at most one semitone. Repeat.

The last part is key; don’t tune each string all the way, or you’ll change the tuning on the other strings too much. By tuning each string just a little at a time, you give the other strings time to adjust to the change you’ve made. Hopefully you found this information useful.

7 years ago today, a group of Islamic hijackers killed 2,999 Americans.  Many questions arise, and I plan to explore one today: “Why do people do bad things?”  I will present two different analytical models which are commonly used to answer this question, and explain how they apply to the 9/11 attacks.

First off, I will note that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are purely subjective terms.  Every person has his own perspective of what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mean.  Every logical person, however, can use analytical models to determine what do to in response to people doing things they personally find bad.  It is my belief that most people reading this blog share similar ideas of what kinds of actions are ‘bad’ - killing people, for example, is generally viewed as a bad thing.

The first model I shall present is the simplest model. I call this the ‘atomic model of bad things.’ It works as follows:

Atomic Model of Bad Things

• Some people are inherently good, and some people are inherently bad
• Good people tend to do good things, and bad people tend to do bad things.

That’s it. Very simple.  What does this model imply? If the atomic model is accurate, it means that in order to stop bad things from happening, we have to prevent bad people from doing them by incapacitating them somehow.

The most effective way to incapacitate someone is to kill them. Therefore, the most effective strategy to be pursued, if the atomic model is accurate, is to identify bad people and kill them.  Does this present a problem? Only if you think killing bad people is a bad thing.  If killing bad people is a bad thing, then you still have other options for incapacitating bad people. You could put them in jail, indefinitely.  That would prevent them from doing most bad things.  What if you think putting people in jail indefinitely is a bad thing to do? I’m not really certain.  Ultimately, if you want to stop bad people from doing bad things, the atomic model says you have to do something to prevent bad people from acting as they are inclined to do.

An objection arises:  what if the bad people think we are bad? This is very likely to happen, but it doesn’t change the most effective strategy for responding to bad events. It simply implies that the people we’re trying to kill also have it in their most logical interest to try to kill us.

This atomic model is quite violent; it advocates a lot of killing. Is there another way from this endless cycle of violence and death?

Yes. I call it the ‘relativistic model.’ It is more complex than the atomic model.

Relativistic Model of Bad Thigns

• People are a product of their environments; no person is inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’
• Someone who does bad things does so as a result of some external stimulus, usually a bad thing that has happened to them

What does this model imply? If we wish to stop people from doing bad things, we have to prevent bad things from happening to people. Note that the optimal strategy under the relativistic model is the exact opposite of the optimal strategy under the atomic model: if the relativistic mode is accurate, than anyone following the atomic model is making the situation in the world worse; they are causing more bad things to happen, and therefore they are influencing more people to do bad things.

Which model do I prefer? Both. I think they both have their applications; which model is more accurate simply depends upon the circumstances.

Example

I once saw a news program about an illegal immigrant on trial for murder.  The immigrant had been apprehend for speeding previously, and was released back into the general population. One host of the show,  (We will call him the atomist for reasons that shall become clear) was outraged, and said that this immigrant should have been deported upon being arrested for speeding. He was arguing in favor of legislation that would deport all illegal immigrants charged with any crime.  The other host of the show, the relativist, was arguing against the legislation.

Let’s look at the situation from both mens’ perspectives.  To the atomist, breaking the law and coming into this country illegally is something that only a bad person would do. By entering the country illegally, the immigrant has shown himself to be a bad person. Upon his being apprehended for speeding, he should have been deported in order to prevent him from doing something bad. The fact that he committed murder was practically to be expected - he is a bad person, after all. Therefore, the fact that he wasn’t sent back across the border represents a glaring problem with our legal system.

To the relativist, anyone in the situation of the immigrant would probably have tried to cross the border illegally. Who doesn’t want to give themselves a better life by migrating to the land of opportunity? How were the police to know he would commit murder after being apprehended for speeding? Any law that would treat all illegal immigrants as potential murderers is draconian, and because it does bad things to many people, would probably create more problems than it would solve.

In this case, I agree with the relativist. I don’t think that breaking into the country illegally makes someone a bad person,  because many people break into the country illegally, and not all of them are murderers.

Back to 9 / 11

The relativistic model for 9/11 is that we were attacked because of our expansive foreign policy, and because we favor Israel over Palestine. If we would change our attitude towards the middle east, be more even-handed in our dealings with Israel and Palestine, and stop interfering with foreign governments, the relativists argue, we would prevent future attacks.  The atomic model says there is a jihad by some of the Islamic people in the world against the west, and that the only way to prevent future attacks is to find and kill jihadists wherever they are.

Note that, once again, the atomic and relativistic models are completely at odds with each other. If we base our strategy on the atomic model, then the relativistic model predicts that we’ll simply inflame tensions in the middle east, creating more terrorists and making our problems worse. If we follow the relativistic model, the atomic model says nothing good will be trying to ‘make nice’ with the very people who are out to kill us, and that our weakness will only embolden them.

Which model is accurate? They are both accurate. Which model’s strategies make the most sense to follow? They both do.  We should stop supporting middle eastern governments that oppress their people, but at the same time we should take take military action against states that support terrorism.  Unfortunately, most people in America subscribe to only one of the models, while completely rejecting the other.    Conservatives in America tend to be atomists, while liberals in America, and pretty much the rest of the world tend to be relativists.  Here’s hoping more people will see the light in the other model, and start advocating a mixed policy, one that is gracious and kind to the majority of people in the world, but merciless towards those who harbor ill will in their hearts.

Imagine you go to a carnival for fun. You buy a fried Twinkie, see the world’s largest living pig, and perhaps ride the whirl-and-puke. You then head over to the midway with the intent of playing some silly games for entertainment. This carnival, however, is different - along with usual staples like the ‘milk bottle ring toss’ and themed shooting galleries, there’s a coin flipping game. You are given a penny, and you get to flip this penny 1000 times. The number of heads you get is recorded, and whoever gets the most heads is awarded a monetary prize. There is no monetary cost to play the game, but you do have to sit there and flip the coin 1000 times. A question arises: How large would the prize have to be in order to convince you to play the game?

Let’s say you can flip the coin once every second. That’s a pretty generous estimate, but I’m a generous guy so we’ll go with it. At that rate, it takes around 17 minutes of sitting there flipping a coin to play the game. Flipping a coin for 17 minutes would get pretty boring. Is it worth it, though, for a shot at, say, $10,000? The odds of you winning are 1 divided by the number of people who play the game. This is where it’s important to mention that the fair is really, really big - let’s say around 200 million people big. Suppose only half of those people decide to play the game. Your expected value, then, for this game is $10,000 / 100,000,000 which is $0.00001. Even if the prize were an astronomical $100,000,000, you’d still only expect to earn one dollar, for 17 minutes of boredom flipping that coin. A rational person would conclude that it makes no sense to play the game. The thing is, most people are irrational and a large number will still play the game even after you explain the math to them. If you doubt me, look at the number of people who buy lottery tickets. My game has a positive expected value - lottery tickets have a negative expected value and people still buy them. Unless you really enjoy flipping coins, it just doesn’t make sense to play the coin flipping game.

What does this have to do with voting? We can easily look at voting systems as large, multi-player games. The payout if you win (your vote chooses the guy who gets elected) is very high. However, the probability that your vote will be the deciding vote is vanishingly small. There is no monetary cost to voting, but it does take time. Going to the polling place and voting takes probably 15 minutes, and you could spend hours each week educating yourself on the issues. Unless you really enjoy doing these things, it just doesn’t make any sense to spend your time attempting to influence an event, when the probability of your actually having an effect is so small that it might as well be zero.

A common rebuttal to this argument is ‘what if everybody thought this way?’ If everybody was rational and decided voting didn’t make sense, it would suddenly become rational to vote, because one vote would decide the election. The same logic works for the coin flipping game, however - if everybody realized how stupid it was to play the game, nobody would play it, and then any one guy who decided to play would win. The fact that a decision makes sense in an alternate reality where everybody behaves perfectly rationally doesn’t in any way mean it makes sense in our reality. The ‘what if everybody thought this way argument’ is like arguing ‘well, if we lived on the moon it would make sense to play basketball with 30 foot high hoops. ‘ Yes, but we don’t live on the moon, so it doesn’t make any sense.

Do you owe it to society to educate yourself and vote? Even people who are very educated about world affairs disagree with each other on the best course of action. The Pew Center for People and the Press does a typology survey every few years, breaking the electorate down into different groups based upon common values and shared attributes. In the 2004 survey, the two groups that followed world affairs most closely were the Enterprisers, who were Bush’s staunchest supporters, followed by the Liberals, who aligned themselves with Kerry. More education most likely isn’t going to change your mind - it’s just going to give you more reasons to believe that you’re right and that your political opponents are idiots.

What about convincing other people to vote? By taking a stand and convincing others around you to vote your way, surely you’re making a difference, right? Unfortunately, the answer is still ‘no’ unless you’re very persuasive. A statewide election decided by 10,000 votes is still considered very close. Unless you can convince 10,000 of your friends to change your mind and vote your way, you really aren’t making a difference.

What does all of this mean? It means that our political decisions are made by people who are irrational - they don’t understand the math governing the logic of making decisions in massively multi-player games. This means that pure democracies, where everything is decided by a majority vote, are probably the worst form of democratic government possible. How can we do better? The electoral college is a start, because it increases the probability that you will be able to influence an election. Increased federalism is another huge step in the right direction - instead of choosing a president who is essentially a king in a giant winner-take-all election, choosing a president who has a limited set of powers prescribed by a constitution interpreted strictly literally lessens the blow of having a bunch of irrational people make decisions.

A final improvement could be gleaned from implementing a recursive system of representatives. Suppose every 1000 people chose a single representative among them. Each 1000 of those representatives would choose a meta-representative, who represents 1,000,000 people. We could have each 100 of those meta-representatives choose a single meta-meta-representative, and so on. Due to the exponential nature of the math in this system, the government would only need 3 or 4 layers. Each of the different layers would be charged with different levels of power, with most of the power at the bottom levels of the system, where it makes the most sense for individual voters to participate. When only 1000 people are voting, your vote matters much more and suddenly it becomes much more rational to vote and to try to convince others to vote your way. Will this ever happen? Probably not. Still, a guy can dream, can’t he?

I believe in myself.  I believe that the mind has incredible power over the body, and that eating breakfast every day is good for you.  I believe in small miracles. I believe in the power of free markets to improve the human condition. I believe that human history is a story of progress, and that the future will be better than the past. I believe that family is the single most important thing there is on this planet. I believe in a thing called love, but I don’t really know what it is or how it works. I believe that peace will  come to the world, albeit gradually.  I believe low pocket pairs are rarely worth the trouble they can cause you.  I believe that strawberry jelly is superior to grape jelly, especially vis a vis peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I believe a first kiss should be as romantic as possible. I believe in following big dreams, no matter how likely you are to obtain them.  I believe in opening the door for others. I believe that not all cultures are ‘equal’ in any real sense, and that the values a culture holds effect that culture’s economies and social freedoms.  I believe in taking responsibility for my actions, and ensuring that others do the same. I believe a man should take his fate into his own hands, whether or not he has the ability to do so. I believe that life is 10% what you’ve been given, and 90% what you make of what you’ve been given.  I believe in preventative maintenance.  I do believe Jones Soda to be absolutely delicious.  I believe in making small differences, especially when they don’t seem to matter at all.  I believe that, somehow, we are all one. I believe that sometimes, the only solution to a problem is violence. I believe that game theory is one of the most underutilized mathematical constructs. I believe that P will eventually be found to encompass all of NP, but that NP-Complete problems will still be effectively intractable. I believe python to be an amazingly useful language. I believe that computer programs are beautiful in of themselves, regardless of what they do.  I believe that the scientific method has been phenomenally successful  in helping us divine the nature of our world. I believe organized religions like modern Christianity have spread good works all over the world. I believe Islam is fundamentally incompatible with a Free, Democratic society. I believe in challenging common wisdom: Can you really boil a frog to death by gradually increasing the heat? I sincerely doubt it. I believe that saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ make a small difference in someone’s day. I believe that small differences can make a big difference. I believe that voting is irrational. I believe it’s OK to be irrational every now and them.  I believe the world was created by a phenomenally intelligent entity, as an act of supreme love.  And in the end, I believe that everything will work itself out.

I can’t be the only one who’s noticed this.

If something in your car breaks, most likely the car will still work, albeit with reduced functionality. If you randomly flip a bit in a computer program, however, the odds that the thing will run at all are next to zero. I tried this as a kid and realized quite quickly I couldn’t use notepad to edit executable files. My little mind simply concluded that computer programs are inherently fragile and subject to breaking. It amazed me, then that our home computer could run for years without suffering any real problems. How is this possible?

There are maybe 1000 parts of a car that absolutely have to function in order for the car to still be drivable. Computer programs have far more ‘parts’ than cars do - a simple 10 mb executable file contains roughly 1o million ‘parts’, all of which have to work properly in order for the executable to function correctly. If one of those parts breaks, the entire program stops working. Shouldn’t that mean that a computer program is far more likely to break than a car?

The reason computer programs are so robust is that the probability that a random bit will get flipped is basically zero. Error-Checking codes are put in place to ensure that, whether in transmission or storage, the probability of an error occurring is vanishingly small. In practice, therefore, the far more ‘fragile’ computer programs are more likely to keep on running than the far simpler, ’stronger’ cars. There are many 40 year old computer programs that still run today, because it’s cheaper to emulate the old hardware than it is to redevelop the software. How many 40 year old cars are still running on a day-to-day basis? It’s really quite amazing when you think about it.

An isomorphism is a mapping between two sets of objects which preserves functional relationships between those objects. An example from Wikipedia is two different types of decks of cards. One deck contains the traditional suits: Hearts, Diamonds, Clubs and Spades. The other deck contains Stars, Squares, Circles, and Triangles. Clearly, the two decks are not exactly the same, but they ‘work the same way’ - games played on one deck will work just the same as games played on another deck. (Mathematicians love isomorphisms, but that is a subject for another blog post.)

Let’s consider two seemingly unrelated phenomena - Terrorism and Global Warming. Conservatives believe that terrorism is the biggest threat facing humanity today. If we do not take drastic action, they warn, we face dire consequences involving millions of deaths. Conservatives either don’t believe that global warming is happening, or that it is happening but it has been drastically overblown as a threat. In any case, they argue, the proposed fixes for global warming such as the Kyoto treaty would do far more to hurt the country than to help it.

Liberals believe that global warming is the biggest threat facing humanity today. If we do not take drastic action, they warn, we face dire consequences involving millions of deaths. They tend to believe that terrorism is overblown as a threat, and that measures taken to prevent terrorism, such as the USA PATRIOT act, are far more of a threat to the country than terrorism itself.

A perfect isomorphism, if ever there were one. What’s interesting about this one is that it sheds light on inherent differences between conservatives and liberals. The liberal ‘bogeyman’ of global warming is propped up by the liberal god of science. Anyone who claims to fully understand global warming had better have graduate level studies in physics and climatology. If they don’t, they’re simply trusting in what they are told ‘the scientists’ have come to conclude. (Never mind that prominent scientists disagree with the mainstream conclusion about global warming.) To question the idea that global warming is the biggest danger humankind faces is heresy.

To liberals, the ‘bad guys’ in the global warming story are the developed nations, specifically the Big Corporations ^® like ExxonMobil who are producing all of the pollution, and the conservative politicians who enable them to get away with it. The case of global warming illustrates the common tendency of liberals to blame two groups for practically all problems in the world: conservatives and capitalists.

The conservative bogeyman of terrorism is based largely upon recently historical events and a strong imagination. It’s harder for me to write about this side of the issue because, although I think it’s very inflated, I do think terrorism, unlike global warming, is a serious threat facing the civilized world. Still, the attitudes of conservatives towards terrorism are very enlightening in terms of the differences between liberals and conservatives. To liberals, it is quite clear why the terrorists are after us - it’s because we’ve done something bad to them with our foreign policy, and they’re angry at us because of it. Once we fix our problems, the thinking goes, they’ll leave us alone.
Conservatives see the issue as a simpler case of good verses evil. They’re after us because they’re primitive savages, and that’s what primitive savages do. The conservative way of looking at things is almost ludicrously simple. Personally, I think it’s the most accurate - if you think you can reason with someone who wants to cut your head off, you’re probably making a mistake. Conservatives don’t blame liberals for terrorism, but they do think of liberals as aiding and abetting the terrorists. This attitude is almost certainly an offshoot of the simplistic “us verses them” attitude that so many conservatives take. Of course, it has the effective of making liberals angry and unlikely to consider further argument, reinforcing the beliefs of the conservatives.

The great problem in all of this is that very few people have a truly open mind. Global Warming threats are so absurdly exaggerated that conservatives tend to ignore perfectly reasonable proposals that would greatly improve the environment. Conservatives are so quick to question someone’s patriotism that they prevent anyone who disagrees with them from seriously considering their arguments. As a result, most, if not all of the people I’ve met are solidly convinced that one is a real threat and the other is a bogey man.

I don’t think we should be dumping garbage into the air and water that sustain us, but I think most of the measures that have been proposed, such as the Kyoto treaty, are ham-handed and would cause far more damage than they would prevent. I think that terrorism is a problem facing the western world, but that we can deal with the problem without passing bloated pieces of legislation of questionable constitutionality and utility. Unfortunately, I feel like I’m one of very few people who think this way.

I wrote my last post about a phenomenon I dubbed ‘Meta-Ignorance’ - being unaware of exactly how much you don’t know. I called it a serious problem and suggested that everyone become aware of just how ignorant they are.  I  think now that should be a warning - challenging your meta-ignorance can be a really depressing process.  I spent the last semester of graduate school paralyzed by the realization of everything that I didn’t know.  New topics that I learned became gaping black holes of unknown facts, into which endless hours of study  could be poured without any hope of obtaining mastery.  I recalled a saying from one of my undergrad professors: “As my island of knowledge grows, so does my perimeter of ignorance. ”

Confidence is a tricky thing. If you have too much of it, you run the risk of making foolish mistakes. If you don’t have enough, you’ll never accomplish anything.  It’s tough to remain confident in the face of overwhelming ignorance, but I’m working on it. Personal growth for the win.

We live in a culture that hates ignorance. We are told to educate ourselves about Darfur, Global Warming, Fossil Fuels, Stem Cells, and every other issue of the day. This is absolutely terrible advice, and probably causes far more harm than good.

The volume of knowledge produced by western civilization in the past hundred years alone is simply astonishing. No person could possibly be expected to be aware of it all, much less understand or comprehend it. Even in a single field, like mathematics, it’s impossible for one person to understand everything. Take an expert topologist and a smart undergrad, and put them both through a class on number theory. It’s a tossup on who’ll do better. Hell, I’d probably bet on the undergrad, because there’s a chance she’s actually interested in number theory. Is the topologist ignorant of number theory? Yes. Is this a bad thing? I certainly don’t think so. No reasonable mathematician would look down upon the topologist for not knowing much about an area in which she isn’t trained. She would certainly be criticized, however, if she presented herself as understanding number theory even though she didn’t. Among mathematicians, Ignorance is fine, as long as you’re aware that you’re ignorant and don’t try to disguise the fact.

Unfortunately, our culture doesn’t adhere to the same standard as mathematicians; Ignorance is roundly criticized as a ‘bad’ thing, to be ‘fought’ with ‘knowledge.’ Global Warming is a perfect example. Ask anyone whether the earth is getting warmer, and they’ve probably got an answer for you. Do they understand what they’re really saying? Not a chance in hell, unless they’ve done serious study in thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and climatology. That certainly doesn’t stop people from forming opinions about subjects that they fundamentally don’t understand. It doesn’t really matter if people spout nonsense about number theory (although it might bother the number theorists.) But when people start forming opinions and voting based upon science that they fundamentally don’t understand, bad things happen. If global warming is really a problem, all the people who are convinced that it isn’t are standing in the way of fixing it. If global warming isn’t a problem, all the people who claim that it is are poised to inflict serious damage to the economy.

I’m not saying that Global Warming isn’t happening - I’m saying I’m not qualified to answer that question, and neither is 99.9% of the population. Unfortunately, it seems like many people who aren’t qualified to answer the question have decided to so. Take a stand for ignorance - accept that you understand very little of the world outside your area of expertise, and be proud of this! I’d much rather live in a culture of ignorant people who are aware of their ignorance than a culture of ignorant people who consider themselves to be educated.

“In a world of perfect karma, Ahmadinejad would be captured by American “students” and held hostage for over a year, paraded before TV cameras and threatened almost daily with death.”

Taken from here.  I couldn’t stop laughing when I read it.