Dejan Mircevski’s blog

It's not surprising that some people believe almost everything they see on the Internet.  Some of us are innocently trusting, and some have never learned the art of picking apart an argument.  But sometimes it gets too much, and this is one of those occasions.  There is a particularly sensationalistic and alarmist video about Muslim population growth currently making the rounds on the 'net.  Although its message is easily debunked (see here and here) and even more easily recognized for prejudiced drivel, people keep recommending it to each other, and it has become remarkably popular on YouTube.

I think we owe it to ourselves to know better.  I think we are more enlightened than that.  I hope we're not a community of people who will blindly propagate this odious fare out of inertia.

But perhaps we're propagating it not out of inertia but out of belief.  Perhaps we are genuinely duped by those flimsy arguments and take up the holy cause of alerting our righteous and exalted tribe to the onslaught of the unclean hordes.  Some are honestly afraid of this imagined danger, grabbing onto any sorry graphics or article, no matter how amateurish.

To such people I have this to say: it is very important that you please sober up.  One of these days, you may end up in charge.  You may have responsibility beyond what you can currently imagine.  Once you have responsibility, you will discover that you cannot accomplish anything good, anything big, anything noble without tolerance and objectivity.  You may as well start practicing them now.  Do you honestly need to be reminded that history is littered with calamities caused by kooky despots leading their people to infamy?  And what does it tell you that the only difference between you and them is that you're not currently despots?

The other day I turned on the TV in hope of seeing some NBA action.  The guide said "NBA Playoffs," but something was wrong.  The picture was lo-def, the faces of familiar players were awfully young, and the jerseys were all wrong.  I stood bemused with the remote in my hands, taking a moment to adjust.  And then it came into focus: this was Sacramento Kings playing Dallas Mavericks.  Divac was coming up to high post as Bobby Jackson slashed to the baseline; Steve Nash dished impossible passes to Dirk Nowitzki, who sank shot after shot in feathery arches.  It was 2002, and two of the most prolifically scoring teams that season met in the Western Conference semi-finals.  Obviously, they were showing NBA classics instead of the current playoffs.

My friends are no longer surprised that I can tell the season and the final outcome after watching a few seconds of a (more notable) NBA game.  I remember every NBA finals after 1993, when I arrived to this continent.  I'm beginning to forget the names of courses I've taken in school (even people's names, but don't tell anyone), yet I never forget that the Rockets played the Spurs in the Western Conference finals of 1995, when Dave Robinson was the season's MVP but got totally owned by Hakeem Olajuwon in that series; or that the Knicks were the first team ever to reach the finals from eighth seed, which they did in 1999 after a lockout-shortened season.  If Patrick Ewing summoned the strength to play injured in the last game, the outcome might have been different, as the Knicks sorely needed inside presence against the oversized Spurs.  Still they went out with honor, as Sprewell almost matched Duncan basket-for-basket in the final minutes.  Duncan just had one more in him.

But the real joy for me is recalling more than the games themselves: it's the context in which I saw them.  The flow of my life at the moment -- where I was, and where I was going.  The friends with whom I sat in a house or a bar or a stadium, opened a beer, and watched some good ball.  The warm nights, laughter, little joys and seemingly big problems that proved not so scary in retrospect, the blissful ignorance of the real trouble that lay ahead and would blindside me unprepared.  These memories punctuate my life, giving it rhythm, flavor, and personal meaning.

Now, 2002 was a good year in this respect.  The Kings were fantastic all season long.  We loved them and followed their advancement throughout the season.  When they played in Boston, we went to the game and cheered so loud that the Boston Globe wrote about it the next day.  The friends I was with on that day will forever stay a part of my life.  The playoffs started, and the Kings played well, making it to the conference finals to face the reigning Lakers dynasty.  And then the dagger: they lost Game 7 on their home turf, melting away at the eleventh hour despite being the better team.  I was so upset over that game that I couldn't bring myself to talk about it for months.  And then the World Championship started in Indianapolis, with the Yugoslav national team featuring those same Kings players, of course.  When they made it into the finals, my roommate decided to drive Boston-Indianapolis in a day and make it to the game.  I had just started a new relationship then, and I had lessons to teach that weekend, and I didn't believe that we'd get tickets, so I decided not to go with him.  To this day I regret it.  Not just because he did manage to get a ticket and witness Yugoslavia win the championship, nor because of all the parties he attended and autographs he collected.  What I most regret is letting a friend drive alone for 17 hours and chickening out of an adventure of a lifetime with a pretty lame excuse.

There are many such stories over the years.  I remember the Sports Depot bar in 2000 when we fought the crazed Red Sox nation for just one TV to switch to the NBA game, and a certain cozy apartment near the Fenway T station in 2005 when the Finals exploded into a nail-biter after the first two games were total yawners.  I remember a game in 1994 when we couldn't get into a bar to watch so we stood outside peering at the TV through a window, while someone's car radio was tuned to the game for sound.  And I remember waking up a friend in Belgrade by SMS in 2008 just in time for him to witness Ray Allen's lightning drive and basket that sealed Game 4 for the Celts.  These people are scattered throughout the world now, and yet they are undeniably with me whenever there's a game to watch and talk about.

None of this is particularly surprising.  Most sports fanatics would offer similar reasons for why they love their sport of choice and how they recollect its events.  It's just amusing to me personally to realize how much of a fanatic I really am.  I don't think I've ever laid it down like this before, but it's fairly plain to see.

The game on TV finished with the Kings victory in a spectacular overtime.  Good choice, whoever chose it.  As the final whistle blew and Mike Bibby ran around the court celebrating, it occurred to me that one of the reasons I yearn to have children is so I can take them to an NBA game and share that love with them.

All happiness is passing, yet not all misery is deserved.

Sometimes people puff their righteous chest while selfishness pokes through. Witness the American populists of today, who tell us in the same breath that it's a grave sin for a CEO to make ten times the wage of an ordinary worker, but it's perfectly OK for this same worker to be paid ten times more that an Indian or a Mexican who can do the job equally well.  Some are more equal than others, and they can have it both ways.

Didn't know about these military tribunals until today.  I'm sure life was generally rough and unfair for everyone at that time and place, but I do recognize an unsettling pattern.  It's another parallel between Lincoln and Obama, interesting not least for what has changed since.  I gather back then it wasn't illegal to fight an occupying army on your homestead.

I saw "Defiance" today, and it reminded me of the partisan movies I grew up on, in the old country.  Hollywood is getting quite good at depicting that desperation, grit, and mad courage to resist unspeakable brutality.  Is the West falling under the same spell we eastern kids have known since childhood?  Or are people here relating to these stories in a different manner?  After all, not everyone has Šumarice in their back yard.

Of course, they can't resist introducing the trademark characters of Anglo-Saxon folklore: the testosterone-charged, square-jawed supermen that tackle every obstacle in their path.  A little incongruous if you ask me, but nothing is perfect in this world.  It's a price worth paying to enjoy a good partisan movie again.

"t was a commonplace of the Soviet era that only people who were slightly abnormal, and utterly indifferent to their own comfort or survival, could find the courage to protest effectively against a totalitarian regime at the height of its powers. And Tyndale fits that description rather well."

Full article

So my blog is getting some comments that look automatically generated.  They are mostly the same text, by users without anything personal in their profiles.  I'm surprised that they aren't trying to sell me something or scam me into wiring money to Nigeria.  Just very generic, vapid blather.  I can't figure it out.

Incidentally, this tells you how widely read my blog is.  All the comments are either my own or spam.  Just me and the bots here.  Surveying the desolation, I'm wondering if Vox has a tumbleweed theme.

OK, after reading the book through and through, and after some thinking, I find it less compelling.  Though its basic idea (that people respond to incentives in a rational manner) is intriguing, the book makes a mediocre job of justifying it.  The author first tells us to beware of contrived lab experiments (in Chapter 1, commenting on the difference in Tversky's and Lists's conclusions), but later happily relies on such experiments to buttress his claims (most egregiously in Chapter 8, with a classroom experiment at Texas A&M, but also in Chapter 6 with play-pretend hiring decisions made by students with little real-life HR experience).  This inconsistency seems unnecessary, as his arguments would be strong even without using the contrived experiments.

At other times, the book is only too content to leave a subject after testing just one possible explanation.  For example, if the fraction of joint papers by co-located authors increased between the 60s and the 90s, that is enough to support the conclusion that "communications technology also seems to stimulate more local collaboration"?  It couldn't be for any other reason?  And same with employers rejecting (fake) resumes with black-sounding names -- is racism really the only possible conclusion?  Could it be that standout names simply prompt more scrutiny, which then discovers the fakery?  I'm not saying the conclusions are wrong or that the original scientific works didn't properly explore alternate explanations.  But if they did, I wouldn't know it from reading this book.

Finally, the book ranges far afield in search of examples to confirm the rational-humans theory when a few obvious tests are close at hand.  In Chapter 3, it accepts as a given that most people marry within their race and age group.  But what is the rational explanation for this?  The book doesn't examine it.  It also doesn't examine the seemingly irrational strategy that humans routinely exhibit in the ultimatum game (even though chimps don't).  If the theory is any good, why not test it on these obvious examples?

This points to a larger flaw in the basic idea itself: it is not really a theory.  Because it relies on perceived incentives, not objectively real ones, it cannot make accurate predictions without knowing for sure how the average human perceives the incentives surrounding them.  But this is quite often impossible to know with accuracy.  So the predictions made on the basis of this idea will frequently prove false not because the idea itself is wrong but because our knowledge of human perceptions is flawed.  This makes the idea impossible to disprove: any time it mispredicts, it can simply blame it on the complexities of human perception.  By definition, an idea that cannot be disproved is not a theory (at least not a scientific one).

Attractive as it is to think that the invisible hand of reason guides the behavior of human groups (and clever as some of the experiments are), I'm still not sure I can let that thought guide my actions in life.

I'm reading "The Logic of Life" and enjoying it quite a bit.  The salacious and iconoclastic topics are a thrill, of course, especially to a misfit like me with a long-standing habit of being enraged by perceived hypocrisy.  But beyond that, the book discusses some quite inventive techniques for testing hypotheses, as well as hard-nosed pragmatism and an honest treatment of certain theoretical follies previously besetting economic thought.  So the knowledge it imparts should at least be reliable, regardless of its ultimate practical usefulness.

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World