But J.K. Rowling DOES Have a Price ...

She wouldn't allow someone to pay her to have their child's name in her Harry Potter series, according to the Financial Times.

I would argue that she does have a price, but none of us has enough money. But imagine if Bill Gates wanted the above transaction and offered Rowling a cool $1 billion. Even if more money has no marginal value for her personally given her vast wealth, a billion dollars could do an immense amount of good for the charities of her choice. It would be impossible to deny the world so much good for something so trivial.

But she, like anyone else, probably wouldn't be able to tell you her price ahead of time, until the money is actually on the table.

Distinctions

I came across two things today that have challenged my mental shortcuts and made me think about what people are really saying.

At work, a vice president gave a presentation about listening to other people's perspectives. He gave the example of someone arguing that a given model won't work. This could mean that they don't think our systems can handle the amount of data, bandwidth, and storage required to the run model. Or it could mean that while the model would be technically feasible, it would be statistically invalid or misleading. Or it could mean something else entirely. Finding out what this person is really saying will help you convince them of your point of view, or convince yourself of theirs.

Just now, the heralded literature that is "South Park and Philosophy" pointed out to me that there's two ways to interpret the phrase "child abduction is not funny." One could be that it "fails as humor," in the same way that Cartman believes Family Guy's endless cutaways do. Another is that it's morally apprehensible to laugh at the subject.

Prediction Markets in the World Ending

I loved this quote from the Post story about the nuts who think the world is ending May 21. (Wasn't it supposed to be 2012?)

Another man was so perturbed by the May 21 message that he brought over a woman he found on the street who needed money. He asked whether the Camping followers would give her some cash, because there was no need for them to keep money with the world ending. They did not.

If you want me to take your doomsday prediction seriously, you should be willing to put money behind it.

I'm reminded of GMU professor Alex Tabbarok's paper about Pascal's wager, which boils down to there being a small-but-nonzero chance that your getting into heaven depends on giving all of your money to Tabbarok, which, he argues, you should do just in case.

The Economics of "Snakes on a Plane"

I really hope someone Googles that some day and I'm the first hit. Take that, Demand Media!

I just read 50 or so painstaking pages of Bryan Caplan's new book Selfish Reason to Have More Kids, where he goes over seemingly every twins-separated-at-birth study ever conducted and argues rather exhaustively yet convincingly that nature matters a lot more than nurture in terms of how a child develops.

I am five minutes into watching "Snakes on a Plane." In this scene, the dude in the picture above has just said the following to another guy who's tied up in front of him:

I'll make sure to tell your son
all about it.
The reason he gets to grow up without a father
is because of how goddamn noble he was.
Then again, I was raised by a single mom and... (he takes a swing at the guy with a baseball bat, spewing blood everywhere)
I didn't turn out so bad, huh? Whoo!

And my first reaction was: "That probably had a small or zero statistical effect on your upbringing! It's all genetic!"

Yes, the master's degree in econ was totally worth it.

Where Are Today's Aladdins and Lion Kings?

Movies in the Disney vault are only available for sale on DVD at limited times. For instance, if you want a copy of Lion King or Aladdin, you'll have to buy a second-hand copy or one at a huge premium (list price of $50 on Amazon).

No new films have entered the vault since Lion King, in 1994. Why? Some theories:

1) Today's movies are just as good. The Princess and the Frog and Mulan are just as awesome as Cinderella or Beauty and the Beast, but today's entertainment market is so saturated that these movies don't have the network effects of movies in decades past and thus aren't considered classics.

2) Today's movies are worse. You could blame this again on market saturation: Disney nows that a Lion King-esque movie released today wouldn't make much money, so they don't bother creating it. Or maybe there's a greater emphasis now on animation instead of music and overall quality.

3) All the good new Disney movies are Pixar projects (Toy Story, Up), and thus perhaps aren't subject to the vault? The existence of these movies probably refutes my second theory.

4) My view is skewed by being someone of my generation, who will always hold a higher opinion of movies I was exposed when I was young (I notice that I also tend to deify Padres players of my childhood, who by any objective standard were average or worse). Maybe Disney's decision-makers fall victim to the same fallacy, and The Princess and the Frog will become vault material once today's children rise up in the ranks.

Is the NFL the New NASCAR?

USA Today ran a front-page story today about how NASCAR's ratings and popularity have plummeted since Dale Earnhardt's death 10 years ago. No drivers have died since, and the article speculates that NASCAR has overemphasized its safety improvements, to the point that fans feel that the sport has lost its exciting edge.

I see some parallels with the NFL's recent crackdown on helmet-to-helmet hits this year. This is not to mention the longer-term increase of protections on receivers and quarterbacks via strict roughing the passer and pass interference penalties. All the while, the defense becomes increasingly marginalized.

It's sort of uncomfortable to speculate on where we stand on the trade-off between death and entertainment. The NFL has had an easier time favoring the latter, because, as Robin Hanson points out, the adverse health effects are often delayed beyond the player's retirement and thus less in the public view. I've always loved how he's framed the devastation:

Surely we can see football hurts players – we often see them carried off in on stretchers. But I wonder: would we accept this harm nearly as much if we saw it all up close? Players would suffer the same average loss if each season one out of ten players just dropped dead on the playing field! (A dead 25 year old player loses 55-25 = 30 years, which is ten times the three years life lost per player per season.)

Watson's Unfair Buzzing Advantage on Jeopardy

By now you've probably heard about the exhibition Jeopardy! match between the IBM-designed machine Watson and the two most heralded players of the show's history.

After watching the constant frustration on Ken Jennings' face, I was confident that all the players knew most of the answers. It was just a matter of who buzzed in first, with Watson doing so most of the time.

Check out this description of the Jeopardy! buzzer, from Jennings' Web site:

If you watch Jeopardy! casually, it's easy to assume that the player doing most of the answering is the one who knew the most answers, but that's not necessarily true. All three contestants, after all, passed the same very hard test to be there. Most of the contestants can answer most of the questions. But Jeopardy! victory goes not to the biggest brain—it goes to the smoothest thumb. Timing on the tricky Jeopardy! buzzer is often what separates the winner from the, well, non-winners, and the Jeopardy! buzzer is a cruel mistress.

Here's how it works: the buzzers don't get activated until Alex is finished reading each question. If you buzz in too early, the system actually locks you out for a fifth of a second or so. But if you're too late, the player next to you is going to get in first. Somewhere between too early and too late is a very narrow sweet spot, like swinging a tennis racket or a baseball bat. No, that's not right. The Jeopardy! buzzer, she is like a woman. No, that's not it either. All I know is, the more I thought about the timing, the less I could nail it. When I could somehow just Zen out and not think about what I was doing, I would do okay.

Watson won primarily because it had first dibs on every question it pleased. I'm much less impressed by this victory because it involved a machine "hitting a button" much more precisely than any human ever could.

Yes, it's still impressive that the machine can perform so well on Jeopardy!-style questions, but the lopsided final score shouldn't imply that Watson is vastly superior to its human counterparts.