Achievement Unlocked: 501c3 Status!

So, this is reposted from the Ronin Blog:


Greetings to all from the Ronin Institute. We’ve got some good news here. The IRS has officially approved our application for tax-exempt status as a publicly funded 501c3 nonprofit organization!

What does that mean? Well, most importantly, it means that you can now donate to the Ronin Institute to support independent scholarship, and your donation should be tax deductible. Or, as they say on nonprofit websites, “tax deductible to the full extent allowed by law,” which is sort of a funny thing to say. I mean, if you gave a donation to me, personally, it would be “tax deductible to the full extent allowed by law.” It’s just that, in the case of giving money to me, the full extent allowed by law would be zero.

Here, though, your donation is tax deductible in the same way that that donations to the United Way or the Red Cross are. That is, donations to the Ronin Institute should be unambiguously tax deductible, but if there is any question in your mind about your particular circumstances, you should consult with a tax attorney.

So, if you (or your foundation, or your employer) are looking for some things to donate to before the end of the year, here we are! If you believe in reinventing academia, here we are! If you want to help to support some really high quality independent scholarship, here we are! Now hop on over to the Donation page!

If you have questions about the Institute, or would like to direct your donation towards a specific program or project, contact us at development@ronininstitute.org.

To the future!

Windows 95 Tips

So, here's one of many awesome things that I am behind the curve on, thanks to the hurricane . . . erm, "superstorm" that knocked out our power for more than a week, and our internet access for a week beyond that. It's a tumblr of Windows 95 tips. Here are a few of samples to entice you:

Rough Day for Liberal Tigers Fans

So, remember how there was this election? And how there was this guy Nate Silver who said that Obama was going to win the election? But the all the conservatives everywhere were like "Nuh-uh!" because they weren't going to just listen to some "blogger" who was using his "math" and "statistics" to pursue his gay agenda of using mind control to hand over the United States over to the one-world government and forcibly relocating all of the suburbanites? I mean, what about the conventional wisdom of Peggy Noonan's friends?

Remember how he then became the darling of everyone on the left, who were all able to embrace his analyses while patting themselves on the back for being reality based? Because, in this case, reality did, in fact have a liberal bias that was, in fact, more extreme than that of the liberal-bias machine of the Main Stream Media. (Someone should come up with a clever, dismissive name for them, maybe "Lame Stream Media"! Ooh, I like that!)

Remember how part of you wondered what would have happened if the statistical analyses of Nate Silver (or the equally awesome – but much funnier – Sam Wang) had pointed towards a Romney victory? Would conservatives have embraced the hard-nosed, numbers-based approach? Would liberals have set up hysterical unskewing sites?

Well, here's our chance to find out.

We need to collect together all the people who were Obama supporters and Nate Silver fans, and who are also Detroit Tigers fans. We then need to see what they have to say about the column that Silver wrote yesterday.

In it, Silver lays out, with his typical clarity, the case that Miguel Cabrera does not deserve to be the American League MVP, despite his being the first triple-crown winner since the debut of Laugh-In. Rather, on purely statistical grounds, the MVP should go to Mike Trout of the California Angels Anaheim Angels Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. Purely based on his performance as a batter, Trout provided greater added value to his team than Cabrera did to his. Beyond that, Trout was a huge asset both as a fielder and as a baserunner. Cabrera, by contrast, provided a net negative contribution to his team in fielding and baserunning.

Really, the only argument in Cabrera's favor is that he won the triple crown. The triple crown! That's a real achievement, and he should be rewarded for it. But should he be rewarded with the MVP? Or should that go to the most valuable player? If we apply the conventional meanings of the words "most," "valuable," and "player," the MVP should go to Trout.

Maybe we could come up with something else to honor Cabrera's extraordinary accomplishment in earning the triple crown. How about, I don't know, the triple crown? (Last three words said extra loud, slack-jawed, and condescendingly.)

I'm just saying. If you spent October laughing at Karl Rove and Dick Morris (and who didn't, really), but think that Cabrera should win the MVP, you're not a realist. You're a partisan who happens to have been on the right side of reality in the election, but who is now on the wrong side of reality in baseball.

Florida Man Commits Suicide over Election

So, if you want to feel better about all the Texans in your Facebook feed who are threatening secession in the wake of Barack Obama's reelection, here's something even stupider. The stupider thing comes from Florida, naturally. Henry Hamilton, a 64-year-old resident of Key West, apparently committed suicide on November 8, after claiming that "if Barack gets re-elected, I'm not going to be around." Empty prescription bottles for Xanax and Seroquel (for the treatment of schizophrenia) were found in the condo Hamilton shared with his partner, Michael Cossey.

The report in the Miami Herald raises a few questions:

First, the article says that Hamilton was the "owner of Tropical Tan on Duval Street." Who the hell lives in Key West, Florida, and goes to a tanning salon.

Second, Hamilton wrote "Fuck Obama!" on his will before killing himself. Does anyone know if this entails a legal obligation on his partner to have sex with the president?

Third, why do articles like this one always end with lines like this: "President Obama, a Democrat, defeated Republican challenger Mitt Romney to win a second four-year term"? Why not "A 'prescription' is a document created by a medical professional that gives a patient access to a controlled substance, typically for therapeutic or palliative use"?

LiL DEBBiE's "Michelle Obama" will bring back your election hangover

So, of all the things you can do to celebrate Barack Obama's reelection, here is unquestionably the worst: watch the video of the song "Michelle Obama" by LiL DEBBiE, best known for being the girl with no rhythm in the Kreayshawn "Gucci Gucci" video.

The song also features the lyrical stylings of RiFF RAFF. No, sadly, that's not the leader of the Catillac Cats, it's just another Southern California rapper with questionable capitalization skills and parents (Bill and Melinda RAFF, I assume) who are questioning the wisdom of having named their son "RiFF."


The one sliver of good news is that the lyric is "Presidential tint," and not "Presidential tits," which is how you heard it.

Also, I like to imagine that LiL and RiFF cut an alternative track that would have been released in the event of a Romney victory. I'm thinking instead of "Presidential tint, Michelle Obama / Frozen femurs in the freezer, Jeffrey Dahmer," the line would have been "Presidential tint, Ann Romney / Egg salad in the deli case, and salami." What do you think?

The Psychology of that one line in Call Me Maybe

So, like, I heard this song the other day. It was by this indie band called "Carly Rae Jepsen." You've probably never heard of them.

Actually *removes hipster glasses* while most of the appeal of "Call Me Maybe," the song that dominated the summer of 2012, comes from its earnest simplicity, there is one line in the lyrics that has some real texture to it:

Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad

This line captures something universal and not at all trivial, the way that our memories of past emotions are reshaped by our current knowledge.

The thing is, we tend to think of ourselves as objective observers. We trust that our perceptions bear a one-to-one correspondence to the world around us. But the information that actually makes it from the outside world into our brains is much more limited and impressionistic. Our brains construct most of the details based on expectations about how the world works.

As William Wordsworth, the Carly Rae Jepsen of his time, wrote:

                            Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half-create,
And what perceive;

While this perceiving-and-creating is a good description of our perceptions, it is even more true of our memories. When we attempt to recall how we felt about something in the past, it might feel like we are accessing internal CCTV footage, what we are actually doing is more like reconstructing those feelings on the basis of crayon sketch by a drunk three year old.

For those of you without drunk three year olds at home, what I mean is that there are a lot of details that need to be filled in. In the case of memories, one of the places we go for these details is our understanding of the world in the present.

Here's an example. In one psychology study (citation below), participants were asked to predict how they would feel if their team lost the Superbowl, and they were all like, "OH MY GOD THAT WOULD BE THE END OF THE WORLD!!!!11!1!!!" But then, when their team actually did lose the Superbowl, they were like, "Whatevs, dude."

That's maybe not too surprising, but the interesting thing is that when these people were asked to recall how they predicted that they would feel, they tended to remember feeling like it would not have been that big a deal. That is, their recollection of their emotional state in the past was anchored to their emotional state in the present.

Similar results were found for studies on the 2008 presidential election, satisfaction from completing a major purchase, and how much they would enjoy eating jellybeans, depending on the order in which jellybeans of different flavors were eaten.

While "recall of predicted hedonic sequence" sounds like a totally awesome study, in a hookers-on-mars-with-three-boobs sort of way, this study was actually about eating jellybeans.

In "Call Me Maybe," there are a couple of different ways to interpret the line "Before you came into my life I missed you so bad." One possibility is that Carly Rae is, in fact, a time traveler from the future. At the age of twenty four, she met her one true soulmate. Unfortunately, he was ninety-six years old and was unable to keep up with her sexually. So, she traveled back to the year 2009, and then waited for her ripped-jeans Adonis to show up in her life on that hot and windy night.

A second possibility is that her emotional state after having met this guy colored her recollection of her emotional state in the time before she met him.

Here's that video of the US Olympic Swim Team lip-syncing "Call Me Maybe." While you're watching it, I want you to try to remember how invested you were in the outcome of the Olympics back in July and August. Then notice how little you care about the Olympics in retrospect. Now, recognize that while you think you were all, "Olympics, Schmolympics!" at the time, you were actually all "USA! USA! That Ryan Lochte boy seems nice!"

Don't you feel dumb?



Don't own it? Here it is on iTunes.  Buy It!!

Meyvis, T., Ratner, R. K., & Levav, J. (2010). Why Don't We Learn to Accurately Forecast Feelings? How Misremembering Our Predictions Blinds us to Past Forecasting Errors. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 139 (4), 579-589 : 10.1037/A0020285

How much growth does Romney need?

So, among the things that Mitt Romney said last night were these:

1) His policies will create 12 million new jobs

2) He will not support any tax cut that increases the deficit

3) He will, in fact, eliminate the deficit, which he claims is a moral issue

He pointed out (correctly) that there are basically three approaches that you can take to balance the budget. You can increase taxes, you can cut spending, or you can grow the economy.

And when I say "grow the economy," I mean, put in place policies that increase the number of jobs.

Also, when I say "grow the economy," I throw up in my mouth a little bit, because, ugh, seriously, "grow the economy?"

Whereas Obama argued for a balanced approach, involving a combination of spending cuts, tax increases, and growth, Romney seemed to be arguing for a growth-focused approach.

Well, Howard Hill, a retired investment banker, did a little back-of-the-envelope calculation to ask how much growth would be needed to eliminate the 1.3 trillion dollar deficit.

He finds, assuming that Romney cuts the top tax rate to 28 percent (which he has argued you need to do, you know, so that the job creators can create jobs), and assuming that this leads to the creation of 12 million new jobs, those jobs would have to pay an average of $433,333 per year.

Alternatively, if we assume that the new jobs will pay an average of $40,000 per year, then to cover the deficit, you would need to create 162.5 million new jobs, which is about 12 million more jobs than the current total civilian workforce.

The point is, even if you give Romney the maximum benefit of the doubt, and buy into the tax-cuts-equals-job-creation argument, there is just no realistic way to tackle a significant portion of the deficit with job growth alone.

Of course, the thing that Hill does not explicitly consider is increased tax revenue from increased salaries from existing jobs. For example, if Romney's plan were to create 12 million new jobs, each of which paid $40,000 per year, and the salaries for the existing 154.6 million jobs were to increase by $40,000 per year, that would do it.

And, everyone could buy a pony.

So, maybe Romney wants to increase the minimum wage to $27 an hour?

Which brings us back to our original point. There is no realistic way to tackle a significant portion of the budget deficit through growing the economy. *hurk*