These days I check out Slashdot about once a week, because they do post a few stories I don’t otherwise see.

Scientists Find Rats Aren’t Smarter Than Mice, and That’s Important

So where did this idea that rats are smarter than mice come from, anyway? Zador says it’s a historical bias. “There was 100 years of practice in training rats. And basically when people tried to treat the mice in exactly the way they treated the rats, the rats seemed smarter,” says Zador. In other words, “over the course of 100 years people had figured out how to train rats, and that mice aren’t rats.” You might think that mice and rats would be basically the same when it comes to these kinds of things, but Zador points out that mice and rats diverged somewhere between 12 and 24 million years ago. For comparison, humans and chimpanzees split somewhere between 5 and 7 million years ago.

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Bill Gates: Piketty’s Attack on Income Inequality Is Right

This one is interesting to me because I started reading Piketty yesterday. Here is His Billness in half agreement:

I agree that taxation should shift away from taxing labor. It doesn’t make any sense that labor in the United States is taxed so heavily relative to capital. It will make even less sense in the coming years, as robots and other forms of automation come to perform more and more of the skills that human laborers do today. But rather than move to a progressive tax on capital, as Piketty would like, I think we’d be best off with a progressive tax on consumption.

What His Billness is glossing over is that capital also yields social status and influence whereas consumption doesn’t (a friend in need is a friend of low marginal utility—we all know that’s not real status; you can’t buy love, but a habit of picking up the bar tab will entrain a “loyal” retinue in short order).

Bill’s personal heroine was leveraging disproportionate influence. His preferred solution sounds a lot like the old Hippo: Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet. Bill never cared about consumption the way he cared about influence. For lent, he plans to give up smoking cheroot cigars. Rather than being anti tobacco, he’s comfortably pro filter.

Normally I don’t read books this thick straight through. It cramps my style. I’m going to actually give this one a go. Supposing my arms hold out. This little item weighs 1.25 kg. Small for a chicken, large for a book.

I copied this passage out last night during the 2nd intermission. The three four highlights are mine.

Without precisely defined sources, methods, and concepts, it is possible to see everything and its opposite. Some people believe that inequality is always increasing and that the world is by definition always becoming more unjust. Others believe that inequality is naturally decreasing, or that harmony comes about automatically, and that in any case nothing should be done that might risk disturbing this happy equilibrium. Given this dialogue of the deaf, in which each camp justifies its own intellectual laziness by pointing to the laziness of the other, there is a role for research that is at least systematic and methodical if not fully scientific. … But by patiently searching for facts and patterns and calmly analyzing the economic, social, and political mechanisms that might explain them, it can inform democratic debate and focus attention on the right questions.

This book is in translation, but that has to be one of the most egregious uses of “by definition” I’ve ever encountered in a serious work. WTF does it even mean?

I think at some point during the second period Stauffer was deflecting attention from the shit show on the ice and he said this (630CHED again as I took another crack at my New York style cold-rising pizza dough):

Hemsky and Moreau, in particular, always put up good numbers against the Phoenix Coyotes.

There’s that word “always” again. “Always” seems to mean that Hemmer and Moreau could be pretty much counted on to at least saw off any given home and away—total sample size domination across the board.

Devil’s Dictionary

the world: that for which injustice is monotonic increasing

That doesn’t even work there, though there are certainly some Chicken Littles out there for whom this serves as an operational tautology.

progress: injustice inflation

Turns out brevity is the soul of wit, after all. That’s a nice little Rosetta stone by which to interpret the footstompers demanding progress at long last. Most people oppose injustice when the spoils are thin.

We finally watched the last three episodes of The Sopranos season five. I love the first seasons when Tony was highly unstable, and Dr Melfi had him on spin cycle. As the show progressed, Chases’s relentless cynicism began to wear on my nerves. I loved Buscemi in the Blundetto role, but I simply lost interest in TB’s character arc, and the whole plot line of finally putting Adriana out to woodland pasture seemed like the final sixty games of last season. Suspense? Not much. Gruesome turns? In abundance.

The other day there was this anomaly where I inadvertently watched the same movie twice: The Man Who Wasn’t There of the title quickly forgotten.

The scene where Billy Bob brings the falsely accused Frances McDormand (his what-the-hell-why-not wife) her petty effects is right out of David Chase.

Just like The Sopranos it’s a great scene on its own terms, it didn’t register on the part of my brain that demands a second helping (I kind of wish it had landed on the part of my brain that averts a second helping, though there are worse fates in life than a repeat viewing of a lessor Coen production featuring a young SJ pursing her puffy jujubes while trying way too hard to please).

“Focus attention on the right questions” echoes Eakins pretty much word for word when first interviewed about the Dellow hiring. And I think MacT also used a similar turn of phrase. (Or perhaps I have them reversed in my failing mind.)

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I’m starting to figure some things out about the social dynamics of group dysfunction and today’s thread would be the perfect opportunity to post these ideas, but they aren’t quite fully baked yet.

What I wrote in my notes the other day looks like this:

* one year of experience, times six
* six years of experience, times one

The group falls into the trap of thinking we have all the bases covered, by the social algorithm of divide and conquer.

* a single-agenda perspective, times six
* a six-fold perspective, times one

In low-dimensional spaces, gradients are prominent. On a six game road trip to visit LA, Anaheim, SJ, Boston, Washington, and NY you almost certainly want to visit each coast as a group of three, though you could instead change times zones six times three hours.

Hypersphere packing is one of the foundations of error correction codes. A 256-bit data packet might have an error correction code defined as space of 256 separate dimensions, one for each bit. Things are little different here than for the familiar one, two, or three dimensional world.

On average, all points in high dimensional spaces are roughly the same distance apart. On your six game road trip, you can do your trip planning by flipping a coin with very little impact on total hypermiles flown.

This is the entire ruse behind the maddening phrase “peak oil”. We’re looking at the world here through a one-dimensional lens (barrels produced, on a time metric). There are places in Saskatchewan that are higher than any nearby point, and you can still watch your dog run away for three days. Perhaps that’s why “peak potash” hasn’t gained the same currency. Low dimensional spaces always bring the peaks and valleys into sharper relief.

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As anger mounts, dimensionality decreases until dressing Petry against LA is the salvation for seven long years of sorrow.

If one evaluates Eakins and MacT through the single-dimensional lens, there’s not going to be much evidence in evidence that these are smart men.

“Smartest man in the room” is halfway true, and halfway a declaration that “I don’t like those stinking higher dimensions”. Top level management is often operating in a decision space with a dozen prominent dimensions. From here, it appears far less likely that dressing Petry against LA is the salvation for seven long years of sorrow. The more agendas one loads into the hopper, the flatter the decision space becomes. The decision space also becomes far more complex, and the bad far outnumbers the good, but the best decision is generally pretty tight up against the second best decision, but with a different weighting function on everything you’re trying to accomplish. You’ve got six pawns to advance, and there aren’t huge strategic differences in how you go about it. If they all need to move, any order is roughly as good as any other order. Of course, it makes a world of difference to how well you sleep at night for the duration, and even there you’re highly exposed to luck and chance.

———

Chapter One of Capital begins by relating this incident:

On August 16, 2012, the South African police intervened in a labour conflict between workers at the Marikana platinum mine near Johannesburg and the mine’s owners: the stockholders of Lonmin, Inc., based in London. Police fired on the strikers with live ammunition. Thirty-four miners were killed. As often in such strikes, the conflict primarily concerned wages: the miners had asked for a doubling of their wage from 500 to 1000 euros a month. After the tragic loss of life, the company finally proposed a monthly raise of 75 euros.

This episode reminds us, if we needed reminding, that the question of what share of output should go to wages and what share to profits [] has always been at the heart of the distributional conflict. … the most common cause of rebellion was the conflict between landlord and peasant, between those who owned the arena and those who planted their butts in the seats.

This is also a dimensional conflict. For the peasant, it boils down to bread on the table, while the landlord is losing sleep over the sweeping change of Victorian England, in the scope of geopolitical world order.

———

The final piece of my half-baked mental model is the role of purity. Purity is the human reflex on the side of the conflict where less is more—those for whom a 3% better chance of winning the LA game is the difference between sane and insane management.

Purity tends to run with taint and bad smell, the cure for which is always to purge.

Purity is also the sharp edge of the wedge underlying the human attraction to monotheism, but that’s a personal sentiment, and not part of my theory. It does explain, nevertheless, why I tend not to bite on the hook baited with peak oil collapsing atmospheres.

PS: I realize this isn’t the smoothest exposition. I did say it was half baked.

Ray Ferraro unloads on Dallas Eakins: “Would [Edmonton Oilers] be better served with a more experienced coach? They can’t be less served.”

For the record, I don’t share Bruce’s respect for Ferraro’s reputation, if this is the best he can muster on what ails the Oil.

The biggest issue they face is at no point did it look like the Oilers felt they could win that game against LA … The coach looked like he didn’t have any answers.

With the roster out there on the ice, there were no answers, so this boils down to:

A) investing all your effort into helping the guys on the ice make the best of the situation; or,
B) worrying about how things look on TV and bending over backwards to put a good face on an impossible situation.

Ferraro seems to believe that an emphasis on optics wins the day. Why was the roster on the ice incapable of winning this game?

The Oilers have half a dozen forwards who are all the same.

Earth calling Mr Ferraro. As Bruce points out, Ferraro must be watching re-runs of the previous season, which would go a long way toward explaining how he sees nothing changing.

… I’d suggest Ferraro needs to watch a few more games of the 2014-15 Oilers; Benoit Pouliot is a very different player from Ales Hemsky, as is Leon Draisaitl from Sam Gagner. The emphasis is still on skill, but the mix is a little different, especially on lines 2 through 4.

The team was so busy over the summer changing the mix—both on offense and on defense—that perhaps we lacked a wee tiny bit of the playoff polish the LA Kings have accrued over the past three seasons.

Ferraro is busy here telling us that we need to get busy changing the mix, when clearly we’re already at Stage 2 of this process: tripping over ourselves while working to incorporate massive change.

You’ve got psoriasis. You go to the doctor who prescribes a steroid cream. Now your psoriasis starts to flake off three times as fast. Dr Ferraro pops into the conversion, “hey, buddy, you should do something about that skin condition—it looks terrible”. Excellent advice, Dr Ferraro. On this fine advice you should now:

A) stop using the steroid cream, flaking immediately returns to previous levels; or,
B) continue using steroid cream, and a few weeks from now the flaking ceases completely and all that remains is a shiny pink oval.

How would we ever know that we needed to treat this condition if the perspicacious Dr Ferraro hadn’t barged into the room? Is Ferraro the kind of analyst who built his reputation on knowing exactly when to comment on peak flaking, while proposing exactly what brought the flaking to the crescendo in the first place, while simultaneously implying that the men in charge were asleep at the switch? Just wondering.

He’s worried about Taylor Hall bailing from the organization. If the season continues to go badly, Ferraro is in favour of getting Drai and Nurse out of the conflagration. This will:

A) augment Hall’s optimism about next season; or,
B) dampen Hall’s optimism about next season.

Note that Ferraro is invoking the contagion meme, with that deep purity root stem.

When I read this Ferraro rant, I just don’t think Ferraro’s left hand knows what his right hand is doing.

Would they be better served with a more experienced coach? They can’t be less served …

They have a more experienced coach in Craig Ramsay. First comment Eakins made about this hire was “he’s already told me some things [from last season] I shouldn’t do”.

Ferraro is invoking pusillanimous logic. Yeah, what we need here is an onion toting coach with magic beans, who will instantly say “this is a big mess that will take plenty of time to fix”. You mean, uh, exactly as long as it was going to take Eakins to fix the same mess? Uh, tell us again why we hired you?

The standard for “can’t be worse” is when you reach into your toolbox for a different inappropriate tool. “Well, it can’t eat the threads any faster than the vice grips.”

No, the new coach needs to be able to do something actually better than the current coach, something that you believe is valid and will come to pass.

Marincin is presently locked up in the reconditioning doghouse for reasons that are far from entirely public. Most likely Eakins drew a line in the sand concerning every player on the team. He asked Marincin to train in a certain way, and Marincin decided to do one half and not the other half, gaining the weight, without also making the complementary improvement that Eakins demanded.

Once a leader sets standards, the leader has to maintain them, or lose credibility. The new coach has the luxury of discarding what the previous coach enacted. But the new coach can’t deliver a high standard of accountability without setting new standards of his own, only to find himself bound by his word come the following season. Or, the coach can wilt on setting high standards and just go with the optical flow. Such a coach might enjoy a lucky season and (briefly) become the talk of the town, but he’ll never achieve sustained success.

Compounded errors by making the same errors over & over again …

In every post-game presser so far, Eakins has emphasized that he doesn’t think most of the mistakes are the same mistakes. Yes, the mistakes are leading to the same outcome, grade A scoring chances from grade A territory.

As Eakins explains what he sees: last season, players didn’t know where to go on the ice; this season, players know where to go on the ice, but are making small errors in execution once they get there.

The worry here is not lack of progress. The worry is that Eakins is coaching a system to an immature group with a severe failure mode. If he’s coaching a system where Ferraro can’t see the difference between 10% achievement and 90% achievement of the coaching vision, is it going to be possible to get over the brutal hump from 90% to 95% where suddenly the system shines?

Krueger was much better at charting out a series of soft landings. He might have got there eventually, but perhaps it would take twice as long, with sooner signs of mild improvement to solidly mediocre, and then an age of men rising out of the bubble group.

MacT deliberately brought in Eakins because Eakins has a straight line approach in getting from A to B. Damn the soft landings, full speed ahead. This stemmed from impatience. Impatience was an easy sell.

Brilliant Ferraro has figured out that it remains an easy sell, while we’re already knee deep in the impatient steroid treatment.

His focus was too wide … You can’t change the world need to focus on what’s right in front of you

Really? What we needed last season was a coach would tip toe cautiously, one careful move after another while Taylor Hall sits in the corner and nods approvingly.

[Bruce] The comment about 1985 seems to be a not-so-veiled reference to the heyday of team builders Craig MacTavish and Kevin Lowe.

This is the usual silliness. Unless he thinks MacT was a bad coach in 2005–2006. I remember many pressers where MacT raved about CFP’s outlet pass with its release timed to the narrowest fraction of a second to break the trap.

The league is different than it was in 1985 you need to be able to defend & counter off your defense …

Smid was the guy on the roster best able to defend and least able to counter off the defense, and guess who was the first to go?

Schultz

Defend against the rush: when he feels like it
Defend against the cycle: he sometimes chips in here or there
Transition: yes.

Nurse

Defend against the rush: yes
Defend against the cycle: yes (someday soon including elite power forwards)
Transition: enough

Klefbom

Defend against the rush: yes
Defend against the cycle: yes
Transition: more than enough

Marincin:

Defend against the rush: yes
Defend against the cycle: often, but not including power forwards
Transition: yes

Our entire future defense corp is being built on the model of defend and counter, with perhaps the exception of Norris Jultz.

I personally suspect the master plan is to groom Jultz as the master trap-breaker, one of the hardest skills in the game. I’m pretty sure he’s getting more heat about his defensive game behind the scenes this season under Ramsay, while he continues to be pushed to become our outlet-pass warlock in residence.

(I’m not saying this is a sane plan. It’s only a sane plan if Jultz can actually achieve this elite skillset—and it starts to show in the near future. Our brain trust clearly thinks he can, and they’ve chosen this hill to die on.)

Forwards don’t dominate the game like they did before.

Ah, but they do if you can consistently break the trap and related defensive postures. And if we can’t, our killer forwards are dead in the water.

What does Ferraro ultimately recommend? Slow and steady, twice as speedy. Onions sold separately. Magic beans not included.