Category: Uncategorized

S.L.U.T. Shaming

Just today I found this 2014 Matthew Yglesias article from VOX that mentions the dismal ROI of street cars. It turns out Matt has written lots of articles on street cars and public transportation more broadly (see this and this, for example), often arguing that buses are a better solution (partly because of cost). That in turn lead me to relisten to this EconTalk episode with Bent Flyvbjerg on megaprojects, which I highly recommend.

In recent years Seattle has opened two new streetcars, which appear to me to be totally useless, and I was happy to see Matt agreed in general. One of the strangest things is that the streetcars run on normal surface streets for portions of their routes, which means they’re subject to the same traffic delays as cars…and buses.

It lead me to look up some data on Seattle’s South Lake Union Trolley (affectionately known in Seattle as the S.L.U.T.).

Even a glance at the Wikipedia page presents trouble. Built in 2008, the S.L.U.T only carries 2,200 people per day, but has a capacity of 12,600, meaning daily ridership is less than 20 percent of capacity. Second, ridership has gone down (!) several hundred riders from the peak years 2011-2013. The South Lake Union area of Seattle is home to Amazon and many other companies and is being built up extremely quickly (new condos all around the area). Traffic there is simply horrific, which makes the ridership numbers even worse since it means people are using public transportation less as traffic worsens.

Matt suggested buses are a better alternative, which seems intuitive after you see how these trolleys operate. The S.L.U.T ended up costing $56 million (it’s just 1.3 miles long), and again as Matt suggests seems much more geared toward making the area seem hip and cool and shuttling around Amazonians than it does toward decreasing congestion. Indeed, this Seattle PI article details some of the political aspects of the plan, notably that “Paul Allen’s Vulcan owns 60 acres in the neighborhood, much of it along the streetcar line.” Vulcan was a major proponent of the project. A prominent selling point to local businesses was that property values would go up $100,000 or more.

I ran some simple numbers to compare the S.L.U.T with a comparable investment in buses. Out of the $56 million spent on S.L.U.T., 25 million was fronted by South Lake Union property owners (again, suggestive of why it was built in the first place), money that certainly wouldn’t have been available had buses been purchased instead. This leaves a potential $31 million budget. Buses cost around $500,000k for diesel options and as much as $1 million dollars for newer battery-powered coaches.

Running some numbers from King County Metro gives an average of 210 passengers per bus during weekdays. Even if Seattle went with the more expensive battery-powered buses and left $15 million for operating costs (meaning the city purchased 15 buses), daily capacity would still be 1,000 passengers more than ride the S.L.U.T. daily. And even this figure is misleading because the 210 number is based on people that actually ride the bus, not total capacity, which is likely much higher.

What’s more buses have many more advantages. For example, you don’t have to block roads for months at time to construct tracks within the road. And since they don’t run on tracks buses are obviously more geographically  flexible. Additionally, the average bus route is much more than 1.3 miles in length and buses serve poorer areas, which South Lake Union certainly is not.

Politically, though, this was never going to happen. Seattle buses are run by King County Metro Transit, but the S.L.U.T. was paid for by the Seattle Department of Transportation.

Why I’m not voting for president, but plan on complaining anyway

“If you don’t vote you don’t have the right to complain,” the saying goes. Alas, I don’t plan on voting, but I have no problem complaining anyway.

Of course the word “right” here is not used to denote a legal construct, but rather a cosmic one. A sort of you-got-what’s-coming-to-you quid pro quo. You didn’t marry LeeAnne so now you have no right to complain about being 35 and alone, or so my mother tells me.

But just as surely as cosmic rights exist, we’re all guilty of violating them everyday, especially when it comes to complaining when perhaps we know better. I might, for instance, procrastinate on the job by harassing my friends to “get out the vote” only to later complain about having to work late. Or I might refuse to take public transportation and then complain about all the traffic I have to sit in. And don’t get me started on all the wasted time we spend lamenting our relationship misadventures, so often the result of our own design.

So for starters even if I have no right to complain about who’s president if I didn’t vote, I’m going to complain anyway because that’s what we humans do. It happens in all kinds of settings, why should politics be any different? Indeed, it’s notable that you never hear the phrase “If you don’t vote you have no right to celebrate.” It seems there is something deeply human and seductive about complaint.

But, the example above regarding public transportation points out another flaw in the not-voting-equals-no-complaining calculus. Even if you decided to take the bus instead of drive it wouldn’t really do anything to mitigate the amount of traffic in your city. It’s not your single car that’s causing congestion after all. You should feel guiltless when complaining about traffic because – unless you happen to be the head of your city’s transportation department – there is quite literally nothing you as an individual can do to reduce traffic even if, paradoxically, you happen to be part of the problem.

By now you have likely unveiled my public-transportation-is-really-voting allusion. I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but stick with me for a moment. That’s right, I’m sorry people but your vote just doesn’t matter.  Let me clarify. Your vote actually does matter in all kinds of important ways. It allows you to express your preferences through our democratic process, to align yourself with politicians you believe to be sensible if not always wholly upstanding, to signal to the world how civic minded you are as you stroll into the afterwork cocktail party with an “I voted” sticker affixed to your lapel. It’s just that your vote doesn’t matter for the outcome of the election itself.

I hesitate to call this position anything other than fact. It has been shown both by mathematical calculations and by historical evidence. In truth the probability of an election being decided by your vote alone is not absolutely zero. The probability that you’ll be struck by lightening isn’t zero either, but you should probably go about living as if it were.

Why should my right to complain hinge on something so superfluous as a vote?

“But what about Florida?” you ask. Yes, in 2000 the U.S. presidential election was decided by a mere 537 votes. These five hundred votes might as well have been five million though because both numbers are larger than zero, the count difference it would take for your vote to decide the election.

“But what if everyone thought the way you do?,” you retort. Well, in that case we’d be in trouble. But everyone doesn’t think the way I do, which is why this piece is likely to draw your ire. If you’re the type of person that organizes the masses to get out and vote then you might matter a lot for an election, but your vote matters very little.

And while we’re at it — no, not voting is not the same thing as voting for Donald Trump. You can bet if Drumpf becomes president I’ll do plenty of complaining, not least because I don’t want my next trip to the White House to involve being blinded by the sun’s reflection off a gold-plated North Lawn.

The situation is even rosier for the would-be kvetch though because not only does voting not matter, but the president doesn’t matter that much either. Now comes the exciting part because I get to reference my favorite kind of bias, aptly-titled “leadership attribution bias.” In short, the president is a manager like any other: they get all of the credit when things go well and none of the blame when things go poorly. A cheap shot I know.

When you credit (or blame) the president you’re really referencing U.S. political institutions more broadly, and you have even less control over those than you have over who the next president is. The president is buffeted by all kinds of institutional and political forces: House and Senate constituencies, tit-for-tat political horse trading, the actions of both rouge and friendly nations, state and local policy, regulatory agencies, the judiciary, and the vacillating will of the American public to name a few.

The average American political scientist thinks the president matters much less than the average American citizen. Maybe they’re out of touch or overly wonkish, or maybe they’re better at understanding the complexities and constraints of the modern American presidency.

I haven’t even mentioned the fact that one might be disinclined to vote simply because none of the candidates in our not-so-diverse, two-party system fit the bill. Now that’s something to complain about.

Nor am I fond of the idea of absorbing the marginal voter into the presidential election decision simply because it’s everyone’s civic duty to vote. If someone is ignorant, let them abstain. It’s probably better than tackling a crash course in U.S. politics days before an election. And while you’re at it, when they’re forced to switch healthcare providers let them complain. The distance between their abstention and healthcare troubles is lightyears.

There are plenty of reasons not to vote. And there are certainly plenty of reasons to complain about policy outcomes. Abstention may seem foolish because it puts a decision that could be ours in the hands of another. But if we have a cosmic right to anything, it’s to complain despite our own foolishness.

[Relax. It’s intentionally incendiary people.]

How much disagreement is there about statistics?

So much that just this year the American Statistical Association put out a 12-page manuscript about p-values and it took them a year of discussion(!) before the manuscript was complete.

See also this very short 2006 article by Andrew Gelman and Hal Stern The Difference Between “Significant” and “Not Significant’ is not Itself Statistically Significant:

The error we describe is conceptually different from other oft-cited problems—that statistical significance is not the same as practical importance, that dichotomization into significant and nonsignificant results encourages the dismissal of observed differences in favor of the usually less interesting null hypothesis of no difference, and that any particular threshold for declaring significance is arbitrary…

In making a comparison between two treatments, one should look at the statistical significance of the difference rather than the difference between their significance levels. [Emphasis added].

And this related 2011 paper by Nieuwenhuis, Forstmann, and Wagenmakers, Erroneous analyses of interactions in neuroscience: a problem of significance, which found that half of the 160 papers reviewed, which all appear in top academic journals, used the wrong statistical procedure when evaluating p-values.

One-Sentence Reviews

Bosch
Slowly absorbing the cast of The Wire.

Bridge of Spies
For some reason I thought: Mr. Holland’s Opus meets the Cold War.

11.22.63
So far the show is horrible and much worse than the book, which I would only describe thus far as “fine.”

The 100 (Season 3)
What is even happening and who the f cares?

The Everything Store
Amazon employees used to go to Toys “R” Us during the holiday season, stock up on sold-out items, and then resell them through Amazon.com. Lolz.

Love
Liked it, but didn’t LOVE it. Get it?

Why foreign policy is difficult

Dear Excellency and friend,

I thank you very sincerely for your letter and for your offer to transport me towards freedom. I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion.

As for you and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection and we can do nothing about it. You leave us and it is my wish that you and your country will find happiness under the sky.

But mark it well that, if I shall die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is too bad because we are all born and must die one day. I have only committed the mistake of believing in you, the Americans.

Please accept, Excellency, my dear friend, my faithful and friendly sentiments. Sirik Matak.

I was made aware of that letter by the movie Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock and Roll, which I saw last night at the Seattle Asian American Film Festival. As the title suggests the film focuses on music in Cambodia before and during the Vietnam War, and its loss after the rise of the Khmer Rouge.

The South Vietnamese and Cambodians were in an impossible position at that time. American opposition to the Vietnam war forced a withdrawal in 1973, though indirect US intervention lasted until 1975. In Cambodia the Khmer Rouge took over and exacted an unspeakable toll. This was especially hard for many Cambodian people because it was a civil war: Cambodian-on-Cambodian violence. During a private and especially emotional Thanksgiving dinner I heard a close friend mother’s recount her life under the Khmer Rouge. I don’t know how anyone had the strength to survive.

The situation is even more complicated, because the rise of the Khmer Rouge itself was a response to American bombing, which itself was a response to fear that communists from Vietnam would overtake part or all of Cambodia. There are many other twists and turns in this story that underscore the complexity and tragedy of foreign intervention and of not intervening.

 

Why are there so many ball commercials?

It started with this Verizon commercial.

Then T-mobile jumped in.

And so did Sprint.

I’m curious why T-mobile and Sprint thought THIS was the commercial that was going to take down their brand unless they responded. Did they think it was destructively creative or effective? Was there a mass exodus of customers?

Having worked for a bit in the marketing space I doubt this decision was based in data. It would have required a quite effective large company. The analysts would have had to see a drop in customer renewal or spike in abandonment, identified the fact that the discontinuity started when the Verizon ball commercial first aired, and passed this information along to the marketing team, which actually decided to do something with the data. Even so the marketing team would have had to work with creative and would have had to decide to produce essentially the same commercial as Verizon. More likely the marketing team itself or an executive somewhere near the top of the company saw the commercial, thought the claims didn’t tell the whole story or became especially concerned about the commercial, and ordered some sort of counter-advertising.

I’m also curious about the strategy. It’s hard to believe T-mobile and Sprint were actually trying to “set the record straight” by mimicking the ball commercials. David Ogilvy, in Ogilvy on Advertising, mentioned in the early 1980s that research already showed an advertisement mentioning both the company’s name and the name of a competitor was ineffective because as time passed customers forgot which company the advertisement promoted. I’ve always assumed this is why commercials so often say, “Tide removes stains better than the next leading brand,” rather than mentioning the name of that other brand. Of course, some commercials do mention competitors by name, which makes me curious about the state of research over the 30 years since Ogilvy’s book first made its appearance.

At any rate, a more probable model in this instance is that T-mobile and Sprint were intentionally mudding the waters by using similar graphics and iconography specifically to confuse the matter. Customers no longer associated a commercial with colored balls rolling down a chute with Verizon’s superiority, but with a confusing mess of claims and counterclaims by all three national providers. The best action for customers becomes staying the course–customers might not migrate from Verizon to, say, T-mobile, but at least they wouldn’t migrate in the opposite direction either.

One possible flaw in the strategy is that by the time T-mobile and Sprint produced and aired the commercials the damage was already done. It allowed Verizon to pivot its creative leaving the impression that T-mobile and Sprint were talking to air.

On Life and Lyft

Driving for Lyft before I start a new job. Here are a few thoughts:

3 ways Google Maps fails

  • When there is short-term construction that closes a road.
  • When roads are layered on top of one another, for example a viaduct running atop a ground-level artery.
  • When it needs to know where the front door is. Is the front door on the street side or the alley side of a skyscraper? Google doesn’t seem to know. Just today it wanted me to take the freeway onramp and then stop so I could let a passenger out at the Seattle Facebook office.

Computer chess, presentation of self, and the best way to get to work

Everyone has a preferred way to get to work in the morning. They sometimes have preferred ways to get to bars and the such, but there is something special about getting to work in the best, most creative way possible. There is usually a “secret” route or “shortcut.” This is sometimes presented passive-aggressively as we in Seattle are famous for being: “Now, when I drive I turn right here and then make an illegal u-turn. But I don’t have my drivers do that.” Sooooo…I should make the illegal u-turn right?

I was talking to a passenger and told him about the preferred route everyone had to work and how I would sometimes overhear them telling their friend about how much faster their way was than a coworkers’. He said, “It’s like they take pride in it.” Exactly. More and more I think most of our behavior is signaling. I’m currently reading The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Performances are very much on display even in the short trip to work in the back of a stranger’s car.

Their “special” directions often override Google Maps (I keep the speaker on so they can hear the directions it’s telling me). They say, “I don’t know why it’s telling you to go that way, you should turn left here.” I do and it’s always slower. It reminds me of Tyler Cowen’s thoughts on computer-human chess. A computer-human combination can beat a computer alone, but the trick is to almost always defer to the computer. Likewise, Google Maps isn’t perfect, but 9 times out of 10 I’d say it’s faster than your secret “shortcut.” For one thing it knows about dynamic traffic conditions. It’s also, you know, a computer so it’s designed to make calculations about getting you from point A to B that aren’t biased by your competition with your coworker about who has the best route to work. I mean, just think about how much data Google Maps must have. Every time you use it you’re loading it with more information about how long it took you to get from Cherry Street to Spring Street on a certain day at a certain time in certain weather conditions. It basically has infinite data on driving routes in every major U.S. city.

Seeing the city through others’ eyes

“You have to turn right. You see if you go straight the road turns into 2nd Avenue Extension, but if you want to just stay on 2nd Avenue you have to turn right.” He said this with an air of disbelief, trying not to laugh. He told me the streets in Vancouver, Canada make more sense. It helps to know about the history of Seattle. It struck me that street creation in Seattle was a bit Hayek, planned in the short term, but emergent over the long term.

A young man visiting from Salt Lake said the air was too polluted. He loves the rain in Seattle.

I drove two men to the Woodland Park Zoo. They had come for a work trip and stayed an extra weekend. They told me they had made it a habit of visiting zoos wherever they traveled.

Surprises

I did not anticipate how much my butt would hurt. Like really hurt. But I guess I’m surprised that I’m surprised since I should have anticipated that sitting down all day would hurt my butt. Also surprising how fast a cell phone battery runs out when constantly using Lyft and Google Maps apps. And I’m surprised by how much time I spend alone. It seems like well over half the day is spent driving around looking for passengers. When I finally find someone it’s like “Thank God!” I don’t have to be alone anymore.

People are good

I’ll never understand Misanthropes. I’ve used online dating sites to go on 50+ first dates and have now given 150 Lyft rides. A small sample in the grand scheme of things, but I suspect a much richer sample than those that fear the downfall of society. Maybe the only things I’ve learned for sure is that people are good. Or even more fundamentally, people are just trying to carve out a living in this crazy world. Some are happy to sit quietly or check email, but many want to engage and learn. Interacting so often makes me feel apart of the world more richly and deeply than I had anticipated (perhaps this should have gone under surprises).

Actually, about 15+% of the time I want to keep hanging out with the person I’m driving and get a little sad I have to drop them off. I want to be like, “Hey…can I come eat dinner with you guys?”

Surge pricing

If supply doesn’t match demand surge pricing is invoked for the passenger. I’ve seen it go up to 200% of a normal fare. This is indicated in the Lyft driver app by a heat map overlaid on the portions of the city where surge pricing is currently in effect. It seems to work much more on the demand side than the supply side. That is, passengers just don’t want to pay the fare so they don’t request a car. In economic theory it’s also meant to send a signal to producers – in this case cars – to “produce” more (drive to that area). However, often the surge pricing is only in effect for a few minutes, or even a few seconds. It reminds me of that line from Pirates of the Caribbean about Isla de Muerta, which can only be found by those that already know where it is. You can only take advantage of surge pricing if you’re already in the area where surge pricing is in effect. Don’t try to drive to it because you won’t make it. As Wayne Gretzky said, “Skate to where the puck is going, not to where it is.” About 150 rides in and I have yet to pick up a passenger that was paying a surge pricing fare.

Perks

Driving allows a flexible schedule so I can take a few hours on a sunny afternoon off if I want to read about sociology in the park, study Real Analysis or Computational Finance, or watch the latest season of the Americans.

Pay

Everyone wants to know about pay. The pay isn’t that great so I’m finding I don’t really have time to do any of those things I just mentioned. The key is to try to keep people in your car. That’s when you can consistently make $20-$25 per hour. But that’s easier said than done.

One-Sentence Summaries

Here are reviews for the month of November.

1. Man in the High Castle
Didn’t see the sci-fi element coming.

2. Jessica Jones
Spending a few dollars on headphones is worth the investment.

3. Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance
Steve Jobs 2.0.

4. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
Pushes the outlier model from the luck of talent to the luck of circumstance.

5. The Sports Gene by David Epstein
Sometimes genes matter…a lot.

6. Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenberg
Love is both hard and beautiful.

7. Master of None by Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang
Love is both beautiful and hard.

8. Open by Andre Agassi biography
Life imitates tennis.

9. Red Oaks
Not quite Wonder Years or My So-called Life or even Freaks and Geeks or Skins, but entertaining, easy to watch, and predictable in an endearing way.

10. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Boyz n the Hood meets Foucault (the best – and most beautifully written – introduction to critical studies I’ve come across).

11. Homeland
Season 4 tho!

12. Shameless (US Version)
Starting Season 3. A bit uneven; headed the way of Californication in the way it toys with the audience and doesn’t have the patience to give the characters some stability for even part of an episode. Has some good moments though, worth giving a shot.

13. The Inexplicable Universe: Unsolved Mysteries by Neil deGrasse Tyson
We might actually be from Mars. Like really.