History education

I Have Forgiven Jesus has a post discussing the legacy of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. I’ve only ever read part of the book, and I remember none of it, but it turns out I have feelings about it.

The thing is, I read APHUS as part of a high school class, where it was the only book. So it’s strange to read the responses to Chait’s tweet, where everybody is saying that they don’t believe Chait, and that this is a meme made up by right-wingers. And it may well be a meme made up by right-wingers; I have no reason to believe there is any widespread use of APHUS as a main textbook. In any case, my personal experience doesn’t support the conspiracy theory about liberals spreading propaganda by teaching Zinn.

[Read more…]

Reason is a powerful aesthetic

I feel like we’re living in a golden age of YouTube vlogging. Every month my link roundup seems to include Lindsay Ellis, Contrapoints, or the like, because they make powerful arguments, and they’re very entertaining. This past month, ContraPoints posted a video called “The Aesthetic”, which I felt was worthy of a longer comment.

The video asks, “What matters more—the way things are or the way things look?”

Justine: I’m not against reason. Reason is a very powerful aesthetic. If you’re a man.
Tabby: What if you’re a woman?
Justine: Oh, don’t be a woman. That’s not a good idea.

[Read more…]

Trumps: Biggest tax frauds in history?

I’m trying to figure out, are the Trumps the perpetrators of the biggest tax fraud in US history?

The NYT reports that Donald Trump, rather than being a self-made man, received $413 million in wealth from his father. If we look at Donald and his 4 siblings together, they received $1 billion. When you transfer that much wealth, you’re supposed to pay taxes on it, but they engaged in legally dubious schemes in order to pay $500 million less than they should have.

The tax schemes were so extensive, The NYT spent 14,000 words describing it. I read a bit of it, and it was clear that Donald himself took a significant active role. But it’s seriously TL;DR, maybe you want to read the short version on WaPo or Vox or something. (ETA: NYT also has some highlights.)

$500 million is of course larger than the amount of money I will see in my life, so to get a sense for how large, I went and looked up the biggest tax frauds in history. I couldn’t find a definitive list, but here’s a page that lists some of the most famous cases. Most of them are for only a few million, or less than a million. By far the largest was Walter Anderson, who owed $141k in taxes (including penalties and interest, he paid over $200 million). I also found another article referring to a $11 million dollar scam as one of the biggest tax frauds in US history.

We don’t know exactly how many of these tax schemes are illegal tax evasion vs legal tax avoidance, but even if only a fraction of it was illegal, Donald Trump and his siblings stand to be among the biggest tax frauds in US history.

Origami: Three-form

A model consisting of many little cubes attached together

Three-Form, a model designed by me.  Some of the component cubes are taken directly from Meenakshi Mukerji.

I was looking through my photos, and I realized that there are several large models that I never got around to sharing.  This is one of them.  The Three-Form consists of 24 little cubes, assembled into a larger mathematical design.

This one is inspired by General Relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity.  At the time I was reading Sean Carroll’s textbook on the subject, and I was lamenting how difficult it was to visualize the mathematical concepts therein.

[Read more…]

Content granularity

I’ve decided to invent a concept that can be used by bloggers and other content creators. Content granularity is a measure of the size of individual pieces of content (or alternatively, the effort that got put into them). A fine-grained blog produces lots of little pieces of content. A coarse-grained blog produces large pieces of content, usually with lower frequency.

Why is this a useful concept? Because blogs tend towards uniform granularity. Usually, you don’t have a blog that publishes a 2000-word essay, followed up by several 280-character posts. Sometimes, this is because the blogger themself finds mixed-granularity to be aesthetically unpleasing, and this can become a problem if they find themselves unable to write the grand essay that they have come to expect from themselves. So let’s examine this in a bit more detail.

[Read more…]

More on the food truck game

In an earlier post, I was talking about the economics of entertainment media. As a way of starting that discussion, I introduced a very basic model which I called the Food Truck game. Several food trucks park along a single street, and each customer patronizes the nearest food truck. It’s a neat little problem, similar to the cake-cutting problem, but it’s not a very realistic model of entertainment media.

So I thought about it some more, and came up with some possible adjustments. With these adjustments, I hope to tease out some real implications. The question I want to answer is, what is it like to have fringe tastes in entertainment media, vs having mainstream tastes? How many businesses will cater to your preferences?  What prices will they charge you?

This also plays into a larger discussion I’ve been having, about the differences between capitalist systems, utilitarian systems, and fair systems.  Here I will show that each system leads to a different solution to the food truck game.

[Read more…]

Evolutionary Prisoner’s Dilemma sim

This is a small programming project I worked on in 2013-2014.  Although I wrote a blog series about it at the time, this is not a repost of that series.  Instead, this is a repost of the explanation I wrote earlier this year, when I uploaded the project to github.  If you liked this article, you might also enjoy this interactive game, although I had nothing to do with that one.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma is an important concept in game theory, which captures the problem of altruism. Each of the two players chooses to either cooperate or defect. Cooperating incurs a personal cost, but benefits the other player. If both players cooperate, then they are better off than if they had both defected. In a single Prisoner’s Dilemma, it seems that it’s best to defect. However, if there are multiple games played in succession, it’s possible for players to punish defectors in subsequent games. When multiple games are played in succession, it is called the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (IPD).

The best approach to the IPD is highly nontrivial. In 2012, William Press and Freeman Dyson proved that there is a class of “zero-determinant” strategies that seem dominant, and which would lead to mostly defection. However, Christoph Adami and Arend Hintze showed that the zero-determinant strategies are not dominant in the context of evolution. Understanding this issue could elucidate why humans and other creatures appear to be altruistic.

How the simulation works

  1. We have a population of 40 individuals. Each individual has 4 parameters that govern how they play IPD.
  2. Each individual plays IPD against 2 other individuals in the population, and their fitness is calculated from their average score.
  3. One individual dies, and another reproduces. The probability of reproduction increases with fitness, and the probability of death decreases with fitness.
  4. All the parameters of the individuals are mutated by small amounts.
  5. Steps 2-4 are repeated a million times. Each repetition is called a “generation”.

[Read more…]