Republic

 

Do Your Job 

These bozos are making one of those death traps

By this time next week, that building's gonna collapse

And the school bus driver hauls a precious load

Hope he's not driving your kids when his heart explodes

As I look around I see everywhere

Americans who just don't care

At the risk of sounding like a Repetitive Joe

Repetitive Joe, Repetitive Joe, Repetitive Joe

I'm the boss, get back to work 

You may be the boss, but how do you know I’m doing my job? 

Since I am a New Englander, it is no surprise that I am going to use a New England example to make a distinction between a democracy and a republic.  New England Town Meetings are democracy at its purest.  Everyone who is a resident of the town can vote at a Town Meeting.  However the business of the town is mundane, boring, and time consuming.  Even though everyone can go to town meetings not everyone wants to, has the time to, or the interest to, participate in town meetings .  Thus in a town with thousands of eligible voters, only a few hundred might participate in a town meeting, and those that do participate may have a bias for certain actions and are not representative of those who do not attend.  Thus while it is a pure democracy, it requires a commitment of time that may be unrealistic.

A less biased and less time consuming method is to give your proxy to a town meeting member who will represent you, i.e. a republic.  Then that person can act in your place and this should reflect your biases, not an unknown bias.  Then you merely have to judge that the person representing you truthfully represents your views.. Whether that  representative is for a town meeting, a city council, a state legislature, Congress, etc., those proxies are chosen in an election.  

The problem then becomes choosing someone to represent you as an individual while recognizing that you as an individual still retain sovereignty of a democracy.  This form of government where the sovereign is the group of individuals but those individuals chose representatives to vote/act for them is called a republic.  It is not an accident that the earliest political party of Thomas Jefferson called itself Democrat-Republican and not until did later did it drop the Republican part of its name.  Thus when a new political party formed in the 1850s, the name Republican was available and became the name of those who opposed the expansion of slavery and included no taxation Whigs who opposed the expansion of slavery into federal territory and anti-immigrant Know Nothings who opposed the same.  While Republicans eventually came to oppose all forms of slavery, not just merely its expansion, that did not occur until after the Civil War, by which time the issue of slavery versus the retention of power became the distinguishing attribute in the Republican Party. 

Fast forward to today, The descendants of no-tax Whigs and anti-immigrant Know-Nothings have taken over the  Republican Party and intimidated, or retaliated against, all those who merely opposed the expansion of slavery.  The Freedom Caucus/Tea Party/MAGA calls those who oppose them Republicans in Name Only, RINOs.  In  fact it is they who are rINOs , opposed to a republic. 

Your job involves three things in order of importance: Execution, Foresting and Communication.  The problem is that the ability to do our job is primarily judged by others on how well our can communicate.  But that communication can be used to lie. 

In republics you desire is to find someone who would act like you, forecast like you, and would communicate like you.  In other words, you want someone to be winning, certain, and true.  But while you can determine whether someone is winning, if someone is less than the absolute you can only be 99.9999..% certain .  Something  can be  100% certainly true or 100% certainly false.  We can view at most 5/6 of the absolute. Humans can only determine 91.28% of the truth under the best of circumstances. 

The issue is NOT voting for someone to represent you unless you are certain that person is telling you the truth.  When faced with two choices: candidate one who has a grade of A in execution, a Grade of B in forecasting and a grade of C in communication, versus another individual who has a grade of execution of F, a  grade of forecasting of F, but a grade of communications of A.  If you can chose only on the basis of communication then the second choice would win.  If you choose on the composite score, then you would choose candidate one to represent you.  So in the last election, how did you vote?  For the best communicator? or the best representative?  They are not the same.  The challenge is to judge not only how they have done the job, but also how they will do their job in the future to represent you, but you only have their word and their past performance on which to judge that. In this case the directive becomes not “I'm the boss, get back to work.” but “I’m the boss, do I believe that you can do my job.”

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. By only reporting the average,  you are reporting the change in position without reporting any 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 a 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.