Winning III

 

Like a Rolling Stone

You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him he calls you; you can't refuse
When you ain’t not got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You're invisible now, you've got no secrets to conceal

Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the rest of you oligarchs be careful.

The tax cuts favored by Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their oligarch cronies have to come from taking the government payments to others, especially those below them. They may call it waste, fraud, and abuse, but as they are finding it is really winning, certain, and true. If they take all of the wealth from others, then they hasten their own demise. One on one, they may win every contest. They may do so because of their merit but more likely they win at any cost, by retaliation for past losses and intimidation not only in future contest but in the current contest in the expectation that their opponent gives up, bends the knee, before the contest is over. That might work singly, but collectively those same opponents can overwhelm them.  By taking from each opponent they make sure that their opponents have nothing, but then those same opponents also have nothing to lose. If enough of their opponents have nothing to lose, and that prompts them to join forces and act in concert, then that can lead to the demise of the oligarchs. I believe that the technical term for subjects, opponents, acting in concert against the ruler is called a revolution. So oligarchs you can lie, cheat, and steal all that you want. It may only be a Pyrrhic victory. You may win the battle but lose the war. Can you hear the people sing?

Tolerance V

 

It Ain’t The Meat It’s The Motion

It ain't the meat, it's the motion
Makes your daddy wanna rock
It ain't the meat, it's the motion
It's the movement that gives it the sock

It ain’t the average, it’s the tolerance.

Engineers learn that you can’t achieve perfection. You have to accept tolerance around the ideal, what statisticians and other scientists call standard deviation, from perfection. That means that you have to report both the average AND the tolerance to determine if you have an acceptable batch. Reporting only the average is meaningless.

Many statistical agencies report only the average when they should also be reporting the variance, the square of the tolerance. You need both measures to judge a batch.

If the goal is to achieve growth then reporting the average is part, and only part, of the story.

·        If the average is increasing and the observations have a variance that is within acceptable limits then there is growth;

·        If the average is increasing but the observations have a variance that is NOT with acceptable limits then there is no growth;

·        If the average is decreasing but the observed variance is still within acceptable limits, there is growth; and

·        If the average is decreasing and the observed variance  is NOT within acceptable limits there is no growth.

Reporting the average without also reporting the variance does NOT establish whether there is growth. It is easy enough to report the variance in addition to the average. Most statistical packages can report both. Most statistical packages can also plot both, the average and error bars around the average. (the error is the standard deviation divided by the square root of the number of observations.)

Statistical reports should report variances, (aka Standard Deviation, tolerances) in addition to averages. Reporting only averages gives an incomplete and possibly misleading picture. It is reporting the meat without reporting the motion. You are actually reporting the growth which is a vector and matrix math applies. Then you are reporting the change in position without reporting and change in direction. You want to report both the observed average AND the acceptable tolerances.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

 

The Gambler

You've got to know when to hold 'em,
Know when to fold 'em
Know when to walk away,
Know when to run
You don't ever count your money
While you're sitting at the table
There'll be time enough for counting
When the dealing is done.

Do you know when to hold ‘em?

There is a classic problem in statistics named after the game on Let’s Make a Deal hosted by Monty Hall. The Monty Hall problem involves making one of three choices of doors, only one of which is a winner. The host, in this case Monty, opens one of the unchosen doors. It is inevitably not a winner. The player is then given the chance to remain with their original choice of doors or to change to the remaining door. When the correct answer, that you should always switch, was presented by Marilyn Vos Savant in Parade Magazine it created a controversy. PhDs who should know better could not believe that answer. In subsequent studies it was found that 85 to 90 percent of players would choose exactly the wrong strategy.  There is a fancy term for this, equiprobability bias. Humans assume that all outcomes are equally likely. When presented with a choice of two outcomes, one of which is clearly 67% probable, humans insist on acting like the probability of each choice is 50%.

 In Vos Savant words, the  Monty Hall dilemma does not involve competing theories of statistics. It reveals something about humility and human frailty. “ The disbelief that we could be wrong.  The tenacity sometimes aggrieved, which we hold our earlier judgment, especially when we feel certain”. So don’t be aggrieved. Know when to hold ‘em.

Laughing

 

I Love to Laugh

The more you laugh
The more you fill with glee
And the more the glee
The more we're a merrier we

The best laughs?

I am a listener of podcasts as a means to drown out outside noise when I try to sleep. But then listening to podcasts makes me laugh and I can’t get to sleep. Or if I fall asleep I have to rewind and listen to the podcast again. Yes, I am that old.

Not only do many of these podcasts prompt me to think, they also cause me to laugh. The benefit of the audio podcasts are that I only hear the laugh, I am not distracted by the sight of that person laughing. So who has the best laugh?

Number three: Holly Frey- One of the hosts of Stuff You Missed in History Class, and Criminalia podcasts  and on her own the host of the Drawn: The Story Of Animation podcast. On top of this she runs races, sews, and is a Disney adult. On that alone I would follow her to the end of the earth even if she stayed quiet. But oh that laugh. There is such joy in her laugh that it is infectious, and you can’t help but laugh along yourself.

Number two: Stacy Vanek Smith-  It was a sad day for me when Ms. Smith stepped away from hosting duties on the Indicator from Planet Money.  She is knowledgeable,  and she treats her subject seriously. She is brilliant and a great communicator. But she also knows that her subject is fun, and she does not take herself seriously. Fortunately I am only in the year 2021 in my podcast listening and she is still around to me, and I can always hope to hear her laugh again.

Number One: Tom Magliozzi. The late older brother, one of the hosts of NPR's Car Talk, Clack of Click and Clack; one of the Lugnuts; one of the Tappet Brothers.  I am happy to say that I knew someone who patronized their garage in Cambridge, MA and did not know of their radio show. Tom grew up in an Italian neighborhood in Cambridge. Despite trying to sound like he is a crazy person who only knows about cars, he was: a graduate of MIT; a former member of the US Military, “PFC Magliozzi”; a former worker at the Foxboro Company; and a professor of business at Boston University. And he was the voice of one of the sponsors of Lightning McQueen in the Pixar/Disney Cars movies. “As The Wrench Turns” indeed. His rants are legendary. His barbs are phenomenal  His spirit may have  left the earth but may his laugh echo on forever. Raise your next cappuccino in a toast to him.

Listen to these wonderful laughs and I dare you not to smile. You might even laugh yourself.

Growth

 Crown of Creation

Life is change

How it differs from the rocks

I've seen their ways too often for my liking

New worlds to gain

My life is too survive

And be alive for you

Aah

And growth is life!\

The most recent episodes of the podcasts Radio Lab and Planet Money were on grwoth.  I like the name “Malthusian Swerve” that they used but mathematically it already exists as the Cumulative Distribution Function, CDF, of the Exponential Distribution’s PDF, Probability Density Function. On second thought Malthusian Swerve does roll more trippingly off the tongue and is probably better branding. 

There is a way to look at growth as NOT constant and thus uncontrollable ( and after all what is cancer but uncontrolled growth). The phrase “Life is change” might be from the Jefferson Airplane's song Crown of Creation, but the concept goes back to the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. The Malthusian way of looking at constant growth is as a power function, Future  = Present * Growth rate to  the  power  of  Time,                                             

Future =Present * Growth Rate ^Time. 

This is NOT the CDF of an exponential distribution. An exponential distribution would be  Future = Present * exp(time * growth rate)),

  Future= Present * e ^{Growth Rate* Time.}  

The base in this equation is e, Euler’s number. The Natural Logarithm of the exponential of x is  ln(x). 

What was not anticipated is a disruption during the forecast time period. The examples in the podcasts did not include this, but in the 1880s the fear was that New York City would be buried in horse manure by 1930. This was a reasonable trend given the horse power in use at the time. What was not expected is that horse power would be replaced by gasoline engine power. But while history is rife with disruptive and unforeseen examples (what economists would call substitution of products), it would be nice to establish what the growth rate should be absent any unexpected swerves.

The Federal Reserve sets its target for inflation at 2%. This is low enough to almost be unnoticeable. But it is still not ideal. And it is also a Compound (and thus constant) Annual Growth Rate, CAGR. It is said that you can boil a live frog in a pot if you keep the growth in temperature low enough. Two percent is also the rule of thumb rate of growth that I was taught as a young engineer. It is close to 1/ln(2)%, 1.44%, which is the ideal growth rate given the two dimensions, space and time, of reality, using exponential growth. It sounds like exponential growth is even higher growth than compound growth, but words can be deceiving.

Trending, assuming constant growth, is NOT a good idea. Take a young child..  If you trend out his current rate of growth he should be 10 feet tall at the age of 20. But you don’t expect him to be. As Han Solo  said in Star Wars VII, “That is NOT how the Force works". Exponential Distribution’s CDF, a sigmoid curve, for the win!

Patience

I Want It ( And I Want it Now)

I want it and I will not wait......I want it.......Now
I sit at home and when I watch TV gotta have remote control with me
Oh and when I'm watching football
I can go to total recall
I got freeze frame, I got slo – mo

Can’t you grow up and be patient and wait?

A good part of growing up is learning that things do not just happen immediately and magically. Actions have to be planned. This is just how the world works. There are cycles but there are also lagging and leading variables. The seasons happen due to the astronomical cycle, orbits. However the changes in those cycles are NOT the start of the growing or weather seasons associated with these cycles. They happened because of this astronomical cycle but there are lagging and leading variables.

The longest day of summer is June 20^th, the summer solstice. However it is NOT the hottest day of summer. That occurs latter in the “Dog Days” of August. The astronomical equinox is March 20^th. However that is NOT the start of the growing season. That will come later in April or May depending on the climate zone.

The retail store Target is closed on Christmas Day. If you want to buy Christmas presents at Target, then you have to do it before Christmas morning. If Target wants to have Christmas gifts to sell to you, then they will have to order and receive them long before Christmas. If the manufacturers want to sell to Target, they have to begin their process even before that. Manufacturers may begin their processes a year in advance of Christmas for you to have gifts to open on Christmas morning. The observable cycle may only be an approximation, and small errors may accumulate over many cycles. That is why there are leap years, the Julian and Gregorian calendar adjustments, Easter, and Passover are not fixed dates, etc.

Expecting things to magically appear is being childish. Being certain about the future. and not anticipating changes in the leading variable is childish. Not dealing with changes and small errors is childish. It is NOT magic, it is science. .If you want it now, then you have to allow others to act on a cycle other than your now. You have to act certainly, not fickly, so that they can plan for your now. And you have to expect, admit, and deal with small errors, ASAP, before they become big adjustments. That IS how the Force works.

Licenses

 

Look What You Made Me Do

I don't trust nobody and nobody trusts me
I'll be the actress starring in your bad dreams
I'm sorry, the old Taylor can't come to the phone right now
Why? Oh, ‘cause she's dead (oh)

Trust is everything

Humans can NOT see everything in the heart of someone else. At best they can see 5/6^th  of what the absolute perceives.  So when someone else tells you something there is a change in that 1/6^th  that you can’t perceive, they may be lying to you.  That is why ethics exams are so important,  You want to believe that a statement is true. but how can you tell if it is true.  You get someone to vouch for the person making that statement.  You might not have experience with that person, but someone may.  And you may rely on that person to reassure that that some other person can be trusted.

So how do you get that trust?  Trademarks, licenses,  guild masters, etc. There are codes of ethics as part of that process.  But you count on that process being itself ethical.  Sometimes it is not.  https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2024/06/ethics.html. 

I have a Professional Engineering license and that often comes with a Professional Engineering stamp.  I have worked for an A&E firm where plans had to be stamped, even if they were prepared by non-stamped staff.  The scramble of PEs diving under their desk when the call went out “who can stamp this” was a sight to behold.  Somehow no one brought their stamp into work on that day. 😉

The number of times I have been asked by clients “can’t you just lie” is staggering to me.  ”Doh, no I can’t. I would lose my license.”  And that may resolve the constitutional crisis.  The number of people who lie in court that are creating the constitutional crisis will be faced with the fear of losing their license, and their livelihood.  Ask yourself, “Would I lie for you?  Is it worth it?”