Fear and Loathing in the 2012 Election

Once again it is time to rant about the cesspool that is American politics. I am sure to lose sleep for the next month worrying about what may happen. As of today, FiveThirtyEight has things looking better than they could be, but the direction has been unpleasant since the debate on Wednesday.

I, of course, support Obama and the Democrats. They are moderately acceptable, whereas I have a passionate hatred of the Republicans. And yes, that level of partisanship leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe I am too much of a radical with no hope of understanding the average American voter. Admittedly I have a hard time relaxing and not worrying under normal circumstances. But my level of loathing the opposing side is not that uncommon in America these days, given what I see in the news. I cannot say that is anything new, my personal participation in American politics only goes back ten years, but to see the negative effects this has had on American today, you have to look no further than the deadlock in Congress over the last two years. Despite this, the best advice I can give is to fight harder and crush the other side.

My desires for American politics are many. I want a reduction in the income inequality that has been dramatically increasing the last several decades in America. Increase investment in our infrastructure, education and scientific research. Improve the disaster that is the American health care system, though I think Obamacare is a step in the right direction; I would prefer something with the simplicity of a single-payer system. I want to reform intellectual property law and protect net neutrality. We need stronger competition law and financial reform. Reduce corporate welfare. End the drug war. Repeal Citizens United and actively work to get money out of politics. Advance women's and gay rights. Increase protection for whistle-blowers. Allow an easier path for immigration. Abolish the TSA. Decrease the size of the armed forces. Close Guantanamo, abide by the Geneva Convention, and provide similar basic protections of human rights. Make far, far stronger environmental protections. And yes, what is most on people's minds these days, lower the unemployment rate, improve economic growth and reduce the national debt.

That is only a brief outline of what I want in America. On many of those issues, the Democrats are significantly better than the Republicans. With many of them, neither side pays any attention. One might even be able to convince me that the Republicans are better for a few of those. I would like to see better arguments and empirical evidence for what policies will accomplish them.

Yet before I could get to arguments, it would be difficult to bring myself to listen to the Republican Party. I admit that this is problematic. Unfortunately their pandering to anti-science, young-earth creationists and other religious bigots, the racists and homophobes, those who would drag women's rights back forty years, and all those other disgusting dregs of America leaves a hideous taste in my mouth. Beyond the general greed, stupidity and shortsightedness I see in both parties, it is the regressive discrimination tainting the Republican Party that is the root source of my partisan vitriol. Beyond that I see the Republicans as liars and hypocrites who would happily lock down the legislature in order to prevent anything positive from happening to this country that might make the next election harm them. They are actively working to disenfranchise voters. I do not feel they can be trusted.

At some of these extremes, I might be showing shades of the irrational exhibited on other side of the fence by people who listen to Rush Limbaugh. Many of those right-wingers have fears similar to mine, as much trouble as I have understanding them. And so I worry that I have simply been riled up by political theater, driven to hate the other side for the sake of my vote and money. I am not saying that I would vote Republican, but what I am saying is that there are other fights that I have become distracted from. We should actually look at why we are horribly hyper-partisan and fight desperately over some issues while ignoring so many others. Why there is relatively little middle ground on the issues we do fight over. I do not know if we are actually more divided and partisan than we have been in the past, but I do know that we should have higher standards.

There are a number of theories for what might be dividing us so: the Big Sort, the Filter Bubble, the corruption of money in politics, distortions in our electoral process caused by gerrymandering, the Electoral College, and first-past-the-post voting systems. With some of the more direct political issues listed above, we could fix them with relatively simple laws and would not even require constitutional amendments. Despite that, the state of the American political system does not give me much optimism that I will live to see any of those issues resolved. I can hope that some exogenous societal or technological change can help advance the system. In the meantime, I will be donating money, making phone calls and possibly knocking on doors. Good luck to us.

Wolfram Alpha's Social Network Analysis

A couple of weeks ago I ran across this new feature of Wolfram Alpha designed to analyze your Facebook activity. I think this is an excellent example of how to summarize and elegantly display some of the mass of social information being captured over the net. We are starting to get enough data in the social sciences that hopefully the soft sciences can be made a bit harder. We're a long ways off from what I want to do with that, but are making some progress. That is one of the reasons I liked Klout, despite the rather unfortunate taste it leaves in some people's mouths. It takes a massively complex set of data and tries to reduce it down to something easily measurable so that people can act on it.

The new Wolfram Alpha project does a good job of that. It is on a very small scale, but I am able to look at my own analysis and learn some useful information. I can see at a glance the various friend groups I'm a part of, where my friends come from, who I'm interacting with over Facebook, what time of day this interaction is occurring, broad statistics of the religions and relationship statuses of my friends, and so forth. I find it very informative.

We still have got a long long ways to go. Get Wolfram Alpha's Facebook analysis expanded to all the social networks Klout covers, and cross-reference all of that data. Have location aware services such as Google Latitude and Foursquare tied in and watch the daily flow of people. Add more economic measurements and get social network systems monitoring how money flows through society. It would be great if someone could find a way to convince people to make public, or least public after being anonymized, data from sources such as Mint.com. Of course, I didn't use Mint.com or any such system until I started writing this article. Getting enough people to plug financial measurements into social networking software for a better understanding of economics is a ways off, but perhaps that's an open market ripe for invention.

I'd give a lot to have better economic theories backed by data to inform our politicians. True, politicians don't often feel the need to back their actions with data, but there's such a massive amount of public ignorance that any tool to help would be of benefit. One study that comes to mind was asking Americans what their desired level of wealth inequality in society was. The results showed that Americans greatly underestimated wealth inequality in the US, and their desired wealth distribution was similar to what Sweden has. People, myself included, tend to have a very poor idea of the construction of society, despite the massive amount of data out there. We still need better systems for working with and displaying this data.


I want, perhaps not a Newtonian revolution that reduces the messiness of the social sciences to clean lines and equations, humans are too complex for that to be possible, but I at least want something better than we have now. If not ways to predict the future, at least better ways of visualizing what is going on around us.  Now, I obviously don't think that having better data visualization will erase human ignorance, but it has to help. Making it easier for everyday people to better see what is going on can't hurt. It feels like there's a bunch of analysis being done inside companies to improve marketing or make financial predictions, and not much progress in creating broad, useful scientific theories. Perhaps I'm just not up to date on what is being learned, ignorantly dreaming of revolutionary theories, but I take comfort in things like Wolfram Alpha doing a bit to peel back the curtain.

There Went The Summer

September already. I survived the summer, just got back from Burning Man and pushing forward with work. I'd like to think that being done with Burning Man would mean I'd suddenly have a surplus of free time, but then again, my weekends will now often be devoted to Stanford football games. Or playing Skyrim, but that won't be much of a change from the last few months since I moved on from EU3.

Burning Man was excellent this year. After the ticket debacle, I saw the camp that I've been a part of in some form or another for several years left in a much reduced state. Several of our more regular members didn't return, many of the remaining splintered into different camps, and we were left with ten to twelve of us holding enough infrastructure built up over the years to fit fifty people. Fortunately we found a way out of our dilemma by joining up with another camp, Camp Charlie, and that worked out tremendously. 

Camp Charlie is a group primarily from LA who apparently watched too many Charlie the Unicorn videos. This year, with our camp fragment added, Charlie numbered somewhere between eighty and a hundred people. They, or 'we' now I should say, have a spiffy art car, and our subsection provided the back end of the camp with dome, shade, kitchen and such. All told, I spent the last week meeting many wonderful people and having a great time. It was also nice to avoid being in charge of much more than spending a night cooking for a hundred people.

Hell, I've now survived two burns with Cori and am still in one piece. Oh yeah! That's another significant happening in my life in the last few months. I'm officially living with my girlfriend, signed onto a lease and everything. At four months now, but I'll consider that an accomplishment.

On the work side of my life, over the last week, while I and half our engineering team were on the playa, Bloodhound pushed out the new website that has been in production for months. Today was my first day back into the thick of coding and bug fixing and there is, as always, plenty to do, but it's great to see the new site out. After our company spent a good share of the summer working on the new website and our new exhibitor focused Retrieve application that made its debut a month ago, it is wonderful seeing the results out there and live. Now to see how that pays off in the next few months.

Back in Existence

After finally transferring this blog away from GoDaddy in SOPA/PIPA distaste, I managed to forget about it and let it sit in DNS limbo for two months. Fortunately, now it's back! Now to just write something mildly substantive...

Europa Universalis 3

My posts here have definitely fallen off the last four months. Part of that has been work at Bloodhound keeping me busy. Things there are going quite well, we're growing as fast as we can and there should be some press releases shortly. However, away from work an almost embarrassing amount of my free time since Thanksgiving has been devoted to playing Europa Universalis 3, specifically the latest expansion, Divine Wind. I can't remember the last time I was this into a game and I can't recommend it highly enough unless you'd like to save a few hundred hours of time.

I have been a fan of both strategy games and alternate history for a very long time, and EU3 is an excellent merger of the two. In many ways it is similar to the Civilization series, but is restricted to occur between the years 1399 and 1820. Due to this it can afford to have more special, specific rules and still not diverge too wildly from reality. For example, it has hard coded rules for Papal politics, the Holy Roman Empire, Scottish resistance to England, the Reformation, etc. You wouldn't be able to write something like that into a game of Civilization, where when a game starts at 4000 BCE the historical divergences would be so great that to include rules written specifically for things that occurred over the last few hundred years would leave me tearing my hair out. Admittedly, I'd love to have a system smart enough that it could automatically generate gameplay options for divergent political/religious/cultural systems, but that is a ways beyond current game design and artificial intelligence. As it is, having these specific rules written in for the setting adds a great feeling of immersion and connection to history.

Perhaps a more significant difference that distinguishes EU3 from Civ is that it has a far greater amount detail. There is enough micromanagement to keep the perfectionist in me endlessly trying to reshape world history. There are 300 plus playable countries and 1700 plus provinces making up the world. You can pick as a starting date any day over the course of the game, and the starting point is modeled with a fair deal of accuracy to match history, with all the attending countries, governments, diplomacy, wars, cultures, religions, royal marriages, and such that existed at that point in time. I still haven't finished a game yet, despite having spent more than a month on a single game. I know at some point I'll snap out of it and get bored of it, but that hasn't happened yet.

If I had to give it a criticism, aside from a few minor gameplay tweaks, it would be that I would like it to go into even more detail. It does a tremendous amount already, but I wish I could go deeper. I would like to have it do things like model demographics and spit out tables and graphs to compare against the actual historical record. Games like EU3 and Civilization never give you an easy readout of your nation's total population, or try to reduce game units to 'tons of grain' or other more tangible measurements, and I find this frustrating. I assume it is because it would be hard to ensure that the game didn't radically diverge from what would be reasonable and break the suspension of disbelief, but EU3 comes so much closer that I think with a bit more effort it could pull it off.

Maybe just because I read Guns, Germs and Steel at a young age, I would prefer if the game would better model agriculture and disease. In the game, New World societies are handicapped with a low tech level as they were in reality, but I would like to see that handicap modeled in more detail with a lack of domestic animals and weakness to Old World diseases being some of the cause of the handicap. Then you could better model the Columbian Exchange, and see things such as how earlier or later colonization could lead to a different rate of introduction of crops, and see how those spread around the world and affect population levels and trading.

Similarly, I would like better economic models, to be able to see where traded items go instead of just having them make you money. In EU3 a province makes a trade good which gets you a certain amount of money, and your traders compete at a center of trade to make you a certain amount of money, and goods can give global bonuses if you have enough market share, but there's not much connection beyond that. I'd love to see supply and demand and see how the goods are flowing around the globe. This would better reflect historical occurrences such as how the breakdown of the Silk Road was an impetus for Europeans to seek overseas routes to the Far East.

Somewhat connected with trading and economics, I would prefer if the modeling of roads, rivers, canals and other transportation were done with more realism, with easy to see maps of how long it takes to get from Point A to Point B by what means. Have rivers reduce transportation time, and canals actually connect rivers, and have that tie in with the trading system.

Beyond that, I'd love to see more detail on the family trees of ruling families... and there if I continue along this path, I'll be down a rabbit hole and I could spend as much time thinking about what to add to the game as I do playing it. As it is, it does a better job of providing a tremendous amount of detail in a simulation/strategy game and still making it addictively playable. It may be the best strategy game I have played.

Though I am looking forward to the engine on the new Sim City game which is apparently doing an agent based simulation of every single human/vehicle in an entire city!