Constrained Bliss Point

General Petraeus gave a talk at Georgetown in late January. I decided to go, since it’s the first time I had a chance to hear a four-star general give a talk. He seemed really cool. I mean, never mind the fact that the guy has an absurd number of awards, honors, and distinctions — being a general with a PhD must be awesome.  Oh, he’s also the Commander of CENTCOM, meaning he’s in charge of thousands of men in twenty countries. But I digress.

But in spite of (or because of) his awesomeness, it seems like a large group of people make a sport out of being a dick to General Petraeus. I cannot understand why. At his presentation, there were at least a dozen student sleeper agents in the audience who would interrupt his talk by reading the names of people killed in military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’m all for non-violent protests, but this was egregious and poorly targeted. Essentially a group of rabble rousers perverted free speech to their twisted ends, not to mention infringed on a lot of peoples’ good time.

I don’t know why General Petraeus is constantly a target for blind hatred. From his Wikipedia article, it seems to me like he made a bad situation way better in Iraq, and helped save a bunch of lives. Also it’s not like this guy embodies the military industrial complex. If you don’t like that we’re in Iraq, go heckle George Bush or Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney. Generals don’t make those sorts of decisions — not least of all generals who weren’t in charge of things at the time. David Petraeus is a gentleman and a scholar, and attacking him only makes you look like an r-tard.

When you decide it’s imperative to be a dick to someone, at least make sure you’re targeting the right person.

I am a list-maker. I enjoy making lists. Getting Things Done (GTD) utilizes lists heavily, and I also enjoy GTD. I’m not sure which way the correlation runs between those two facts. But not all lists are created equal. I think there are very important constraints on the sizes of to-do lists, Next Action lists, and Projects lists, to name a few. For the differences among these types, GTD’s Wikipedia article is a great read — if you don’t care for the distinctions, just think of your own to-do list (and if you don’t utilize a to-do list, may God have mercy on you).

Lists cannot be too long, if you are going to use them effectively. How many times have you created a to-do list for yourself, and everything was going fine for a few days, until eventually you got bogged down and started procrastinating? I find it incredibly easy to convince myself that, paradoxically, I have so many things to do that I might as well not do any of them. This does not bode well for productivity.

Over the last half of last year, I stopped seeing myself as a task-completing machine, who should optimize his throughput of actions for maximal efficiency. I realized that it wasn’t making me any happier, just checking more things off my list, since the other half of the time I was hiding from the morass of tasks. Yet again I’ve remembered that lists are merely tools for being an effective person.

It’s important to keep perspective as you go through life — otherwise you might end up in the wrong place. I realized that it’s not important what actions I complete; it is only important where they are getting me. So, I still use the GTD system, but with a few caveats:

• I keep a short list, on my whiteboard, of the tasks I should finish ASAP.
• I make sure this list doesn’t exceed ten or so items.
• I don’t let any item sit on the list too long: complete it or scrub it.
• If I let the whole list sit for too long, I have to finish as many actions as possible in the next free moment I get.
• If the whole list gets stale, I throw it out and start over. They obviously weren’t the right tasks anyway.
• I warehouse tasks not important enough for my whiteboard list on my Next Actions list.
• I review my Next Actions list periodically to see if any actions should be whiteboarded. Stale actions get thrown out.

The key change I’ve seen is that my lists are much, much smaller. Constant pruning of my Next Actions list has kept it under 15 items for a few months now. And I’ve never felt better.

Yesterday was unequivocally the high point in my graduate school career to date. The big event was our first Micro 2 class, in game theory. Micro was the only class we hadn’t had yet, and my expectations were high: Econometrics is typically dry and exceedingly difficult, and our Macro class is shaping up to be intense, courtesy of our new professor. I was hoping that Micro could be the class to keep me sane this semester.

Luca Anderlini is our professor for Micro. He’s the new Director of Graduate Studies too, so my performance in Micro serves the dual role of not failing out of the program and not embarrassing myself in front of the guy running things. I had seen him present a paper last semester, and this gave me high hopes. He had a sense of humor, an entertaining manner of lecturing, and a way of making the topics at hand seem relevant.

Let me cut to the chase: my hopes were realized. The lecture was interesting, but most important, something crucial happened, something I have been waiting my entire time at Georgetown to hear someone admit. Before Professor Anderlini got into the meat of the lecture, he made a caveat. He expressed to us, in no uncertain terms, that math is not the point of what we’re doing. While, he explained, he enjoys math a great deal, and even considered a career in math, he stressed that math is a just a tool to clarify our thinking. Anyone can reason, he argued, and make a convincing case. The key is that math is a rigorous formal language to express our ideas,  so that we can make sure we are not just deluding ourselves with words. Again, math is not the end, it is only the means.

That was the breath of fresh air I needed.

Kiva.org is a person-to-person micro-lending website, which allows prospective do-gooders in the developed world to fund micro-finance operations for entrepreneurs in the developing world. I found out about Kiva around two years ago, and even though I gave a few gift certificates, it took me until today to make my first loan.

My lendee is so awesome that I felt the distinct need to blog about her. First, her name is Joice Pita, which is cool in and of itself. She lives in South Sudan, and runs a pub. I know very little about the Sudan — Wikipedia reminded me that Darfur is part of the country, and also noted that Sudan’s motto is “victory is ours” — but I can posit a guess that they could use more pubs. The thought of helping a pub-owner in the Sudan was too much to pass up.

Here’s her blurb, straight from her Kiva page:

Joice Pita is currently in the business of selling local alcoholic beverages, beer, and soda, and is requesting a loan to stock more crates of beer and soda to sell. Joice is 33 years old and is married with a husband that is a soldier. She has 6 children, and her children go to school. With the extra profits from her loan, she hopes to be able to open a hotel.

Now try and tell me that is not a cause worth funding. I thought so.

If you have some spare time, definitely check out Kiva. The money you put in isn’t a donation or a handout (though you can donate to Kiva.org itself to cover their operating expenses), which means that when your lendees pay you back, you can find new lendees and start the cycle over. You can even withdraw the money in your account after you’ve done some lending with it. So, if your bank account has some extra money in it, and you decide that instead of earning one percent interest you want to help save the world, you should head over to Kiva.org and start lending, like rite nao.

Friends, I have a story of an unlikely advertisement achieving its purpose.

Over winter vacation I purchased a netbook, a Dell Mini 10v. It’s an adorable little thing, really gets the job done, and it has a solid feel I haven’t experienced since the old Thinkpad T series, back when IBM made laptops. I’m quite happy with my little netbook. Alas, every copy of Windows needs its antivirus protection. I haven’t had to even think of antivirus software in about four years now: RPI students got a corporate version of McAfee as part of the laptop deal.

A trial version of McAfee came preinstalled on my mini, and I actively shunned it. I heard about a new antivirus called Vipre (like the snake), decided to give it a try. I wasn’t too happy with the trial, though, mostly because it kept deleting the BIOS update I was trying to download. I’m not sure if that’s standard practice, but I distinctly remember telling the program not to delete my BIOS update. It remained obstinate.

So I decided to do some research. Apparently Norton is still the best around, according to a few sites doing antivirus reviews, but one particular product caught my eye. Kaspersky antivirus jumped out at me, because of a ridiculous little video circulating around the interwebs:

That is insanely catchy, and awesome in a ridiculous way. You can see how Kaspersky was stuck in my mind this whole time, just waiting until I needed antivirus software. I also recall one of my economics professors lauding Kaspersky in his technological change class. He liked the idea that Kaspersky keeps track of which files change between scans, and only re-scans those that need to be. Technological progress indeed.

Anyway, I hope Kaspersky is as awesome as that video makes it seem.

What am I going to do when I finally live in one place?

I’ve moved more than a few times in my life. During my early years I moved within New Jersey, one time that I can’t remember, and five or six that I can. Actually most of those moves were within the same town. Then at some point I went off to college, where moving in and out of one’s dorm room each year is part of the natural ebb and flow of semesters coming and going. Nowadays I find myself living in DC for some reason, and I have the feeling moving will be commonplace for the foreseeable future.

I kind of like moving around. That’s not to say I don’t like staying in one place — because I do. But there is no better way to get one’s material possessions in order than to pack them all up and head on out. One reason college is awesome is that you can pack up all your worldly belongings into a car and then drive away. There is something liberating about living with as few possessions as feasible. Then again, unpacking thereafter is a necessary consequence. I think I still have some boxes still packed in my basement from younger moves, and that’s been quietly nagging at me for years.

The truth is that packing up clears my head. There are never enough opportunities to fit the world so neatly into little boxes with cleanly demarcated edges. Some day I might live in the same house for years at a time. I think at that point I’ll need to take turns every few months boxing up a whole room and then unpacking it into a different configuration.

Dear Microsoft,

I used to not like you a whole lot. I was kind of mean, too, sometimes calling you the Evil Empire or something similar. I want to take this opportunity to apologize, and to try to explain myself.

A whole lot of people used to not like you. I admit I got swept up in the anti-Microsoft rhetoric and jumped on the bandwagon when I should have given it more thought. You know the whole FOSS-vs-MSFT posturing, people hating on Windows because it’s not free, stuff like that. I even came up with a whole tirade about the economics of monopolies and marginal cost pricing, how charging so much for Windows is inefficient. I was petty, and it was silly of me; I recognize this now.

Here is why I came around:

First, you gave $15k to Creative Commons at the end of their 2008 fundraising campaign to put them above their goal. That was big. And I know you’ve been funding CC for a while. They’re a cause I really care about, so it means a lot that you’d be such a supporter.

Second, you’re really not that bad. I read an argument that the Microsoft Windows monopoly really amounted to extracting economic rents from middle-class Americans and, through the Gates Foundation, channeling those funds to aid efforts in Africa. Not to mention, Windows gave everyone a standardized platform in the meanwhile, and that is really valuable.

Third, you’re just a profit-maximizing firm, after all. You have a duty to your shareholders to make as much money as you can, even if sometimes that means using underhanded tactics. Spreading fear uncertainty and doubt, or engaging in “embrace, extend, extinguish“, while uncool, isn’t out of the ordinary in the business world. I can’t blame you for the system you’re a part of.

So it took me this long to realize that, no, Microsoft is not evil. You’re just doing your thing, you know? Maximizing profits and all is hard work. And right now Google is in a position to do a lot more damage to freedom than you are. I hear Windows 7 is pretty awesome, too.

I hope you accept my apology. Give Google a hard time for me, okay guys?

Amicably yours,

-Frank

I had a thought while sitting in class the other day. (This is, in fact, less common than you might imagine.) In loose terms, graduate school can be cast as a constrained optimization problem. Students have preferences over their classes, so that they prefer to spend time on the topics they enjoy learning about. I for one used to like microeconomics, but now I am leaning toward macro, for reasons to be discussed in the future. Students also prefer not to fail. So, other things equal, they will spend more time on classes that they’re doing poorly at.

I posit that, for whatever reason, not liking a class and not doing well in a class are correlated. For students who are sufficiently intelligent, and thus not close to failing any one of their classes, this doesn’t matter. They can spend the most time on the classes they like most. Those are good times.

But if you are up against the failure constraint, you will tend to be spending less time on the classes you like and more time on the classes you need to make sure you pass. It is all the worse if the classes you are doing poorly at are also those you do not enjoy very much. (This is probably the case: see above). Those are not very good times.

Here’s hoping my constrained optimization problem has a feasible solution.

Last week I purchased Tegan & Sara’s new album Sainthood, which has quickly become my second favorite musical purchase this year. For those of you just tuning in, Tegan & Sara are Canadian identical twin lesbian singer-songwriters, which is even more awesome than it sounds. They are streaming their new album on Myspace, so if you’re into that sort of thing you can navigate over there and listen to their glorious tunes as you read the rest of my post. I implore you: such a decision is full of epic win.

Even though they are like seven years older than I am, I feel like I’ve been watching (listening) to them grow up. I was introduced to Tegan & Sara through Grey’s Anatomy, back when it was good. I think I bought their album So Jealous first, which was new at the time, and which, while I still like it a lot, was and stayed my least favorite of their albums. So Jealous was their third-or-so album at the time, not including a beautiful little gem called Under Feet Like Ours which they released on cassette when they were just starting out, and which you could order from a website that charged you in Canadian dollars.

Under Feet Like Ours was insanely worth the purchase. It is incredibly genuine, without the studio finish that comes with big budgets and famousness, and all the better for it. You can hear how T&S developed and matured through their albums. Every album is different, every one is good, and they all lead to where they are right now. Which, right now, just happens to be Sainthood, but it used to be The Con, and before that So Jealous (and then If It Was You and then This Business of Art).

And some day in the future they will grace us with something we will have been waiting for the whole time.

Not to be alarmist or anything, but Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is probably to blame in bringing the global financial system to its knees. A few months ago I came across an intriguing article in the New York Times about fat tails and gaussian copulas. It was a pretty good piece, worth at least a glance.

The interesting part begins on page six. Long story short, JPMorgan developed a way of using maths to quantify financial risk into a dollar value. Value at Risk, or VaR, as it was abbreviated, was a useful tool internal to JPMorgan. Then they did something totally bonkers: they gave VaR away. Anyone who wanted to learn and implement VaR could do it, and JPMorgan would help you out. Why would they just give away such a valuable piece of proprietary technology? This quote sums it up nicely:

As Guldimann wrote years later, “Many wondered what the bank was trying to accomplish by giving away ‘proprietary’ methodologies and lots of data, but not selling any products or services.” He continued, “It popularized a methodology and made it a market standard, and it enhanced the image of JPMorgan.”

The story ends with a score of financial firms coming to rely too heavily on VaR, then they overextend themselves, get lulled into a false sense of security, and finally fat tails come in and kick everyone’s asses. Also the economy exploded.

I can’t help but wonder if it was the tactically-superior give-it-away model of FOSS that allowed JPMorgan’s mathematical monstrosity to consume the world’s financial sector in a blaze of nihilist glory.